Free Republic

I'm a member of an off-the-record list-serv called "Journolist," founded by my colleague Ezra Klein. Last Monday, I was deluged with angry e-mail after posting a story about Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) that was linked by the Drudge Report with a headline intimating that I defended his roughing-up of a young man with a camera; after this, the Washington Examiner posted a gossip item about my dancing at a friend's wedding. Unwisely, I lashed out to Journolist, which I've come to view as a place to talk bluntly to friends. Below the fold are quotes from me e-mailing the list...

Washington Post “Right Now” blogger David Weigel once again has shown that he’s a peculiar choice to report on conservatism, after he bashed both traditional marriage proponents and Matt Drudge. On May 1 he tweeted, “I can empathize with everyone I cover except for the anti-gay marriage bigots. In 20 years no one will admit they were part of that.” Weigel attempted to defend his tweet in a May 3 article, “Covering Same-Sex Marriage,” but by then other members of the media had pointed out Weigel’s obvious bias on Twitter. Weigel seems to be slow to learn from his mistakes,...

On April 12, the conservative Website WorldNetDaily published an expose on newly appointed White House “green czar” Van Jones that labeled the environmental activists a “an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader.” Based on readily available online sources, including an alternative weekly paper in Oakland, California, Aaron Klein’s piece had a sensational title–”Will a ‘red’ help blacks go green?”–and a sensational spin. In the 2005 profile of Jones that Klein cited, reporter Eliza Strickland recalled Jones’s first year out of Yale Law School, working for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in the Bay Area, and how when he...

David Weigel, a reporter for the liberal Washington Independent news site, wrote an article this morning with the laughable claim that liberal sites like the Daily Kos do not trade in conspiracy theories.Weigel wrote about Joseph Farah responding to a call from a conservative blog for conservatives to boycott World Net Daily.Weigel, who is a decent reporter when he doesn't let his inner moonbat write his articles, served up this whopper to conclude his piece: Conservatives differ from liberals* in that their Web 1.0 sites like WND and FreeRepublic survived and kept their readers in the George W. Bush era,...

This thread at the Right Side of Life, keying off of a FreeRepublic.com thread, is actually a pretty useful look at the way facts bounce off of the “birther” community like so many eggs off of a Humvee. David Wiegel (sic) is a regular poster at the Politijab Forum. Actually, no: I joined the site in order to read the threads at that superlative Web forum for “birther”-debunkers. I’ve never posted a comment there. The rest of the argument posits that “Politijab is an astroturf site” because its inbound links come from AOL News, Daily Kos, Topix, and Democratic Underground....