Blogger loses job; For Looking at Conservatives "As If Visiting A Zoo".

Dave Weigel has had to resign from The Washington Post having been discovered to have made sarcastic and scornful comments about certain conservatives on a private listserv called “Journolist."

Raju Narisetti, the managing editor who oversees The Post’s Web site, accepted Weigel's resignation and said this:

“I don’t think you need to be a conservative to cover the conservative movement,” Narisetti told me late today. “But you do need to be impartial... in your views.”

Why do you need to be "impartial" to report upon conservatives? I've certainly never noticed any impartiality amongst the Fox News guys when they are covering Democrats.

With bloggers such as Weigel, “I think The Post needs to decide what it wants to be online,” said Dan Gainor, a vice president at the conservative Media Research Center. “Does it want to be opinion? Or, does it want to be news? The problem here was that it was never clear.”

“If it’s going to be opinion, it ought to have somebody on the conservative side -- something Dave Weigel never was,” he said.

If The Post wants to assign a “good neutral reporter” to cover conservatives, “we’d be thrilled,” said Gainor. But quickly added, Weigel “wasn’t one. He looked at the conservative movement as if he was visiting a zoo. We’re more than that.”

So conservatives are now demanding that they get to say what kind of blogger should get to cover them for the The Washington Post and are insisting that only "somebody on the conservative side" is really acceptable.

When did conservatives acquire this power? And how is it possible to cover present day Republicanism, where Obama is considered a person born in Kenya, leading Republicans actually believe that the Democrats are about to introduce death panels, and tea party protesters hold aloft posters demanding that the government keep their hands off medicare, without getting the feeling that one is looking at a group of people for whom collective hysteria has become more important than facts?

It is like looking at a zoo, that's the only way it is possible to report on the insanity which Limbaugh and Beck spout daily; and certain parts of the Republican base simply eats it up.

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Tags: Washington Post, Dave Weigel, conservatives