In a piece published late this morning ripping the Washington Post for not being as cool as BuzzFeed, Rosie Gray mentions Slate's Dave Weigel, and the events surrounding his parting of the ways with the Post in June of 2010:
Late to the internet and struggling to maintain its status as a top-tier news outlet, the Post turned to high-profile, often partisan bloggers, led by the liberal policy wonk Ezra Klein, to generate traffic and buzz. But the outlet's unfamiliarity with the online news environment quickly showed: Their first conservative blogger was fired in a plagiarism flap, and the second, Dave Weigel, was let go after Post management learned — apparently to their surprise, if not to his actual readers' — that he wasn't a movement conservative.So snarky.
So clever.
Such a well-crafted piece of above-it-all, ironic distance.
No, really, that paragraph really is a thing of BuzzFeedian beauty.
Except it isn't true.
And it's not just not true, it's Orwellian not true in that in-your-face way that's proud of how untrue it is and knows it doesn’t matter that everyone knows it's untrue.
Anyone even somewhat familiar with media, knows that BuzzFeed is rewriting history here. But BuzzFeed doesn’t care, because in this new media-era, it's not the truth that matters, it's what the media wants to be the truth that matters. (Again, see: Economy, Obama's…)
But just for kicks, let's correct the record and tell the truth. I know it doesn’t matter anymore, and I don’t mean to come off as old-fashioned and force my values on anyone. But for old time's sake, let's pretend truth does matter.
In June of 2010 Weigel "resigned" from the Washington Post after it was discovered he had participated in something called Journolist; which was made up of a cabal of several hundred journalists, some of whom were caught red-handed (after the listserv leaked) coordinating coverage.
