In Which Greg Sargent Layeth The Smack Down

Greg Sargent steps up to defend his former WaPo colleague, Dave Weigel, from the nefarious forces of...the Washington post newsroom.

Now that the smoke has cleared from the Dave Weigel mess, here's a response to the anonymous sources inside the Post who used Jeffrey Goldberg's blog to urinate on the type of opinionated journalism that Weigel, Ezra Klein and others (myself included) practice.

The sources told Goldberg that practitioners of this type of journalism are not real reporters:

"This is really about the serial stupidity of allowing these bloggers to trade on the name of the Washington Post."

"It makes me crazy when I see these guys referred to as reporters. They're anything but. And they hurt the newspaper when they claim to be reporters."

The cowardly hiding behind anonymity is pathetic enough. But let's take on the substance of this. I submit that someone can be a "real" reporter if he or she is accurate on the facts and fairly represents the positions of subjects; if he or she has a decent sense of what's newsworthy and important to readers; and if readers come away from his or her stuff feeling more informed than they were before.

There's simply no reason why caring what happens in politics -- prefering one outcome to another -- should inherently interfere with this mission. By publicly advertising a point of view, bloggers are simply being forthcoming about their filter: They are letting readers in on what guides their editorial choices. This allows readers to pick and choose communities where they can expect discussions about topics that interest them with other, generally like-minded readers.

There's no basis whatsoever for the B.S. charge that revealing a point of view of necessity compromises the integrity of the actual information purveyed. If Ezra isn't a "real" reporter, why did readers of his stuff feel more informed about the ins and outs of the health care debate than after consuming the work of a hundred other journalists? Why did readers feel more informed by Weigel's stuff about the Tea Partiers than they did by hundreds of more "objective" articles about the topic that appeared in scores of "neutral" publications?

If the reporting on these blogs isn't "real," then why do other news orgs consistently follow up on their scoops? 

Greg has a real point for not just himself but other "newsbloggers" out there that are quoted by newspapers and magazines as legitimate reporting sources...that's because they are legitimate reporting sources, the good ones.  More and more the real news sources are the rapid world news services like Reuters and AP, and more and more bloggers like Greg, Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, Reid Wilson, etc. who get quoted by newspapers all the time.

They're doing the yeoman's work on this, and the Village knows it.  It's pissing them off and they cut Dave Weigel out.  But it only displays how petty the Village is.