Jeffrey Goldberg: I didn't read it but here's what I think

Submitted by toddshui on Mon, 07/26/2010 - 06:15

The second funniest thing when the Washington Post fired Dave Weigel was Jeffrey Goldberg's shit-sucking post on the The Atlantic, in which he allowed his self-serving, anonymous friends at the WaPo to shit all over not only Weigel but all Post bloggers:

"How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?" one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. "I'm not suggesting that many people on the paper don't lean left, but there's leaning left, and then there's behaving like an idiot."

I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.

Okay-- compare Goldgerg's sniffing about journlistic standards with his post today about the WikiLeaks Afghanistan documents:

 

I haven't read the Wikileaks documents, or even much of the summaries of the Wikileaks documents, so I have nothing to say on this except to express the feeling I've had for several years, which is that Afghanistan is neither winnable nor particularly worth winning. I'll try to come up with something more original later. In the meantime, Jim Fallows has actual thoughts.
 

See?  That's what real journalists do-- spout ignorant opinions without even looking at the material they're commenting on! 

Goldberg's own journalistic toilet-training is obviously unfinished.