Blogger's Fall: The Lesson in David Weigel's Demise

The political punditry are all a-twitter about the crash and burn of the Washington Post's Dave Weigel. For many, the deep details may be as murky and uninteresting as figuring out the offsides rule in World Cup soccer. But there's at least one important lesson at the core of this episode, even for people who do not aspire to public political opining.

In case you missed it: Weigel was hired by the Post as a blogger tasked to focus on the "conservative movement," even though his political sympathies seemed to lean in another direction. In the last couple of days, word leaked out that he'd posted crude and unpleasant things about conservatives to a "private" listserv. Weigel tendered his resignation and the Post accepted.

A day later the listserv closed shop.

Cue the query-storm.

Can a political liberal cover political conservatives? Should the folks being covered have a say in who gets assigned to cover them? Has the Post lost "face" on one side or the other over the handling of this contretemps? Whither trust? I'll leave others in the Politics Daily stable, such as Matt Lewis, Mara Gay, and Walter Shapiro to assess those kinds of questions.

But in the accounts of the events, I keep seeing this phrase used to describe Journolist, where Weigel made his intemperate posts: "an off-the-record listserv."

Seriously?

My wife is a "civilian," a non-journalist. I started telling her the story, intending to spring my big conclusion on her. She interrupted me mid-rant when I mentioned the "off the record listserv."

"Was he crazy?" she said. "There's no such thing."

She spotted the oxymoron straightway. And here's my lesson: An "off the record listserv" is like a unicorn, a leprechaun, and a non-public status update on Facebook. Imaginary.

That a professional journalist could believe in such a thing is difficult for me to believe. For a political reporter, whose stock in trade inevitably features leaked items that people had once thought were private, to believe in such a thing leaves me well nigh breathless.

I don't know Weigel, and I mean no disrespect when I gently suggest that his naiveté, not his intemperate comments, rendered him unsuitable for his assignment.

My personal hobbyhorse, as regular Politics Daily readers know, is to encourage greater civility in political discourse. I even invented a word for it: "civilogue." And yes, I think greater civility, particularly in online discussions, would make the world a slightly better place.

But the sad case of Weigel demonstrates that there's also a bit of self-protection in civility. If he had applied Politics Daily's Joann M. Weiner's rule to his comments -- "Would you post this comment if your mother knew you were posting it?" -- would he have hit the "send" button? Would he still be working for the Post?

I cannot imagine typing words into any arena on these Internets that any other people have access to and assuming that those words will not ever become public. Particularly if those words are controversial.

That's been true for e-mail, Facebook, MySpace, IM, blog posts and comments, all the way back to the ancient and honorable Compuserve forums. Never in the world's history has it been easier for people to express their thoughts to more of their fellows so quickly. And never have those thoughts been more permanent and more easily accessed and broadcast.

Ironically, virtual words are more persistent that anything on wood pulp. An uncivil word you write today may come back to bite you in a day, a year, or for as long as servers continue to serve and Google cache or its successors continue to store data.

Is that enough incentive for you to, as Woody told Sid, "play nice"?

Back in 1956, the magazine Astounding Science Fiction published a story titled "The Dead Past," by the amazing Isaac Asimov. The story was about a machine called the chronoscope, which had the power to view the past anywhere in the world, and the efforts of three scientists to wrest the device from strict research limits set by the government.

Asimov, never settling for the obvious, showed how the government was right. The idea the scientists had -- that viewing the "dead past" would be a boon to academics and that the government was evil for restricting it -- was a particular kind of blindness. After all, a machine that views the past can see what happened a minute, or a second, or a nanosecond ago -- essentially seeing the present.

In the story, the scientists succeed in making the invention public, and in the final scene, the government agent sums up what they'd done:

"What kind of a world we'll have from now on, I don't know, I can't tell, but the world we know has been destroyed completely. Until now, every custom, every habit, every tiniest way of life has always taken a certain amount of privacy for granted, but that's all gone now."

He saluted each of the three with elaborate formality.

"You have created a new world among the three of you. I congratulate you. Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever."

I'm not saying that these Internets don't have their uses or that they've damaged our privacy in the same way that Asimov's chronoscope would do. But they have created a new level of responsibility that every one of us who say anything online ignore at our peril.

Walter Shapiro's PD post condemns the backstabbing still-unknown person who leaked Weigel's "private" posts -- and bemoans the loss of trust that the leak will inevitably create. Me, I guess I never had that much trust to begin with. (An honorable man? So are they all, all honorable men...)

In the Olden Days, I was warned by a venerable colleague not to put anything in writing that I'd mind seeing in a 72-point headline on the front page of the newspaper. I guess the 21st Century version of that advice is not to put anything in writing that you'd mind seeing at the top of the Drudge Report.