Dave Weigel, Former Washington Post Reporter, Tells Story of His Exit

Former Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel, who left the paper last week after several media outlets reported leaked e-mails in which he attacked conservatives, wrote on the conservative media blog Big Journalism that his rants were "hubris" and explained how he came to express himself so openly on a liberal listserv known as JournoList.

"I treated [JournoList] like a dive bar, swaggering in and popping off about what was 'really' happening out there, and snarking at conservatives," he wrote. "Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean."

Weigel, who wrote a blog on the conservative movement on the Post's website, came under fire last week when the blog Fishbowl DC published several of his e-mails that were critical of conservative political figures, Ron Paul supporters and Matt Drudge. The next day, the conservative website The Daily Caller published a second batch of messages that featured Weigel saying the views of "real Americans" were "[expletive] moronic."

Weigel apologized for the comments and resigned from the Post on Friday, amid a wave of outraged defenses from friends, former colleagues and even some conservatives in the blogosphere. (Politics Daily's Walter Shapiro, Jeffrey Weiss and Matt Lewis all addressed the controversy.)

In his explanation Monday, Weigel charted the evolution of his political views and his arrival on the Washington media scene. Weigel said he was surprised to find that "one part of journalism in Washington was a give-and-take of gossip, and that sources learned to trust one another by bitching about people and projects they didn't like."

He was quickly invited to join the JournoList by Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, and occasionally participated in the frank back-and-forth between mostly liberal journalists and academics. On Friday, Klein announced he was shutting down JournoList in the wake of the leaked e-mails.

"Journolist is done now," Klein wrote. "That's not because Journolist was a bad idea, or anyone on it did anything wrong. But insofar as the current version of Journolist has seen its archives become a weapon, and insofar as people's careers are now at stake, it has to die".

Weigel writes that he is talking to several media outlets about his professional future.