Milbank v. Weigel

Like Matt, I think that Carr has the Post dead to rights on its double standards. A couple additional points:

• The analogy is pretty direct.   If I understand, the justification for firing Weigel was that you couldn’t expect Weigel to cover Matt Drudge if he wrote mean emails about him.   Milbank’s beat involves covering the White House, so it would seem that the same logic would apply in his case.
• It should also be re-emphasized, as Carr says, that “none of the Post leadership suggested his actual work was anything less than rigorous or fair.”   Whereas one can actually find examples of Milbank’s sexist attitudes about Clinton affecting his actual work for the Post.    But, then, Milbank himself believes that media antipathy toward Clinton can simply for taken for granted.   It’s not like picking on poor defenseless Matt Drudge!
• A central issue would indeed seem to be that Weigel just isn’t part of Beltway media culture, and I’m guessing that one of the biggest crimes that one can commit among the kind of people who send anonymous emails to Jeffrey Goldberg is to actually take politics seriously.    One can’t imagine Weigel acting like Milbank and asking politicans multiple questions about how they look in a swimsuit; in the culture of the Post, this is apparently a major negative.