Litigation

Journolist

By Ted Frank

Glenn Reynolds reports that Journolist, Ezra Klein's now-defunct private mailing list for DC liberal writers, was used to "link up the older, more established set with the younger up-and-comers, all to better staff newspapers, magazines, and institutions with liberals." Reynolds and a blogger pose the question whether this violated employment discrimination laws. While it's certainly an example of media bias, I'd be hesitant to suggest that networking events present employment discrimination problems. There isn't any evidence that Journolist excluded women or minorities, and no legitimate legal requirement for the list to have quotas before acting as a job-matching tool.

My take on L'Affair Weigel: the Washington Post sold Weigel to its readership as an example of its outreach to conservatives to make up for the fact that they had several blog-reporters who didn't hide their cheerleading for liberal causes. Someone gave the Post the faulty idea that Weigel was the conservative analogue of Ezra Klein. If it was Weigel himself, he took the job under false pretenses, and the blowup was bound to happen sooner or later; if it was the Post's screwup because they didn't communicate to Weigel that that was why they were hiring him, then they should have resolved the problem by giving him a different beat.

Full post as published by Point of Law on June 28, 2010 (boomark / email).