John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, had some harsh words for RedState.com and The Daily Caller in a November BuzzFeed piece:
He singled out RedState.com, which has earned credibility on the right, in part, by targeting vulnerable moderates in Republican primaries, and directing grassroots readers to defeat them. Podhoretz warned against the site’s “hunger and desire to establish an ideological party line and draw boundaries around it, and say anyone who’s not in this line should not be elected and should be destroyed.”
“A deliberate choice is going to have to be made,” he said. “Is RedState a news and information website, or is it an activist partisan Republican website pushing specific politicians? Regrettably, right now I think it’s more the latter than the former.”
He also distinguished between “high-minded” publications like his own, and the “much more scrappy, low down, tough, take-no-prisoners ad hominem stuff” published on certain websites, and said that the latter’s approach was misguided.
“The Daily Caller may have thought that surfacing a speech from 2007 was going to ruin the election for him, but I think that was a foolish hope,” Podhoretz said. “He’d already been elected in spite of all that.”
I just saw this. At least, I don’t remember reading it in November.
The new news, of course, is that RedState is looking to hire some reporters. Here’s hoping they can become as “high minded” as John would like.