“Nothing drives this blog quite as crazy as media organizations that don’t answer questions about their own journalism.”
That line was written by Erik Wemple, a media critic for The Washington Post, on his first day on the job last June. Wemple was hired by The Post to write “a reported opinion blog on news media,” and he outlined what his blog would focus on. Three of his points stood out. Wemple claimed that his blog would 1) deal with the hypocrisy of media organizations that don’t answer questions about themselves (see the quote above), 2) take on the problem of bias with fairness and guts, and 3) do original reporting: “The crankshaft of this blog will be phone calls, documents, electronic mails, interviews, and the like.”
Sounds good. But Wemple has been on the job for almost six months and he won’t answer a simple question: What are his political opinions — he writes an opinion blog, after all — and how do they affect what he decides to cover? I ask this because Wemple’s column has quickly devolved into standard liberal boilerplate, and I want to know why I should read it if it’s not going to offer anything different than Dana Milbank, E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson and the rest of the low-T chorus.
The most glaring example of this is Wemple’s lack of coverage of the media and the chaos of Occupy Wall Street. On October 11, Wemple wrote an entry about the media’s frustration with Occupy Wall Street’s lack of spokespeople. Wemple argued that the OWSers were actually a well-oiled machine: “Shocking though it might be to all those who’ve described OWS as a bunch of ragtag, disorganized lefty rubes, the group’s Twitter feed channels discipline. It doesn’t run off at the mouth with platitudes about ideology and the like so much as it feeds critical information to its people. Especially about where the cops are and what kind of gear they’re wearing.” Wemple also celebrated the fact that the Occupy movement’s organizers would never say what they were about. Obfuscation is not normally something that journalists admire.
After that, Wemple’s coverage of Occupy Wall Street shrank. Now it has all but stopped. This was seemingly in direct proportion to the rapes, thefts, lice and general violence that have plagued the tent cities. Here was a story for a truly ballsy media-blogger to tackle: Was the combustive pig-pen cloud of OWS being ignored by the media because most people in the media are liberal? It was time for Wemple to fire up that crankshaft of interviews, documents and emails.
Increasingly, as the crime tally climbed, Wemple’s blog, which promised to be uncompromising and to tackle the hypocrisy of the media organizations that don’t answer questions about themselves, became a showcase of liberal outrage, a Maddowite cavalcade of right-wing bogeymen. Sarah Palin ad nauseum. Bill O’Reilly’s a tool. Look what that blowhard Rush Limbaugh said. James O’Keefe, you should be ashamed. Herman Cain, Herman Cain, Herman Cain. Wemple, in his reported blog, could not be bothered to take a trip to New York to see if the media was covering the OWS swamp accurately. He couldn’t even walk a block from The Post’s headquarters to the Occupy D.C. camp at MacPherson Square to see if it had any of the reported problems. Instead he presented, and presents, a daily view master reel of conservative ghouls. Who needs it? We already have a Daily Kos.
Moreover, readers who’ve read this article about Wemple know that his wife, Stephanie Mencimer, is a writer for the Marxist magazine Mother Jones. Indeed, Mencimer dutifully tweeted her husband’s early cheerleading entry about Occupy Wall Street.
In his first entry back in June, Wemple wrote that he would address the conflict between liberal and conservative claims of bias: “That clash is the mother of millions of page views all over the web, along with an enlightenment quotient of zero. We at the blog promise to go deeper, to press people to make their cases for media bias with specifics. At the same time, we’ll be monitoring the issue from our own control booth, straining to spot ideological tilt in all kinds of content streams. As we speak, we are looking to build a machine that’ll track real instances of media bias.” He added this: “As I move up the learning curve, I’d ask that everyone be as merciless as possible — just rip me to shreds, please. True, pleading for nastiness on the Internet is a bit like asking a cowboy to please wear boots, but I find that nothing motivates me quite like heavy-handed criticism in the comments section.”
Well, he certainly seemed ready to man up. So: What are Erik Wemple’s politics? How do they influence his writing? And does his wife’s position and her politics affect what he covers — and what he doesn’t? Does he think that the media is liberal and that because of this liberalism it is ignoring rapes, assaults and vandalism committed by Occupy Wall Street protesters? Has the machine he built to detect media bias detected any from the left wing?
Does Wemple think Occupy Wall Street is Marxist? Does he support it?
Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.
