David Weigel

At 42 years old, David Weigel physical status not available right now. We will update David Weigel's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Weigel began his professional career as an editorial assistant and researcher for the USA Today editorial page and as a reporter for Campaigns & Elections. He has contributed articles to Slate, The Daily Beast, Time, The Guardian, The American Prospect, The American Spectator, The Washington Monthly, The American Conservative, Politico, and The Nation. He has appeared on NPR's Fresh Air and MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show. Weigel has also blogged for The Economist's "Democracy in America" blog, and guest-blogged for Andrew Sullivan's "Daily Dish" blog at The Atlantic. His book The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock was published in June 2017.

Weigel is a contributing editor of the libertarian Reason magazine and was one of its staff political writers from 2006 to 2008. He wrote for the liberal Washington Independent from November 2008 until early 2010 and was one of the "best sourced" reporters there, according to Michael Calderone of Politico.

After working for the Washington Independent, Weigel took a job writing the "Right Now" column on the Washington Post website, focusing on the conservative movement. Weigel told Politico that "If readers get a deeper understanding of these people, their strategy, and their ideas, then I'm doing my job." The national editor of The Washington Post said Weigel was hired to add a voice to the paper's online politics coverage. Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post said the online columns were supposed to contain a mixture of reporting and opinion.

Weigel was criticized by conservatives for tweets that he made on May 2, 2010, that disparaged news editor Matt Drudge, and that called opponents of same-sex marriage "bigots". Penny Nance of conservative group Concerned Women for America responded that Weigel's "arrogance disqualifies him as a serious journalist assigned to covering conservatives." Politics Daily noted that The Washington Post's guidelines require Post journalists to "refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything ... that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility." Weigel apologized on May 3.

In late June 2010, excerpts of several of Weigel's private emails from JournoList were posted online by the website Fishbowl DC and later by Tucker Carlson's conservative news site, The Daily Caller. JournoList had been started in 2007 by Ezra Klein as an invitation-only discussion and debate forum for left-of-center bloggers and reporters. The excerpts of Weigel's archived emails contained negative remarks about various public figures associated with American conservatism such as Pat Buchanan, Matt Drudge, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh.

Weigel said all of the emails were sent before he joined The Washington Post. He apologized online before the second round of email excerpts was published on the Tucker Carlson site, explaining that he had thought the off-the-record listserv environment was a place where he could "talk bluntly to friends". However, The Washington Post responded that the apology could not save his job because "the damage was too severe." Jim Geraghty of the National Review Online wrote that "there was definitely a perception that his blog was designed to make conservatives look bad."

As a result of the leaked emails, Weigel resigned from The Washington Post and Ezra Klein shut down JournoList. The executive editor of The Washington Post said the paper "can't have any tolerance for the perception that people are conflicted or bring a bias to their work.” Journalist Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic said Weigel was forced to resign under an "old media," "non-ideological standard that just doesn't exist". In closing down JournoList, Klein said it had "become a weapon, and insofar as people's careers are now at stake, it has to die". Describing Weigel as "an idiosyncratic libertarian who likes some politicians and media figures, and not others", Klein said that Weigel's "likes and dislikes do not fall neatly across party lines". Remarking that leaked information can show only a partial, cherry picked truth, and that it can be just plain wrong, Klein said that if other emails had been chosen, Weigel could have been made to look like a conservative extremist.

Weigel began appearing on MSNBC in 2009. On June 28, 2010, Keith Olbermann announced that Weigel was joining MSNBC as a news contributor.

Politico, listing Weigel as one of the "50 politicos to watch", commented that "Weigel may have lost a blogging job with The Washington Post over his leaked e-mails to an off-the-record liberal e-mail list, but he didn't exactly damage his career. If anything, the enthusiastic endorsements of his reporting skills after he left the Post last month brought Weigel to the attention of a wider audience than the relatively small group of conservative activists and the reporters who write about them for whom Weigel has long been a must-read" and that he expected to sign on to "some outlet that has a big online presence" by the end of July.

In August 2010, Weigel joined Slate magazine (owned by The Washington Post) as a political reporter. Weigel said "This is the magazine that invented the sort of journalism I want to do", he continued, "And I'm very pleased that I'll get to continue working the beat I developed at the Post, the Independent, and Reason." Weigel ran a blog covering politics, focusing largely but not exclusively on the conservative movement, his area of expertise. He also wrote long-form pieces, including a multi-part series on progressive rock.

In September 2014, Weigel left Slate in preparation for a new job at Bloomberg Politics.

After only nine months at Bloomberg Politics, Weigel returned to The Washington Post on July 20, 2015. His beat was to cover grassroots movements as part of the Post's presidential coverage.

On December 8, 2017, Weigel tweeted a photo of the crowd at President Donald Trump's rally at the Pensacola Bay Center in Florida that showed many empty seats. He quickly deleted the tweet after it was pointed out that the photo was taken before the venue filled up. Trump addressed the incident the next day on his Twitter account and demanded that Weigel be fired. Weigel replied and apologized, writing "Was confused by the image of you walking in the bottom right corner."

In June 2022, the Post suspended Weigel without salary for a month after he retweeted a joke which characterized all women as being bisexual or bipolar. Weigel, who later removed the retweet and apologized, was publicly criticized by colleague Felicia Sonmez.

Source