One question that hasn’t received enough attention in the whole David Weigel/Washington Post brouhaha is whether the Post needs a reporter to cover the conservative beat in the first place. There’s been a lot of discussion of what kind of reporter would be best on the beat — a conservative, a liberal, or someone studiously uncommitted? — but there has been less talk about why such a reporter is needed at all, or whether there should even be a conservative beat.
In the past several years, newspapers have assigned reporters to specifically cover conservatives, but they haven’t done the same thing for liberals. It started in January 2004, when the New York times chose David Kirkpatrick to cover the conservative movement. The goal, as Times editor Bill Keller told then-ombudsman Byron Calame in 2006, was to identify “the [conservative] thinkers and the grass roots they organize” and explore “how the conservative movement works to be heard in Washington.”
