Can A "Reporter" Be Too Biased Even For DNC Daily Newsletter Politico? Apparently So.

Joe Williams is an idiot and he works at Politico (sometimes coincidence and causality match up). Yesterday on Martin Bashir's daily diatribe of a show Williams said Mitt Romney is only really comfortable around white people.

That was too much for even the hacks at Politico.

Politico journalists have a clear and inflexible responsibility to cover politics fairly and free of partisan bias. This expectation extends to all of the public platforms in which we and our reporting and analysis appears, including cable TV and social media platforms like Twitter.

Regrettably, an unacceptable number of Joe Williams’s public statements on cable and Twitter have called into question his commitment to this responsibility. His comment about Governor Romney earlier today on MSNBC fell short of our standards for fairness and judgment in an especially unfortunate way.

Joe has acknowledged that his appearance reflected a poor choice of words. This appearance came in the context of other remarks on Twitter that, cumulatively, require us to make clear that our standards are serious, and so are the consequences for disregarding them. This is true for all Politico journalists, including an experienced and well-respected voice like Joe Williams.

Following discussion of this matter with editors, Joe has been suspended while we review the matter.

Harris VandeHei

Personally, I'm kind of meh on this. The issues isn't the occasional times liberal activists masquerading as reporters let the mask slip and are too honest for even Politico management to ignore, it's the 99.9% of the time they simply do a better job of hiding their true feelings.

I'd rather the media as a whole spend less time pretending to be something they are not and just be honest about their rooting interests.

Here's the link to the video. Note the headline of the story, "Politico Reporter: Romney Only Comfortable Around ‘White Folks’. I think a better alternate title would be, "Martin Bashir Only Comfortable Around Other Assholes". Tomato/Tomahto I guess.

posted by DrewM. at 10:17 AM

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