More than once at this site, I’ve taken considerable issue with blog entries written by Ed Morrissey at Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air. Prior to joining Hot Air in March, Morrissey ran his own highly popular and well-respected conservative blog, Captain’s Quarters. Back in February when he announced that he would move his full-time efforts over to Malkin’s blog collective, I wrote the following:
As far as I’m concerned, Ed Morrissey is the gold standard for rational political commentary from the right. He’s not a political insider and might not be among the right’s shrewdest thinkers or highly accomplished writers but his genuine willingness to put aside his personal bias in approaching a topic is a rare treasure in the blogosphere.
Most recently I was particularly ill-researched hyperbolic entry from late September in which he disingenuously blamed the “current collapse” on Democrats in the House of Representatives. In my response at this site, I wrote:
For anyone unfamiliar with Captain Ed Morrisey, there used to be a day when he ran his own highly respectable conservative blog Captain’s Quarters. I often listed Captain’s Quarters among my favorite conservative blogs and respected Captain Ed’s opinions as thoughtful, researched and even handed. Sadly, since joining Malkin’s team of subordinates at Hot Air, Ed has given up command of not just his personal forum, but his integrity. I don’t believe the sense of diligence possessed by the Ed Morrissey I used to respect and read regularly would ever have allowed him to post this video and claim:
In 2004, a year after the Bush administration tried to tighten regulation and oversight on Fannie and Freddie, Congress was told yet again that disaster loomed. The Democratic response is instructive to seeing who really sat back and allowed this collapse to occur…much less throw around such sloppy hyperbole as:
Democrats distorted the market through the CRA and through Fannie and Freddie’s massive securitizing of bad debt, and then blocked regulators from doing their jobs. That’s the real story of this collapse.
Earlier today, Scott Martin, from Conservatism Today forwarded this blog post from Morrissey to me with the suggestion that the objective Captain Ed I used to respect still makes his presence known. In that post, Captain refers to Jake Tapper’s criticism of what he calls “Obama derangement syndrome” as he (on cue from tapper) rails against Rep. Paul Broun’s (R-Georgia) abjectly hyperbolic public concern that Obama seeks to usher in a “philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”
Perhaps Scott is right. I don’t read Captain Ed as avidly as I did before his move to Hot Air so it’s possible that I’ve simply not caught his more objective posts. Of course there’s no questioning this new tendency for the Captain to stray from his former standards of integrity at his new gig. But perhaps I was a touch rash in stating, as I did in reply to Scott in the comments section of the “Addressing Blatant Dishonesty” post, that…
When he went to work for Malkin, the blogosphere lost one of it’s most valuable voices.
Good post – I’m sure some of your perspective has to do with you not reading him as much anymore. And I’m sure some of it has to do with him being more partisan at times.
In my mind, I believe many different things that are all closely aligned with one another. I can be a reasonable conservative, a typical conservative or an over-the-top ideologue depending on my mood and the tone and attitude of the person I’m talking to. But all are a part of my mentality.
One thing to note is that this is a business for Ed. And it will be my business as well. Were some big site called say “Guerrilla Conservatism” to make me an offer, my posts would suddenly become a lot more strident and vicious in my opposition to liberalism than most of mine at CT are.
If the same deal was offered to me by say “Intellectual Conservative,” my posts would be a lot more reasoned, intellectual and more open to discussion than most of my posts at CT are. Right now, I play it middle of the road, but the other two are not outside the “real” me.
If I went to either theoretical website and started writing differently, I myself would not have changed. The only thing that would have changed is my audience’s expectations and therefore, which aspect of myself I choose to emphasize.
Thanks, Scott. But it’s more than a simple matter of being more partisan. There’s no getting around the fact that Ed Morrissey has lowered his personal standard for integrity since joining Hot Air.
If he were just writing from a more fringe ideology, that would be one thing, but that should never require him to make outlandish claims which he knows aren’t true. It’s not a matter of his degree of partisanship. It’s a matter of his intellectual honesty. Morrissey is a skilled enough writer and thinker to play up the former without sacrificing the latter. And if I’m wrong about that, I have been grossly overestimatig him for years.
It is true that you have shown me that the old Captain Ed can still take the helm from time to time. And hopefully he does so more often than I realize. Integrity requires consistancy. Perhaps the overheated election campaign season got the better of him. He certainly isn’t the only writer I respect who has disappointed me in the past few months. I’ll try to keep an open mind and continue to read his posts. I’m sure I’ll never get back the blogger who used to be essential daily reading for me but I’d like to know that he hasn’t sold his soul.
No, you probably won’t get the old Captain Ed back. I just disagree that anyone can be consistent who makes 20 posts a day. Or even as few a I do, 3-5. Or really, anyone.
Assuming you ever think I’m reasonable, I’m sure I disappoint you sometimes. And sometimes that comes from you mis-reading my intent, and sometimes it comes from me being in a particular sort of mood where my intent is to piss off people like you and excite the people already in my corner.
We aren’t robots. We aren’t professional journalists (thank God). We are humans who react to things as they come at us. We try to do our best to maintain a world view, to maintain our grounding. If we live off of our writing to any extent, then we have to try to juggle the headline that might double our readership, but that we aren’t quite comfortable with, with the one that feels right, but won’t bring us the action we need.
Attempting to break a person down to where they must be consistent in everything they do is not nearly as logical as it seems. People are highly irrational, and very inconsistent in the ways that they choose to be rational. And, of course, they weigh different things against each other in ways that might not always make sense to you and/or I.