I first noticed this on Atrios’s blog. Jennifer Palmieri, who’s acting CEO of the Center for American Progress while John Podesta is working on the transition, did a forcible ‘guest post’ on Matt Yglesias’s blog, which is now hosted at CAP, disavowing one of Matt’s posts that was critical of ‘Third Way‘, an avowedly centrist and incrementalist Democratic pressure group.
I’m curious whether Podesta would have done something so clumsy.
In any case, I think it would be reasonable for CAP, if they had some institutional disagreement with what Matt wrote to say so on their front page or perhaps say so on some CAP company blog, if there is such a thing. I can’t think of an example where I’ve done that. But if someone who writes at TPM wrote something I strongly disagreed with, I don’t think I would refrain from doing a post on TPM saying I disagreed with them. But forcing a post onto the person’s own blog, their own editorial turf, completely undermines the whole organization’s credibility and all the writing that gets done at the site and frankly for the whole organization — which is too bad, since a lot of it is extremely good.
It’s true that there’s some inherent tension in housing journalistic writing under the roof of what is after all fundamentally an advocacy organization. But some basic rules of the road combined with maturity and discretion on the part of the overlords could make it workable.
Adding to the problem is the fact that the ‘guest post’ seems pretty clearly to stem from inter-group Dem politics rather than any disagreement that some actual person has with what Matt said.
Can someone who knows Palmieri mention to her that she goofed here? That she undermined Matt and made herself and the institution she’s helming lose a significant amount of credibility and respect? I would think that Palmieri could say that this was a slip up caused by the novelty of the blogging medium or some such mumbojumbo. It might even be true.
(ed.note: Full disclosure. Matt’s a friend and prior to hosting his blog at CAP and The Atlantic, he ran his blog at TPM.)
