Matt Yglesias is now called a blogger, but he has been an editor and a writer at places like The Atlantic and Vox. He’s a journalist; an opinion journalist, for the most part, but a journalist. He also seldom meets a progressive idea he doesn’t like, which is fine, I suppose; after all, that just makes him like about 90 percent of all journalists.
He also endorses lying. The tweet above from Matt is a couple years old, but was recently raised again in an interview with the conservative Daily Caller and some of Matt’s Twitter exchanges with other writers.
“Fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do, yes,” wrote Yglesias last week. He seemed shocked that anyone would be troubled by this, asking a conservative writer, “Do you really think deception is immoral in all circumstances?” He told the Daily Caller that he approves of lying by policy advocates, but of course he would never lie, because his job as a blogger is to inform.
Does that mean that he would flag, expose and criticize a lie from a politician or advocate he favors, used in the service of a progressive policy Yglesias wants to see succeed? Say, a health insurance program where the primary public policy-making advocate swears will allow everyone to keep their current health care plans, “Period!”? Will Matt vigorously expose hype by climate change advocates like Al Gore, or false budget claims by politicians like Bernie Sanders? If Yglesias thinks that the public wrongly believing that Mike Brown was surrendering when he was shot will lead to important social reforms, will he expose the lie, or bolster it? What are the implications of a journalist’s belief that lying to the public may be ethical for officials and advocates?
Ethics Alarms 