Yglesias The UnYthical
The indispensable crew at Ydiot note that earlier today, Matthew Yglesias posted the phone number of Daily Caller reporter Jonathan Strong on his popular blog. He obtained the phone number through private correspondence with Strong, and cut and pasted the following conversation:
I wrote you about this yesterday, but I continue to be curious as to why it is that you’re writing this series of stories based on misleading descriptions of excerpts of JournoList emails where you don’t post the full text of the emails online anywhere.
best,
Matthew YglesiasThen at 4:07 PM Eastern, Strong finally replied:
Mathew,
I was hoping to chat with you for a few minutes this afternoon regarding Journolist. If you could call me at 202-xxx-xxxx, I would appreciate it.
Best,
Jonathan Strong
I redacted the phone number to protect Strong’s privacy. Yglesias afforded him no such courtesy. Needless to say, this is a shockingly churlish action on the part of Yglesias.
Now, it appears, the post in question has been removed from Yglesias’ blog. No comment has been made regarding the post; no apology, no explanation, no mention of it ever having happened. Into the ether.
Remember this the next time Yglesias lectures his colleagues about journalistic ethics.
UPDATE: The post in question is back up — complete with Strong’s office number. Yglesias has now added more private correspondence to the post as well, which, given the cause of this brouhaha, is profoundly ironic.
UPDATE THE SECOND: Epstein’s Razor cuts deep. Yglesias now posts the following:
A technical glitch temporarily caused this post to be deleted from the blog. It was just an accident, don’t read anything into it. Let me also note that the controversy in comments over the phone number is much ado about nothing, that number is the publicly listed phone number of The Daily Caller not Strong’s home phone or anything.
Yglesias is being somewhat misleading regarding the “publicly listed” number of the Daily Caller, however. The number that Strong gave Yglesias is not listed anywhere on the the Daily Caller’s website.
Even more damningly, the number Strong gave Yglesias is not the the Daily Caller’s number that is listed in the White Pages. Only reverse google searches reveal that the number Strong gave Yglesias belongs to the DC. This hardly constitutes being “publicly listed.”
Maybe it’s not just UnYthical Yglesias. It’s Misleading Matt, also.
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“The post in question is back up — complete with Strong’s office number.”
Umm… “Let me also note that the controversy in comments over the phone number is much ado about nothing, that number is the publicly listed phone number of The Daily Caller not Strong’s home phone or anything.”
Was that bit up when you posted this? Seems relevant, and also easy to find out on your own since it’s the first dozen or so hits when you Google the number.