Jon Chait’s TNR article on the “netroots” makes an important point: there is a new wave of liberal bloggers who are putting ideological/partisan loyalty ahead of the open-minded pursuit of the truth.

One device that Chait uses effectively is pointing out that even Matthew Yglesias, a famously open-minded liberal blogger, “confessed in March that he had soft-pedaled his opposition to gun control. ‘I don’t write about this issue much because, hey, I don’t want to be a wanker,’ he wrote. ‘Wanker’ is the netroots equivalent of the conservative term ‘squish’–an expression of derision reserved usually, but not exclusively, for ideological defectors.”

Yglesias objected to Chait’s characterization of what he wrote:

Rather than “confessing” to a pattern of soft-pedaling my views on the issue, I was–in my mind at least — bragging that, unlike many other professional journalists, I don’t go out of my way to harp on points of disagreement with the liberal orthodoxy purely in order to bolster my credentials as an independent-minded blogger.

Chait then pointed to a different Yglesias post in which Yglesias was more explicit about his motivations:

A separate question is whether or not journalists think of themselves as political actors. Overwhelmingly, I think journalists would tell you “no, they shouldn’t” and that most liberal (but not conservative) pundits would agree. To me, this is wrong. I could in perfectly good faith spend all my time looking for flawed arguments for conclusions I agree with, finding far-left people with unsound views to denounce them, and mocking the foibles of politicians whose views I agree with on the merits. A blog like that might even be entertaining and perhaps widely read. I wouldn’t do a site like that, however, because I think it would be irresponsible. I’m not a political activist by trade, I’m a writer, but hopefully my writing has some kind of impact on the world and I’d like it be a good impact rather than a bad one and that’s something I try to take seriously.

I want to add one more piece of evidence to the mix. Like Chait, I think Yglesias is about the best blogger out there, which is why I was similarly disappointed in this December 2006 post in which Yglesias admits he ignored the Sandy Berger controversy for ideological reasons:

With what I consider a great deal of justification, I tried to rigorously ignore the story of Sandy Berger poaching documents when it was first being pushed by conservatives who wanted to use it as a lever to continue grossly failed foreign and domestic policies. That said, it’s a long way from Election Day and, seriously, a new Inspector General report says he “removed classified documents from the National Archives, hid them under a construction trailer and later tried to find the trash collector to retrieve them, the agency’s internal watchdog said Wednesday.” Hid them under a a trash collector!

One assumes this will make it difficult for Berger to obtain any high-level executive branch appointments in the future.

In short, Yglesias didn’t write about the (troubling) Berger story because it was being pushed by conservatives with goals he opposes. He even half-jokingly cites the amount of time until Election Day as partial justification for bringing it up at all.

As Chait argues, if this is how Yglesias thinks, imagine what the rest of the “netroots” is like.