[11] In May 2002, then-The Daily Northwestern writer and current Bloomberg News reporter[12][13] Dan Murtaugh noted how "in two years Dave Weigel has gone from being a Ralph Nader-voting uber-liberal to the scorn of the leftist movement at Northwestern" and how Weigel underwent a "180-degree political turn" "after he was turned away from The Daily" and started working for The Chronicle.

"[27] The national editor of The Washington Post said Weigel was hired to add a voice to the paper's online politics coverage.

[28] Weigel was criticized by conservatives for tweets that he made on May 2, 2010, that disparaged news editor Matt Drudge,[29] and that called opponents of same-sex marriage "bigots".

[31] In late June 2010, excerpts of several of Weigel's private emails from JournoList[32] were posted online by the website Fishbowl DC[33] and later by Tucker Carlson's conservative news site, The Daily Caller.

[35] The excerpts of Weigel's archived emails contained negative remarks about various public figures associated with American conservatism such as Pat Buchanan, Matt Drudge, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh.

[28] He apologized online before the second round of email excerpts was published on the Tucker Carlson site, explaining that he had thought the off-the-record listserv environment was a place where he could "talk bluntly to friends".

"[37] Jim Geraghty of the National Review Online wrote that "there was definitely a perception that his blog was designed to make conservatives look bad.

[38] As a result of the leaked emails, Weigel resigned from The Washington Post and Ezra Klein shut down JournoList.

[39] Remarking that leaked information can show only a partial, cherry picked truth, and that it can be just plain wrong, Klein said that if other emails had been chosen, Weigel could have been made to look like a conservative extremist.

If anything, the enthusiastic endorsements of his reporting skills after he left the Post last month brought Weigel to the attention of a wider audience than the relatively small group of conservative activists and the reporters who write about them for whom Weigel has long been a must-read" and that he expected to sign on to "some outlet that has a big online presence" by the end of July.

Weigel ran a blog covering politics, focusing largely but not exclusively on the conservative movement, his area of expertise.

[46] On December 8, 2017, Weigel tweeted a photo of the crowd at President Donald Trump's rally at the Pensacola Bay Center in Florida that showed many empty seats.

"[47] In June 2022, the Post suspended Weigel without salary for a month after he retweeted an allegedly sexist joke which characterized all women as either bisexual or bipolar.

[49][50][51][52] In September 2022, Weigel left the Washington Post and was hired by news startup Semafor, which launched the following month.