With the firing of Dan Froomkin, the Washington Post takes its stand as the house organ of the Village idiots

Ah, of course, as the WaPo "make[s] sure we’re giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources," Dan Froomkin is out and the comedy team of Milbank and Cillizza is in.

"The Washington Post's firing of Dan Froomkin reveals much about the modern establishment media. Froomkin was one of the very few journalists working for an establishment outlet who understood and practiced the function of journalism. That is why he had a history of tension with the Post. Froomkin is everything that a political journalist is supposed to be -- and everything that most of them are not. That's why he was an aberration -- and, to them, an unpleasant one. Just look at the record."

-- Glenn Greenwald, in a Salon.com column yesterday, "The
Washington Post, Dan Froomkin and the establishment media"

by Ken

Is there any doubt that on a daily basis, the best thing in the Washington Post, or at any rate the best coverage of national affairs, for some time now hasn't been in the Washington Post but is Dan Froomkin's resolutely to-the-point and thoroughly researched "White House Watch," which appears only on the paper's washingtonpost.com website? Or, I should say, appeared. Naturally now he's been shoved out the door.

At this point I would really encourage you to click through to the piece of Glenn Greenwald's I've quoted from above. It's Glenn at his very best, starting with a brief see-no-evil, hear-no-evil quote from David Gregory, followed by a long, passionate exposition from Dan Froomkin himself, which Glenn brackets as "The American establishment media in a nutshell." And that's before Glenn himself goes to work on the subject. This is a must-read.

But to back up a little, in case you're just coming into the story, yesterday RawStory's John Byrne offered this convenient summary:

Washington Post Media Communications Director Kris Coratti said the blog wasn’t a good use of Post resources.

“I think the easiest way to put it is that our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we’re giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources,” Coratti said in a statement to Politico Thursday. “Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com.”

The departure of his blog has raised eyebrows. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald, also a progressive, said he was vexed because Froomkin was actually an Obama critic who stuck to his values rather than expressing blind fealty to the Democratic party.

“One of the rarest commodities in the establishment media is someone who was a vehement critic of George Bush and who now, applying their principles consistently, has become a regular critic of Barack Obama — i.e., someone who criticizes Obama from what is perceived as “the Left” rather than for being a Terrorist-Loving Socialist Muslim,” Greenwald wrote. “It just got a lot rarer.”

The original Glenn Greenwald piece, which John quotes from, is still the basic text on the subject. Yesterday, however, Glenn followed up with a delicious piece called "Persecution of the Right and the Washington Post Op-Ed page and with the big piece I've already referred you to.

The "Persecution of the Right" piece, by the way, takes off from a preposterous whine by that toxic pile of sludge Charles Krauthammer that the imaginary lack of opposition to President Obama in the U.S. press "makes us a lot like Caracas where all the media, except one, are state run, with the exception that in Hugo Chavez-land, you go after that one station with machetes. I haven't seen any machetes around here, so I think we are at least safe for now."

Here's just a further taste of Glenn's big piece yesterday, picking up from the opening paragraph quoted at the top (naturally the original is link-laden):

The first public controversy erupted when then-Post Political Editor John Harris -- now, appropriately, the Editor-in-Chief of the consummately wretched Politico -- demanded that the name of Froomkin's column ("White House Briefing") be changed because Froomkin was too liberal to be presented as a real reporter. The Post's Ombudsman Deborah Howell defended that decision, noting that "Political reporters at The Post don't like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin's 'White House Briefing,' which is highly opinionated and liberal." She quoted Harris as saying that Froomkin's column "dilutes our only asset -- our credibility" and he "writes the kind of column 'that we would never allow a White House reporter to write.'"

Why was Froomkin deemed "liberal," inappropriate and biased? Because he pointed out that the Bush administration's claims were false and their policies radical -- i.e., he wrote what was factually true. But that -- writing what is factually true and pointing out false statements from those in political power -- is the number one sin in establishment journalism. As David Gregory said, that's not their role. In the Bush era, pointing out the lies of Bush officials was all that was necessary to be deemed a leftist. Stephen Colbert explained why: "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

And Glenn is just warming up. As I said, this is a definite must-read.

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