Julia has the last say in WashPo’s attack on columnist Dan Froomkin:
John Harris: How Dan would be writing about a Kerry administration is obviously an imponderable. Does Dan present a liberal worldview? Not always, but cumulatively I think a great many people would say yes—enough that I don’t want them thinking he works for the news side of the Post.
Without agreeing with the views of this conservative blogger who took on Froomkin, I would say his argument does not seem far-fetched to me.
In the interest of the non-partisan full-disclosure news coverage that’s so very, very important to Mr. Harris, perhaps it would help you to understand the scope of the problem if I identified “this blogger” as a gentleman named Patrick Ruffini.
Mr. Ruffini is, in fact, a conservative blogger (if you accept the current debased definition of the word “conservative”).
Mr. Ruffini is also the former webmaster of the ‘04 Bush-Cheney campaign website.
Whatever. At least they still have that rigorously non-partisan Mr. Woodward on tap.
As long as the White House says it’s OK, and he doesn’t need it for a book.
UPDATE: Brad DeLong has some thoughts and Jane piles on.
I think it’s pretty clear to any sentient being that the main problem with Froomkin’s column is the White House reaction, and no one else’s.
Which raises the question: Who does WashPo really serve?
I especially liked their snide comments about how the people who went after them for attacking Froomkin “don’t really understand the difference” between Froomkin and what real journalists do. As Duncan so often points out, it is the mainstream media that insists on mixing reporters with political hacks on talk shows. Talk about blurring the line!
“a great many people”
That sounds very Fox Newsy, doesn’t it? It’s right up there with, “some people say…”
“it is the mainstream media that insists on mixing reporters with political hacks on talk shows.”
And in the case of the Post, in the pages of their own paper, as with Dana Milbank, who does all the mixing in one persona. Milbank the reporter? Milbank the columnist? Who could tell?
Was June so very long ago? Back in June, Dana Milbank wrote the only coverage of Congressman Conyers’ hearings on the Downing Street minutes. He wrote a send-up (under the headline “Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War”), a joke, a long snark; his first sentence characterized House Democrats as taking a trip to “the land of make believe.”
The piece was published in the paper on page A6. Milbank had never been previously identified as anything but a reporter, and he was not identified as anything but a reporter when the piece ran.
The Post’s ombudsman at that time, Michael Getler, wrote later that it was “unfortunate” that it had never been announced or explained by the Post that Milbank was not only a reporter but also a columnist, and that this piece (and an earlier one in which Milbank referred to the “wing nuts” of the left who had offered a reward for the first so-called journalist to ask Bush about the Downing Street minutes) were columns, not news.
He wrote in that aggrieved Getlerian tone that I have lately come to miss — it’s true that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. He implied — by my reading, at least — that although nothing specifically identified Milbank as a columnist and no such announcement had ever been made, the Post’s readers were smart enough to know Milbank’s opinion pieces from Milbank’s news pieces, and were being deliberately stupid in regard to the two pieces under discussion.
This is a line of argument that apparently applies only to the Post’s readers of Milbank, and not to the Post’s readers of Froomkin.
Harris, so far as I know, was not heard from on the subject of this unfortunate confusion. Perhaps because mixing reporting and political hackery is “what real journalists do” these days. On the Post, at least. The potential for confusion didn’t seem to dilute Milbank’s credibility …
I think we need a different word to describe people who ask Who, What, Why, When, Where, and How, and write about it. “Journalists” is no longer fitting and proper.
Kind regards,
Dog, etc.
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written before coffee i wish comments had a preview feature