Via Matt Yglesias, the Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander weighs in on the firing of Froomkin:
First, it’s not about ideology. My original Omblog post quoted Hiatt as saying Froomkin’s “political orientation was not a factor in our decision.” In my discussions with Froomkin, he has not cited ideology as the primary reason. And several veteran Post reporters have dismissed that as the cause. In an online chat this week, Post Pulitzer-winning columnist Gene Weingarten, who expressed “respect” for Froomkin and regret that White House Watch was ending, said: “I don’t know why Froomkin’s column was dropped, but I can tell you that the diabolical conspiracy talk is nuts. Froomkin wasn’t dropped because he is too liberal; things just don’t work that way at the Post.” It’s also worth noting that The Post hired Ezra Klein, a liberal political blogger, within the past several months.
Much of that is true, but I still don’t think it’s quite right. Imagine if the Post employed a blogger seen as conservative who had written a respected, substantive (whether one agreed or not) blog/column that was critical of a Democratic president and coverage of the president.
Is there any way on earth that blogger/columnist would have been fired? Of course not.
Froomkin wasn’t fired for being liberal. But he would not have been fired had he been conservative.
Papers like the Post are deathly afraid of being accused of “liberal bias”. And they make a lot of decisions accordingly. This is one example. The bizarre defense of George Will’s global warming claims is another. (Can you imagine such a defense being mounted on behalf of a liberal columnist making liberal claims? Of course not.)
Andy Alexander’s willful naivete about this issue is not surprising, but neither is it constructive.
Update. Michael Calderone makes some interesting points about the Froomking firing:
Interestingly, before management decided to finally pull the plug, editors chose to spike a few Froomkin columns because they fell more on Howie Kurtz’s turf.
It’s strange that a White House columnist — especially one with a unique audience — would be discouraged from writing on the WH press corps. Not to mention, it’s not so out of the ordinary to cross over the two beats: Indeed, Post White House correspondent Michael Shear has a media-related item up today.
And here’s some more from Eric Wemple (who has a lengthy piece on this that is well worth reading):
Froomkin and his editors clicked from the homepage onto other portals of conflict. Media criticism was a good one: The columnist considered commenting on how the media were portraying the White House a significant part of his job; his editors felt otherwise. “They told me they didn’t want me to do media criticism. I could never quite figure out how I could avoid it,” says Froomkin. The friction produced a series of spiked Froomkin columns, which generally got published on the Nieman Watchdog blog, including the columnist’s takedown of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner.
slippytoad
I think the technical term for this kind of statement is lie. A lot of them together form a pack.
When you need to heat them up in order to serve them to the public, you use a crock.
Jennifer
Well, hey, what do you expect from the poison fruit of Nixon’s poison vine? Controlling the media via ownership was the lesson – and the strategy – Republicans took from Watergate. They had pretty much fully succeeded in that goal by the mid-90s.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Is it me, or does the fact that the O-man for a newspaper can’t be more specific rest on the far side of fucking pathetic?
Here’s the thing I recently figured out about the Post. It only seems to be a real paper because it’s sole “competitor” is truly crap (I don’t remember much about the Star, maybe that was true crap as well).
I’m starting to wonder if it’s been riding on Watergate all this time. I’ve been wondering what Priest & Hull had to do to get the Walter Reed story in print for a while.
Balconesfault
Note the internal contradiction in that statement. From the Corporate Media POV, it is impossible to criticize Obama from the left and still be considered “respected, substantive”.
merrinc
Has ombudsman become just another word for useless? I was listening to NPR’s On the Media earlier this evening and my head nearly exploded as their ombudsman attempted to defend NPR’s policy for calling waterboarding an “enhanced interrogation technique” rather than torture.
Dennis-SGMM
How could Froomkin muster the temerity to opine when he was not an actual, certified member of The Village? How could he possibly match the intellectual rigor of Will and Broder – not to mention the always prophetic work of Bill Kristol. And Cokie Roberts is available also.
ksecus
WaPo has become Fox news in print.
They just magically picked the most important liberal columnist for firing , not because of ideology , but because it was his lucky day. And Im the easter freakin bunny
El Cid
The # 1 rule of permissible, non-DFH analysis of major news corporation behavior is that there can never, ever be any systematic reason suggested for why they repeatedly favor hawkish and right wing reporting and analysis.
The process of favoring unjustified lousy hawkish and right wing viewpoints in typically demonstrably wrong coverage must be seen as non-existent and if it seems to be happening it must be seen as accidental, coincidental, the result of natural and unchallengeable social and business processes.
Any attempt to see what is directly before one’s eyes marks one as a moonbat DFH.
InflatableCommenter
Fresh from the Inniescope(tm).
Rosali
Actually, I feel bad about Froomkin. I used to read him every single day during the Bush years but, with Obama in office, I stopped checking his postings. It’s not that I think that Obama can do no wrong. I just recognized that Obama walked into a big mess and should be given a few months to assess the situation and try to fix things before we started scrutinizing his every decision. I’m sure that other people like me stopped reading and, collectively, we contributed to Froomkin’s decline in web clicks.
geg6
I think that they are being technically honest when they say it wasn’t Froomkin’s ideology that got him fired. But the lie of why he was fired is still a lie. Froomkin himself telegraphed the exact reason he got fired: he saves his most scathing criticism for the Villagers. They gave him that valuable Village real estate and he came in and trashed the place. As I wish more people would.
jnfr
Crock works for me, if you follow it up with of shit. Froomkin will land on his feet, I’m sure. The WashPost, not so certain.
Tom
@Rosali: Just about everyone in the political web, including newspapers themselves, experienced significant loss of page views after the election. The presidential campaign was a banner year, and an unusual year. I think that is why the Post won’t give any data and any comparative data on Froomkin’s column.
In addition, Froomkin’s column used to be 5 pages long: you had to click through five page views to read it all. That wasn’t the case in his new format. So that had an impact as well.
I think it is absolute hogwash that it wasn’t an ideological thing.
Anton Sirius
I’m sure Froomkin’s decline in clicks also had nothing to do with the fact that WHW was impossible to find from the WaPo front page (especially compared to the prominent placement Millbank’s crap blog gets).
Ideology didn’t lead to his firing. Ideology just drove all the decisions that created the conditions that led to his firing.
asiangrrlMN
@slippytoad:
This is great. I like it very much. That is all.
inkadu
Shorter Ombudsman: Yes, being liberal is a necessary condition for being fired, but it is not sufficient.
r€nato
I’ve been very conflicted about the continuing worth of having WaPo around. The firing of Froomkin is one step closer to resolving that conflict for me. If they let Walter Pincus and Dana Priest go, that’s it.
Brachiator
@geg6:
This may well have entered into the decision, even if the WaPo executives can’t admit it to themselves.
DougJ’s update mentioning the Michael Calderone piece notes, “Interestingly, before management decided to finally pull the plug, editors chose to spike a few Froomkin columns because they fell more on Howie Kurtz’s turf.”
And there is this little tidbit from the WaPo ombudsman piece, quoting Post Pulitzer-winning columnist Gene Weingarten:
It’s not that the Post wants to cater to the right (although there may be a bit of that as well). It’s that the White House beat is a little aristocracy within the Beltway beat, a little self-policing clique in which status and a passport to the various corners of the Village is far more important than doing whatever it is a journalist is supposed to do.
Wile E. Quixote
@Eric Wemple
See, this wasn’t ideological at all, we didn’t fire him for being a liberal, we fired him for making fun of the villagers. Now will you let it go already?
/Fred Hiatt
JGabriel
Michael Calderone:
This is one of the more infuriating answers being given, all the more so due to its likelihood of being true.
Why would any specific type of criticism about a subject be regarded as someone else’s turf? It’s like saying you can’t use the blue, that word belongs to Joe. If a regular columnist has something original to say, then they should be permitted to say it in their column, whether or not the type of criticism falls in someone else’s bailiwick, especially if they’re not saying it.
Arrrgh!
Froomkin is better off without them.
.
Anne Laurie
Shorter Hiatt: When will you filthy peasants learn that lese-majeste is a bad, bad thing? ! ?
El Cid
Okay, but by odd coincidence, little blockages such as this presumed aristocracy always ends up favoring the hawks and the establishment powers — again, we are creating exceptions which prove the rule.
Singularity
Fuck the Post. They are so bad it makes me wonder if Nixon might have gotten a raw deal. (kidding, kidding…)
MikeJ
Calderone:
Froomkin:
Howie:
Steeplejack
@MikeJ:
This. Word. Ditto. Also.
(Apologies to Steve S.)
Brachiator
@El Cid:
I agree with you to this extent: this presumed aristocracy always ends up favoring the establishment. Courtiers always look for an ass to kiss as they simultaneously seek to puff themselves up. This phenomenon is far more psychological than it is political.
What they most fear is being ignored with respect to their social pretensions. And so they were worried that Obama would be too much of an outsider and not attend the correspondents’ dinner. They fretted about the White House not starting press conferences on time, and not calling on questioners according to some tired old ridiculous protocol which reporters interpret to show which media representatives are the high school jocks and which are lowly nerds. I even recall hearing some NPR correspondent talk about the pecking order implied by the seats assigned to the reporters who cover the Supreme Court.
Nancy Irving
I have great admiration for Froomkin, but I’ve got to admit that since Bush became a lame duck, I’ve pushed the link to his column down the list of my daily reads, and I seldom get to it these days. I would wonder if others have as well, and his readership has suffered now that people no longer need to rely on him as a check on Bush admin horrors.
While others have noted that Froomkin has not given Obama an easy ride either, the Post may want someone on that beat who is seen as ideologically opposed to a Democratic administration–just as Froomkin was seen as ideologically opposed to Bush–to create the kind of hostile commentary that will bring more readers in.
This is merely speculation on my part, though.
Bill E Pilgrim
Your idea that all things being equal, they wouldn’t dump a conservative columnist is the most plausible. and most of what Wemple wrote about how “ideology has absolutely nothing to do with it” is as naive as the Ombudsman’s column.
All of the tap dancing going on doesn’t change the fact that the Washington Post, in this day and age of Barack Obama and the Democrats winning congress, of Republicans getting only 20% voter identification because they’ve drifted too far to the right, publishes the most astonishing collection of Neoconservatives (and I mean the leading lights, two of the most reknowned and utterly disgraced) along with Bush’s ex chief speech writer, FOX News’s Krauthammer, and on and on, going from somewhere to the right of Dick Cheney to almost moderate. On the “other side” we have a handful including Gene Robinson and Michael Kinsley, which I’m absolutely certain that the Post sees as the equivalent extremism on “the left”.
The end result is an opinion section extremely out of synch with the country, not to mention the city they serve. And they just made it worse. How does ideolgical leaning have nothing to do with that?
AhabTRuler
@Bill E Pilgrim: Yes, and they often fork over two-thirds of the op-ed page to “Dr.” Henry Kissinger.
Comrade Kevin
I know what you mean, but do you really think the population of DC actually read that paper? I have my doubts.
AhabTRuler
SInce the Times is a gigantic shitburger, yeah we do.
ETA: Although the free minis have mostly displaced the big kids papers on the Metro, except for Serious People. But if you go into a business, most will have the Post, maybe the NY Times, USA today.
Bill E Pilgrim
Comrade Kevin:
Well, the problem according to the Post itself is that basically no one does. Not to put too fine a point on it. Whatever their target audience is, in other words, it’s not suceeding.
As a side note, I didn’t realize that the mobile version of this site won’t let me reply to someone. Ah well.
sturunner
Someone hit it earlier. The Villagers really, really don’t like it when someone says there is shit on the Green. True, it is covered w/shit, but we never, never say that. That is, if we want to stay IN the Village.
Bill E Pilgrim
@sturunner:
I don’t buy this Villager explanation, not entirely. Ronald Reagan wasn’t from the Village, and the DC media adored him. They sang his myths all over the country and still do, just as they did initially with good old cowboy George W Bush until it became so obvious that he was a complete fuck up that they had to turn on him. Took them long enough though.
I think Doug nails it with the mention of how terrified they seem to be of any right wing criticism. It’s to the level of bizarre, read some of this same Ombudsman’s posts, it’s an obsession. They’re making the same mistake that the Republican party is to some degree, mistaking a relatively small group of noisy letter writers and etc for the actual pulse of the country. You can get a lot of viewers by pandering to that fringe as Fox knows, but it still doesn’t amount to anything but a fringe group, in the grander scheme of things.
That’s really the issue here, through a combination of many factors, the general across the board drop in newspaper readership, the struggle to compete with new media and figure out how, and their built-in long standing basic conservatism trying to figure out how to stay relevant in a world that isn’t anymore, the question is whether they end up surviving by becoming an organ for one party only, and one that’s declining horribly. For me, the answer is already clear, they’re gone.
The Grand Panjandrum
I guess Dana Milbank’s head is on the chopping block for writing that whiny piece about Nico Pitney cutting in line getting asked a question before the Very Serious People? Oh wait … he wasn’t criticizing his fellow Villagers he was protecting it’s turf from the unwashed masses … So you might be right … but I too think it is more related to this unconcious fear of being being called that really mean name: liberalm so they over compensate for it.
Batocchio
Marcy Wheeler had a good piece on this, too – the WaPo simply can’t give a good reason for why he was fired.
As for that Wemple piece – he doesn’t cover the Krauthammer dust-up, nor the Harris and Howell skirmishes, or any of the rest – and cherry-picks Sullivan and Greenwald, who covered those. He accuses Froomkin of arrogance baselessly. Even if Froomkin’s hits were down, according to Wemple, he was still consistently in their top 10 (unless he’s parsing blogs versus other columns). He takes Fred Hiatt’s word in several places. He points out the print-new media divide, but doesn’t acknowledge that the key divisions were quality and a commitment to accountability. By the end, he makes several decent points, and give him credit for valuing Froomkin and pointing out the move was dumb, but it’s too bad Wemple can’t drop the smugness and disingenuousness that has long filled City Paper between the sex ads.
And yes, as noted upthread, the DC-area definitely reads the Post, including the dead tree edition. Unfortunately, now there’s only Dana Priest, Walter Pincus and a few others left to make it worthwhile. FFS, they fired Froomkin, yet they’ve kept Richard Cohen, and hired Bill Kristol after his pathetic NYT stint.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Batocchio:
Not to mention about 18 other right wingers. Even the ones they think are moderate are still right wing.
One of the comments somewhere in the Post’s explanation for firing Froomkin was something about having to decide “what would work best in the new world of media” or something.
Yeah that young fella David Broder, he’s really got his finger on the pulse of the new media and politics, you betcha. Hang on to him but fire Froomkin, good thinking.
Jim-Bob
Is Megan McArdle guest-blogging for DougJ?
;)
Jim-Bob
Also: MikeJ wins at the Itnernets.
El Cid
The Washington Post‘s Jim Hoagland, sharing establishmentarian non-insights today, but we don’t know why they fired Dan Froomkin:
“Harsh but effective”, and it was “against Hamas forces”.
Thank goodness he’s one of the good moderate liberal Iraq invasion boosters whose insights we get to regularly see because us young hip net savvy readers demand such with-it analysis.
SenyorDave
Today’s WaPo has an impassioned column from Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (GA-R) whining about southern states being “tarred” by the antiquated Voting Rights Act. I might take a column about problems with the Voting Rights Act seriously from another southern Republican congressional rep. But Westmoreland? He’s the one who referred to Baracka nd Michelle Obama as “uppity”, and when criticized, had his office issue a statement saying he was unaware the word had racial connotations.
El Cid
@SenyorDave: That’s “Ten Commandments” Westmoreland to you, pal.
DougJ
I agree that it isn’t clear what Froomkin’s politics are. But the Post clearly sees him as liberal.
Redhand
What they are is press secretaries for the press.
I took the WaPo off my bookmark list under “Blogs and News” after they fired Froomkin. Their editorial lineup now is 95% neocon: a complete waste of time.
Svensker
@Steeplejack:
Amen.
(No apologies to Steve S.)
Andrew
The villagers simply ADORE cowboys and other real folks. (By which I mean, completely fake cowboys and people that pretend to be real folks.) It’s an essential feature and requirement for the Villagers to ooze love and affection for stereotypical anti-Washington people and places. E.g. The fetishization of small towns and blue collar workers.
Nutella
Perhaps the Post hiring Ezra Klein is the reason Froomkin had to go. Having two DFH* pushed them over their quota.
And you know how neocons love quotas.
DFH definition at the Post: anyone to the left of Cheney.
priscianus jr
Froomkin argues, convincingly I think, that doing responsible media criticism is truly not a left/right thing. So if the Post didn’t like him doing media criticism, and if that is a good part of the reason for his firing, then it is true they did not fire him for being “too liberal.” They fired him for being too critical of how the news media work.
El Cid
@priscianus jr: OK, but, once again, if your fair and accurate and common sense media criticism happens to differ from the establishment-conservative-hawk agenda, then all of a sudden by definition you’re ‘left’ unless you continually scream that you’re right.
I.e., pointing out the complete joke of a fraud of a media propaganda campaign was being carried out for the U.S. invasion of Iraq made you a ‘leftist’ by definition unless you’re Pat Buchanan.
If you on principle defy the establishment-conservative-hawk nexus and you’re not doing so for explicitly right wing reasons, you are by definition a ‘leftist’.
I should know. It’s how I became a ‘leftist’, because everything I concluded or supported which seemed simple and common sense to me was dismissed as ‘leftist’, including thinking that the U.S. had no right whatsoever to hire terrorists to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.
dude
Funny….a lot more consternation about a liberal bush-basher getting fired than an independent IG getting fired illegally by Obama.
Not surprising of course.
pseudonymous in nc
It’s a parish newsletter. Dana Priest is barely used, Dafna Linzer is gone, Barton Gellman is basically gone, Walter Pincus files regularly but his beat is constrained. (His pieces are great, but he’s kept well away from A1.) The Post is really defined these days by Howie ‘Ongoing Conflict of Interest’ Kurtz and Dana ‘Really Not As Funny As He Thinks He Is’ Milbank. That’s to say, a pile of wank.
Dan Froomkin will do fine. He’s insulated himself from the Village — literally, by filing from home.
Funny, isn’t it? Also funny how NBC shot a pilot covering the lives of Ed and Edwina Rogers, GOP lobbyists-in-chief, and their 18,000 square foot mansion. (Just for comparison’s sake, Monticello is 11,000, including cellars.)
JGabriel
@dude:
We’re so glad we could confirm your liberal biases.
.
eyeball
Wemple’s piece makes a lot of sense. let’s trim it right down to the nub, because alas my friends, this is how it ALWAYS works in the news business, especially today:
Publisher: “I need $10 million in cuts! Tonight!”
Large fatted group of Management Editors: “Ya’as boss. Right away.” (Publisher exits)
Management Editors (gazing over half-specs at each other): “Well, clearly we’re all essential. You (Lowest on Rung), fetch the ledgers!”
Top Management Editor: “What, we’re paying this guy Froomkin 100K for some internet crap, What gives?”
Others (murmuring): “Yeah, what gives? … We crazy? For some online junk … (etc.)”
Lowest on Rung: “Well, he does a Web following.”
Top M.E. “Silence him.”
Others: Attack, kill and eat brains of Lowest on Rung.
Second Lowest on Rung (now lowest): “That’s an easy call, boss. We gotta unload that Froomkin contract.”
Others: (burping) “Yeah. We never see the guy in here anyway. … Thinks he can just work on line. … ”
Top M.E.: “Yes. My ass is rarely kissed in person by this … Froomkin.”
Others: Disbelieving grunts.
Top M.E.: “Next … ”
Moral: All politics is local. Never neglect the boss’s ass.