Froomkin Retrospective
7/7/09 8:54 PM
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Froomkin Retrospective Five things to note: (1) A strange piece on Fred Hiatt and company's firing of Dan Froomkin from the Washington Post by the Washington City Paper's Erik Wemple, who writes: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/07/froomkin-retrospective.html
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Why Did the Washington Post Sack Dan Froomkin?: [J]ust because the Post’s decision wasn’t tainted by neocon ideology and the cowardly calculations of an “establishment media” operation... This is an odd thing for Erik to assert. For the first attempt to push Dan Froomkin off to the side--the one led by thenombudsman Deborah Howell and then national political news boss John Harris--was explicitly and unashamedly motivated by neocon ideology and the calculations of an "establishment media" operation. Remember December 2005? How Deborah Howell wrote that: The Two Washington Posts: Political reporters at The Post don't like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin's "White House Briefing," which is highly opinionated and liberal... How Washington Post national political news editor John F. Harris uttered a truly remarkable and bizarre sequence of adjectives about Dan Froomkin over a five-day period: [Froomkin] invites confusion... dilutes our... credibility... we would never allow a White House reporter... a problem... a liberal prism... not trying very hard to avoid such perceptions... we do not want to spike his column--or at least I don't... an obstacle to our work... tendentious and unfair... no regard for the tradition of objective journalism... Froomkin’s... pompous suggestion... [false claim to be] high priest and arbiter of good journalism... total bullshit... [Froomkin's] comment... a smear on Washington Post reporters... I'm not trying to make this a bigger matter than it is... on-line crankosphere... [Republican operative claim: "Dan Froomkin: Second Rate Hack"] does not seem far-fetched to me... And how, when NYU Professor Jay Rosen asked John Harris to come up with an example of Froomkin's "bias," Harris came up with was an attack by Patrick Ruffini--Bush-Cheney 2004 Webmaster and at the time eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee. At the time we wondered: is it really possible that the Washington Post's national political editor really thinks that the Washington Post should be responsive to a claim of liberal bias made by the RNC's eCampaign Director? Is it really possible that the Washington Post's national political editor really does think that the idea that Dan Froomkin is a "second-rate hack" "does not seem far-fetched"? The answers appeared to be "yes." Now John Harris and Deborah Howell are gone from the Post. The Post honchos have clammed up. But is it really that farfetched to think that Howell and Harris think like the rest of the people at the print Post--who, after all, were hired by the same trio of Graham, Downie, and Hiatt who hired them? And is it really that farfetched to think that people have been waiting in the weeds to fire Dan since? (2) Having concluded--by overlooking the history here--that Dan Froomkin's firing was a pure business decision, Wemple goes on to say that it was a very bad business decision. An insane business decision. An incompetent business decision by clowns who fundamentally do not understand their industry: That doesn’t mean it wasn’t dumb, short-sighted, and self-destructive. It was all of those things. The key number in this whole saga... is $500,000-plus. That’s what the Post invested over the years in "White House Watch." That’s what it took to pay someone with the doggedness to mine every last detail about presidential coverage on the Web and turn it into something digestible. And that’s what it took to actuate thousands upon thousands of fans to bookmark Froomkin for as long as he stayed at it. And what a wise investment it was, to judge by the outrage that has spilled onto comments boards around the Web. To fire the guy six months into a new administration... [is] a betrayal of... patient, long-haul planning. As President Obama faces more and more difficult decisions in reforming Washington, he’s bound to alienate the lefty constituency that has formed a crowded party on Froomkin’s platform for more than five years. Three to six months more--that’s all it would have taken for Froomkin to get back to his old traffic neighborhood... (3) And Wemple then spins his theory of what really went on: Froomkin, 46, should have seen this coming. He’s just the latest in a series of departures from the Web side of the Post. His first job with the organization was back in 1997, not long after the Post located its online operations in Arlington. Part of the motivation for placing Froomkin and other web people on the other side of the river was to keep their operation from getting swallowed whole by the retrograde print cluster.... Over the past year, top Post officials have http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/07/froomkin-retrospective.html
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operation from getting swallowed whole by the retrograde print cluster.... Over the past year, top Post officials have decided to merge the print and Web operations. But “merge”... [is] far too mutual a term.... [T]he [web]site’s top talent has either fled or been elbowed aside, including online Publisher Caroline Little, washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady, Managing Editor Ju-Don Roberts, multimedia editor Tom Kennedy, and political editor Russ Walker.... [O]nce his contract came up for review, he essentially had to rely on the print team to back him up. Yeah, like that was going to happen... Because the print Post is incapable of understanding the environment it now lives in: Froomkin is a new-media animal.... [H]e doesn’t bang the phones all day and attend briefings. [Actually, Dan Froomkin does bang the phones all day. And he does attend briefings--remotely, however.] He does his work by reading and synthesizing what other journalists do. And he does it all from his Tenleytown home! How could a second-hand journalist like this guy become such a force on the Internet? Via constancy. Day in and day out, Froomkin nailed the same themes and the same players--and delivered his package at the same hour, not unlike the evening newspapers of yore. His franchise fused the basic principles of Internet success: define your beat narrowly, post consistently, be passionate. It’s a great formula, and the Post should be proud of having nurtured it. Pretty soon now, it’ll be the asset of whatever organization hires Froomkin to replicate it. The columnist expects to reach a deal with a new employer “within a week or two.” (4) Another theory--in addition to the ideological-revenge-tastes-best-cold theory and to Wemple's--come from Michael Calderone: that Howard Kurtz did not like Froomkin showing him up: Michael Calderone: [B]efore 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... (5) And Bob Somerby has a somewhat different twist on that theory: EZRA SI, FROOMKIN NO: Why is Dan Froomkin gone from the Post when they employ other liberals?... [W]e’ve been looking for an excuse to discuss Ezra Klein’s move to the Post. This is a good day for it.... We of course have no way of knowing why the Post has dumped Dan Froomkin.... [But] Dan Froomkin criticizes the press corps. In the press corps, if you’re a liberal, that just isn’t done. Duh. We’ve explained this bone-simple point for years. If there’s one thing you’ll never see Dionne or Robinson do, it’s criticize their cohort—--he coven, the clan. Dionne established this point quite brilliantly all through Campaign 2000. Of course he knew that his cohort was talking all manner of bullsh-t about Gore. (On one or two very tiny occasions, he even tinily said so.) But in the mainstream press corps, liberals don’t discuss the mainstream press. That’s the price of getting those (very good) jobs. It’s also the price of holding them.... This brings us around to the recent hiring of Ezra Klein, a smart young liberal who just may know how to keep his big trap shut. (Froomkin doesn’t do that.) A few years ago, Ezra broke all the rules! Behaving much like Froomkin himself... he described a recent speech by Gore.... By the rules of the Washington mainstream press, this simply cannot be done.... KLEIN (4/06): The address was the keynote for the We Media conference, held at the Associated Press headquarters in New York last October and attended by an audience that included both old media luminaries and new media innovators. In attendance were Tom Curley, president of the AP, Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, all leading lights of a media establishment that, five years earlier, had deputized itself judge, jury, and executioner for Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, spinning each day’s events to portray the stolid, capable vice president as a wild exaggerator, ideological chameleon, and total, unforgivable bore...
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/07/froomkin-retrospective.html
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Ezra was just a kid in those days... And you may recall what happened next. Ezra went on C-Span’s Washington Journal to discuss his cover story. And sure enough! He didn’t say a freaking word.... On C-Span, Ezra didn’t repeat what he’d said--and he never discussed it again. Go ahead: Reread what he wrote. In a rational world, is that remarkable statement the sort of thing a person says just once?... [W]hy is Ezra at the Post? This is what it says in our novel: Ever since making that rookie mistake, he’s kept his big trap shut. Liberals get to write about policy. They aren’t allowed to tell the truth about the “mainstream” press corps’ conduct. Dionne and Robinson know that rule. They know they must never disrespect it. Froomkin never played by that rule. Today, he’s on the street. RECOMMENDED (4.63) by 2 people like you [How? ] You might like:
Washington Post Andy Alexander Says that It Is Dan Froomkin's Fault that Fred Hiatt and Company Fired Him Froomkin Departs, Leaving Angry Loyalists And Questions Morning Daniel Froomkin News Roundup 2 more recommended posts » Brad DeLong on July 05, 2009 at 10:33 AM in Information: Better Press Corps/Journamalism | Permalink TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e551f0800388340115717df1a1970b Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Froomkin Retrospective:
Comments Here's a column by Ezra from last year, where he made similar criticisms of the media. A choice quote: "Ask those pundits about the new Gore, of course, and they will sigh and search the heavens and moan that, oh, if he had only been this way when he was in politics, how different it all could have been. But he was this way when he was in politics. He was a substantive global-warming obsessive with a penchant for long disquisitions on meaty topics. When his pipeline to the public was a gaffe-hungry media looking for ways to humiliate him, that didn't turn out so well. When he was able to speak directly to the public, those traits were considerably more attractive." "[A] gaffe-hungry media looking for ways to humiliate him." And there's more like it in the rest of the article (and not just on their treatment of Gore). I don't think he's kept his trap shut. Posted by: Blar | July 05, 2009 at 12:56 PM Thanks - Wemple completely ignores the substance of some of the bloggers he slams, such as Greenwald. It's not as if all the reasons for firing Froomkin need to have beeb mutually exclusive. Routine idiotic office politics probably played a role, as did business shortsightedness. But given the history, the snit fit thrown publicly by Krauthammer and other neocons over Froomkin, and the "integrity" of Fred Hiatt, it really strains credulity to claim that the neocon gang played no role. Hiatt's kept hawkish dolt and "liberal" Richard Cohen, and hired neocon Bill Kristol after his pathetic stint at the NYT. The City Paper occasionally features a good piece, but has a long tradition of smug, poorly-supported sniping in between all its sex ads. Posted by: Batocchio | July 06, 2009 at 10:39 AM
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