Liberal Media

So the Washington Post fired Dan Froomkin. Apparently, according to Froomkin, his column "wasn't working" according to his bosses. One of the hardest things he did was his job, while keeping his job. That is because, as a political critic, many times he found his columns repudiating the war cheerleaders on the editorial page.

He was branded with the scarlet letter of being a liberal.

Somehow, I missed the part where avoiding foreign entanglements, opposing torture, opposing illegal wiretaps and expecting elected officials to follow the law as liberal positions.

Asking tough questions has become out of vogue for our stenographic press. Press The Meat fellator David Gregory explains the media failure in the run-up to the Iraq war:

"I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up [in the run-up to the war] and say 'this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this,' that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role"

As an example to Froomkin, David Gregory shows how to question the President prior to going to war:

Q Mr. President, good evening. If you order war, can any military operation be considered a success if the United States does not capture Saddam Hussein, as you once said, dead or alive?

Q Sir, I’m sorry, is success contingent upon capturing or killing Saddam Hussein, in your mind?

In sales, this is called a choice close. "Do you want the red car or the blue one." One assumes the sale and gives the choice of options as opposed to whether the sale should take place at all, or in the field of journalism, calling bullshit:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do.

What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.

Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.

[...] Dan Froomkin, recently fired bullshit detector.

Froomkin served an odd function in that he practiced the art of journalism at the Washington Post, and it "wasn't working." He turned into the guest actor of an old Star Tek episode, the one with the different colored suit.

Spock, Bones, Scotty and...Froomkin, beam down to the surface...

Hell, you knew Froomkin wasn't coming back. It was his perverted view that journalists should be skeptical and adversarial to claims made by political figures, and was labeled liberal for pointing out their false claims and radical policies. Reporters are simply supposed to type down what both sides say and run it through a spell check program. Calling bullshit, as David Grogory has told us, "It's not our role."

To get an idea of what Dan Froomkin felt the role of the press was, read this, this and this. Simply put, he didn't believe journalists should be stenographers, much less cheerleaders for politicians. And he was fired.

But the persecuted and largely silenced voice of conservatives, like neocon Charles Krauthammer, neocon Bill Kristol, Kathleen Parker, Glenn Beck, neocon and serial comb licker Paul Wolfowitz (who told congress prior to the Iraq invasion that Iraqi's would be able to finance their own rebuilding. He went on to head the World Bank, where presumably, math was involved. He got fired shortly thereafter) still get published in The Washington Post.

Keep chasing that thirty percent WaPo and see where that gets you.