We followers of Dan Froomkin’s wonderful blog at the Washington Post are teetering between depression and rebellion at the news that he’s been dumped. (Our esteemed founder has already weighed in, and Glenn Greenwald talks about it here.)
The Post, like any other major media company, will try to sell the dumping of any relatively clear analysis, claiming that such is inherently socialist and Americans don’t wanna hear it (in other words, to paraphrase Colbert, reality has a well-known socialist bias). They’ll say, I’m betting, that it was a business decision, not an editorial one.
But that’s obviously false. Froomkin seems to have been the most linked-to author on the paper’s website, and as the news migrates from paper to the web, you’d think you might want to keep writers who generate lots of links and thus traffic.
Perhaps that’s only true if the writer in question favors torture. Froomkin recently had a dust-up with one of the Post’s in-house neocons, Charles Krauthammer, over this issue. Krauthammer is one of many Republicans these days who are comparing themselves to oppressed folks around the globe, to the point that he says critics of Obama on Fox News are “a lot like [Hugo Chavez’] Caracas where all the media, except one, are state run.”
Yeah, here in America we have freedom of the press, and the newspapers all parrot the same line, which is part of why they’re dying. They used to offer a variety of views, reporting from different angles and with different agendas, but no longer. What we’ve lost is huge. What we’re left with is a privately owned media monopoly that is collectively the best propaganda machine in history, which is at the service of a small and shrinking set of mega-corporations that are trying to control the world, water, air, soil, seeds, the genome, everything.
The Mighty Wurlitzer remains powerful, but alternative voices are starting to be heard more clearly, in large part due to the internet’s democratizing influence. My guess is that Froomkin was originally brought on board as a sort of loss leader to bring in readers from the blogs; but he’s got a bit of a voice now and he’s using it to contradict the Fred Hiatt pro-war pro-torture lines. And that will not be tolerated.
Personally I’ve taken the Post off my browser’s speed dial, and complained to the ombudsman. I’m sure they don’t care what I think; henceforth I return the compliment.
Well said, Chuck. I've culled my media bookmarks too, for essentially the same reasons you've outlined.
Froomkin, BTW, blogs at the Nieman Watchdog.
http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/
One of your clearest and best posts yet, Chuck.
Posted by: Mike Goldman on June 18, 2009 11:02 PMThanks to both Jim and Mike, and I want to reinforce for everyone that Froomkin is still at Nieman Watchdog, an excellent source of journalism critiques and commentary in general.
One of the ways we could poke the Post is to help Froomkin find a huge audience wherever he goes.
Posted by: Chuck Dupree on June 18, 2009 11:12 PM