POLITICO learned today that the Washington Post has terminated its relationship with liberal columnist/blogger Dan Froomkin. Froomkin authored the "White House Watch" blog and was told today that the blog had essentially run its course.
Washington Post Media Communications Director Kris Coratti tells POLITICO that "our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we're giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com."
Froomkin was none too happy with the decision, telling POLITICO that he's "terribly disappointed."
Many Froomkin fans took to the blogosphere to denounce the decision.
Andrew Sullivan called Froomkin the paper's "best blogger" and wrote: "Dan's work on torture may be one reason he is now gone. The way in which the WaPo has been coopted by the neocon right, especially in its editorial pages, is getting more and more disturbing. This purge will prompt a real revolt in the blogosphere. And it should."
Salon's Glenn Greenwald echoed Sullivan's praise of Froomkin and said: "All of this underscores a critical and oft-overlooked point: what one finds virtually nowhere in the establishment press are those who criticize Obama not in order to advance their tawdry right-wing agenda but because the principles that led them to criticize Bush compel similar criticism of Obama. Rachel Maddow is one of the few prominent media figures who will interview and criticize Democratic politicians 'from the Left' (and it's hardly a coincidence that it was MSNBC's decision to give Maddow her own show -- rather than the endless array of right-wing talk show hosts plaguing television for years -- which prompted a tidal wave of 'concern' over whether cable news was becoming 'too partisan'). In general, however, those who opine from the Maddow/Froomkin perspective are a very endangered species, and it just became more endangered as the Post fires one if its most popular, talented, principled and substantive columnists."
On DailyKos, "numediaman" writes: "In the end, Donald Graham and Fred Hiatt are moving the Post hard right. Their support for war was not just a kiss up to power, but a real commitment to the neo-con way of looking at the world."
Gawker: "The Washington Post, which pays money to opinion writers such as Bill Kristol (smarmy) and Richard Cohen (smarmier), has fired blogger Dan Froomkin, one of the only WaPo opinion writers who pointed out that the Bush White House was crooked."
The snark kings at Wonkette protested as well: "Everyone give it up for your capital city’s hometown newspaper, the very liberal Washington Post, which has abruptly fired its only liberal pundit, Dan Froomkin, who in past years did more than the rest of the Post op-ed staff combined to show how our beloved leaders George W. Bush and Richard 'Dick' Cheney were careless law-breaking criminals from Hell."
Froomkin's work for the Post has, at times, been amongst the most popular, but he has also ruffled some feathers internally at the Post, including former ombudsman Deb Howell, who used a column to field complaints over the labeling of Froomkin's "highly opinionated and liberal" "White House Briefing" column, which was subsequently changed to "White House Watch."
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer even took Froomkin to task in one of his columns, calling Froomkin's analysis "stupid."
Under the stewardship of Fred Hiatt, the editorial and op-ed pages of the Washington Post have gradually moved to the right. Post editorials and op-eds have defended the decision to go to war in Iraq; opposed any improvement in bilateral relations with Russia; refused to acknowledge Israel's misuse of military power in the Middle East; and lobbied against the need for investigation of the detention and interrogation programs of the Bush administration.
As part of the campaign to prevent a rigorous examination of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (read: "torture and abuse"), the Washington Post's editorial pages have been particularly protective of the Central Intelligence Agency and its senior leaders--the ideological drivers for torture and extraordinary renditions policies. These CIA leaders, particularly deputy director Steven Kappes and acting general counsel John Rizzo, are not trying to protect the reputation and mission of the CIA; they are trying to protect themselves.
Surely senior journalists from the mainstream media must understand that reliance on anonymous CIA clandestine sources is neither good reporting nor professional journalism. Many of these "anonymous sources" almost certainly are former and current CIA officials seeking to protect themselves. George Tenet, John McLaughlin, and John Brennan are individuals who fit that description.
In the past several days, the Post has carried editorials and op-eds by its own editorial writer David Ignatius; its longtime national security writer Walter Pincus; former CIA director Porter Goss; former CIA operative Michael Scheuer; and Marc Thiessen, a former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. These articles have been similar in content and similar to the statements of other CIA directors past and present (Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, Goss, Tenet, and John Deutch) who opposed the release of the memoranda of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that justified the use of torture and abuse.
The Scheuer article is particularly scurrilous, accusing President Obama of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance" in deciding to release the torture memos. Scheuer believes that an end to torture will lead to future terrorist attacks that could involve the "loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen," and that the president will bear some responsibility. Scheuer, an aggressive proponent of torture and abuse, was the leader of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit in the 1990s. His behavior at CIA was so bizarre that he was eventually quarantined by the Agency, spending the last few years of his employment in the Agency's library without access to classified documents.
These Post articles also reflect the opinion of key members of the CIA's National Clandestine Service and Office of the General Counsel, who want to cover up CIA war crimes and prevent any authoritative investigation of the CIA's creation, operation, and maintenance of its detention and interrogation programs. The CIA took a similar stance in trying to block investigations of such intelligence failures as the inability to track the decline of the Soviet Union in the 1980s; the 9/11 intelligence failure in 2001; and the provision of specious intelligence to the White House and the Congress of the United States in the run-up to the war with Iraq in 2003.
The leader of the Washington Post editorial squad has been Ignatius, who has developed close relations with CIA clandestine operatives over a period that spans three decades. Ignatius' key source in the 1970s was the late Robert Ames, one of the most successful clandestine officers in the history of the CIA. Ames was the source for most of Ignatius' writings on the Middle East as well as for his novel about CIA clandestine tradecraft, "Agents of Innocence."
Over the years, retired and active members of the directorate of operations have taken their stories to Ignatius; they have been rewarded by Ignatius' one-sided accounts of CIA derring-do and willingness to ignore operational and analytical failures. Ignatius is welcome to his opinion on these matters, of course, but he should not be permitted to create facts that don't square with the history of the recent past.
A comparison of last week's op-eds by Ignatius and Goss, a former CIA clandestine operative and a former chairman of the House intelligence committee as well as the CIA director during the period of torture and abuse, is particularly revealing. Both Ignatius and Goss argue that foreign intelligence services will not share sensitive intelligence with the United States and the CIA because of the declassification and release of the torture memoranda. That is nonsense!
by
gatekeeper50 on
07/02/2009 03:05:55 PM EST
