Dan Froomkin of White House Watch at washingtonpost.com will join us at Virtually Speaking in Second Life simulcast at BlogTalkRadio. BTR widget is on the Virtually Speaking website.
Program starts at 6pm Pacific/9pm Eastern. Among the things we'll talk about is what I call the Froomkin Flap.
That's my name for the ruckus that got raised at the end of 2005. What happened was the White House was very unhappy with Dan's all too clear and critical postings at what was then called White House Briefing. The White House sent the Washington Post's White House correspondents, Jim VandeHei and John Harris back to the home office to complain about Froomkin. Their access to key White House players was threatened to end if they didn't get him off his prominent position on the Washingtonpost.com pages.
This simple attempt to control the media narrative exposed a number of elements of White House press coverage by the WaPo, and the lines of authority at the newspaper. Turned out that the web operation is independent of the print operation ("Rubbish, you have no power here. Begone before someone drops a house on you."). But what was much more interesting was not just the brute force attempt by the White House to control who spoke out and what they said, but also the craven response from the supposedly tough-minded reporters who cover the White House (now for Politico). The ombudsman Deborah Howell got involved, and we had a scandal for the Jaybirds. The Post did all the wrong things, first stonewalling, then deleting hundreds of comments, lying about the deletions, and then blaming the vile-tongued hippies for being too mean as justification for the deletions.
Jeff Jarvis wrote about the ruckus.
Jay Rosen did an online interview with Harris, and Jim Brady, who was running the WaPo website.
What interested me most,and what we'll talk about with Dan was that they trotted out the "We get strong criticism from both sides, so we must be okay" argument. In the first place, this was a serious, and misplaced criticism of Froomkin's work, because it implied that he was a partisan, which he certainly does not seem to be. Second, it seemed to demonstrate willful ignorance of the different nature of the media criticism from the right vs the left. The right's goal was to remove the legitimacy of the media, to reduce all discussion to political partisanship, where there is no truth or reality, only liberal or conservative points of view. The criticism from the left was that in pursuit of chimerical "balance," the media was producing, at best, inaccurate stories, and, at worst, providing stenography of flat out lies.
The unwillingness of the beltway media to see that these were different criticisms was something that I found befuddling. Venality, rather than stupidity, seemed the most plausible explanation.