One has to ask: does the ghastly Jennifer Rubin possess compromising photos of Washington Post Editorial Page editor Fred Hiatt? Fred wrapped in a hammer and sickle flag with his member stuck in a dead mammal? Honestly, nothing else makes sense.
To be sure, Hiatt is a neocon stooge and Iraq War cheerleader and ipso facto not terribly bright, but even the spineless Hiatt must have some tenuous grasp of professional ethics in journalism (if not in government).
God knows, reasonable people have been calling for Hiatt to fire the repellent Rubin for a long time.
Patrick Pexton, The Washington Post's ombudsman until 2013, wrote an open letter to incoming owner Jeff Bezos. In it, Pexton advised Bezos to:
Have Fred Hiatt, your editorial page editor—who I like, admire, and respect—fire opinion blogger Jennifer Rubin. Not because she’s conservative, but because she’s just plain bad. She doesn’t travel within a hundred miles of Post standards. She parrots and peddles every silly right-wing theory to come down the pike in transparent attempts to get Web hits. Her analysis of the conservative movement, which is a worthwhile and important beat that the Post should treat more seriously on its national pages, is shallow and predictable. Her columns, at best, are political pornography; they get a quick but sure rise out of the right, but you feel bad afterward.
And she is often wrong, and rarely acknowledges it. She was oh-so-wrong about Mitt Romney, week after week writing embarrassing flattery about his 2012 campaign, calling almost every move he made brilliant, and guaranteeing that he would trounce Barack Obama. When he lost, the next day she savaged him and his campaign with treachery, saying he was the worst candidate with the worst staff, ever. She was wrong about the Norway shootings being acts of al-Qaida. She was wrong about Chuck Hagel being an anti-Semite. And does she apologize? Nope.
Internet shopkeeper Bezos and the useless Hiatt did nothing. After all, click-bait means higher advertising rates, which mean higher revenues for a money-losing paper.
Hiatt's reply to Pexton was a classic example of point-dodging flannel:
I appreciate Patrick's perspective but I think he is quite wrong about Jennifer Rubin. Regular readers of her blog know that she is an indefatigable reporter who is as hard on politicians on the right when she thinks they get things wrong as on the other side.
Fred Hiatt--Profile In Courageously Ducking The Substantive Points. You should have been a politician, Fred: you're a natural.
But there comes a time, Jeff and Fred, when common decency and respect for your readers must take precedence. To quote Army counsel Joseph Welch addressing the odious Sen. Joseph McCarthy:
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
And that's the point we've reached with your newspaper and Jennifer Rubin: you have allowed her to make you and your newspaper contemptible. Or should that
more contemptible?
It is one thing to take differing views on matters of policy and/or implementation. Indeed, it is entirely right and proper that your newspaper hold government and politicians accountable. That is your most important function, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out.
But when you allow one of your columnists to quote, with approval, the accusation that the President of The United States and his Secretary of State are borderline 'anti-semitic', then you have abandoned your proper Jeffersonian function and become little better than a tabloid scandal sheet and a stench in the nostrils of decent Americans.
What next, Fred? Will Rubin announce the discovery of Elvis, alive and well on the moon and voting Likud? Why not? That's the level you've sunk to.
You were warned, over and over again, that Rubin was toxic; a deranged 'entertainment lawyer' who, far from adding anything to public discourse, spouted hate-filled lies every time she got near a keyboard.
As Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation in 2012:
In addition to her animus toward dovish and liberal American Jews—which, by the way, is most of them—Rubin displayed an obsessive antipathy toward President Obama. Indulging the most paranoid ravings of right-wing jingoists, for instance, she insisted the president’s “sympathies for the Muslim World takes precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens.”
She accused him of being “the most anti-Israel U.S. president (ever),” and insisted that supporters of Israel “must figure out how (quite literally) the Jewish state is to survive the Obama presidency.” Even more egregiously, Rubin quoted, in apparent approval, an elderly Jewish woman in Florida who professed to see “parallels” between Nazi Germany under Hitler and the United States of America under Barack Obama.
And now the chickens come home to roost. By your inaction, your disdain for your readers, your contempt for civilized discourse and your indifference to journalistic ethics, you've turned a once great newspaper into what it is today: a shrill, dishonest, dumbed-down click-bait machine: Buzzfeed for the Beltway Bores (but much less successful).
Eric Alterman ended his excellent piece with the following elegiac words. They can't be improved on so I won't try:
In his engaging portrait of Bradlee, Yours in Truth, Jeff Himmelman recounts an incident from 1969 in which two young Post reporters, Leonard Downie and Jim Hoagland, had worked for months on a story about racial discrimination in the Washington savings-and-loan industry. Titled “Mortgaging the Ghetto,” it was scheduled to run over a ten-day period.
Just before that happened, a group representing the industry went to Bradlee’s office and told him that if the series ran, they would pull all their advertising from the paper—representing, even then, about $1 million in revenue.
What did Bradlee tell Downie? “He puts his hand on my shoulder and he says, ‘Just get it right, kid,’ and walked away.”
The series ran. The advertising was pulled. And the Post went on to become the great newspaper that not only set a standard for accuracy and bravery in the profession, but helped to demonstrate the power (and beauty) of the First Amendment in American democracy.
That the same institution that risked so much for so long simply to “get it right” now publishes—and defends—a writer who cares nothing for the truth, but rather dedicates herself to spewing childish insults at the president of the United States as well as the millions of people who reject her ideological obsessions, is a potent symbol of how far it has fallen.
That whirring sound you hear, Jeff, is Ben Bradlee doing 5000 RPM in his grave.
You have a choice, Jeff (forget Hiatt; like all neocons, he's a born flunky and worships the rich. He'll do as he's told).
You want to be remembered like the reptilian Rupert Murdoch, Jeff? Who took a respected (albeit conservative) newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, and turned it into Fox News-for-people-who-can-count-to-20-without-taking-their-shoes-off?
Your choice, pal. The man who saved The Washington Post or the self-absorbed billionaire asshole who let it die?
Nobody's going to remember you for selling crap more efficiently, Jeff, but you'll be remembered for this, whichever way you jump.
Make it the right way.