From the diaries. mcjoan
I think Josh Marshall sums up my feelings towards the newest Washington Post travesty against nature better than most:
I'm embarrassed for the Post. Embarrassed by the Post.
Pretty much. This is, after all, just the latest skid into what at this point is sheer buffoonery by the online Post, after a slide that began with the first utterances of new ombudsman Deborah Howell, and will probably end the precise day that somebody -- anybody -- in the Post management figures out enough about their current situation to send her packing, and probably online executive editor Jim Brady himself soon afterwards for not keeping better control over the whole mess.
Let's be blunt about one thing. It took about three posts to demonstrate that the new Washington Post "Red America" blog (ugh, even the name reeks of faux-Beltway whoreism) is never going to be anything but a fourth-or-fifth-tier backwater. That's not really the point. The larger point is that the Washington Post felt they wanted -- or needed -- to put it online, and put the imprimatur of their journalistic brand behind it.
And in doing so, it demonstrated yet again exactly how far the media has fallen. As Josh said, I'm embarrassed for the Post.
After both Howell and Brady just got through feigning the vapors over accusations of liberal bias, now they are freely embracing and in fact specifically endorsing a voice of conservative bias. After snuffling and preening about the respectability of the Post, and how worrisome that it might be that a claimed liberal twinge might damage the paper's credibility, now we've got them giving big props to the premise that having another abjectly pro-Bush and pro-rightwing voice, well, that's just fine.
The spin is absolutely spectacular. I mean, really. Has there been any example to date quite so roundly demonstrative of just how in the tank the Washington Post currently is?
It was unironically the supposed inverse of this
exact issue over which Howell and Brady were themselves very publicly falling over themselves in tittering faux frustration, not too long ago -- the premise being that Dan Froomkin, a columnist known primarily for his superlative pulse-watching on both online and offline stories, his willingness to use factchecking where factchecking is deserved, and even just snark where only snark is merited,
might be a liberal, in spite of his own eye-rolling protestations to the contrary.
I'm not sure if it was the intelligent use of outside sources, the awareness of multiple sides of an issue, or the just-below-the-surface voice that made it quite clear that politics should probably be treated as a game among children that gave Froomkin the dreaded mark of the beast, but the premise held water for ombudsperson Howell and editor Brady because the bloodhounds of the White House and hyperconservative Bush apologists like Powerline told them so. (If you're a supposedly impartial ombudsman, getting a complaint from connected conservatives is, apparently, as agonizing as being spritzed with Holy Water if you're a vampire.)
Connected conservatives have it as a specific part of their job description to complain bitterly about anyone and anything that doesn't hold their hands and tell them they look pretty, so I'm not entirely sure why they have the credibility to bitch about anything at this point. It was insufferable ten years ago; now it's just self-parody. Complaining about the bias of media figures in an age in which Fox News pumps raw partisan sewage directly into the coaxial cable of your television set? What, are we kidding?
Anyway -- yes, blah blah blah, Howell and Brady were concerned that Froomkin might reflect badly on the Post because, gasp, those connected conservatives were complaining about the factcheckings and snarks. (It was the same snarkiness in the face of the eminently and unavoidably mockable that sent the Post into public hyperventilation when Dana Milbank showed up on MSNBC's Countdown wearing an orange hunting jacket after the Cheney shooting. Milbank was publicly chastised for this alleged-liberal outburst.)
Anytime anyone at WaPo even glances at the left side of the spectrum, the ostensible "ombudsman" and friends freak out like they've discovered live rats in their underwear. But you can go as far right as you want -- attacking the left as much as you want -- and they don't have a problem with it. None. At. All. And let's face it, rightwing punditry is the cheapest kind. It doesn't require facts. It doesn't require research. It doesn't require links. It doesn't require intellectual argument. Any idiot can churn it out, which is the reason that Any Idiot is getting so damn much attention, these days.
Honestly, do we even have to take them seriously, at this point? When you've hired an intellectual giant like Ben Domenech, for God's sake, I think progressives pointing out transparent right-wing control of the acquiescent media get to declare victory and go home. Deborah Howell? Guess what. You're a hack. Brady, you may have to go back on Hugh Hewitt's show to complain bitterly again about your progressive oppressors. I'll bring marshmallows.
Seriously, forget credibility -- once you've bounded into hiring folks like Ben Domenech, you're firmly in Fox News' groove. Well, the Muppet Babies version of Fox News, anyway, which is probably all the Washington Post can afford, these days.
How symbolic is it that "Red America" is to be represented by a twentyfour year old homeschooled self-described superior intellect, whose primary contribution to humanity, aside from being too cowardly to fight in his much-vaunted war but not too cowardly to make a few quick bucks off the names of people who weren't, has been the advantages of constant nepotism from his very well connected Republican father?
Are those what we're horking up as the ostensible values of Middle America? This veritable human strawman, this spectacular walking stereotype of nepotistic Bush-era well-connected incompetence that we're going to say represents those actual mid-country voices that Washington D.C. couldn't find with both hands and a flashlight? Good Lord. Now that demonstrates the problem rather perfectly, in my book.
You know, I'd like to see a column about Red America written, for once, by a true Red American. Not a professional pundit, or a wannabe-professional pundit, or a paid partisan hack posing as an unpartisan regular feller. Better yet, I'd like to see the Washington Post and other papers open themselves up to promoting opinions from a very wide variety of actual, on-the-ground citizens from a variety of backgrounds. But this? No, this new column just demonstrates, yet again, the cartoonish depiction that the right passes off as their own personal brand of Middle America, and which the media laps up as if the sorry swill actually had substance of some sort.
The ridiculousness of passing off a well-connected, indoctrinated tot still sucking off the teats of nepotism as the voice that the common supposed red-state people should praise and identify with -- ugh. Just ugh. Way to go, guys.
And incidentally, the preponderance of young, conservative-nourished homeschooled supposed child prodigies dredged up to pass for the highest voices of conservative thought demonstrates precisely the ease by which the pinnacles of "conservative thought" can be reached. It isn't exactly a three-day hike.
One more note: you may argue that I am attacking Ben Domenech, the person, as opposed to Ben Domenech, the writing. I assure you, this is only because the writing is so pedestrian, hackish and conventionally predictable, without a hint of original argument or even intriguing rehashing of anyone else's intriguing argument, as to be completely incapable of sustaining a worthwhile critique. Domenech is a brilliant young practitioner of mediocrity, and as such is a veritable monument to the same -- caught in the bowels of his own personal movement, as it were.
Let me make something clear here, since it really has been a point beyond the grasp of the Post itself, that Froomkin was and is popular among the "left" (a term now taken by shills and hacks alike to refer to all those not specifically and obsequiously on the right) not for a supposed "liberal" voice. He is popular because his column is a superlative example of what an online "major media" column should be: heavy on links, superb at factchecking and followup, not demonstrably in the tank of one party or another, and gratefully light on pretense and reverence.
This last one is indeed a trait shared by more identifiably progressive and popular voices like Olbermann or Jon Stewart, and is the key for their success as well -- it isn't the supposed blistering partisanship. It's the willingness to call out a talking point as being a mere talking point, in an age where that is desperately being begged for. It's the willingness to not treat insulting or offensive arguments with respect, but to be healthily insulted by them, for God's sake.
These are traits once shared by journalists, at least in some mythical Woodwardian past. No longer. Now balancing a truth with a lie is just as newsworthy as balancing a truth with a truth -- and requires less work. These days, it's considered quite gauche for a reporter to point out an obvious, flat lie from a quoted source. It's also considered unnecessary, as merely reporting what partisan operatives tell you is considered the primary role of Washington journalism, these days -- not reporting whether or not what they said was accurate.
The Post's national reputation glided for years on Woodward, so it is with no little dose of irony that Woodward is now himself an icon of the new hackery infesting the so-called "investigative" media, a veritable poster boy for a once-proud press corps brought to their knees by a concerted Republican effort to damage them, and now eager lapdogs for the continuation of that very effort.
In that Froomkin and others have the occasional audacity to post, say, factchecks of sources, they are indeed the bane of the conservative movement, and especially the Bush presidency.
So, the proposed remedy? More hackery, to balance.
And that's what journalistic cowardice looks like, in a nutshell.
I've got an idea. If the Washington Post wants to retain credibility, let's have Froomkin and Howell switch places. They both seem to be more gifted in the other's job, anyway -- Howell as an opinionated crank, and Froomkin as the factchecker straining to be hard-hitting but neutral at the same time.
It's surprising to me, in spite of the fact that the right has roundly punked the press for six years now -- in the nineties, the battle was in earnest, but at this point the press will pretty much put up with anything, and even are able to convince themselves that assisting these constant punkings is evidence of some sort of neutrality.
But I think what this latest series of events shows, more than anything, is that the print media fundamentally does not understand, in the slightest, the reasons for the rising anger against them. They don't understand why they're losing influence; they don't understand why they're losing market; they don't understand why they're losing credibility. They don't understand the widespread disaffection with supposed "hard" news that is now anything but "hard" -- and is therefore now more and more replaceable by other sources.
As far as the online world goes, the reason the Washington Post is losing credibility is simple. They're not giving us many reasons to think they have the basic integrity required to maintain it. From the embarrassing, truly whorish fall of Woodward to the sniffling and transparently self-contradictory pronouncements of Howell and Brady, there's not much reason to think that the Post, outside of a handful of still-admirable reporters, remembers what journalism is. WaPo, I've got news for you -- "Red America" isn't even close.
And those voices that I want to hear -- actual red staters, actual blue staters, and more to the point everyday citizens who laugh their asses off at the entire absurd red/blue conceptualization of America -- those voices will never happen, in the dwindling old-growth thickets of the national media. The online world could support it spectacularly well, the necessary budget would be vanishingly small, and the potential brilliance, in this world now fascinated with even the most sickly flashes of "reality", could be great, but it won't happen. The media is too enamored of the pundit framework of cookie-cutter opinionating to give us anything else, and the more obsequious and predictable the punditry, the better. Will the editors of the large dailies ever give me, on a regular basis, scientists arguing about science, or educators arguing about education, or laborers arguing about labor? Not bloody likely. They will, however, give me David Brooks' latest treatise on what life among people who do their own laundry might be like, or George Will's analysis of why political action number two thousand eight hundred forty seven is just like baseball.
What a loss.