June 18, 2009

WaPo Fail

When I lived in the DC suburbs I delivered the Washington Daily Star, the afternoon competitor of The Washington Post. The Star was a pretty good paper, but the Post was the paper in town. We all know about Woodward and Bernstein and their work (from the city desk, mind you!) on Watergate. But it did much more than that over the years.

From what I've seen of it, since the GW Bush Administration it has concluded that its editorial stance should be "whatever Government wants, Government should have." What else could a reader conclude after reading all the pro-Iraq columns from its editor, Fred Hiatt, and its stable of conservative writers like Charles Krauthammer and George Will?

Today, the Post put one more black mark up against itself: it fired Dan Froomkin. Froomkin was one of the few columnists at the paper or its website who regularly criticized the Bush Administration for its policy actions, and he continued to do so when Obama took office. He was a must-read for me for every day. Now he's gone.

Here's what he said:

"I'm terribly disappointed," he said. "I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn't "working" anymore. Personally, I thought it was still working very well, and based on reader feedback, a lot of readers thought so, too... I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online.

"As I've written elsewhere, I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That's what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I'll have to try to do it someplace else."

The Post gets stupider every week.

Posted by Linkmeister at June 18, 2009 12:49 PM | TrackBack
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