The Washington Post Fires Froomkin and America Pays the Price

Dan Froomkin (Image from trueblueliberal.com)

The news shocked everyone when Politico’s Michael Calderone first reported it: The Washington Post has fired one of its most beloved columnists and watchdog journalists, Dan Froomkin. While I was surprised and saddened when I heard about it last night, the full impact of the news didn’t hit me until I read today’s paper.

Reading the op-ed section of the Washington Post today was like walking through the charred remains of Thermopylae just after the Persians invaded Greece: brutal. My first thought was: No one should have to see this. Can I somehow burn all the papers in New York before anyone awakes? 

But it was too late. Citizens awoke to this “rich variety” of perspectives: Neo-Conservative Charles Krauthammer, Neo-Conservative Paul Wolfowitz, David Ignatius, and Bush CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden. Glenn Greenwald does an excellent job of mocking the self-proclaimed martyrs of the right, who whine that they’ve been marginalized from the mainstream media, while simultaneously occupying the entire op-ed section of a major American newspaper. 

What I want to do is focus on Dan Froomkin himself, and why he’s such a valuable journalist, and why his disappearance from the Post is a loss for all of us. 

Froomkin was the author of the Post’s White House Watch blog, which performed a badly needed service in the days during Obamania. Without attacking a Democratic president simply for being a Democrat, Froomkin analyzed the White House happenings with a critical eye (like journalists are supposed to.) Even though his criticisms were nonpartisan, he was nonetheless a target for the wrath of his Conservative colleagues at the Post (none of whom are ever criticized for their blatant partisanship). 

But a good journalist should be the most unpopular person in the room, and Froomkin seemed to relish that role. When he wasn’t acting as a watchdog for the White House, he was criticizing the embarrassingly sycophantic behavior of his colleagues. For example, the blowjob interview of President Obama performed by NBC’s Brian Williams.

The legendary independent investigative journalist, I.F. Stone, is (unsurprisingly) Froomkin’s hero. He wrote, “Most significantly to me, Stone never squelched his voice — an informed voice, full of outrage and born of an unconcealed devotion to fair play, civil rights, civil liberty, free speech, truth in government, and peace on earth. These are the same nonpartisan, humanist values that have fueled our discipline’s best work throughout history.”

Froomkin was commemorating the 100th birthday of Stone. In closing, he wrote, “the occasion of I.F. Stone’s 100th birthday provides the perfect opportunity for us to focus on the need for journalists to be independent from inappropriate economic, political and personal pressures — and for us to celebrate those who live by the principles Stone embodied.”

America should celebrate independent journalists like Stone and Froomkin. Good journalists are the sentinels between government propaganda and the people. Without a critical, independent press, bad things happens (like the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan wars).

We need more journalists like Dan Froomkin, which is why his absence from the Washington Post is a loss for all Americans.