Froomkin gets the axe

Was Dan Froomkin “purged” by the Washington Post’s neoconservative editorial politburo? That was the take around the left-leaning blogosphere this weekend.  A critic of torture, the Iraq War, and associated neocon hijinx, Froomkin saw his online column abruptly axed last week. To compound the insult, the news broke as another leading Iraq War proponent made his way onto the page: Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary. 

The message seemed clear enough: The Post, the paper that brought down Richard Nixon and invited a generation of right-wing hostility, was now a place where even the most thoroughly discredited righty could find safe harbor. Former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson, fired New York Times columnist William Kristol, credibility-challenged Bush cheerleader Charles Krauthammer? Stick around. The blogger who called them all kunckleheads? Beat it.

“The way in which the WaPo has been coopted by the neocon right, especially in its editorial pages, is getting more and more disturbing,” writes Andrew Sullivan. Officially, the firing was a budget measure, though no one has coughed up any traffic numbers detailing what happened to Froomkin’s blog in the five months since he stopped having George Bush to kick around. Critics suggest the real reason was that Froomkin took vocal and sarcastic issue with the pro-war opinion honchos who employed him (plausible) or that the news section breached the Chinese wall and whacked an opinionator who showed up the paper’s reporting (less so). 

Either way, the Post now has one fewer left-leaner to compete with all those newly underemployed Bush foreign policy types it now publishes.

I don’t believe for a minute that the column was killed purely because of traffic and money. But while this may be a distinction without a difference, I’m also not so sure this was a simple matter of right-wing fellow-traveller logrolling. Rather, I think its roots lie in institutional culture–the Post’s, Washington’s, and the nation’s. As such, it’s both more and less disturbing than the idea of editorial page editor Fred Hiatt booting Froomkin for questioning whatever Very Serious Cause it is that has the neocons grasping for Churchillian analogies this week.

The Post’s culture: To peruse the op-ed pages of Washington’s daily of record is to realize that the Post has hitched its opinion brand to superannuated establishmentarians. Leaving aside the columnistic merits of people like Gerson, this may actually represent a decent piece of counterprogramming. The Web crawls with bright young things. The Post is a reliable bastion of gray hair. Even online, the company’s idea of a hip, youth-oriented feature is to have Tucker Carlson and Ana Marie Cox, both of them a long way out of their twenties, go back and forth around the shocking premise that one is a liberal, the other a conservative. Against this backdrop, it didn’t matter so much the Froomkin was anti-torture. It mattered that was a punk.

Washington’s culture: If the Post’s institutional tropism towards establishmentarians explains why Wolfowitz is welcome while Froomkin is fired, it doesn’t explain why it is that Wolfowitz gets to remain in the establishment. Wolfowitz is guilty of the same sins as the other Iraq War cheerleaders: Overselling the threat, underselling the complications, dismissing the moral seriousness of the critics, etc. Unlike mere columnists, Wolfowitz was also the number two in the defense department. Thousands of people died as a result of his office’s botched planning. It’s the sort of thing that ought to lead to professional disgrace. But the bipartisan establishment maintains peace by offering admission based on the objective measure of someone’s CV rather than the subjective issue of whether or not someone was a grotesque failure. So he remains Very Serious Man. Froomkin, by this measure, is not. 

America’s culture: Do our elites face consequences? I don’t mean jail time. I mean the vast array of small ignominies that befall ordinary people who screw up their jobs: No upward trajectory, no right to play the expert, etc. Today, after all the traumas of the past few years, ex-Bushies still make money on the lecture circuit, stock-bubble hypers still opine on CNBC, failed health-care CEOs buy ads against health-care reform, etc. Whatever you can say about Washington, or the Post, it’s a reflection of a culture that’s fundamentally lenient, especially to insiders. My first boss in journalism told me that our job was to restore consequence. He was talking about exposing the ineptitude of a dysfunctional city government. But in the wake of insider-abetted clusterfucks like Iraq or the housing bubble, that’s something we really ought to think about as a country.

One bloggy-triumphalist answer to the problem of elites and establishments and the like is to promote the idea that blogs are going to simply kill the dreaded MSM, exposing its contradictions and shortcuts. Oddly, affairs like the Froomkin firing give me doubts. Not because they don’t demonstrate some of the shortcomings of haughty insiders, but because they show how important all those alleged MSM killers still think the Post is. Just as when bloggers took shots at William Kristol’s execrable Times column–at the time, I wrote that bloggers acted as if the paper were the Louvre and Kristol were a charlatan whose tacky art should never be allowed inside–the tone of some of the outrage is reverent, as if Fred Hiatt were besmirching something that still matters.