This is an interesting scuffle.
The Post’s new ombudsman Deborah Howell believes Dan Froomkin’s daily online quasi-blog ‘White House Briefing’ is “highly opinionated and liberal”.
Because of that she believes that the column should not be allowed to retain the name ‘White House Briefing’ because some readers may think Froomkin is one of the Post’s White House reporters. And that, in the words of the Post’s political editor John Harris, “dilutes our only asset — our credibility” as objective reporters.
Says Howell …
Harris is right; some readers do think Froomkin is a White House reporter. But Froomkin works only for the Web site and is very popular — and Brady is not going to fool with that, though he is considering changing the column title and supplementing it with a conservative blogger.
The first point, it seems to me, is that reading one or two of Froomkin’s columns would disabuse all but the most foolish readers of any notion that he’s a White House reporter. Even if he were, he’s clearly not writing news copy. It’s an anthology of items appearing around the web. And it uses humor and opinion. I think that’s clear to anyone who’s familiar with the various genres of writing that have grown up on the web over the last few years.
As for balancing Froomkin with a conservative blogger, can’t we just match him with Jim Hoagland and it call it a draw? That would be pretty generous, I think. Has there ever been any accounting for all the misinformation Hoagland (presumably) unintentionally spread through his column? And what about all the stuff he’s made up since then to cover for the earlier baloney? Who balances him? Who balances Howie Kurtz’s sometimes myopic focus on ‘liberal bias’? How about the fact that an editor at the Wapo.com recently intentionally tilted a scandal story to include more Democrats than the facts would bear so as to make the story appear more ‘balanced’?
More to the point, with all that has happened to journalism and this country in the last three years — or perhaps just the Post in the last few weeks — is this really all the Post’s ombudsman can think to concern herself with?
