The Washington Post Double-Downs On Its Right-Wing Stance

It figures. Nevertheless, it means the Washington Post, along with the Washington Times, have decided irrelevance is the best strategy for their future:

The Washington Post Company has dismissed veteran online columnist Dan Froomkin, according to Politico's Mike Calderone, who writes about media for the political website.

Author of "The White House Watch" blog, Calderone said only that Froomkin had been let go. "In so many words," he writes, "Froomkin was told that his blog had essentially run its course."

"Froomkin's work for the Post has, at times, been amongst the most popular, but he has also ruffled some feathers, including former Post ombudsman Deb Howell, who used a column to field complaints over the labeling of Froomkin's "highly opinionated and liberal" "White House Briefing" column, which was subsequently changed to 'White House Watch,'" he adds. Froomkin's purportedly final column is available here.
Glenn Greenwald, a popular columnist and scholar at Salon, questioned the Post's intelligence in dismissing one of their most popular online writers.

One of the rarest commodities in the establishment media is someone who was a vehement critic of George Bush and who now, applying their principles consistently, has become a regular critic of Barack Obama -- i.e., someone who criticizes Obama from what is perceived as "the Left" rather than for being a Terrorist-Loving Socialist Muslim," Greenwald writes. "It just got a lot rarer, as The Washington Post -- at least according to Politico's Michael Calderone -- just fired WashingtonPost.com columnist, long-time Bush critic and Obama watchdog (i.e., a real journalist) Dan Froomkin.

What makes this firing so bizarre and worthy of inquiry is that, as Calderone notes, Froomkin was easily one of the most linked-to and cited Post columnists. At a time when newspapers are relying more and more on online traffic, the Post just fired the person who, in 2007, wrote 2 out of the top 10 most-trafficked columns. In publishing that data, Media Bistro used this headline: 'The Post's Most Popular Opinions (Read: Froomkin).' Isn't that an odd person to choose to get rid of?
Greenwald praised Froomkin as one of the few liberal pundits who criticize Obama from the left under principles they also drew on when they criticized former President George W. Bush.

...Wonkette, a popular satire blog, was equally scathing.

Think about this one example, of many: wretched columnist Richard Cohen, whom the Post passes off as one of its tenured liberal critics, was embarrassingly wrong about every possible aspect of the Iraq War — as was the entire Liberal editorial board — and when asked in 2006 to reflect on his hawkishness during the first Bush term, he wrote, “In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.” This pathetic, grumpy person who was sneeringly wrong about very important War issues and then explained it all away, years later, with that sociopathic “quip” about human life, is still a weekly columnist at this newspaper, where the other op-ed “stars” include Charles Krauthammer — who called Froomkin “stupid” in a printed column — Bill Kristol, David Broder, Fred Hiatt, Jackson Diehl, George Will, David Ignatius, and Michael Gerson.

-John Byrne