Redstate

By PatrickR Posted in User Blogs — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Promoted from Diaries.

Over the last couple of years, the online news digest, once the province of costly subscriptions, has been thoroughly democratized. ABC News's The Note is the undisputed leader in this regard. Despite an annoying cultural elitism that comes with being a permanent part of the D.C. establishment, their north star remains political reality - and explaining it with a level of clarity that's orders of magnitude beyond what most pundits can muster. The Note has inspired scores of imitators, from CNN's Morning Grind to NBC's First Read.

The granddaddy of them all is National Journal's Hotline, lunchtime fodder for thousands of political aides, holding a Subway sub in one hand, and scrolling this bottomless trove of information with the other. (A subscription will set you back in the mid-four figures annually.) Aside from some light editorializing at the top, and the very creative headlines, the Hotline plays it straight up the middle, conveying only the key, need-to-know bits from over 100 articles daily; the two times this blog has been quoted in there - sans hyperlink alas - they quoted me accurately and the excerpts conveyed the spirit of what I was trying to get across. How many beat reporters can you say that about?

I have to give credit where credit is due. These reports rounding up other news are something MSM does pretty well. Perhaps having a paid subscriber base, or structuring them as a memo to news executives (how The Note started out) instills that kind of discipline. Despite a few missteps here and there, a round of applause is in order.

For everyone, that is, except for the Washington Post, and the trite Democratic partisan it has chosen to write its daily roundup, Dan Froomkin. Compared to the masters, Froomkin's White House Briefing is second-rate hackery. And you might say that coming from me, that's saying something!

Read on to see the goods on Froomkin's bias. A selection of headlines from Froomkin's last few weeks paints the picture:

Bush's Two Minds (March 28)

Bush's Approval Takes a Tumble (March 25)

What Trumps What in the White House? (March 24)

Bush's Roadshow May Be Losing Its Magic (March 23)

For Bush, High Drama and Mixed Reviews (March 22)

Fake News Gets White House OK (March 15)

Hughes's Return is a Blow for Rove (March 11)

Bush vs. the Governors (March 1)

Far be it for me, a fiercely partisan blogger, to decry partisanship in online media. But here's the thing. On WashingtonPost.com's Politics home page, Froomkin is listed as a News Columnist, as opposed to the Opinion Columnists listed below, and which include David Broder, E.J. Dionne, George Will, and Charles Krauthammer. Moreover, when you're reviewing the news, as opposed to making it, it tends to be easier for whatever reason to play it straight up the middle. The Note does it. The Hotline does it. You couldn't tell which side Peter Daou is most definitely on from reading his site. There's no hard-and-fast-rule here - and I may have been an exception (I'll explain below) - but the format of these columns has tended to stray from partisan commentary. Absent his outing as a full-throated Kossack, a reasonable reader would expect the same from Froomkin.

That is sadly not the case.

For a guy who's so resolute, President Bush is apparently of two minds when it comes to the Terri Schiavo case. First he dramatically rushes back to the White House in an effort to intervene, then he retreats into silence.

So what's going on? Is he caught in the rift between the social conservative and libertarian wings of his party? Is it a political reaction to bad polling numbers? Was he dragged against his will into intervening in the first place? And what's Karl Rove's role in all this? (March 28)

Then at the mid-day briefing, Press Secretary Scott McClellan officially confirmed that the White House is blowing off the Government Accountability Office's finding that prepackaged administration video news releases constitute illegal covert propaganda. (March 15)

President Bush takes his Social Security show on the road again today and if past is prologue he will be surrounded by supporters, showered with praise and cheered like a winner.

But outside the bubble, there are more signs of trouble. (March 10)

Here's one Atrios recommended highly to his readers:

Good policy can withstand tough scrutiny. And a good politician can tolerate tough questioning.

President Bush is barnstorming through five states to try to drum up support for remaking Social Security, but instead of fleshing things out and confronting his critics, he is surrounding himself with hand-picked flatterers and adoring crowds. (February 4)  

Here's his response to the State of the Union, entitled "Omissions, Implications, and Contradictions":

The banner headlines in today's newspapers belong to the stories that dutifully recount the highlights of President Bush's daring State of the Union address.

But the morning news is also alive with little headlines advertising analyses and sidebars that dig deep into the speech's omissions, implications, misrepresentations and contradictions. (February 3)

Is it easier for Froomkin to pile on when the news is bad? Hardly. When we had those string of "Was Bush Right?" stories a few weeks ago, Froomkin was simplistic and derisive in his approach to the premise, but gallant and thoughtful in voicing the dissent:

Here and there, you can hear a new melody emerging in the press coverage of President Bush, and it goes something like this: Bush is a historic figure, the Ronald Reagan of the Middle East, whose heroic invasion of Iraq is a historic turning point for worldwide democracy tantamount to the fall of Berlin Wall.

But the counter-melody can be heard as well: Bush is falsely taking credit for the pro-democratic movement in the Middle East, some of those moves are insignificant and transitory, the long-term impact of the Iraq war will be disastrous, and Bush is engaging in unseemly saber rattling. (March 9)

This is from Froomkin's "Bush vs. the Governors" opus, which even the Post's editors needed to rein in:

But when the time came for the governors to ask Bush some questions, the press was shooed out. And no transcript was made available.

That's really too bad. Because in the view of at least one governor, it wasn't pretty. (This is a corrected version of this column. An earlier version of this column, then titled "Bush Gets an Earful," incorrectly interpreted the following story to suggest that the governor made his comments directly to Bush.) (March 1)

The day after an election is always a revealing time. Even fierce partisans like Paul Begala show signs of grace, tipping their hats to the winners. With their assumptions held up to the harsh light of 100% undiluted political reality, the losers must publicly adjust their big-think ideas, and watching them is often as rare and revealing as watching tectonic plates shift below your feet. But not with Froomkin. Here's his "analysis" the day after the election:

* The Bush campaign super-charged the "moral minority." Exit polls showed 21 percent of voters said moral values were the most important issue -- and 78 percent of them voted for Bush. That's about 18 million Bush votes right there.

* Bush profited hugely from the dramatic social, cultural and geographic divides that we first saw so clearly in 2000, that were if anything deeper this time around, and that assured him of enormous swaths of rock-solid support.

• He was successful at stoking voters' fears about terror, vesting himself with the cloak of a commander in chief at war and defining his opponent as a weak and vacillating leader.
• He kept to his plan and kept his message simple. He didn't get bogged down in details and didn't admit mistakes.

* He divided -- and conquered. (November 3)

Well, you get the picture.

It didn't take long to find these quotes. In almost every single column, the lede is resolutely anti-Bush. He just can't contain himself. And because he's wearing the reporter's hat (he got his start as a line staffer for the Post's web site) - and not the polemicist's - he gets to make his cheap shots not through argument, but through specious, process-driven wordplay designed to disguise his opinion as conventional wisdom. There's only one word to describe this kind of work: Fluff.

Take something as seemingly innocuous as today's column on the Intelligence Commission, one of his bailiwicks. In it, he describes its leaders, Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Chuck Robb as "an intensely conservative Republican and a centrist Democrat." Since little is known about the commission's deliberations, what purpose does this serve other than shameless spin? It's a tactic as old as referring to the "ultraconservative" Jesse Helms while labeling Ted Kennedy nothing at all.

Am I opposed on principle to Froomkin writing a liberal opinion column for WashingtonPost.com? Not so long as he admits he's a liberal, or his editors label his column what it is: Opinion. Like they do for the other esteemed writers on the Post's op-ed pages. Unfortunately, Froomkin makes matters worse by contending that his column is devoid of his personal views, stating in a CJR interview, "Typically, a blog includes a lot of personal opinion; mine doesn't." Right.

I can actually understand Froomkin's thought process as he crafts his message of the day. I did the same thing for several months - writing a daily news roundup... for the Bush campaign blog. Because the Kerry campaign had no comparable document, I often thought of Froomkin's column as the opposition.

So much for rarefied institutions like the Post being above being above self-interested, partisan motivations that run rampant among us bloggers!  

UPDATE: Pure bias:

It is flatly un-American for people to be hauled out of a public event with the president of the United States because of, say, a political bumper sticker on their car.

But is it too much to ask the White House to say so?

Apparently.

Oy vey.