The Froomkin Firing - By Paul Krugman "You Have To Be Wrong To Be Respectable"

[kpete]

The Froomkin Firing
By Paul Krugman

.............

OK, I have no idea about the actual decision process. But I have a theory about the general mindset of the people who made this decision.

Here’s how I see things: many people in the news media, especially at the managerial level, decided a long time ago that movement conservatism was The Future — and that the sensible thing, whether or not you yourself were a conservative, was to go with the wave. That meant treating right-wing politicians and media figures with great respect, while ridiculing the opposition as the Incredible Shrinking Democrats or the Incredibly Shrinking Democrats, or whatever.

And anyone who didn’t treat the right with great respect, who didn’t get with the program, was a flake, a moonbat. The way Iraq war skeptics were frozen out of the prewar discussion was only the most conspicuous example; pretty much the same thing happened in early 2005 to anyone questioning the push for Social Security privatization.

Now, you might think that the way things turned out — the total failure of movement conservatism in government, and the abrupt, humiliating end to the Permanent Republican Majority — would lead to some soul-searching. But that’s not how human nature works. Instead, it became more urgent than ever to assert that those who didn’t get with the program were flakes and moonbats, not worthy of being listened to, while those who believed in the right to the bitter end were “serious”.

Thus we still live in an era in which you have to have been wrong to be respectable. You’re not considered serious about national security unless you were for invading Iraq; you’re not considered a serious political analyst unless you spent the last 3 years of the Bush administration predicting a Republican comeback; you’re not considered a serious economic analyst unless you dismissed the idea that the Bush Boom, such as it was, rested on a housing bubble.

....................

more at:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/the-froomkin-firing/

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[Deb]

2. Paul Krugman is invited to dinner at my house, anytime.

Yes indeed. k&r

[Captain Hilts]

3. The WP's op-ed page's hard turn to the right -and I think conservatives are people too- made me can

my subscription to the WP.

Right after the hired Michael Gerson.

[Mojorabbit]

25. The reply to the email I sent the post

clearly underscores the fact that they do not get it. I am done with them.

[JohnyCanuck]

33. I am surprised that so many are surprised over the "right turn."

After all The Washington Post's former publisher Phil Graham (now deceased) worked as a close partner of the CIA in establishing the CIA's anti-democratic, media subversion program known as Operation Mockingbird, and is apparently on record as stating that "the function of the press was more often than not is to mobilize consent for the policies of the government" (see excerpt from "A letter to the Washington Post" below).

Who controls the media

It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.

In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, __a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

"By the early 1950s," writes formerVillage Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst." The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

http://www.freedomofthepress.net/mockingbird.htm

If you click on freedomofthepress.net above and page down a bit you come to this:

A Letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes
_

April 25, 1992 Richard Harwood,
Ombudsman The Washington Post
1150 15th Street NW Washington, DC 20071

Dear Mr. Harwood,

Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy", and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability -- the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!!

It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS".

Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra.

Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2).

But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5).

Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release(an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter.

Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9). In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages, challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN). who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11).

Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485 which had asked President Reagan to answer questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John

Hull (from Hamilton's home state). was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security", Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100 year old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15).

Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies:

SNIP

And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work.

Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictment was announced ...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83).

Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism and the news media, Mrs. Graham said: "A second challenge facing the media is how to prevent terrorists from using the media as a platform for their views. ... The point is that we generally know when we are being manipulated, and we've learned better how and where to draw the line, though the decisions are often difficult" (*85).

http://www.freedomofthepress.net/mockingbird.htm

The Washington Post along with other mainstream media outlets has always been a tool of the establishment. And any "liberal" commentators etc. allowed in their pages was nothing more than window dressing to be discarded when it was no longer felt to be necessary for maintaining the "fair and balanced" illusion.

Now read my sig line and after the word "government" add the words "and the mainstream media" and you will have a pretty good idea how the political and econmomic situations have devolved to the point we are at today.

[izquierdista]

4. Movements

To be a conservative is to be in need of a great movement. One that will deplete the bowels completely, so that the shit that has backed up into the cranium can have a chance to clear.

[asjr]

5. Krugman is spot on!

[madaboutharry]

6. I like his blog.

He is exactly right in his analysis.

I have seen this kind of thing myself. The person who points out the truth and points out that the Emperor has no clothes is often the one marginalized and shoved out the door. It is human nature to not like someone who points out that you are wrong.

[Cha]

8. Yeah..the neocons were so dead wrong

that they're not ever going to admit it..it take a real person like Andrew Sullivan to do that.

May Dan Froomkin land in a good place(wonder if he was tired of the wapo?)and know this was one of the best things that ever happened to him!

[struggle4progress]

31. Sullivan is still pushing rightwing economic theory

[Cha]

7. Thank you, Paul Krugman! Somebody

with a megaphone is pointing this out in the most interesting way. What's it going to take for those in the media to want to be respected the way Walter Cronkite was and is? A Meteorite called the internet that the "media" claimed "Al Gore said he invented"?

This is freakin' Gold..

"That’s why the firing of Dan Froomkin now makes a perverse sort of sense. As long as the right was in power, he was in effect the Post’s designated moonbat, someone who attracted readers but didn’t threaten the self-esteem of the self-perceived serious people at the paper. But now he looks like someone who was right when the serious people were wrong — and that means he has to go."

[chill_wind]

9. Preach it PK. K & R. n/t

[bbgrunt]

10. All respect to Dr. Krugman, but I think all he has to

do to really explain this reverence of all things on the right is to look at who OWNS the g**da*m media. It is only human nature in so far as everyone wants to prosper and keep their jobs.

[BlueMTexpat]

11. Dan Froomkin was one of the few reasons I would go to the WaPo

website.

The Sudoku is practically the only thing left worth opening the website for!

The Post's betrayal is nearly complete.

:wow:

[Bette Noir]

23. And E.J. Dionne, and Eugene Robinson.

[BlueMTexpat]

27. Agreed!

:hi:

But the WaPo has gone downhill fast since the Reagan years; Katharine Graham must be turning over in her grave. I hope that the days of these two excellent columnists are not numbered. And I hope that Dan Froomkin finds a good home where he'll be appreciated. His Washington reporting and subject roundups were among the best I've seen.

[philly_bob]

12. After neocon decades, measures of expertise are broken.

I see it in the field I'm involved in. The people at the table with the longest resumes -- the ones who've been on the most talk shows, the ones who've been witnesses at the most Congressional hearings, the ones from the think tanks with the longest list of publications, who've held the most positions of responsibility -- are often clueless ideologues, mouthing obsolete cliches and pat solutions that nobody believes anymore.

The career path was greased for those who entered the job market after Reagan's victory and belonged to the Young Republicans, the Federalist Society, went to religious universities, or worshipped the laissez-faire free market.

And they're still in power.

For instance, next fall's 2009 American Bar Association annual antitrust forum is being chaired by the same person who stood before an earlier forum and said, to some thousand lawyers and journalists, that "Everybody in this room believes that 'Free trade,unfettered by either private or governmental restraints, promotes the most efficient allocation of resources and greatest consumer welfare.'" (The quote was from a "modernization" report she co-authored.)

She (former Bush-era Department of Justice official Deb Garza) will run a conference that has to deal with the consequences of the failure of the very ideology she once urged to absolute power.

[glitch]

13. Gawd. They are still in power aren't they? I guess we'll have to go for full implosion.

I was hoping to get some mitigation on that so that we could concentrate on dealing with global climate change and perhaps survive.

Guess not.

[Joe Chi Minh]

24. To dire to even qualify as dark humour.

[ooglymoogly]

14. Powell and her coven of right wing moon bats have destroyed WaPo

may it rest in crap.

[mrdmk]

15. May people in Washington DC tell the Washington Post what we

told the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Take their attitude and their lousy on facts newspaper and go stuff it!

It is almost like these idiots want to lose business.

[DFW]

16. When I was growing up, the Washington Post was my paper

My dad was posted to DC before I was born, so for the first 16 years of my life, the Post
was my "local" paper, so to speak. Legends like Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham ran the
paper with journalistic integrity, and other such concepts so sadly foreign to the current
editorial moguls. While Richard Nixon was sending out his Press Secretary to decry the
"hysterical reporting" of the Post (later condensed by history to the shorter "truth"),
the Post stuck to its story because the story was right. Now, it's only "far right" that
counts, and apparently only columnists with the correct bent are welcome. "Correct" in
this case means towing a certain line. Roger Ailes, at least, stated flat out that Fox
"News" had an agenda, and recently, Republicans have admitted that it was "their" station.
If the Washington Post of the past is dead and buried, and has decided to become a
publication with a single political slant in mind, then it should also start to use
the quotation marks when calls itself a "News"paper.

[DeSwiss]

17. It’s not just that they fire Froomkin....

...but that they keep Krauthammer!



K&R!

[Dr.Phool]

18. Krauthammer is flat-out nutz.

[DFW]

19. Second that!

He makes references to his being wheelchair-bound, almost as if he is using it
as a shield against being called on his extremism. "I'm handicapped, you can't
touch me!" Well, I know plenty of handicapped people who are perfectly emotionally
well-adjusted, and don't feel the need to spout off right-wing extremist propaganda
using their handicap as if it were a deflector shield from the USS Enterprise.

Krauthammer is a fruitcake, and he'd still be a fruitcake if he walked on one, two
or three legs.

[Mr. Sparkle]

20. The Washington Post has many Neocons in its employment.

It is slowly losing its credence and credibility if it has much left after the Bush years.

[williesgirl]

21. I worked there for 15 years while it was still a great newspaper. It sickens me that they

are literally shitting on Kay Graham's grave. Don Graham has always been weak, although he's a decent man but he's listening to the wrong people. That's one of the things that made Kay so wonderful. She had a knack for hiring the best people and then actually listened to them and her own conscience. When they replaced Ben Bradlee with Len Downie, most of us knew that was a major mistake. He didn't have the backbone of Ben nor the smarts or personality. It was also pretty obvious he was right-leaning although he prided himself on letting everyone know he never voted to keep his neutrality. We all disagreed with that since voting is not only a privilege, it's a responsibility. Then they made a cretin named Steve Hills their President, which was the icing on the cake. This man has zero principles, is a liar, stabs folks in the back and is a poster boy for neocons and right wing-nuts.

They've lost circulation, advertisers and the respect of most reasonable people in our country and especially the DC/VA/MD regional area. They've become stenographers, resting on their formal laurels.

This is a great loss to our country since at one time they were the only newspaper with integrity and the balls to go after criminals leading our government.

I wish Dan Froomkin well and hope he finds great employment soon where we can once again benefit from his knowledge, integrity and backbone.

[spooky3]

26. thanks for the inside info. It truly is a shame to see such deterioration.

[Mr. Sparkle]

32. I didn't realize the neocons reached so high up at the post.

Unless the owners have a rapid change of heart, i think the post will continue to decline. Which is great shame for a once great newspaper.

btw, thanks for the info , great post. I hope things there works out eventually.

[Joe Chi Minh]

22. It's pretty much what Taleb says in The Black Swan, and John K Galbraith said, earlier.

Two quotes from Galbraith:

"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."

"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."

[NJCher]

28. we had a seminar at my university about the failure of newspapers

There were panelists up there from AP and other large news organizations. They were lamenting about newspapers going under because of the web and how the business model can't compensate for the number of journalists they've traditionally had.

Then they started telling the audience they would have to start paying and one of the students burst out laughing.

He said, "For what? What have you done for us?"

When asked to expand, he responded with "weapons of mass destruction?"

I was so proud of that kid.

In all "fairness," however, his was the only comment that made any sense out of all of the ones from this current generation of freshman and sophomore college students. Most of them don't know or care about newspapers. They don't even read their own student newspapers.


Cher

[earcandle]

29. What kind of Democracy is this? Bring back the Fairness Doctrine to protect our Journalists and our

Democracy.  I am beginning to feel like we are in a trap, a
third world trap. 
And our leaders suck.  

[Faygo Kid]

30. Exactly right. The Washington Post remains a neocon mouthpiece.

Take a couple days ago: The regular Obama-bashing column by Krauthammer, and a guest op-ed by Paul Wolfowitz.

Of course they fired Froomkin. The Post cannot stand dissent from the neocon philosophy.

[LiberalEsto]

34. As a former journalist, I agree with Krugman

Media owners did purge their staffs of liberals.

This is precisely how I was pushed out of my last newspaper job 12 years ago. The right-wing publisher hired a neocon as managing editor. This editor, who later went on to work for the disgusting Heritage Foundation, went about purging the staff of anyone who showed the slightest liberal tendencies. It was done rather subtly -- reporters were harassed for smoking (outside the building), men having long hair, not having the right "slant" to their articles, etc. In his first year, he managed to get rid of 13 people in various departments including advertising, at a small daily with 6 reporters.

In my case the skunk monitored everything on my computer screen from his cubicle like Big Brother, and gave me a hard time if there was anything on my screen that he didn't think belonged there. He re-wrote my stories to suit his own right-wing viewpoint. He tried to force me into working full-time, even though I had kids at home and was hired 4 years earlier with the understanding that I would work from 9 to 3 and be paid a bit less. Of course he didn't want to pay me a full time salary, just force me to work full time hours. However my work was good, and I had a couple of decades of earlier newspaper experience, including a large metro daily, so he hadn't found a convenient excuse to fire me. Then a close friend of mine desperately needed me to appear in court with her on a child custody hearing, and the bastard editor refused to let me have the afternoon off. With all the petty harassment, I was totally fed up, and quit. This was precisely what he wanted, only I didn't realize it at the time.

Not surprisingly he managed to run this formerly liberal paper into the ground, and eventually everyone was let go, the office closed, etc. Chalk up another victory for the neocons: another liberal paper destroyed and more liberal journalists forced out of work. I'm sure this sort of thing happened in many places around the U.S.