Firing Dan Froomkin

Tap one more nail in the coffin of the “Liberal Media” myth, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon. The Washington Post just fired Dan Froomkin, its liberal “White House Watch” blogger, in a “bizarre” and suspicious move—newspapers crave online traffic, and Froomkin was one of the Post’s most-read columnists. He was a harsh critic of Bush, but he also criticizes the Obama White House. For the Post, apparently, it’s “neoconservative pablum” or nothing.

That doesn’t jibe with the Post’s recent hiring of liberal blogger Ezra Klein, said Ed Morrissey in Hot Air. In fact, if partisan politics had anything to do with Froomkin’s firing, it’s probably that his column, like all liberal blogs, saw a “fair decline in readership” after Obama took office. Or, for all the gripes about the Post’s rightward shift, maybe it didn’t want Froomkin’s “hawk-like” scrutiny of the Obama White House.

Maybe the Post is becoming more “neocon and establishment-minded” under editorial page chief Fred Hiatt, said James Fallows in The Atlantic, and maybe it isn't. But there's no question that the decision to fire an “independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics” like Froomkin is yet another “self-inflicted wound” by a struggling old-media stalwart.

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