WaPo Finally Admits: We're More Wingnut Stupid Than Fox

As suicidally incompetent as the repugs are proving themselves lately, in the one case of "media bias," the wingnut freakazoids are actually playing - and winning - a long game.

It started more than 40 years ago, when Nixon fought against objective and factual accounts of his campaign tactics by labeling all objective media "biased liberal."

Nonstop repetition of this lie wore objective outlets like the Post and the NYTimes down to the point they started believing it themselves, or at least thought they could relieve the weight of the accusation by becoming biased conservative.

The more they leaned wingnut while claiming an objectivity they lost sometime in the '80s, the easier it was for wingnut freakazoid Fox to claim the objectivity mantle for itself.

So the only genuinely objective dead-tree news source today is The Nation, which has proudly claimed the motto "that liberal media bias you can't find anywhere else."

Why do I say this now? Because today the Washington Post fired Dan Froomkin.

Glenn Greenwald:

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. 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?

SNIP

All of this underscores a critical and oft-overlooked point: what one finds virtually nowhere in the establishment press are those who criticize Obama not in order to advance their tawdry right-wing agenda but because the principles that led them to criticize Bush compel similar criticism of Obama. Rachel Maddow is one of the few prominent media figures who will interview and criticize Democratic politicians "from the Left" (and it's hardly a coincidence that it MSNBC's decision to give Maddow her own show -- rather than the endless array of right-wing talking hosts plaguging the television for years -- which prompted a tidal wave of "concern" over whether cable news was becoming "too partisan"). In general, however, those who opine from the Maddow/Froomkin perspective are a very endangered species, and it just became more endangered as the Post fires one if its most popular, talented, principled and substantive columnists.

Read the whole thing.

As for the dead-but-don't-know-it-yet Post and the Times:

sic semper culum vertere

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....