alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

August 24, 2005

Froomkin Watch

by kim @ 3:00 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

I’m a huge fan of Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing column. Still, in today’s online discussion he goes beyond himself. I was particularly struck by this opening statement responding to a critique of the Washington Post’s coverage of Bush vis-a-vis Iraq:

The Post’s editorial board, which I believe has the complete confidence of The Post’s owner, has been largely supportive of Bush’s war effort. Although I should note that today’s lead editorial took a surprisingly jaundiced view of the current goings-on in Iraq. For instance: “In short, what some Shiite and Kurd leaders are calling federalism looks dangerously like a recipe for partition or civil war.”

Writing about Bush’s imagery, conflations and mischaracterizations, furthermore, could and should legitimately be the province of the reporters and editors, not editorial writers.

There were several things, for instance, that Bush said just yesterday that merited journalistic scrutiny and maybe even clarification or refutation. One of his statements — a classic Bush “straw man” argument, suggesting that “those” who oppose the war are calling for an immediate pullout from the entire Middle East — was in fact picked up by several reporters.

But consider this statement by Bush from yesterday: “We had a policy that just said, let the dictator stay there, don’t worry about it. And as a result of dictatorship, and as a result of tyranny, resentment, hopelessness began to develop in that part of the world, which became the — gave the terrorists capacity to recruit. We just cannot tolerate the status quo. We’re at war. And so this is a hopeful moment.”

Doesn’t that sort of beg for a journalistic postmortem?

And then there was his dubious assertion that that the Iraqi constitution only talks about Islam as “a religion” not “the religion.”

I think that every arguably false, confused or misleading statement made by the leader of the Free World should be addressed by the journalists whose job it is to cover him.

I think this is important for a few reasons. First, it’s important to point out that Bush’s style always has been to caricature the positions of his critics, and then to make sweeping statements amounting to a rejection without further analysis of the caricature. It’s a style so hacky that even Jonah “I support the troops by hacking” Goldberg occasionally has second thoughts.

Second, for those of us “truth seekers” out there, and I count myself as one, Bush is to the truth, what a snowstorm is to a barbecue. While there is no physical law that says the two cannot coexist, in practise the union is unheard of.

Finally, some of the journalistic post-mortem can be done in the blogosphere. There are certain journalistic things that are difficult if not impossible for bloggers to do. Few if any of us have access to the White House, so it’s not like we can play Helen Thomas with McClellan or Bush. Fact checking is something we can do, and some of us are pretty good at it.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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