The Washington Post’s self-inflicted loss is the Huffington Post’s gain. Glenn Greenwald at Salon is reporting that Dan Froomkin has been hired by the Huffington Post.
Seeing as how his sources include Dan Froomkin and Arianna Huffington, Glenn has nailed the story. As always, his take is at least as interesting as the facts:
In yet another sign of how online media outlets are strengthening as their older establishment predecessors are struggling to survive,The Huffington Post has hired Dan Froomkin to be its Washington Bureau Chief and regular columnist/blogger.
…Though the precise reasons for Froomkin’s firing by The Post remain unclear, there’s no question that his penchant for aggressively criticizing establishment media behavior escalated tensions. In recent months,The Post spiked columns of his that contained pointed media critiques.
And here, IESHO, is the ‘money’ graf from Greenwald:
Indeed, nothing eliminates the possibility of establishment journalist jobs more quickly or decisively than criticizing the establishment media as being too sycophantic to political power, manipulated by the Right, and, in general, slothfully devoted to doing nothing other than uncritically repeating what “both sides” say (by stark contrast, the tired right-wing grievance about The Liberal Media is not just permitted but welcomed; Bill Kristol spent years depicting The New York Times as an anti-American, Terrorist-loving beacon of left-wing bias, only to be hired by them as a full-time columnist, while right-wing polemicists who voice similarly trite claims about the media — Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett — are routinely heard in the very venues they attack). As Brad DeLong documented in a thorough retrospective on Froomkin’s firing, the first attempt at The Post to remove Froomkin from his status as “reporter” was driven by right-wing complaints that the content of his column was inappropriate for a reporter.
As El Somnambulo wrote in the wake of Froomkin’s firing, “When the final chapter on who killed newspapers is written, the answer will be simple. The newspapers themselves.”