Bada Bing
by digby
The reporter editor who raises questions about the appropriateness of Dan Froomkin's column is John Harris --- the same guy featured in this interview:
Paul McLeary: You covered the Clinton presidency for the Washington Post from 1995 to 2001, and during that contentious second term, what was your general take on the mood of the press corps in response to Clinton and his policies?
John F. Harris: The mood of the press corps was oftentimes kind of sour -- sour in both directions. People tend to forget, for understandable reasons because the Lewinsky scandal was such a sensational affair, that 1997 was in its own way a very sullen, snippy, disagreeable year in the relationship between the White House and the press. Most news organizations -- the Washington Post included -- were devoting lots of resources, lots of coverage, to the campaign fund-raising scandal which grew out of the '96 campaign, and there were a lot of very tantalizing leads in those initial controversies. In the end they didn't seem to lead anyplace all that great.But there were tons of questions raised that certainly, to my mind, merited aggressive coverage.
Now who exactly, was asking all those "questions" do you suppose? And who, exactly, is giving John Harris and the rest of the Washington Post a hard time about Dan Froomkin today? If you guess that it's Republicans, you'd undoubtedly be right.
Here's a fun example of how this works:
Russert: Libby called me to complain about something he had seen on MSNBC...
Imus: What did he complain about on MSNBC, do you remember?
Russert: I haven't gone into it,--you know-publicly-cause I just didn't want to get involved with all that viewer complaints, but I do remember it because of his language that he chose and that's why- I actually called Ben Shapiro, the president of NBC news and said I just gave your direct line to this guy named Lewis Scooter Libby, who is upset about something he watched on TV and you may hear from him.
I understand that the press comes under tremendous pressure when they write negative things about the administration. Their access dries up. They are frozen out of the scoops. Their bosses are called and they are asked to explain themselves. The other day when all the news outlets were gleefully reporting that Bush had come back up in the polls a bit, I could understand that the reporters were tremendously relieved to get the Republican attack dogs off their backs with a little good news for their boy.
That's how things work. We get that. But please don't blow smoke up our asses about "credibility" ok? We know what's going on. The Republicans operate like the Sopranos. And they're just as dumb. If the media would report this crap up front, we could put an end to this nonsense.
Update: Harris shakes out his lace cuff, takes a long whiff of snuff and puts Froomkin in his slaggardly, bloggy place.
Fine. Fuck it. Change the name if it bothers the "real" white house reporters so much. Call it The Whorehouse Report. It amounts to the same thing.
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