On the face of it, it's a puzzling decision. Aside from the excellence of Froomkin's work, he's popular with readers. On sheer business grounds, why drop him? . . .
Here's how I see things: many people in the news media, especially at the managerial level, decided a long time ago that movement conservatism was The Future - and that the sensible thing, whether or not you yourself were a conservative, was to go with the wave. . . .
And anyone who didn't treat the right with great respect, who didn't get with the program, was a flake, a moonbat. . . . Now, you might think that the way things turned out - the total failure of movement conservatism in government, and the abrupt, humiliating end to the Permanent Republican Majority - would lead to some soul-searching. But that's not how human nature works. Instead, it became more urgent than ever to assert that those who didn't get with the program were flakes and moonbats, not worthy of being listened to, while those who believed in the right to the bitter end were "serious".
Thus we still live in an era in which you have to have been wrong to be respectable. You're not considered serious about national security unless you were for invading Iraq; you're not considered a serious political analyst unless you spent the last 3 years of the Bush administration predicting a Republican comeback; you're not considered a serious economic analyst unless you dismissed the idea that the Bush Boom, such as it was, rested on a housing bubble.
That's why the firing of Dan Froomkin now makes a perverse sort of sense. As long as the right was in power, he was in effect the Post's designated moonbat, someone who attracted readers but didn't threaten the self-esteem of the self-perceived serious people at the paper. But now he looks like someone who was right when the serious people were wrong - and that means he has to go.
(NY Times)
