Journalism has been completely defeated, at least at the Washington Post. Today, the public editor calls Dan Froomkin’s column liberal, and his editor, John Harris agrees. The charge is completely ridiculous. Froomkin does not have a liberal bias. Froomkin is combinative, questioning, refuses to take anyone’s word for anything, and completely unafraid to call a spade a spade. He was assigned to the White House beat, so most of his time is spent dealing with the Bush Administration. But you would have to be either an idiot or a liar or a partisan hack to equate the brand of tough questioning with bias. Froomkin is doing what reporters should always do to everyone they interact with. But Froomkin’s editor — a man who had no problem admitting that tension between reporters and the White House was a good thing in1997 — claims that such questioning is evidence of bias. Why? I suspect that it is because Harris seems to believe that advesarial reporting must be the result of liberal bias:

I perceive a good bit of his commentary on the news as coming through a liberal prism–or at least not trying very hard to avoid such perceptions. Dan, as I understand his position, says that his commentary is not ideologically based, but he acknowledges it is written with a certain irreverence and adversarial purpose.

And Harris says this as if it is a bad thing:

If he were a White House reporter for a major news organization, would it be okay for him to write in the fashion he does? If the answer is yes, we have a legitimate disagreement.

With those two sentences, the national editor for the Washington Post, one of the nation’s premier newspaper, reveals himself to lack anything resembling an understanding of journalism. Of course a reporter should approach the White House, any White House, with “adversarial purpose”. It is their duty to try and get the people of the country the truth — not just repeat what the White House tells them. As Jane points out, the WaPo has a history of simply repeating whatever GOP operatives tell them, no matter how well it represents verifiable facts. Harris is the national editor, where many of those stories are reported, and so he obviously has no problem with that kind of “he said, she said” reporting. Adversarial purpose is apparently not something he regards highly, based on the practices paper he defends and edits, and its presence must obviously be a sign of liberal bias.

But it is not. It is the heart of journalism. People who talk to journalists, especially politicians, are going to have an agenda to advance. They are going to want to use the journalists to present their case in the best light possible. Journalists, however, owe those people nothing. They owe their readers their best efforts to ascertain the truth. And ascertaining the truth requires a willingness to question closely they people they talk, a willingness to ask hard questions and keep asking them until they get an answer, and the effort to compare those answers to known facts. Journalism requires the adversarial purpose that Harris thinks is inappropriate. Without it, there are no such creatures as journalists. Just stenographers.

And Mr. Harris is apparently quite happy being the National Politics Editor for a collection of tape recorders made flesh. Journalism has been thoroughly defeated, and Mr. Harris applauds the score.