Dan Froomkin has officially started his tenure as Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post, and he has now published his first column in that capacity–a piece arguing that, through healthcare’s outcome, “We’re finally going to get to know the real President Obama.”
The piece is essentially similar, in tone and general content, to the White House Watch column Froomkin wrote for The Washington Post; the main difference for Froomkin fans is that, now, his column is buttressed by blurbs for such HuffPotastic gems as: “Heidi Montag’s Dirty Playboy Cover (PHOTOS)”; “Billy Mays’ Autopsy: Cocaine Contributed To His Death”; and “Presidents And First Ladies In Swimsuits: From Buttoned-Up To Barely Clothed (PHOTOS, POLL).”
Still, as if to counter the sex-and-drugs themes slapped next to his column on the HuffPo’s “Popular Stories” box, Froomkin explains his relatively high-minded vision for the column in more detail:
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.I’ve spent the past two weeks getting up to speed on the operations over here and getting to know the extraordinary HuffPost crew. I hope you’re familiar with their work already, but if you’re not, please come to the site (and its Politics section) often from this point forward, and watch what they do.
We’ll be putting a premium on accountability journalism, focusing relentlessly on the corrupting effect of lobbyists and money on our government, and calling out those people in the national discourse who traffic in misinformation and know-nothingism rather than argue in good faith.
It’s an opportunity to directly encourage and shape the kind of journalism that, in my previous incarnation, I occasionally championed – but more often yearned for.
