The Problem With Dana Milbank's Head

If Fishbowl DC  is right and the paper's Pugwash meeting focused exclusively on local coverage, it's a shame; I'd love to see some discussion over there about how many hats a single journalist can wear. Because people like Dana Milbank have only one head.

Ombudsman Michael Getler recently permitted Milbank to insult him in a column on war and Downing Street coverage. ("...You have been within your rights as ombudsman over the past five years to attempt to excise any trace of colorful or provocative writing from the Post...") In that column, Getler suggested part of the problem was readers not understanding the distinction between straight reporting and Milbank's Washington Sketch column, which I call an Op-Ed and defenders might describe as "analysis." But no wonder people are confused. Here are some observations on June 18 from Milbank the Sketch Artist:               

President Bush was in Minnesota yesterday talking about Medicare. The House was debating United Nations dues. And at Arlington National Cemetery, Army Spec. Louis E. Niedermeier of Largo, Fla., was being placed in Section 60, Grave 8188.

Sixteen days earlier in Ramadi, Iraq, according to his family, Niedermeier, a scout who pointed lasers to guide missiles to targets, was shot in the head by a sniper as he stepped from a Humvee. He was 20 years old.

Niedermeier, one of more than 1,700 American men and women who have died in Iraq, is the 144th to be laid to rest at Arlington. Arlington, just two miles from the White House, buries the Iraq dead at a rate of one or two a week.

But the nation's leaders are missing these somber and patriotic pageants. Members of Congress rarely attend. Top Pentagon officials do so only occasionally. And President Bush has yet to bury a fallen warrior....

Bush's absence from funerals has kept them off the front pages, one of several administration policies that have minimized Americans' exposure to the costs of war.

And this June 17 volley  in the other direction, on a mock-hearing:

In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along...

Very well, but why then should readers (or sources) view Milbank as an impartial broker when he slaps the PRESS card in his fedora in plain news files like Poll Finds Dimmer View of Iraq War ? (I see Claudie Deane shares the byline on that June 8 story--maybe she's a chaperone.)