If You Do Say So Yourself

In ombudsman Deborah Howell's A Blog's Blast Damage, a valuable window into William Arkin's self-image:

Arkin is unrepentant about two things: He works for The Post. Period. And he said he is "probably one of the best-known and respected anti-military military bloggers."

That definitely helps clarify what we'll call an interesting creative choice by washingtonpost.com in hiring, as his tagline says, William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security

I missed L'Affaire Arkin but the script is well-known to anyone who cares; after watching an NBC News segment where some troops expressed disappointment about how the public views the war, Arkin wrote in The Troops Also Need To Support The American People that considering the "obscene amenities" they enjoy in the field, every U.S. "mercenary" should be grateful for whatever support they get. His message is Shut Up And Shoot.  And granted, when I sit in my condo and watch American soldiers getting blown up by IEDs or shot out of the sky or buried at Arlington National Cemetery, I often muse that's all well and good, but what are they doing to support the American people?

Arkin developed his philosophy of civilian-military relations over a series of at least three columns, finally apologizing in the modern style adopted by bomb-thrower soul-mate Amanda Marcotte: he was sorry if anyone took him "literally" but the "demonization" was uncalled for. This from a man who wrote in The Arrogant and Intolerant the following:

I was dead wrong in using the word mercenary to describe the American soldier today.

These men and women are not fighting for money with little regard for the nation. The situation might be much worse than that: Evidently, far too many in uniform believe that they are the one true nation. They hide behind the constitution and the flag and then spew an anti-Democrat, anti-liberal, anti-journalism, anti-dissent, and anti-citizen message that reflects a certain contempt for the American people.

I do not believe the hed was an ironic self-mocking, but it's hard to tell. There are many contradictory and tangled pathways in the Arkin oeuvre and the chief consistent theme is arrogance and intolerance. In one of his apologies he writes I'm just asking you to understand that different people have different views of the world, and that those views don't mean that they are un-American, anti-American, or contemptuous of the military. In the same column he says The public has duties, but not to the American military and as quoted by Howell above he proudly emphasizes that he is "probably one of the best-known and respected anti-military military bloggers and let's not forget about those obscene amenities he exposed. So he wants everyone to understand he is an anti-military blogger and the public has no duties to the military and its obscene amenities but that does not mean he is contemptuous of them.

He is paid by washingtonpost.com to blog, and I am not. Explain.

Anyway this is old news now, but Howell's column highlights two unrelated problems. The first concerns Howell and the limits of her column: She often fails to accurately describe whatever abuse she's responding to. And you know it might just be space--that's one tiny column once a week in the Outlook section. But there's got to be a better way. Last week she downplayed the importance of greater coverage devoted to the latest antiwar march compared to the pro-life protest: The front-page antiwar story probably merited it and the page-10 pro-life coverage was adequate. Big deal--two stories, different page placement, move on. What she didn't acknowledge was that the A1 antiwar story was twice as long, and that it was accompanied by two other stories and a full-page "voices of the protest" feature. And while I think she's tried to write less about washingtonpost.com, the imbalance continued there, with more and longer coverage of the antiwar march.

She does the same thing this week, noting that Arkin apologized but without commenting on the snark-laden path that led him to that destination, with simultaneous apologies and insults. She writes about the firestorm over "one online column," but I'm counting three columns plus one semi-apology piece. And I think she minimizes Arkin's left-wing background, but I'll have to save that for another day.

And the second issue concerns Arkin and washingtonpost.com: He's "adamant" that he writes for the Post. In empty moments when there's some 'post.com controversy or another I sometimes point out that Dan Froomkin or The Nation alum Jefferson Morley or whomever do not write for the newspaper, but for a separate operation called washingtonpost.com run by Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive. They have different staffs, different buildings, different bosses and very possibly different paychecks. To her credit Howell brings this up and passes on the entirely rational sentiment that some reporters think the column hurts the Post, with Howell herself saying an online column rubs off on the newspaper. She doesn't mean that in a good way. And this is why:

The Troops Also Need To Support The American People

The Arrogant and Intolerant Speak Out

A Note To My Readers On Supporting The Troops

Demonization and Responsibility

Update: A reader notes that Howell clearly said "Arkin's column did not meet Post standards." Yep, I neglected to cite it--that's called burying the lede!

Update Update: ViaInsta, great minds think alike--Winds of Change started with the same quote (and, um, French pretension) I did:

It's a reasoned, establishment take on blogging, is appropriately critical of Arkin - even though she understates the loathsomeness of what he said - and includes one gem that needs to be held up and examined.

Arkin is unrepentant about two things: He works for The Post. Period. And he said he is "probably one of the best-known and respected anti-military military bloggers."

I hadn't seen that before, but it pretty accurately sums him up, doesn't it? So - two questions fall out from that exposition. How in the world can the LA Times or other news media justify calling him 'a military analyst' (as opposed to 'an anti-military analyst')? And what an interesting story he himself must be....

 

 

Comments

[George P]

Howell goes to much trouble to explain to us knuckleheads that the post-dot-com is different from The Washington Post. True, but for millions of Net users it's irrelevant -- a distinction without a difference. If the Washington Post Company honestly doesn't wish to be reponsible for the foibles of their dot-com gunslingers, they should spin off the unit and get out of that aspect of Internet business.