i don't like the washington post today

Hermann Finsterlin, 1919, Das Haus der Atlantiden - Montsalvat, A Journey Around My Skull

I apparently don't like the Washington Post today. My favorite schaudenfreude stories of the day were all anti-Post. Also, Slate is owned by the Post, and I seem to hate Slate with some amount of passion these days. Of course, there was the whole Froomkin issue which is probably a bigger deal than the issues of today, but I don't know much about it, having never been a Post reader, and thus having never read Froomkin's blog. But, the internet people whose opinions I trust seem to be pro-Froomkin and anti-Post on this issue. (It is getting annoying to put Post in italics. Let's see how long I keep that up.)

Anyways, so here is one good, funnier story about how the Washington Post sucks: The Time Gawker Put the Washington Post Out of Business. I read the Post story after (a) reading the Hater story which led me to (b) read the Gawker story, which in turn (c) led me to read the Post story. Here is the Gawker's summary of the controversy:

[R]eporter Ian Shapira profiled Anne Loehr, a consultant who gets companies to pay her to explain the mysteries of Gen Y. Our own Hamilton Nolan wrote an item about it in which he reprinted four of Loehr's most laughable quotes and ridiculed them. After initially being pleased that his metro profile got some play on a widely read blog, Shapira changed his mind when he got an email from his editor: "They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?" This led Shapira, in a piece for the Post's Outlook section, to conclude that his job is doomed.

The difference between the Gawker & Hater versions and the Post story is the credulous, mostly laudatory tone of the Post piece. The generational consultant said inane things inanely to inane customers, yet the original story did not point out how ridiculous the things she said were. The Gawker and Hater provide amusing, biting wit, to make us feel a little better about the fact that this woman is able to make a living of some kind doing such worthless things. My reaction to the Post story was that the author must be a retard to think that this woman was worth profiling in his paper, unless purely for the purposes of derision. Stupid Washington Post.

Okay, second stupid Post news of the day. So Dana Milbank, trying to save face after sparring with Nico Pitney on CNN, has begun a series of unfunny videos called "Mouthpiece Theater" generally seen as a sign of bad things to come for the mainstream media (see The Daily Dish and The Gawker and Glenn Greenwald's blog). Here is an excellent parody of these videos:


Washington Post's New Editorial Team - [Two Dudes and a WebCam]

Update: So Milbank and friend apparently still haven't gotten the message, and have put up another video. You can read about it on the Huffington Post: "
Milbank And Cillizza Record Unfunny "Response Video" To Outrage Over Last Unfunny Video" (via Ta-Nehisi Coates: " Let it go boys. A HuffPo commenter nailed it--'The trick is to stop digging.'").

Update Aug. 5: Mouthpiece Theater has been put of its misery. From the guy who was not Milbank:

What did I learn from doing Mouthpiece? That I am not funny on camera (this will not be a revelation to many of you), that name-calling is never the stuff of good comedy, and that the sort of straight, inside dope reporting I pride myself on made for a somewhat discordant marriage with the sort of satire Mouthpiece aimed to create.