Dan Froomkin is Washington Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post. Previously, he wrote the White House Watch column for the Washington Post’s website. He began his journalism career as a reporter at the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal, the Miami Herald and the Orange County (Calif.) Register before being awarded a Michigan Journalism Fellowship in 1995. He then served as Editor of New Media for Education Week, and as Senior Producer, Metro Editor, and ultimately Editor of washingtonpost.com. He is also Deputy Editor of NiemanWatchdog.org, a website from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University devoted to encouraging accountability journalism. Here is an archive of his White House Watch columns from the Bush administration. Dan welcomes your email and can be reached at froomkin@huffingtonpost.com.

Blog Entries by Dan Froomkin

Celebrity Journalism at the White House

25 Comments | Posted June 3, 2009 | 02:28 PM (EST)


What would you do if you -- and your 32 camera crews -- were granted unparalleled access to the White House for a day? And then you had two full hours of prime-time TV to fill?

There are many mysteries you might try to explore. How does President Obama actually...

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'Playing it Safe' Is Killing the American Newspaper

45 Comments | Posted May 29, 2009 | 03:27 PM (EST)


We're all in a state of despair these days over our inability to monetize our journalism online the way we've been used to doing in print.

A big part of the problem is that we're doing a really poor job of connecting buyers and sellers on our newspaper Web...

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What Google Can Do for Journalism

Posted January 7, 2009 | 03:53 PM (EST)


Via Romenesko, I see Google CEO Eric Schmidt telling Fortune's Adam Lashinsky that he wants to help newspapers survive - he just doesn't know how.

"What if the newspaper industry does go down?" Lashinsky asks.

Schmidt replies: "To me this presents a real tragedy in the sense that...

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It's Time for a Wiki White House

Posted November 25, 2008 | 09:20 AM (EST)


Barack Obama's campaign promise to use the Internet to "create a transparent and connected democracy" will be put to the test when he launches a new White House Web site on January 20.

On that day, the Bush administration's stodgy, wheezing version of whitehouse.gov will be carted off...

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Has the 'Surge' Brought Us Any Closer to 'Victory'?

Posted September 18, 2008 | 04:09 PM (EST)


Peter Galbraith's new book, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies has a chapter on the "surge", in which he calls it the "Potemkin Surge."

This may sound surprising -- if not heretical -- to many people in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, who have bought into...

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Unqualified for Duty

Posted September 3, 2008 | 12:49 PM (EST)


One of the problems with modern political journalism is that when something manifestly absurd takes place, as long as there are people willing to argue both sides, our top reporters feel obliged to treat it as deserving of serious debate.

Case in point: John McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah...

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Former Knight-Ridder Editor Wins First I.F. Stone Medal

Posted July 24, 2008 | 01:12 PM (EST)


The Nieman Foundation and its Watchdog Project this year established an I.F. Stone Medal for journalistic independence.

I'm delighted to announce that our first winner is John Walcott, the bureau chief who ran Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau during the run-up to war in Iraq, producing dozens of...

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Celebrating I.F. Stone's Birthday

Posted March 6, 2008 | 04:32 PM (EST)


I.F. Stone's 100th birthday comes at what feels like a real low point in terms of the iconoclastic, independent journalism with which Stone is so unmistakably identified.

So it's particularly appropriate that the observations of Stone's birthday aren't just fond looks back at the rebel journalist's storied career; they...

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Citizen Journalists, Start Your Engines!

Posted December 4, 2007 | 03:44 PM (EST)


Bloggers and other citizen journalists have a new and exciting opportunity to find and shed light on stories the mainstream media are missing -- by combing through transcripts of recent Congressional oversight hearings. Without any fanfare, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has started posting preliminary transcripts of many...

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