The highly respected White House reporter weathered numerous battles between FNC and the White House and maintained the highest standard of journalism during his tenure. Developing…

UPDATE: Brian Stelter of the NYT tweets: NYT’s @jwpetersNYT confirms that National Journal is hiring Major Garrett away from Fox News. Apparently Atlantic Media owner David Bradley wasn’t fooling around when he said he wanted to take on Politico. [GM]

MAJOR GARRETT RETURNS TO PRINT JOURNALISM
Leaves FOX News September 3rd
FOX News’ Chief White House correspondent Major Garrett announced today that he will leave the network effective September 3rd to return to his roots in print journalism. White House correspondents Wendell Goler and Mike Emanuel will assume joint coverage of the beat.

In making the announcement, Garrett said, “Slightly more than eight years ago, [FOX News Chairman & CEO] Roger Ailes, [former FOX News Executive Vice President] John Moody and [former FOX News Washington Managing Editor and current Senior Political Analyst] Brit Hume created a full-time reporting position for me in the Washington bureau. Our new Senior Vice President of News, Michael Clemente, has continued that support. Since August of 2002, the network and its top executives have given me every opportunity a journalist could hope for. I thank the network for giving me the chance to grow as a reporter and broadcaster.”

He continued, “Throughout my television career, I’ve known with certainty I would someday return to my roots in print journalism. That day has come. I will soon announce an exciting new phase of my career — one made possible in no small part by FOX News’ consistent support. It would take a lot – something near perfection – to lure me away from the best job I’ve ever had. Details to come.”

Garrett further remarked, “I will miss many dear FOX News journalists, colleagues and friends. I wish all of them success. I look forward to discussing my future work on FOX News – keeping in touch with an audience I’ve come to know and cherish. Before I leave FOX News, I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to each and every viewer who extended to me their generous good wishes, support and encouragement.”

Michael Clemente, Senior Vice President of News Editorial for FOX News added, “There are reporters and then there are truly tenacious reporters who come along every so often. Major Garrett is a fact-finding machine, and wherever he goes he will continue to serve an audience that is thirsting for genuine reporting and balance. We wish him the best as he turns this page.”

Joining FOX News from CNN in 2002, Garrett served as the network’s chief White House correspondent since January 2009. Prior to that, he held the position of congressional correspondent reporting on House and Senate races and providing extensive coverage of the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Before embarking on a television career, Garrett spent seven years at the Washington Times as its congressional reporter and later a deputy national editor.

FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour general news service covering breaking news as well as political, business and entertainment news. For over 100 consecutive months, FNC has been the most-watched cable news channel in the country. Owned by News Corp., FNC is available in more than 90 million homes.

> Update #2: Here’s an internal memo sent out from Clemente:

To all,

After eight years of solid work at Fox News, Major Garrett is moving to the next phase of his career and returning to his roots in print journalism.

As you well know, Major is as sharp and determined as any journalist in the business. He’s been at Fox since 2002, having already worked at CNN and a number of print organizations including The Washington Times and U.S. News and World Report. He’s covered everything, from wars to elections, Congress, the White House, impeachment and terror attacks. He was with President Bush on September 11th in Florida and he’s been with President Obama, across the globe.

We wish him all the best in his future endeavors and we want to give a heads up to those who may find themselves on the receiving end of his questions…get ready.

A press release is attached as we send this news out beyond Fox, so please join me in wishing Major the best of luck, as he bids farewell here.

Michael

Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.

Really? Isn’t this the President who refused to turn over his Blackberry? Hmm. At any rate, the ban on Twitter is providing something of a challenge to the Twitter happy press corp, who over the past 24 hrs have been attempting to access the site through various means. This from today’s Playbook:

DESPERATE TIMES CALL FOR DESPERATE MEASURES – With Twitter blocked from our laptops here at the Shanghai filing center (Burton, don’t be getting any ideas), @JakeTapper is tweeting from his ‘Berry. @EdHenry found a workaround with TwitPic: ‘We’re fighting the power.’ @ChuckTodd figured out how to update through his PING.FM account. Chuck e-mails from the transmission pool next door: ‘i posted a ‘if you can see this update on twitter/facebook’ let me know… and got deluged with friendly acknowledgments. The revolution can still be twittered thanks to the ping dynasty!’ (Also blocked: bit.ly, which is why we’re using tinyurl as our URL shortener today.)

A number of member’s of the press corp have twittered out that they aren’t sure whether their tweets are getting through because they can’t access the site, says Time‘s Michael Scherer: “Twitter is blocked in China. I won’t know if anyone sees this message (sent from cell phone) until we get to South Korea.” However, it seems so far, so good. Below is a look at the tweets coming from the top Twitterers currently traveling with the President. (It updates every time the screen is refreshed.)

Over the weekend the Times ran a cool-ish profile of chief of staff Rahm Emanuel that noted, once again, his aggressive style, which is so at odds with the President’s (also that Rahm now likes puppies more than dead fish, and maybe didn’t qualify for a recent inner circle invite to Camp David because he hadn’t technically suffered through the campaign). Today at The Daily Beast, Lee Siegel is turning a sharply critical eye on press secretary Robert Gibbs. Blame the messenger!

Siegel complains that Gibbs is “smug, sardonic, and lacking in self-control as he slides into defiant, snide babble, rather than—at least you can respect it—terpsichorean evasion.” Utterly unlike his gentlemanly predecessor Tony Snow who was a gentleman. Also, gasp, Siegel says Gibbs is a dick to everyone.

It doesn’t matter whether a reporter is from ABC News or Fox News, Gibbs will sink to the occasion—he is as antagonistic to the former’s Jake Tapper as to the latter’s Major Garrett. Indeed, one of the most curious results of Gibbs’ Sarcast-athons is to create in both Tapper and Garrett identical facial expression while jousting with the press secretary: somewhere between stony and clenched, their professional pride ready to burst or pounce.

It’s hard not to read this as a compliment actually. In the sense that Gibbs is not playing favorites and is pissing everyone off equally (though Fox would have you believe otherwise), which at the end of the day is sort of his job.

“White House press secretaries are often chosen for the contrapuntal statement they make with regard to the president, even as they help project his identity,” says Siegel. Yes, and a lot of times that means expressing some of the anger and frustration the president is feeling but unable to personally disclose to the public. Or, in the case of Tony Snow, being “dignified, elegant and courtly” in the “face of a criminally stupid regime.” Though Dana Perino, who reflected fairly accurately at times the same criminally stupid regime, doesn’t really fit in to this stereotype.

Anyway, point being, Gibbs is the more aggressive face of the administration (just imagine if Rahm was giving the briefings) and rightly so. Furthermore, it’s probably not a mistake that Obama has surrounded himself with “perplexingly arrogant and thin-skinned” folk, someone needs to be pushing back, maybe it’s the press that needs a tougher skin.

Last Thursday, you may recall, Fox News’ Major Garrett got into it with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs over Garrett’s questioning of White House email procedures. He asked Gibbs a question that there was only one way to answer, then attacked him for trying to answer it. On the air later, Garrett admitted there was a problem with his question.

That didn’t stop Fox News from hounding the White House all weekend. At issue were what Garrett described as “hundreds” of Fox viewers who claimed to have gotten unsolicited emails from the White House. When Gibbs offered to check those people’s names against a list to determine the answer, Garrett acted as though the White House was trying to steal their souls.

Since then, Fox News has posted several breathless updates to the story, including a statement, yesterday, from the White House. As I caught up on this story, I realized that I hadn’t gotten any emails from the White House since 5:25 pm yesterday.

Is it possible that the White House has frozen outgoing emails while it investigates this story? I emailed them to find out, but I haven’t heard back!

Fox has apparently sent some examples to Gibbs to check out, after getting permission from the emailers. If they’re anything like this guy that Garrett interviewed, it should be apparent what’s going on here:

Benjamin, who also described himself as a Republican, said he received the Axelrod health care e-mail as a pop-up ad while he was reading a blog. He said the pop-up must have been approved by his internet service provider, AOL.

“The White House wants to put out a message so they have a conduit to put the message out to people who haven’t contacted them in any way,” Benjamin said. “Therefore, they’re using AOL the same way that a spammer would be. I’m not particularly interested in hearing from David Axelrod.

So, Major Garrett is getting complaints from dialup users who still haven’t figured out that the CD-ROM drive isn’t a cupholder, and stoking the paranoia of NObama Nation in the bargain.

Photo by Remo Casilli, Reuters (via Vancouver Sun)

Two high-profile stories about the intersection of racism and the Republican Party are exploding all over the internet. The flap over comments at Free Republic and the Young Republicans’ election of a new president make for a sour cocktail this weekend.

Most of the heat is being generated by this Vancouver Sun story about the comments on a Free Republic article featuring 11 year-old Malia Obama:

“A typical street whore.” “A bunch of ghetto thugs.” “Ghetto street trash.” “Wonder when she will get her first abortion.”

These are a small selection of some of the racially-charged comments posted to the conservative ‘Free Republic’ blog Thursday, aimed at U.S. President Barack Obama’s 11-year-old daughter Malia after she was photographed wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on the front.

You might think that this is the same as the lame attacks that Bill O’Reilly levels at commenters on DailyKos and/or Hot Air. There are key differences. The Sun report says that the offensive comments overwhelmingly outnumbered those critical of the vitriol, but the real problem is this:

After attention from other blogs, the thread was suppressed and placed under review, but before long it was returned to the site intact, and attracted a new series of racial slurs when the original complaint email was posted publicly to the site, with the sender’s email address intact.

So, they knew about the comments, put them back up, and apparently made the complainer a target for harassment. Very ugly. Eventually, they took it down again.

As disgusting as this story is, it didn’t stand to hurt Republicans that much on its own. Freepers are not exactly considered the bellwether of mainstream conservative thought.

Then, even after an impassioned plea by very young Republican Meghan McCain, the Young Republicans elected a new president with serious racism problems.

The Young Republicans faced a stark choice at their convention in Indianapolis yesterday as they chose their next leader: a center-right twentysomething interested in greater outreach, or a self-described “true conservative” who is almost 40 and spent last week dealing with Daily Beast reports about her beliefs, which are, at best, often hateful, and at worst, downright racist. The delegates, in a vote of 470 – 415, chose the latter.

Fair or not, the effect of these two stories is devastating. Already on Twitter, I’ve seen comparisons of the Freeper story to the Letterman/Palin feud, with liberals asking where the conservative denunciation is. The Young Republicans story serves to neutralize the “few bad apples” rationale on the Freeper story.

As a liberal with a lot of conservative friends, I hate to see conservatives get painted, en masse, with this brush. While this makes them understandably defensive on the subject, that defensiveness can lead to tone-deaf handling of these situations. While some liberals’ idea of the GOP as the Ivory Soap of racism is way off the mark, many conservatives are also in denial about their party’s race problems. The truth, as they say, lies somewhere in the middle.

On the issue of racism, the truth can be elusive. I think there’s always more racism, in general, than white people think there is. On the other hand, I think there’s a lot less of it in the Republican Party than most liberals think. Part of the perception problem that the GOP has today is that the Democrats have a black President. Where else are the racists supposed to go? Just because most of the racists belong to one party doesn’t mean that that party is mostly racists.

Still, when your party stands in opposition to policies that are seen as benefiting minorities, this kind of thing can really be damaging.

I’ll tell my liberal friends exactly what I told conservatives who asked me where the liberal outrage was on the Playboy story: Give it a minute. This story broke on a Saturday afternoon. Two of my conservative friends who write for very influential blogs just heard about it this morning, from me.

To my conservative friends, I hope their reactions, and those of the Republican leadership, veer away from the kind of persecution complex stuff that Newsbusters’ treatment portends, and closer to this. This story is already drawing attention from media heavy-hitters like Jake Tapper, Major Garrett, and David Shuster. The conservative response can be a big win.

As for the Young Republicans, I think Meghan McCain’s got their number.

Update: The plot thickens. Gawker reports that Chris Parry, the Vancouver Sun reporter who broke this story, was also a blogger for Daily Kos, and has suggested, in the past, posting hate speech and blaming it on conservatives (Gawker repeats this claim by the freepers, but I haven’t found anything in Parry’s DailyKos posts to back this up). This does little to change the facts in this story, as Parry could hardly have pulled, then reinstated, the offensive thread. It might mean a rough week for Parry, though. Parry responds here.