Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is taking heat from the WashingtonPost.com ombudswoman Deborah Howell:

Dana Milbank can be controversial with readers. The Post reporter has his fans — and I can be one of them — but I think his appearance on MSNBC last week was a mistake in judgment.

Milbank wore hunting gear — an orange stocking cap and striped vest and gloves — on Keith Olbermann’s show Monday night and made several meant-to-be-humorous remarks about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident.

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The mail was swift and sure. I got hundreds of e-mails, many prompted by conservative blogs. A number of readers asked the same question as Mark O’Brien of Mechanicsburg, Pa.: “Is Milbank an opinion columnist or a reporter?”

The answer isn’t simple. Milbank, a national political reporter, writes the frequent Washington Sketch column on Page 2 and also does the occasional news story. Editors here do not consider him an opinion columnist.

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Washingtonpost.com, which is under different management than the print Post, lists Milbank as an opinion columnist. I think that’s right. Milbank said, “I realize there’s a fine line between making observational judgments and expressing an opinion.”

If Post editors insist he is not an opinion columnist, then Milbank ought to drop the funny hats and stay away from comedy shows.

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It all comes down to what Stephen Stanford of Saltillo, Miss., wrote: “If you are going to keep using his work, how about labeling it as opinion and not news?”

Exactly.

Or, how about admitting that opinion sometimes sneaks into the writing of even the most earnest “objective reporter”? How about doing away with the labels “reporter” versus “columnist”?

This discussion goes to the very heart of the problems that plague the modern news media. Outlets insist that their “reporters” are objective, while “columnists” aren’t held to the same supposedly-stringent rules of objectivity. But what distinguishes a “reporter” from a “columnist”? If you look through many newspapers, you may have a hard time figuring out which is which. Even the Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com don’t seem to agree how to categorize someone like Milbank. If two sides of the same news organization can’t figure it out, how can they expect the reader to understand the distinction?

I don’t think Milbank’s the bad guy here. His situation is merely the result of the unrealistic set of rules and assumptions that govern the modern newsroom. Milbank’s just being Milbank. If you read him regularly, you see the same kind of snarky—dare I say blog-like—attitude in his writing that you see on display when he mocks the Vice President by donning day-glo hunting gear on a national news program.

So, maybe it’s time for the establishment media to rewrite its rules. The existing environment doesn’t seem to lead to a very good product, and it’s preventing people like Milbank from doing the sort of work that they so clearly ache to do.

A year ago, I posted my interview with Dana Milbank, to which I added this observation:

The problem [for the news media] is, if significant segments of the population think you’re biased, perception is what matters, not reality. In the establishment press, your credibility is locked up in portraying yourself as objective. Any perception of bias makes the claim of objectivity seem like a lie. If people think you’re lying about that, they might not believe you even when you’re giving them cold, hard facts.

Under the rules of the blogosphere, bias isn’t a problem. Everyone’s expected to have a bias, and it is our duty to broadcast that bias, because it helps readers understand when to view our claims with a little extra scrutiny.

As Mr. Milbank points out, just because you shun objectivity doesn’t mean you dismiss objective fact. Fact and opinion can be commingled without killing anybody, so long as your facts are facts. But for years, the establishment media has been promising us that what they say is fact. And for years, they’ve been letting us down. From the Dateline NBC’s bottle rockets under the gas tanks to Dan Rather’s bogus memos, from the newspaper circulation scandals to the admitted cover-up of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, Big Media doesn’t have much credibility left. So it’s a little hard to believe that all the people who’ve been cutting corners in the mainstream press for non-political reasons wouldn’t take similar liberties with the truth in their political coverage.

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Objective reporting died because it requires objectivity at the individual level. But you see the world one way, I see it slightly differently, and frankly, I’m not so certain of myself that I’d stake my credibility on the world being exactly as I perceive it. If I say I’m an objective reporter, I’m claiming that I can distinguish between reality and my perception of it. I’m saying that I can tell you a story about an event significant enough to write about, and not a single word of what I say will be colored by my own thoughts on the topic. How can I make such a promise and honestly mean it?

Instead of requiring perfect objectivity from each individual, open source reporting allows distributed objectivity. I can post a message online, and if my bias goes overboard, someone else can point that out. The checks and balances are built-in, because rival bloggers have much more incentive to scrutinize their competitors than rival media outlets do. The establishment press club is too cozy. They can’t police themselves. When you’re living in a neighborhood of glass houses, nobody wants to be the first person to start a stone-throwing war. I’ve seen the blogosphere derided as a circle-jerk, but it’s more like a circular firing squad. In a good way. The bullets chip away the falsehoods, leaving truth.

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If Dana Milbank freed himself from the bondage of the unattainable ideal of objectivity and joined the blogosphere, he could help drive the national discussion in a more direct way, and I bet he’d have more fun. He asked how the Post could work with bloggers. Well, he was kind enough to participate in this discussion, so in a way, he and the Post already are working with bloggers. But why must the blogosphere remain completely separate from the establishment media? Why not experiment with blending the best of both? If the Post wants to learn about the blogosphere, what better way than starting a blog? Unleash Dana Milbank! Give him a co-branded website with a separate domain name, and let him say what he wants to say outside the artificial constraints of objectivity. But back it up with the kind of world-class organization that only exists in the establishment press. Become a hybrid.

Join us, Mr. Milbank. I think you’d like it over here.

After being spanked for his latest stunt, I’ve got to think that this suggestion is looking a bit more enticing to him.