During the third week of March, blogs of all political stripes were consumed with the flap created by the Washington Post’s hiring of right-wing blogger Ben Domenech, who resigned his new position after a three-day tenure during which he was exposed as a clumsy and obvious plagiarist.
A founder of the RedState.com blog, Domenech, 24, has no conventional journalistic experience and is not a college graduate. He was hired by Post's editor Jim Brady not as a print journalist, but to write a daily column for the paper’s online operation, WashingtonPost.com.
Brady’s announcement that he had hired Domenech, and the reasons he gave drew intense and immediate reaction from left-leaning bloggers. Why, they asked, had Brady chosen to specifically seek out and hire a right-wing commentator? Led by the front-page writers at dailykos.com, several bloggers speculated that Domenech’s hiring was motivated by a desire to placate right-wing critics upset with regular Post print columnist Dan Froomkin's frequent criticism of the Bush administration, which Brady denied.
Other bloggers asked why Brady, after supposedly searching for a qualified candidate to add “balance” to the Post’s site, chose one whose qualifications were at the very least questionable. The American Prospect’s Greg Sargent, writing on the magazine’s blogsite (prospect.org) commented that “(T)he thing that probably matters most to the folks who run the Post is that they're seen in the end as professionals. The widespread attention being given to the hiring of a political operative type like Ben simply doesn't reflect well on the institution insofar as it's one of the leading practitioners of journalism.”
The most perceptive analysis of the Domenech controversy was provided by Josh Marshall at his Talking Points Memo (talkingpointsmemo.com), who accurately surmised that Brady was simply caving in to the constant attacks on the Post from the “liberal media bias” crowd, and contended that “The Washington Post, or rather its online incarnation, has managed to capture the essence of the silliness of the ‘media bias’ debate in one easily digestible set-piece of its own making.
“(T)o balance Froomkin,” Marshall continued, “the Post goes out and gets a high octane Republican political activist who hits the round running with a tirade of Red State America revanchism and even journalism itself.
“Managing perceptions is the death of good journalism, especially manufactured perceptions,” Marshall concludes, “and even more those manufactured for the easily cowed.
“I’m embarrassed for the Post. Embarrassed by the Post.”
It wasn’t long before the Post had ample reason to be embarrassed for itself. Domenech’s first piece for the WaPo blog ran on March 21st. Two days later DailyKos.com and Atrios’s Eschaton blog (atrios.blogspot.com) revealed Domenech as a habitual plagiarist, posting links to movie reviews he wrote for the student newspaper at William and Mary College, along with parallel sources which showed he had lifted them almost verbatim from Salon.com and a Usenet reviewer, Steve Rhodes.
Other bloggers quickly jumped in to expose more of Domenech’s thefts of others’ work, and found that he had appropriated a chapter from the 1990 book “Modern Manners” by the humorist P.J. O’Rourke and ran it as an editorial in the same college paper that published his bogus reviews. By March 24th he had resigned, and his career as a Washington Post blogger was ended.
By March 25th even conservative bloggers like Michelle Malkin (MichelleMalkin.com) admitted that Domenech had no business writing under the masthead of a major newspaper, and that he deserved the obscurity toward which he is rapidly bound.
All this raises the question of whether the Domenich affair is worth all the ink and heat it generated. It’s reasonable to ask whether bloggers don’t have more important things to concern themselves with than the WaPo’s hiring of a puerile, inexperienced winger. But careful reflection and Josh Marshall’s words above lead to the inescapable conclusion that media intimidation and manipulation is vitally important, and that when a major news organ caves in to right-wing pressure, we lose another fragment of democracy.
James Madison contended in The Federalist Papers that the most important democratic right, and the one that determines all the others, is the right to information. If we can’t openly exercise this right, without manipulation, free of any sort of political orthodoxy, our other rights don't matter because they will soon cease to exist.
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