The Washington Post Messed Up
March 24, 2006 – 12:55 pmA few days ago, washingtonpost.com launched a conservative blog called Red America, written by a guy named Ben Domenech. Ben is about my age, I think a hair younger, which makes him 23 or 24 years old. A pretty sweet gig for a guy that young, eh?
Red America got a lot of attention from the left-leaning blog writers/readers, because there was no left-wing counterpart at washingtonpost.com. Red America was designed to be an in-your-face type of conservative blog, with material similar to what you would find on conservative talk radio or the Fox News Channel. For whatever reason, washingtonpost.com decided they would not launch a similarly themed liberal blog, and claims of bias soon followed.
Things really got ugly in the past day or so when word began to surface that Ben Domenech is a plagiarist. And not just your typical run-of-the-mill plagiarist (whatever that may mean), but a serial plagiarist. You can search Technorati or Google Blog Search for “domenech” or “ben domenech” and find plenty of examples of his past plagiarism. Things got rough enough that Ben resigned from his position earlier today.
What is the lesson learned here? Introducing political extremists into mainstream media rarely works well. That’s why we have blogs, AM talk radio, and the Fox News Channel. Do you remember what happened when Rush Limbaugh worked at ESPN? He made a racist comment on air within a couple of weeks, and *poof* he was gone. These people make their money by saying the most outrageous/unconscionable/utterly false things imaginable just to raise a reaction, and then others are surprised when the mainstream American audience doesn’t bite.
Let’s save our newspapers for real news, okay?