The decline and fall of the Washington Post

I haven't written about the absurd decision of the Washington Post to hire a 24-year-old right-wing blogger, Ben Domenech, to provide "balance" to what has been described as the "liberal" (read: factual) column of veteran JOURNALIST Dan Froomkin, mostly because with only an hour in the morning and a little time in the evening during which I can blog, there's only so much I can do. But the Alpha Dogs of Left Blogistan have been doing a perfectly whiz-bang job of covering just what kind of ugly, mean-spirited, racist, bigoted, chickenhawk pisher this guy Domenich is.

Today in Salon, Joe Conason distills the whole sorry tale, which now includes exposure of this OTHER Virgin Ben as a plagiarist and fabricator:

Does the Washington Post intend to maintain journalistic standards in the brave new blogosphere? Or are those standards incompatible with the Post company's ambitions for WashingtonPost.com?

Those questions arise from the Post's hiring of Ben Domenech -- best known as a founder of RedState.com, but also known as a Bush appointee, and the son of a Bush appointee, and as a contributor to National Review Online -- to write a daily blog on the newspaper's Web site. That decision by Post management has provoked much speculation about its motive for employing Domenech. Many observers surmise that Domenech was brought on to "balance" Dan Froomkin, the popular White House Briefing blogger on WashingtonPost.com whose skepticism and wit have provoked whining from the right -- and defensive reactions from certain Post reporters worried by accusations of "liberal bias" at the paper.

Media watchers will remember that the Post's internal thrashing over Froomkin's column led to the Web site's last major public stumble, when it removed blog comments from a post by the paper's ombudswoman, Deborah Howell (after an imbroglio that began over Froomkin's column and continued over Howell's imprecise post about allegedly bipartisan political contributions by GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff.) In their eagerness to appease critics on the right, the Post editors have blundered again. Whatever Froomkin's political views may be, he is a veteran reporter with a long résumé of newspaper jobs, including a decade at the Post. Domenech is a partisan operative with no newsroom experience of any kind, no training in journalistic standards and ethics, and nothing to guide him except home schooling and Republican reflexes.

Almost immediately the liberal blogosphere exploded with outrage over Domenech's hiring by the Post. But by Thursday bloggers had more than ideological reasons to oppose the Post's move, as he plagiarized film critic Stephanie Zacharek, and Mary Elizabeth Williams, writing about television.

In a post dated June 16, 2002, he brashly upbraided two of the president's critics on the deficit issue, Jonathan Chait of the New Republic and Tim Russert, NBC bureau chief and the host of "Meet the Press":

"The bigger issue," wrote Domenech, "is that Russert and Chait both claim the President never made caveats about deficits during times of crisis, that he's creating political cover out of thin air. They're wrong. Indeed, President Bush expressed his deficit views very [word missing] during the first New Hampshire debate on January 7, 2000 -- moderated by none other than Tim Russert: 'This is not only no new taxes, this is tax cuts, so help me God' -- Bush said, brushing away the prospect that national emergencies, such as war, might get in the way. Such developments would be 'extreme hypotheticals,' he said. 'If I ever commit troops, I'm going to do so with one thing in mind, and that's to win,' Bush said. 'And spend what it takes? Even if it means deficits?' asked the moderator, NBC's Tim Russert. 'Absolutely,' Bush replied, 'if we go to war.'" (AP, from Boston Globe)

"Does that refresh your memory, Tim?" he concluded mockingly.

Unfortunately for Domenech, his June 16 post drew the attention of Brendan Nyhan, one of the trio who then ran Spinsanity.org, the (now lamentably defunct) political fact-checking Web site. With a series of simple searches on Nexis and Westlaw, Nyhan learned that the electronic archives contained no such article. There were versions of an AP story that resembled the article cited by Domenech -- but none of them included that crucial question attributed to Russert: "Even if it means deficits?"

Challenged by Nyhan to produce proof that this story had ever been published, Domenech responded with a series of feeble non-answers.

This whole foofarah is just another sorry example of the recent tendency by the news media to assume that the presentation of actual facts requires "balance" by presenting utter horseshit pulled out of some wingnut's ass as being "another viewpoint" of equal value to the truth, in an attempt to bring in the eyeballs of the frothing, rabid, lunatics of the right. From MSNBC's short-lived courtship and romance with the odious Michael Savage to CNN's hiring of compulsive gambler and values hypocrite Bill Bennett, the news media seem to be laboring under the delusion that they are somehow going to lure people away from Fox News and the New York Post simply by hiring wingnut mouthpieces, even if said mouthpieces not only have no credibility as journalists of any stripe (online OR print), but actively cheapen the entire notion of news.

When you think about the Janet Cooke scandal, and the Jason Blair fracas at the New York Times and the downfall of Mary Mapes and Dan Rather at CBS due to insufficient due diligence -- all in the name of Truth in Jouranlism -- one wonders exactly what WaPo was thinking -- and whether it's indicative of just how little respect the right has for facts that don't correspond with their larger agenda.