Not Quite Dan Rather…
Live by the blog, die by the blog. Ben Domenech resigned from the Washington Post three days after the debut of his Red State column. There is no question at all that the through going over which his past received at the hands of the lefty blogs who went nuts when he was appointed ensured he couldn’t continue.
Interestingly, the lefty blogs went nuts initially without the slightest evidence that Comenech was anything other than provocative and a Bush supporter. That was enough. But a bit of digging apparently suggests that Domenech had a way of using material without crediting it.
This is considered a major ethical breach in the journalism biz – less of one in the political/speechwriting/blogging world where Domenech had been operating. However, with the assorted disasters which have been occuring in the fact checking/crediting end of the MSM recently that was not a hill the Editors of the Washington Post were going to die for.
All of which adds up to a win for the lefty blogosphere and, I would argue, new media in general. While it is sad that it was over something as essentially matter of fact as the appointment of an online columnist – hardly a position of huge influence – it is a furrther demonstration of the power of a citizenry which can fire off a hundred thousand emails an hour or crash the Washington Post’s servers.
This is a fact which should not be lost on the people who run legacy media. As the Washington Posts dead tree circulation drops fast its one hope for the future is online. But online is a very different world from the more genteel and less interactive world of newspapering. The Post is going to have to learn how how to function in that world.
Update: Comenech rebutts the lefts attack with this post at Red State:
I know that charges of plagiarism are serious. While I am not a journalist, I have, myself, written more than one thing that has been plagiarized in the past. But these charges have also served to create an atmosphere where no matter what is said on my Red America blog, leftists will focus on things with my byline from when I was a teenager.No, not quite Dan Rather.
I can rebut several of the alleged incidents here.
The most recent accusation, is that I stole a music review from Crosswalk and passed it off at National Review Online. In fact, I wrote both lists myself; I was one of Crosswalk’s music review contributors at the time.
The Left has also accused me of foisting Sen. Frist quotes and some descriptive material from the Washington Post for a New York Press article on the Capitol Shooter. But the quotes I used were either properly credited or came from Sen. Frist’s press conference, which I attended along with many other reporters. So it is no surprise that we had similar quotes or similar descriptions of the same event. I have reams of notes and interviews about the events of that day. I also went over the entire piece step by step with NYPress editors to ensure that it was unquestionably solid before it ran.
Virtually every other alleged instance of plagiarism that I’ve seen comes from a single semester’s worth of pieces that were printed under my name at my college paper, The Flat Hat, when I was 17.
red state
Assuming for an instant that what Comenech writes is true then the Washington Post should not have made his resignation necessary. What it should have done, quickly and quietly, is found out whether what Comenech was saying was true and then made a decision.
The problem here is that we are left with a lefty blogswarm smear which has been rebutted by its target but which has not been properly investigated. It is a lousy way to end the matter.
March 25th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
That is what you may appear to have but it is unlikely what we know is the full truth which is very much like Rathergate. In the end it is someone being foisted on their own petard in a way and the ultimately unimportant becoming important due to the herd mentality of the blogosphere regardless of the political bent of those writing in the particular case. It is a great medium for spreading the word about a fire but not one for determining whether there was actually a fire in the first case.
March 26th, 2006 at 2:30 am
I think we got to the bottom of the Rathergate issue pretty fast: the memos were forged and Dan and his producer were so eager to nail Bush that they did not bother to check the authenticity of the docucuments.
The rest of your point is well taken as usual.
March 26th, 2006 at 3:42 am
I agree but I also do think there was a assumption of journalistic perfection that infected both sides of Rathergate, that made each argument fairly stunned in its entrenchment. but that was not discussed. As a result I would expect that all we learned is that the journalists made an error they were to proud to admit. Yet no one figured out if Bush had or had not served his duty properly or where the forgery came from. It did expose the strength of the blogosphere as a collective critic but what the blogosphere did not admit is that it also exposed its weakness as being primarily only that collective critic and not a source or even analyst of what is.