It was bad enough a few weeks ago when Deborah Howell, ombuds(wo)man for the Washington Post, erroneously stated that Jack Abramoff had given money to both Republicans and Democrats. Not true, of course. Abramoff only gave directly to Republicans, nothing to Democrats. Unfortunately for Deborah Howell, readers did not exactly take kindly to her comments on the subject, with "thousands of flaming e-mails...so abusive and many so obscene that part of The Post's Web site was shut down." Ouch.Yesterday, Howell botched yet another big one, the Post's hiring of right-wing blogger - and serial plagiarist - Ben Domenech. According to Howell:
Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, has said without equivocation that hiring Domenech was a mistake. I'm not going to pile on. Anyone out there who's ever hired or fired has chosen at least a few clunkers. Brady wants to enlarge the reach of the Web site's opinion section with a conservative blogger; there's nothing wrong with that. He said he will pick someone with more of a journalism background next time. The Post covered the controversy as a news story. If Post radio had been up, the story probably would have been on the air.
Nothing wrong with it, huh? Here's Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (founder of Daily Kos) on this subject:
...they claim that the hire was to balance out a liberal blogger already writing on washingtonpost.com. This liberal blogger does not exist. There is a journalist who has been very critical of the administration who is somehow being accused of being a liberal blogger. He's just very critical of this administration....have a liberal blogger, have a conservative blogger, activist partisan liberal and activist partisan conservative blogger. That would have been fine. But what we saw was that not only did Jim Brady not understand the nature of partisanship online, but he doesn't know how to use Google. He runs washingtonpost.com, couldn't simply Google Domenech's previous writings and realize that the guy was a serial plagiarist.The guy has no clue how the Internet works and he runs "The Washington Post" online operations. It's startling.
Needless to say, I agree with Markos on this one. The question is, why is the Post's ombudsman - tasked, by the way, with "promot[ing] public understanding of the newspaper and journalism" - so concerned with/hell-bent on whitewashing her newspaper? Does Deborah Howell completely not get it, or what? If not, let me quote the Post's own definition of what an Ombudsman is supposd to do: "The Ombudsman serves as the reader's advocate. She attends to questions, comments and complaints regarding The Post's content."
Well, Ms. Howell, I have a question, comment, and complaint that I'd like you to attend to. Namely, why on earth are you so concerned with knee-jerk defenses of the Washington Post, and not "serv[ing] as the reader's advocate" and "promot[ing] public understanding of the newspaper and journalism" as you're supposed to be doing?
By the way, if the Post really wants a good conservative blogger, there are plenty of 'em here in Virginia (Vincent Thoms springs to mind). And, by the way, if they want to be "fair and balanced," they might want to consider one of Virginia's fine Democratic bloggers as well. I believe Waldo Jaquith, Paul Anderson, Virginia Belle, and a whole host of others - myself included - might just take you up on such an offer.