US: Washingtonpost.com criticized for comments by their right wing blogger
After a comment made by right wing blogger Ben Domenech, 24-years old, calling the late civil righs activist Coretta Scott King a “communist,” the Washingtonpost.com site has quiet a lot of cleaning up to do.
Domenech, hired in an attempt to represent all voices and to balance out liberal views on Washingtonpost.com, also wrote for the new conservative blog titled “Red America.” Domenech is a board member and one of three founders of the site RedState.com, which calls itself a “Republican community weblog.” Hired for his opinion and not his journalism, Domenech not only made comments that infuriated the Internet community, but he has now been fired for plagiarism.
In addition to the King statement, critics also discovered plagiarized content written by Domenech. Some work, dating back to articles written for his college newspaper, included long passages that were taken from others like full sentences from a book by PJ O’Rourke and a movie review with a passage identical to one in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Domenech, a former Bush administration aide, has resigned as a Washingtonpost.com blogger after only three days and six postings. His blog on the Red America site has been suspended as well.
Sources: WashingtonPost.com, Media Guardian [Registration required] and Media Bistro
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There’s nothing new about Ben Domenech defrauding his readers. In 2000, he published a hatchet job against a good friend of mine at the College of William and Mary, Peter Maybarduk, on a Web site run by James Dobson's Focus on the Family (http://www.boundless.org/2000/features/a0000404.html). Among other blatantly and materially false accusations, Domenech claimed that Maybarduk "got more than a little play during the World Trade Organization protests in D.C., where he was arrested for chucking a Dasani bottle at a police officer," something which had never happened nor been alleged by anyone before Domenech.
Domenech was hauled before an ostensibly "student-run" Honor Council, but College President Timothy Sullivan and Vice-President for Student Affairs Sam Sadler, who favored Ben's position in the controversy over Henry Kissinger's induction as College chancellor, pressured its members to acquit him, which they ultimately did. Dobson, meanwhile, continues to host Domenech's libelous article on a public forum accessible to hundreds of millions of Internet users. Each should consider himself lucky that Peter is a much nicer guy than I; if I had found myself in his position, both their lawyers would have screamed for a settlement years ago.