As Hunter laid out below, the Washington Post's special quota hire Ben Domenech is quite a plagiarist. He's not just some one-off plagiarizer, he's a recidivist plagiarist. But don't look at him as the main problem in this fiasco at the Washington Post. Ben Domenech is just the example of an ethically and intellectually bankrupt conservative movement, especially its bloggers. And the fact that he was even hired shows that the Washington Post is craven for trying to strike a balance between political fact and fantasy, and is itself so ethically bankrupt that it has forgotten the lessons of the most infamous period of the newspaper's history.
A major element of this scandal at the Washington Post is that it perceives a need to balance out the factually-informed work of a serious journalist with the fantasy rants of a rightwing shill. As Gilliard points out:
The Post does not have a left blogger. Dan Froomkin is a journalist. Racist Redstate Ben is a political operative. See the difference.
Apparently the folks at the Post were too concerned about toadying up to the wingers to notice that distinction. They were intent on balancing out Froomkin's reality-based analysis with screeds from a winger. We should assume the Post hired the best person they could find. The problem for the Post, therefore, is that the intellects and professional ethics of conservative bloggers are so risible that the best person they could hire ended up being a plagarizer.
By doing a laughably bad job of due diligence on Domenech, the Post has earned all the mockery and derision coming their way. But people who care about the Post probably aren't laughing, because this scandal has too many resemblances to the darkest moment in the history of that newspaper: the Janet Cooke scandal.
Let's take a look at this column about the Cooke scandal and other pertinent issues, titled The Perils of Press Arrogance:
The series of fabrications that resulted last week in the resignations of the top two editors of the New York Times is a calamity for all of American journalism...
Anyone who can gloat at their discomfiture is worse than a fool. This is far more than a personal embarrassment or a black eye for the Times. It is a serious blow to the credibility of the press, and it comes at a time when public trust is fragile.
Those of us who work at The Post know what our friends at the Times are going through. In 1980 a talented colleague of ours, Janet Cooke, concocted a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict, which The Post played prominently on the front page. It was not until the story was awarded a Pulitzer Prize that it and its author were exposed as phony.
We live with that legacy every day. No matter how much distinguished work is done by this staff -- and there is a wealth of it -- it does not erase the enormity of the failure to prevent the Janet Cooke fiasco...
If the Times' leadership is wise, it will recognize this institutional disaster for what it is and reflect on the culture that produced it. It will not simply change editors but change attitudes.
The besetting sin of big-time journalism is arrogance -- the belief in our own omniscience, that we know so much we don't have to listen to criticism. And the Times as an institution leads the league in arrogance.
More than 35 years ago, as a newcomer to The Post, I recognized that we were dangerously cut off from the forces that were reshaping this country. In the 1968 presidential campaign, we were (and I definitely include myself) slow to pick up on the anti-establishment movements that propelled such different candidates as Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace and Richard Nixon.
The next year, I was on sabbatical at the Institute of Politics at Harvard when elite students trashed Harvard Square in an antiwar demonstration and forced the university to shut down weeks early.
Returning to the paper, I showed no special wisdom in suggesting to Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and Publisher Katharine Graham that any institution as large and visible as The Post could expect to be targeted by anti-establishment forces. It was one of many factors that led them to hire the first ombudsman at The Post -- a professional journalist whose sole responsibility is to respond to reader complaints and provide an independent critique of the paper's performance.
When the Janet Cooke story exploded, the ombudsman on duty, Bill Green, conducted his own investigation, and his detailed report to readers was the first crucial step toward restoring the paper's reputation.
By contrast, the Times management has consistently rejected having an ombudsman or readers' representative, asserting that it would enforce its own standards, thank you very much...
The Times has had its comeuppance. Its sins are symptomatic of the press's inflated self-importance. The Times can lead the way back to trust -- if its publisher will.
Who wrote that? The Post's own Grand Protector of the DC Establishment Consensus, His Holiness, St. David of Broder.
Ultimately everyone will take that wretch Ben Domenech's advice regarding plagiarists, and forget him. But has the Washington Post gotten so arrogant that it has forgotten Janet Cooke? Is the Post so cut off from the forces changing the media that it believes it's OK to have a plagiarist on staff, because if people don't like what he has to say, they can just ignore him? Do they think all bloggers and all viewpoints are equally valid? That there's no difference between bloggers like us here at Daily Kos, where we often beat up on the media for disregard of facts and for shoddy reporting and laughably bad arguments, and bloggers like Ben Domenech, who respond to inconvenient facts with laughably bad arguments, shoddy thinking, lying, intimidation, hypocrisy and serial plagiarism?
We'll learn over the next few days if the Washington Post has forgotten the infamy of indulging Janet Cooke's lies. they shouldn't indulge Ben Domenech's lies. As plagiarism expert Ben Domenech argued in a similar case, "no quarter" should be given to such lies. Maybe Domenech will do the Post a favor and resign so he can spend more time with Claude Allen's family. If not, the Washington Post has only one option: admit they were wrong to try to balance sound journalism with ideology and plagiarism, and fire Ben Domenech.
[UPDATE by DHinMI] As Kosmopolitans and others dig through Domenech's publish output to discover that this guy has hardly written an orginal sentence in his entire life, we're finding he had plagarized all kinds of sources. But pb may have just found the sweetest example of all: in this piece Domenech plagarized a page 1 article from--God, if we just made this stuff up nobody would believe it--the Washington Post.