Web pulls apart a web

IN the years to come, a growing share of the American public is going to read an increasing amount of its news and commentary online, which makes this week’s nasty little dust-up at WashingtonPost.com of more than parochial interest.

The problem began when the Post’s Web operation, which has its own executive editor, Jim Brady, and is run separately from the paper’s newsroom, announced it was creating a new conservative blog -- Red America. To write it, Brady hired Ben Domenech, a 24-year-old editor at the right-wing publishing house Regnery. He also is one of the creators of RedState.com, which frankly labels itself a Republican website, as his official Post biography forthrightly acknowledged:

“Ben Domenech is a co-founder of RedState, the web’s leading Republican community blog. He began his career as a political journalist covering Capitol Hill, writing for numerous publications and working as a contributing editor to National Review Online. After 9/11, he abandoned the journalism field for a taxpayer-funded life and was sworn in as the youngest political appointee of President George W. Bush. Following a year as a speechwriter for HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and two as the chief speechwriter for Texas Senator John Cornyn, Ben is now a book editor for Regnery Publishing, where he has edited multiple bestsellers and books by Michelle Malkin, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Hugh Hewitt.”

In fact, Domenech is something of a poster child for contemporary social conservatism. He was home-schooled by his mother -- that’s the new right-wing school tie -- in the impeccably red states of South Carolina and Virginia, and his father is the White House liaison to the Department of the Interior. The younger Domenech began writing for Human Events at 15. Under the pseudonym “Augustine” -- no lack of chutzpah there -- he contributes to a variety of rather nasty online discussions in the course of which he has compared the Supreme Court to the KKK because of its abortion rulings, called Coretta Scott King “a communist” and described Teresa Heinz Kerry as resembling an “oddly shaped egotistical ketchup-colored Muppet.”

Definitely no manners class in that home school, and he must have had a cold the day mom touched on facts and logic.

By Thursday night, WashingtonPost.com had received more than 1,000 protests over the appointment. Brady told the Post’s Howard Kurtz that “Domenech is ‘controversial’ and the fact that liberals object to his hiring ‘shouldn’t really be a shock to anybody.’ ”

What did turn out to be shocking is the fact that the conservative wunderkind is a serial plagiarist with a documented record -- turned up by liberal bloggers -- stretching back to his undergraduate days at the College of William & Mary. (One of the people he ripped off was P.J. O’Rourke and nobody at his school apparently noticed. Those kids should get out more.)

No ethics class at that home school, apparently.

In an announcement posted midday Friday, Brady said that Domenech had resigned after the Post had opened its own plagiarism inquiry.

THE most interesting thing about this whole embarrassing incident has to do with the relative exercise of responsibility by the online journalists -- and all prissy hand-wringing to the contrary, their number certainly includes independent bloggers -- and

the mainstream news media, in this case represented by the Post.

Even a casual reading of the facts demonstrates clearly that the online folks -- whatever their ideology -- performed pretty much as one would wish. In fact, they vindicated many of their medium’s claims to be a seedbed to communities of collaborative watchdogs, each building on the other’s work to shed light on an issue that engages them.

And, as anyone who’s ever owned one knows, the best watchdogs will bite, as well as bark.

While the initial concerns about Domenech were raised by liberal bloggers and online commentators alarmed by the extremity of his politics and the recklessness with which he expressed them, his critics didn’t stop there. Because his career -- if a 24-year-old can be said to have such a thing -- has essentially been conducted online, there was a digital trail to follow through cyberspace. And follow it they did, within hours. What they found was not simply vulgarity and intemperance, but serial plagiarism of an unsophisticated, unimaginative under-

graduate sort.

In short order, the evidence was up on the Web for all to see and judge for themselves. That’s when something important happened. Now, the Web is about as polarized as a virtual place can be. It doesn’t value civility; ideologically, the law of tooth and claw attains. But because the liberal bloggers and commentators had fashioned a convincing and utterly damning case against Domenech out of his own vanity -- who in their right mind compiles an archive of his own thefts? -- by Friday morning, conservative bloggers, one after another, began calling on the young man to resign.

One of the first, in fact, was Malkin, whose last book Domenech edited at Regnery. In a comment posted late Friday morning, she wrote: “It is one thing to paraphrase basic facts from a wire story. But to filch the original thoughts and distinctly crafted phrases of a writer without crediting him/her -- and doing so repeatedly -- is unacceptable in our business. Some of the cases occurred while Ben was in college; he is blaming an editor for these transgressions. But at least one other incident involved a piece he wrote for [National Review Online] after he graduated. The side-by-side comparisons of these extensive passages is damning. I certainly understand the impulse on the Right to rally around Domenech. But I can’t ignore the plain evidence. And the charges can’t be dismissed as ‘lies’ or jealousy attributed to Ben’s age.... The bottom line is: I know it when I see it. And, painfully, Domenech’s detractors are right. He should own up to it and step down.”

Others were similarly plain-spoken.

It would be nice if the impulse that led the Washington Post Co. to hire Domenech in the first place had reflected as clear a sense of responsibility. Earlier Friday, Brady told the Post’s Kurtz that he hired the young commentator because “we were completely unrepresented by a social conservative voice.” Fair enough, but the fact is that WashingtonPost.com also doesn’t have a designated blue state voice, which lent a certain plausibility to the liberal bloggers’ initial charge that Domenech was recruited to appease conservative critics who have been raging about the alleged liberal bias of Post staff writer Dan Froomkin’s popular White House Briefing blog.

Brady has denied that was his motive, but Domenech himself earlier wrote that “Dan Froomkin is without question a lying weasel-faced Democrat shill.” (Their meeting would have made for one hell of an office Christmas party.)

If the Post’s online edition thinks it has a bias problem, the way to address that is to enforce the same standards of fairness and balance that prevail in a print newsroom. There are all sorts of antique things that have to be checked at the door of cyberspace, but values and ethics aren’t among them. Moreover, one-from-column-A-one-from-column-B balance doesn’t add up to anything but a verbal

food fight, and that’s as true on a flat screen as it is at the newsstand.

Finally, there’s the wretched young master Domenech. When participating in his various overheated online exchanges under the nom de plume “Augustine,” he was fond of ending his own mock-heroic posts with a line from King Harry’s famous Agincourt speech from Shakespeare’s “Henry V”:

“This story shall the good man teach his son.”

We couldn’t close on a better thought.