Danger, Will Robinson! Conservatives Invade the Washington Post!

Howard Kurtz reports on a big brouhaha at the Washington Post. Gosh, they hired a conservative blogger for their online edition and look what happened:

The Washington Post Co.'s Web operation has touched off an online furor by hiring as a blogger a 24-year-old former Bush administration aide who co-founded a conservative site and recently referred to Coretta Scott King as a "communist."

Ben Domenech, an editor at the conservative Regnery Publishing, said he regrets the King reference, which he insists was tongue-in-cheek, and that the reaction to his new "Red America" blog is "a little meaner" than he expected.

Conservative blogger Ben Domenech called the late civil rights activist Coretta Scott King "a communist," a remark he later regretted making.

More than 1,000 people and a Democratic member of Congress have sent the newspaper letters of complaint. The decision to hire Domenech was made by Washingtonpost.com, an Arlington-based division that works with the newspaper but is editorially independent.

Of course later we find that this "online furor" has been orchestrated by the usual suspects:

Late yesterday, the liberal Web sites Daily Kos and Atrios posted examples of what appeared to be instances of plagiarism from Domenech's writing at the William & Mary student paper...

Liberal bloggers, some of whom have been criticizing The Post since its editorial page backed the war in Iraq, have expressed varying degrees of outrage over Domenech's hiring. Many say there is a false equivalence in hiring a Republican political activist to balance Post bloggers, such Froomkin, who are viewed as left-leaning but have journalistic backgrounds.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote that he is "embarrassed for The Post" and that the editors' explanation "doesn't cut it. If they want to make a blogger Crossfire with a firebreather on the left and on the right, they should do it. . . . But here they've just been played by bullies and played for fools.

"It's kind of funny reading this kind of blather from Kos and Marshall, both of whom are well-known for their online flamefests which constantly feature undocumented slanders of writers anywhere to the right of their own political belief systems—probably a good 80% of known writers, even liberals. And love the remark on Froomkin, who's "left-leaning" but okay because he has a "journalistic background." Is that sort of like Dan Rather's and Mary Mapes' "fake but accurate?"

Domenech's main problem is that he carries political baggage as "one of the founders of RedState.com," which has been antagonizing the Kos Kids and their brownshirted bretheren for quite some time now. So looks like it's payback time, eh?

Most telling in this article, however, is its concluding graf:

John Amato of Crooks and Liars wrote that The Post "continues to become more and more a mouthpiece for the GOP by hiring a right-wing blogger."

Once again, it's easy to detect the Stalinist reflex of the Gramscians, who, like termites, have so infested journalism that the edifice itself is getting close to collapse. The notion of the virtually socialist Washington Post getting even close to being "a mouthpiece for the GOP" is laughable. Taken as a group, 90-95% of the editors and writers at this paper probably never met a Republican they liked, except maybe John McCain.

But just as Communist house organ Pravda was (and may once be again) carefully edited to parrot the party line back in the good old days of the Soviet Union, so too, according to today's American Marxists and Stalinists, must papers like the Post and the NYTimes hew to the party line as well, 100% of the time. Anything less is deviation from the party orthodoxy. Following this line of reasoning, the Post's editors should all be purged for deviating from this orthodoxy.

More likely, the pressure will continue instead to purge Domenech. It's funny how lefties like Amato will claim that the hard left reportage and editorial opinion common in today's MSM is "unbiased," while at the same time suppressing any attempt to broaden coverage in the opinion arena. Increasingly, American readers are rejecting this kind of intellectual bankruptcy which is why newspapers, including the Post, are experiencing plummeting sales figures. They are no longer trusted as unbiased carriers of the news.

We'll watch this situation with some care. It will be interesting to see how long the left's smear campaign against Domenech will continue. And if the Post's editors will bow to the onslaught. The Post has actually made a good business situation that will drive readers to their website, as they will soon see. With their declining circulation numbers, it will be intriguing to watch the battle between the business people and the ideologues as this little battle plays out.

Meanwhile, if Domenech survives, we may just put him in our list of "good guys" to the left, which would be a first for a Postie.