I know it's old news, but I hadn't seen it and couldn't find anything about this on the site:
From the Star Tribune, we find out that Deborah "I only comment on the WashPost website when attacking non-conservatives" Howell has admitted that the Domenech affair wasn't exactly a good thing for the WashPost brand.
"It just happens that former Pioneer Press editor Deborah Howell, now the Post's ombudsman, was in our newsroom today for a Q&A session on journalism topics. I asked her about the Domenech affair.
Her reply: "I can't defend it. It's a f****in' disaster."
From my personal soapbox, I have to say that I'm a little suprised she's being so honest.
When I was in school, I was involved with our student run paper and one of the problems we kept running into was plagarism by young writers, especially when it came to national sports stories and political stories. Thankfully, we caught almost all of them before they went to press. We used this thing called Google (pronounced Go-GLY) and paid attention to whether the writing sounded like the voice of the writer. I understand that sometimes, good people, in a time crunch, made a mistake and decided to use someone else's words, but that didn't mean that we cut them slack. The least punishment given for plagarism was a semester suspension for a senior who wrote since his freshman year (and I still think that was too lenient). Most writers were kicked off the paper.
The only thing a news source has is it's credibility. The WashPost seems to often be ignorant of this fact.
Now, I'll be interested to see if they learned their lesson, or if they just try to find another "writer" to fill their "balanced" focus.