We have all wanted to know what our favorite ombudsman, Deborah Howell, thought about the Ben Domenench - Red America affair. We thought we had heard she was not the the ombudman for the Washingtonpost.com unless a "liberal" journalist was involved. But here she is in her own sweet and candid words:
Deborah Howell
DigitalDrifter
Red America came and went in less than a week.
Washingtonpost.com hired GOP operative Ben Domenech, a 24-year-old wonder boy with virtually no journalism background, to add an explicitly conservative voice to its stable of blogs. Domenech made his first post Monday and immediately came under fire from liberal bloggers, outraged that the Post would create a Red America blog but not one for Blue America.
But that's not what ended Domenech's short-lived stint in the mainstream media. (By the way, I loved how he used his gig in the MSM to attack the MSM for ignoring conservatives.) It turns out there were strong indications that he was a serial plagiarizer. He resigned today, and Post officials said he would have been fired had he not resigned.
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."
DigitalDrifter StarTribune.com