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That whole Domenech thing? I think it’s probably a tempest in a teapot. Honestly it seems like an awful lot of people got way involved in something that, ultimately, changes very little. Has the Washington Post learned its lesson? I doubt it, or they wouldn’t keep making the same mistake.

What’s the mistake? You don’t respond to criticisms by right-wing ideologues who say there exists a left-wing bias at the paper by hiring right-wing ideologues without implicitly admitting that you agree with the criticisms.

I think it’s pretty clear that the Washington Post does (or did) at least as good a job as any other major news organization following American journalistic standards for maintaining a relatively neutral voice in its reporting. No reporter is ever going to be able to completely remove his or her voice from a story, but I don’t think he or she should have to. Part of what draws readers to a media outlet is the voice collectively formed out of the individual reporters.

But the Post has been too quick to internalize these criticisms, so much so that they jump and overreact to the silliest criticisms by the right.

Froomkin may be critical of the White House, but merely being critical is not the same as being an ideologue or a partisan, something I think the Post has yet to learn. Michelle Malkin, and other conservatives on the Web, rightly criticizes and condemns Domenech’s behavior; yet no one in their right mind would immediately equate her criticism with left-wing partisanship.

Andy so, although I’ve read a fair number of stories and blogger posts on the Domenech affair these last couple of days, I don’t really think much of it is worth really talking about beyond what I’ve just said. However, the opinion piece linked below at the LA Times site is, I feel, one of the better bits of writing about the story from this week.

Web pulls apart a web – Los Angeles Times: 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.

(Via AMERICAblog.)

And this is, quite frankly, one of the best functions that the blogs can serve: the canary in the mine shaft, the watchdog barking at an intruder, the whistle-blower. There are other functions that blogging fulfills, of course, but in today’s world of thousands of available media streams, when people generally can come to feel overloaded with information, the blogs ability to perform dozens of mini-investigations within a broader subject and then reassemble the narrative in a coherent form is one of the most remarkable, and will probably be among the most influential and lasting.

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corruption, justice, politics, internet, Michelle Malkin, Ben Domenech, plagiarism, Red State, Washington Post, Dan Froomkin