What’s going to happen to the Washington Post‘s new blogger? We’re trying to find out ourselves, but folks who know have gone to ground.
The blogosphere put on its research hat yesterday and dug up at least half a dozen instances of apparent plagiarism by Ben Domenech, the conservative blogger whose recent hiring by the Washington Post sparked a firestorm in the blog world.
DailyKos has some examples, and then some; Atrios has a few more — oh, and more.
We’ve been calling the Washingtonpost.com to find out what its thinking on their new hire is, but they haven’t gotten back to us. Domenech himself has not yet replied to our email.
The Washingtonpost.com has, however, gone ahead and launched his page. Be forewarned — all the biting comments take a while to load.
The Post’s Howard Kurtz mentioned the brewing fiasco in an article this morning, but treaded lightly:
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. Three sentences of a 1999 Domenech review of a Martin Scorsese film were identical to a review in Salon magazine, and several sentences in Domenech’s piece on a James Bond movie closely resembled one in the Internet Movie Database. Domenech said he needed to research the examples but that he never used material without attribution and had complained about a college editor improperly adding language to some of his articles.
Look up — does anybody see another shoe, and does it appear to want to drop?
