Washington Post blogger resigns amid allegations
WASHINGTON — A 24-year-old conservative blogger hired by The Washington Post's Web site resigned Friday, three days after his debut, amid allegations of plagiarism.
Ben Domenech, an editor with Regnery Publishing, relinquished the position hours after a liberal Web site posted evidence he had plagiarized part of a movie review he wrote for National Review Online.
Previous allegations of plagiarism about Domenech's writing for the College of William & Mary student newspaper surfaced Wednesday, but the 2001 review was the first instance found since he left the college.
Domenech attended William & Mary, but he did not earn a degree, college spokesman William Walker said.
While liberal bloggers objected to Domenech's hiring and his inflammatory language, such as calling Coretta Scott King a "communist," it was not until they gathered evidence that he had repeatedly used material without attribution that some conservative bloggers joined the call for his firing.
Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, which operates independently from the newspaper, said he would have dismissed Domenech if the former Bush administration aide and Republican Senate staff member had not offered to quit first. He said there was "enough smoke" in the allegations of plagiarism "that we needed to sever the relationship."
The furor over the rise and demise of the blogger made "Ben Domenech" the most-searched term on the Web Friday, according to the tracking firm Technorati.com.
Salon.com — whose lead story Friday morning was "A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Plagiarist" — accused Domenech of using material by its writers without attribution while at William & Mary.
On liberal blogs and Web sites, many commentators said there was no equivalence between a Republican activist who co-founded the site RedState.com and Post.com journalists who are viewed as leaning to the left.
Domenech said Friday he resigned because "if the firestorm gets past a certain level, there's nothing you can ever say that will be taken seriously ... It's reached the point where there's nothing I can really do to defend myself."
He said most of the allegations of plagiarism, from the William & Mary student paper, were from his freshman year, and that while he thinks the unattributed material was inserted by his editor, he cannot prove it.
"When I was 17, I was certainly sloppy," Domenech said.
Michelle Malkin, a prominent conservative blogger, wrote before the resignation that Domenech had edited one of her books and she had been cheering for him. "But now the determined moonbat hordes have exposed multiple instances of what clearly appear to me to be blatant lifting of entire, unique passages by Ben from other writers." That, Malkin said, is "unacceptable."
Material from The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.
Comparing words
Daily Kos, a Web site edited by liberal activist Markos Moulitsas, posted a comparison of Ben Domenech's National Review piece on the film "Final Fantasy" and a 2001 review by Steve Murray of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Domenech said he thought his piece appeared first, but a database review found Murray's review was published three days earlier.
Murray wrote:
"Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, wriggling countless tentacles and snapping their jaws. They're known as the Phantoms, alien thingies that, for three decades, have been sucking the life out of the earthlings of 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.' "
Domenech wrote:
"Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, splaying their tentacles and snapping their jaws, dripping a discomfiting acidic ooze. They're known as the Phantoms, otherworldly beings who, for three decades, have been literally sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human."
The Washington Post