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Washington Post hires left-wing blogger. I guarantee they wouldn’t hire someone from the right.

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  January 2nd, 2009 at 01:16 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Well, we really don’t need any reminder as to the liberal bias of the mainstream media, but I’ll remind you anyway.

Greg Sargent was with the left-wing Talking Points Memo. Now he is with the Washington Post.

I’m sure Greg Sargent is good at what he does, but I’m also sure the Washington Post would not even consider hiring someone directly from the right-of-center blogosphere.

Of course the Washington Post is connected to both Newsweek and Slate, so its biases are pretty well established and no doubt considers TPM to be right in line with the mainstream.

UPDATED: Just a quick update. A lot of lefties are laughing about this post and bringing Ben Domenech up. I perhaps should have been more clear as there is a clear difference.

Ben was specifically hired to write a blog about conservatives. To my knowledge, Greg Sargent is not being hired to write a blog about liberals.

Likewise, the left began hounding Ben out of the job before any allegations showed up relating to plagarism — it was the initial lefty lynch mob that led to the rest.

Also, it took months before the Washington Post again tried to hire a conservative. They got Ramesh Ponnuru. But they wouldn’t let him have a blog. They basically made him the moderator of a forum.

There is a clear difference in treatment — conservatives can write about conservative issues, but liberals get to cover the news.

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COMMENTS

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  • CrabCakes

    nt

  • James_Roe

    Has a large enough audience to justify giving them a newspaper column? Usually picks like this are made with the hopes of boosting subscriptions or in today’s world incoming links. I’m not sure of any right of center blogger who commands enough traffic to warrant a salary.

    Most right leaning editorials are picked from a pool of talking heads like Michelle Malkin, or Bill Kristol. It would certainly be nice to see some of our bloggers in the papers, but unless we can boost traffic on the right it doesn’t seem particularly likely in the near term.

  • NYC_GOPer

    From left-wing website to MSM. Shocking. Follows in the footstepts of (off the top of my head):
    Jake Tapper (Salon.com to ABC)
    Nicholas Confessore (The American Prospect to NY Times)
    Garance Franke-Rute (The American Prospect to Washington Post)
    I’m sure there are others…

  • scarshapedstar

    Erm… yeah, just like when they hired that lefty pinko fever-swamp BDS DUmmie, Ben Domenech. They’ll never hire a Republican. Never!

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • George Claghorn

    Where does anyone get off insulting the CO-FOUNDER of a blog on his own blog?

  • Aaron Gardner

    These guys really have nothing better to do…sad.

  • Moe Lane

    But that was a couple of years ago, and they probably wouldn’t do it today.

  • bs

    characterized that type as a “sleeper cell.” Beautiful analogy.

  • http://www.erickerickson.org Erick Erickson

    He was tossed quickly after lefty outrage — and let’s be honest, it had more to do with the lefty outrage than later revelations. They weren’t going to stand by him the minute the phones started wringing.

    The replacement conservative, which took forever to get, was Ramesh Ponnuru, and they wouldn’t give him a blog — he’s got to moderate a forum.

    Now they are giving this guy a lead blog for their online site.

  • Wubbies World

    … would make the libs there have seizures. I would love to read his blog if he did, but never let it be said that the WP was actually interested in delivering a product people actually wanted to read.

    The WP would rather beg for bail out money then allow a conservative write there.

  • timwayne

    The “later revelations” were of some rather profound serial plagiarism. Come now. I wouldn’t stand by him either.

  • katherine007

    WAPO reported on Saturday, March 25, 2006; Page C01 “conservative bloggers joined in calls 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 staffer had not offered to quit first. He said there was “enough smoke” in the allegations of plagiarism “that we needed to sever the relationship.” …

    “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. . . . And, painfully, Domenech’s detractors are right. He should own up to it and step down. Then, the Left should cease its sick gloating and leave him and his family alone.”

    “Rick Moran, who runs the site Right Wing Nuthouse, wrote on the American Thinker blog: “The plagiarism of Mr. Domenech cannot be chalked up to youthful indiscretion nor to some kind of unconscious parroting of something he read before putting words to paper. . . . Ben Domenech is not the kind of writer we want representing the conservative viewpoint at The Washington Post or anywhere else.”