Why did the WaPo launch Red America, the new conservative blog written by Ben Domenech? Is it a good business decision to attract conservatives to Washingtonpost.com? Is it because Ben is a good writer who will probably generate a lot of traffic?
No. Obviously, it’s a “sop to the paper’s right-wing critics” which, according to Tapped’s Greg Sargent, is a result of our mafia-like “protection racket”:
Indeed, one way to think about the right’s “media-is-liberal” campaign is as a kind of crude protection racket. The analogy isn’t perfect, but the idea is this: The right-wing criticism effectively says to the MSM, “Look, there are a lot of pretty pissed off people out there who think you’re too liberal. You need to hire some of us to protect you against them and the too-liberal charge.”
So the MSM hires a few conservatives — witness CNN’s recent hiring of Glenn Beck and Bill Bennett — desperately hoping to avoid the “liberal” label, as the Post obviously was. Of course, the whole thing’s a scam job. Once hired, the goons proceed to trash the place — they just keep on bashing the media as liberal. Exactly as Domenech did.
Wrong. Domenech didn’t “bash” the media for being liberal. He simply pointed out what this Pew poll demonstrated in 2004:
About a third of national journalists (34%) and somewhat fewer local journalists (23%) describe themselves as liberals; that compares with 19% of the public in a May survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. Moreover, there is a relatively small number of conservatives at national and local news organizations. Just 7% of national news people and 12% of local journalists describe themselves as conservatives, compared with a third of all Americans.
This is the disparity Domenech is describing when he talks about the “pachyderms in the mist” attitude — a description that fits the mindset of a newspaper that would create a “conservative beat,” as the NYT has. It’s the disparity that led the WaPo to give Domenech the Red America blog rather than a spot on the news pages. Maybe if Domenech had worked for The New Republic — like Post reporters Dana Milbank and Charles Lane — he’d be eligible to cover the White House or the Supreme Court. But, like Post columnist George Will, Domenech worked for National Review. He’s only qualified to write opinions.
Essentially, what the WaPo has done is add another conservative columnist to its roster — only this one has a blog instead of a space on the op-ed page. I can understand why that annoys liberals, but I can’t understand why it should invite comparisons of conservatives to the mafia.