BEYOND HOOKERS,
HAMAS AND HAGEL
ton Post blogger Jennifer Rubin,
failed to derail Hagel’s nomination
after producing a flood of stories
focusing on the former Republican senator’s past criticism of the
pro-Israel lobby and the Iraq war.
The anti-Hagel pile-on also produced notable missteps, such as
when Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro relayed word from an anonymous
Senate aide that Hagel may have
once been paid to speak before the
group “Friends of Hamas.” It was an
easily debunked rumor that nonetheless got picked up, with some
caveats, by the Washington Times,
National Review and Fox Business
Network. While all news outlets
make mistakes, what stood out was
Shapiro’s unwillingness to admit
that he pushed a bogus rumor.
Conor Friedersdorf, a rightleaning blogger at The Atlantic who
previously criticized Rubin’s 2012
coverage for not being fact-based,
recently pointed to the Hagel stories as evidence of “conservatism’s
information disadvantage.” Writing
on the same morning as Erickson’s
post, Friedersdorf argued that conservative writers, including Rubin,
had willfully ignored the political
realities surrounding the likelihood of Hagel’s confirmation.
In an interview with The Huffing-
HUFFINGTON
03.24.13
“IT’S A CIRCLE JERK,
ISN’T IT?”
ton Post, Rubin said she wasn’t familiar with Friedersdorf’s writing;
nor, she added, was she bothered
that Erickson had criticized her for
doing Romney’s “dirty work” from
her perch at the Post. She defended
her work, saying that she regularly
breaks news, interviews major candidates and covers foreign policy.
“That I do not adhere to a
straight-line, far-right agenda is
going to upset some people,” she
said, with regard to her conservative detractors.
FROM MALAYSIA TO MENENDEZ
Conservative media has suffered
more bumps and bruises post-Hagel. BuzzFeed revealed on March 1
that the Malaysian government had
paid nearly $400,000 to conservative writer Josh Treviño — who in
turn hired other conservative writers — as part of a paid propaganda
campaign. Government-funded columns and blog posts ran on several
conservative sites and The Huffington Post, which has since removed
Treviño’s work.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post