Jim Romanesko and Ben Jacobs ran some scoops last week about a story that seemed very inside Washington. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, scourge of the FCC, had not been writing the columns syndicated under his name. Those columns hadn’t often raised hackles in the capital – Bozell showed up in Media Matters from time to time, but not with the frequency of, say, Michelle Malkin.
But the key word in this story was “syndicated.” For years, Bozell had appeared in newspapers, filling a conservative-shaped hole in editorial pages that often skewed left. Belatedly, I see that the Quad City Times has dropped Bozell.
The column we’ve run for a decade under Bozell’s byline skewered reporters and media firms he condemned as “liberal,” regularly slamming them for being dishonest.
We disagreed with many of the columns Bozell presented as his own. We’d wince every time he damned the “mainstream” media. Our newspaper and many others in the so-called mainstream media send him a check every month. But we stuck with him in the interest of presenting diverse views on our Opinion page.
Bozell may have been comfortable representing others’ work as his own. We’re not.
Yeah, journalists don’t enjoy being told that they’re lazy America-ruiners by someone using a ghost writer.
