Right-wing hack finds home at right-wing paper

Meet a guy named John F. Solomon.

John Solomon is a longtime reporter - to use the term quite loosely. At one point he seems to have been a credible journalist, but he transformed into advocacy journalism in the incoherent early third of the current decade. In the middle third of the decade, his name appeared on a lot of Associated Press hit pieces against major Democrats ranging from John Edwards and Howard Dean to John Kerry and even Harry Reid. These were typical noise machine offerings that were little different from those written by right-wing bloggers. Instead of legitimate exposes, these articles turned out to be political hatchet jobs from the right - and these pieces went a long way in the Republican-dominated bunker climate of the time.

(The Last Word of 1/7/04 debunked an AP piece by John Solomon and David Gram that blamed Dean for lax security at a Vermont nuke plant. The trouble with the AP story was that Dean wasn't governor yet when the first security breach happened, and that it was the federal government - not the state - that was responsible for security there.)

I'm no Harry Reid fan, but Solomon went over the top for partisan purposes - so much so that a 2006 piece on a Reid nonstory prompted criticism as people were finally on to this bullshit. The AP, however, gave Solomon a cash reward for this bogus article because it became the "most talked-about, blogged-about political story" in the wingnutosphere that week.

After Solomon was rewarded by the Assholciated Press for writing a story that was shot full of holes, he took a similar job at the Washington Post. Dissidents looked on in disbelief as his hackery moved him through the biz. The Washington Post was previously thought to be respectable, but the hiring of Solomon must have happened around the same time the paper gave right-wing hack Ben Domenech his own conservative blog - a blog that was quickly discontinued after Domenech plagiarized much of his material. Despite accusations that the Post had a liberal bias, it had no parallel liberal blog.

But now John Solomon is finally ending up where he belongs. Sun Myung Moon's archconservative Washington Times has appointed Solomon as its executive editor. The Times is the rag long trusted by right-wing Beltway insiders. This paper has such a reputation for ideological hackery that Solomon's appearance there erases any doubts that he's more of a right-wing advocate than an objective journalist.

The Washington Times is one place where conservative journalism careers go to stink and rot. According to the unrelated New York Times (which is where the photo of Solomon comes from), the Washington Times "has never entirely left the cold-war era" and is "best-known for its right-wing editorial stance."

Being hired by the Washington Times seems to retroactively discredit anything John Solomon has written in the past few years - but it's a few years too late.

(Source: http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/7614.html;
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/business/media/11times.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)