Saying goodbye to Michelle
Our parent company's flagship publication, The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, has dropped the columnist Michelle Malkin from its op-ed roster. The Pilot's ombudsman, Marvin Lake, explains why.
Malkin has a long history of poorly supported polemic, as journalist David Neiwert and others can document. Moreover, her recent book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror," was thoroughly debunked by Eric Muller, a UNC law prof, and Greg Robinson (details here) before it even was published. This was about an order of magnitude harder to do than smoking out whatever the truth, or "truth," was about the documents in Dan Rather's National Guard story about George W. Bush, and M&R pulled it off in roughly the same period of time, and yet it has gotten nowhere near the attention in the blogosphere that the Rather case got.)
One final note: Some commenters have suggested that a Pilot editorial writer's comment, quoted in Lake's column, that Malkin is an "Asian Ann Coulter" was a gratuitous reference. I think not, in the limited sense that her ethnic background was at least tangentially relevant to the argument she was making about internment in her book. Otherwise, I think her ethnicity has much less to do with her gig, and her performance, than the facts that she and Coulter are both, in no particular order, conservative, female, easy on the eyes and apparently willing to say damn near anything they think might get people's attention, regardless of its factual basis or lack thereof.