tagged w/ Huffington Post
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The war in Afghanistan has been totally forgotten for the most part. Here are five new videos to show it is still going on.
http://corksphere.blogspot.com/The war in Afghanistan has been totally forgotten for the most part. Here are five... more
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Several videos showing our troops in Afghanistan on this Memorial Day weekend.
http://corksphere.blogspot.com/Several videos showing our troops in Afghanistan on this Memorial Day weekend.... more
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If you click here, you’ll see that nothing remains of the 39 articles I’ve written for Arianna Huffington. Not a title, sentence, or tag is left. My author bio now reads:
"Matt Osborne has deleted all his posts from this site as part of Operation HuffPuff and encourages other bloggers to do the same."
I see the point many of the 9,000 or so unpaid contributors have made about deserving some kind of compensation, even at a token rate per post, as thanks for building the product she has sold for a fortune. But it wasn’t personal avarice that led me to this; I don’t desire any part of Arianna Huffington’s AOL millions, for in my mind that money is cursed. Just ask Ted Turner.
Instead, my participation in HuffPuff — the growing online rebellion against Arianna and her newly-mintworthy media empire that began at the Adbusters website in February — is the culmination of many months of disillusionment and growing disgust. The sale of Huffington Post represents exactly the sort of “veal pen captivation scheme” that firebagging lefties constantly project on anyone with the temerity to question their paranoid conspiracy theories and character assassinations. To wit:
For someone who writes so often about the president as a man standing aloof of the middle class, Arianna’s own behavior is rather aristocratic. Mayhill Fowler, who famously quit writing for HuffPo last September, has remarked that despite her stellar reporting and Arianna’s many trips to the Bay Area where she lives, she has never been invited to meet the Greek duchess of news. Arianna has never been without privilege. This wouldn’t be enough by itself; background is not destiny. But set within her pattern of hypocrisy and self-advancement, it is enough to put a question mark on her liberalism.
Despite her public shift away from conservatism fifteen years ago, Arianna is still friends with Newt Gingrich, one of the most offensive panderers of the culture war fringe. He is not the only right-wing freak with whom she maintains friendly associations. But far more worrisome are her longstanding ties to the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA) — a cult whose founder has been accused of seducing young acolytes and threatening ex-members, among other things.
Arianna has reportedly pressured staff members into attending MSIA meetings. Having seen corporate environments where Tony Robbins was a kind of mandatory godhead — indeed, having served in military units where the Amway cult was rampant among noncommissioned officers — these accounts make me shudder at the all-too-familiar sense of pressure her staffers must feel.
It also explains why her website features so many New Age gurus and crackpots instead of a science section. Indeed, the only hard science news comes as AP and Reuters feeds. Huffington Post has always been a hotbed of the very celebutard culture of self-help snake oil that Chris Hedges describes in The Death of the Liberal Class, and only becomes more so with each passing day.
The editorial slant of her publication has also shifted in the last two years. It is impossible for any submission mentioning Barack Obama to gain the front page unless it stands to his extreme left and denounces him for standing too far to the right. This is not simply about pulling the Overton Window to left-of-center, either: firebagging outrage and ginned-up controversy bring page loads, which are are what AOL pays millions to own. See how that works?
This is the only point of personal contention I have with Huffington Post. Standards of excellence that one assumes in a high school English class, such as correct spelling and sentence construction, have little or no bearing on whether a post is promoted to the front of a vertical. It is hard to fully explain the annoyance of seeing your hard work relegated to obscurity in favor of a poorly-penned screed.
One group of HuffPo bloggers has also formed a virtual “picket line” and gone on strike, filing a lawsuit they probably won’t win. They have nevertheless drawn Arianna’s disdain for labor into sharp relief. Her dismissive attitude towards them continues even though Richard Trumka and other labor leaders are respecting the picket line. This has ignited my proletarian ire: we writers ARE the working class she claims to care about so much.
I stopped posting at HuffPo nearly a year ago. I have since become the only anonymous blogger in the comments. In February, I began the process of rerunning all my best HuffPo pieces here; that paused in March with the Goat Hill Project, but has now resumed. Having copied all of them into my own blog, they are now erased. I call this “Operation HuffPoof.” I am not the first blogger to erase their work, and almost certainly will not be the last.
As for the future of Huffington Post in this blog: I still follow the RSS feeds of some of the paid bloggers there, and am happy to quote from and link to them. Many of them, such as Shahein Nasiripour and Ryan Grim, are still doing very good work. I no longer read “the internet newspaper” as a news aggregator, as I can accomplish the same thing with my own newsfeeds. Barring a change of management style, I shall never post at Arianna’s place again.
One final note: this action does not end my association with terrific bloggers who still post there unpaid. Bob Cesca and Chris Weigant, both members of the Banter Media Group, are friends and allies for whom I wish the best. They may choose as they see fit, without prejudice from me. I hope I might ask the same.
http://www.osborneink.com/2011/05/with-a-puff-huffington-posts-go-poof.htmlIf you click here, you’ll see that nothing remains of the 39 articles I’ve... more
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bambuu
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What terrorist advances the causes of empires?… Except for cheap and untraceable foreign state terrorists for hire. That is the mission of Al Qaeda. To hire cheap impoverished people who are ready to die for their beliefs. Except that they died for America’s interests. What luck America has… and it must be because of God, because it says so on the dollar bill...What terrorist advances the causes of empires?… Except for cheap and... more
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by Eric K. Arnold, Media Consortium blogger
The proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger continues to dominate media policy headlines, but the wireless merger isn’t the only game in town. AOL’s recent buyout of the Huffington Post has raised intellectual property issues, rural communities still lack speedy broadband access, and a proposed Verizon antenna in Oakland has come under fire by neighborhood activists.
AT&T an Underdog?
Telecommunications giant AT&T is many things, and an underdog in need of federal assistance isn’t one of them. Yet Colorlines.com’s Jamilah King says that’s exactly how the company is portraying itself in its proposed $39 billion dollar takeover of T-Mobile.
In its official filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), King reports, “AT&T spends nearly 90 pages describing T-Mobile’s weaknesses, while detailing the roadblocks it says it’ll face if federal regulators don’t green light the deal.” If federal regulators block the deal, AT&T argues, its customers “would face a greater number of blocked and dropped calls as well as less reliable and slower data connections. And in some markets, AT&T’s customers would be left without access to more advanced technologies.”
It’s hard to feel sorry for AT&T, though, since the deal has raised concerns that consumers ultimately will pay more for cell phone service, which could adversely impact low-income, minority, and immigrant users who rely on the low-cost plans currently offered by T-Mobile. If the merger passes federal muster, King writes, “it’ll likely mean the unheralded return to prominence of the former Ma Bell monopoly that ruled American telecommunications for most of the twentieth century.”
Competition without Competitors
As Nancy Scola writes in The American Prospect, AT&T’s 381-page FCC filing essentially comes down to this: “you can have the benefits of competition without actual competitors.”
Scola traces the history of the telecommunications industry, touching on the 1982 antitrust case which resulted in the break-up of Ma Bell (aka AT&T) into seven Baby Bells, as well as analyzing current media policy in Washington:
As a powerful company that just announced $31 billion in revenues last quarter AT&T retains great sway. The FCC often defers to the company’s role as the founders of American telecommunications. And Congress, a recipient of large sums of AT&T cash, often seems dazzled by the company’s bright lobbyists who talk in confusing but exciting ways about ‘spectrum synergies’ and ‘LTE deployment.’
The takeaway? Congress and federal regulators need to put consumers’ needs ahead of the telecoms:
In 21st-century America, mobile phones are simply far too important a technology for Washington to give them the usual treatment. With a breathtaking nine out of 10 Americans now owning a cell phone, the wireless market is one that has to work for consumers.
HuffPo Lawsuit, Boycott Highlight IP Issues in New Media Era
The AT&T/T-Mobile merger has garnered a lot of media attention, but it’s not the only merger worth scrutinizing. Truthout’s Nadia Prupis takes a closer look at reactions to the class-action lawsuit recently filed on behalf of Huffington Post’s unpaid bloggers. HuffPo was recently sold to AOL for $315 million. As Prupis reports, “the class-action suit, filed by freelance journalist Jonathan Tasini, alleges that the posts created by unpaid writers were worth an estimated $105 million, and that the profit should have been used as compensation.”
HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington is quoted as saying, “The vast majority of our bloggers are thrilled to contribute – and we’re thrilled to have them.”
Yet the merger—and the lawsuit—highlight one of the biggest issues facing contemporary journalism: The devaluation of intellectual property. For that reason, a number of former bloggers have instituted a boycott of HuffPo. As Prupis notes, “The Newspaper Guild of America, the National Writers Union and the AFL-CIO have all endorsed the boycott, with many of their members refusing to contribute to the web site until Huffington agrees to talk with the unions about how best to approach the changing landscape of online journalism.”
Rural Broadband Access Still Slow
Mark Scheerer of Public News Service tackles the issue of broadband access in rural communities – an important topic in a down economy, since faster connectivity could result in economic stimulus for small businesses, such as livestock farmers.
A new report (PDF at link) issued by the Center for Rural Strategies concludes that “communities without broadband service could be hobbled economically, losing the race to those with faster connections.”
Farmers in places like Stamping Ground, Kentucky, Scheerer says, are paying for high-speed broadband, yet receiving dial-up download speeds, which hinders efforts to “streamline and economize their livestock sales.”
The report essentially mirrors the FCC’s 2010 findings: “broadband providers are not expanding their services in a timely and satisfactory fashion.”
Activists Push Back Against Verizon Antenna
As Oakland Local’s Dennis Rowcliffe reports, a proposal by Verizon to install a powerful cellular antenna close to two schools and several residential units has been met with opposition by community groups.
“The residents, school parents and teachers express concerns about the potential health effects of sustained nearby exposure to increased levels of the electromagnetic frequency, or EMF, radiation emitted by the antennas,” Rowcliffe writes, adding that a group called East Bay Residents for Responsible Antenna Placement (EBR-RAP) has suggested several alternate sites, all of which were rejected by Verizon.
Verizon executive John Johnson is quoted as saying, “Please note that we intend to retain our rights to the city-approved location and to use it as the project site if we are unable to identify a viable alternative after further review.”
However, EBR-RAP members say they intend to keep up the pressure on Verizon until an alternate site is found.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about media policy and media-related matters by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. To read more of the Wavelength, click here. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets, and is produced with the support of the Media Democracy Fund.by Eric K. Arnold, Media Consortium blogger
The proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger... more
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by Eric K. Arnold, Media Consortium blogger
The proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger continues to dominate media policy headlines, but the wireless merger isn’t the only game in town. AOL’s recent buyout of the Huffington Post has raised intellectual property issues, rural communities still lack speedy broadband access, and a proposed Verizon antenna in Oakland has come under fire by neighborhood activists.
AT&T an Underdog?
Telecommunications giant AT&T is many things, and an underdog in need of federal assistance isn’t one of them. Yet Colorlines.com’s Jamilah King says that’s exactly how the company is portraying itself in its proposed $39 billion dollar takeover of T-Mobile.
In its official filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), King reports, “AT&T spends nearly 90 pages describing T-Mobile’s weaknesses, while detailing the roadblocks it says it’ll face if federal regulators don’t green light the deal.” If federal regulators block the deal, AT&T argues, its customers “would face a greater number of blocked and dropped calls as well as less reliable and slower data connections. And in some markets, AT&T’s customers would be left without access to more advanced technologies.”
It’s hard to feel sorry for AT&T, though, since the deal has raised concerns that consumers ultimately will pay more for cell phone service, which could adversely impact low-income, minority, and immigrant users who rely on the low-cost plans currently offered by T-Mobile. If the merger passes federal muster, King writes, “it’ll likely mean the unheralded return to prominence of the former Ma Bell monopoly that ruled American telecommunications for most of the twentieth century.”
Competition without Competitors
As Nancy Scola writes in The American Prospect, AT&T’s 381-page FCC filing essentially comes down to this: “you can have the benefits of competition without actual competitors.”
Scola traces the history of the telecommunications industry, touching on the 1982 antitrust case which resulted in the break-up of Ma Bell (aka AT&T) into seven Baby Bells, as well as analyzing current media policy in Washington:
As a powerful company that just announced $31 billion in revenues last quarter AT&T retains great sway. The FCC often defers to the company’s role as the founders of American telecommunications. And Congress, a recipient of large sums of AT&T cash, often seems dazzled by the company’s bright lobbyists who talk in confusing but exciting ways about ‘spectrum synergies’ and ‘LTE deployment.’
The takeaway? Congress and federal regulators need to put consumers’ needs ahead of the telecoms:
In 21st-century America, mobile phones are simply far too important a technology for Washington to give them the usual treatment. With a breathtaking nine out of 10 Americans now owning a cell phone, the wireless market is one that has to work for consumers.
HuffPo Lawsuit, Boycott Highlight IP Issues in New Media Era
The AT&T/T-Mobile merger has garnered a lot of media attention, but it’s not the only merger worth scrutinizing. Truthout’s Nadia Prupis takes a closer look at reactions to the class-action lawsuit recently filed on behalf of Huffington Post’s unpaid bloggers. HuffPo was recently sold to AOL for $315 million. As Prupis reports, “the class-action suit, filed by freelance journalist Jonathan Tasini, alleges that the posts created by unpaid writers were worth an estimated $105 million, and that the profit should have been used as compensation.”
HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington is quoted as saying, “The vast majority of our bloggers are thrilled to contribute – and we’re thrilled to have them.”
Yet the merger—and the lawsuit—highlight one of the biggest issues facing contemporary journalism: The devaluation of intellectual property. For that reason, a number of former bloggers have instituted a boycott of HuffPo. As Prupis notes, “The Newspaper Guild of America, the National Writers Union and the AFL-CIO have all endorsed the boycott, with many of their members refusing to contribute to the web site until Huffington agrees to talk with the unions about how best to approach the changing landscape of online journalism.”
Rural Broadband Access Still Slow
Mark Scheerer of Public News Service tackles the issue of broadband access in rural communities – an important topic in a down economy, since faster connectivity could result in economic stimulus for small businesses, such as livestock farmers.
A new report (PDF at link) issued by the Center for Rural Strategies concludes that “communities without broadband service could be hobbled economically, losing the race to those with faster connections.”
Farmers in places like Stamping Ground, Kentucky, Scheerer says, are paying for high-speed broadband, yet receiving dial-up download speeds, which hinders efforts to “streamline and economize their livestock sales.”
The report essentially mirrors the FCC’s 2010 findings: “broadband providers are not expanding their services in a timely and satisfactory fashion.”
Activists Push Back Against Verizon Antenna
As Oakland Local’s Dennis Rowcliffe reports, a proposal by Verizon to install a powerful cellular antenna close to two schools and several residential units has been met with opposition by community groups.
“The residents, school parents and teachers express concerns about the potential health effects of sustained nearby exposure to increased levels of the electromagnetic frequency, or EMF, radiation emitted by the antennas,” Rowcliffe writes, adding that a group called East Bay Residents for Responsible Antenna Placement (EBR-RAP) has suggested several alternate sites, all of which were rejected by Verizon.
Verizon executive John Johnson is quoted as saying, “Please note that we intend to retain our rights to the city-approved location and to use it as the project site if we are unable to identify a viable alternative after further review.”
However, EBR-RAP members say they intend to keep up the pressure on Verizon until an alternate site is found.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about media policy and media-related matters by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. To read more of the Wavelength, click here. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets, and is produced with the support of the Media Democracy Fund.by Eric K. Arnold, Media Consortium blogger
The proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger... more
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Major progressive media stars have recently lost their platforms, while the Huffington Post eschews progressivism -- both worrying developments in the media war with the right.Major progressive media stars have recently lost their platforms, while the Huffington... more
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Leen61
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1 year ago
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The N.Y.Time’s declared war on the Huffington Post shows no sign of dissipating, and as ever the new-look NYT Magazine is at the front lines of the attack. Andrew Goldman’s interview with Arianna Huffington is quite astonishing, but first it’s worth looking at other news of the week.(it all ties together in some twisted sick way keep reading and hold on to your seat ladies and fellas-figg)
On Monday evening, HuffPo’s Shahien Nasiripour got his hands on a photocopied internal document from within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Marked “confidential for AG Miller,” it shows that the CFPB is deeply involved in putting together the AGs’ settlement with mortgage servicers. Nasiripour wrote:
Perhaps most important to some lawmakers in Washington, the mere existence of the report suggests a much deeper link between the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, led by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, and the 50 state attorneys general who are leading the nationwide probe into the five firms’ improper foreclosure practices, a development sure to anger Republicans in Congress and a banking industry intent on diminishing the fledgling CFPB’s legitimacy by questioning its authority to act before it’s officially launched in July.
Earlier this month, Warren told the House Financial Services Committee, under intense questioning, that her agency has provided limited assistance to the various state and federal agencies involved in the industry probes. At one point, she was asked whether she made any recommendations regarding proposed penalties. She replied that her agency has only provided “advice.”
The Republicans in Congress reacted exactly as Nasiripour said they would. Spencer Bachus immediately posted Nasiripour’s document on his website (the exact same photocopy, not any other version), and came out fighting:
Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus and Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee Chairman Shelley Moore Capito are asking Elizabeth Warren, the Obama Administration official charged with setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, if she wants to clarify or correct her recent testimony regarding the Bureau’s role in the ongoing mortgage servicing settlement negotiations. Recent reports indicate that the CFPB’s role in these negotiations has been more extensive than Professor Warren suggested during her testimony before the Subcommittee earlier this month.
The Huffington Post’s document caused so much of a stir in Washington that even the NYT felt compelled to report on the developments:
Last week, Ms. Warren told the committee that she provided “advice” to the Treasury secretary and others about a possible settlement but was not involved in the negotiations. State attorneys general and federal officials are discussing a settlement with mortgage service companies in response to questionable foreclosure practices.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Bachus released a seven-page document titled “Perspectives on Settlement Alternatives in Mortgage Servicing,” which, in a letter to Ms. Warren, he said demonstrated that she had a larger role than she had indicated to the committee.
Nowhere in the NYT story, which was written by Edward Wyatt, was there any indication that the document had been ferreted out by an assiduous reporter at the Huffington Post. And of course his link to the document was to house.gov rather than anything with HuffPo branding. In hindsight, Nasiripour would probably have been smart to put some kind of HuffPo watermark on the front page of the document, because both Wyatt and Bachus (with his vague reference to “recent reports”) seemed determined to ensure that Nasiripour got no credit for finding it at all.
And so to Goldman’s interview, which includes this jaw-dropping exchange:
I think that hiring a slew of traditional journalists seems counter to the model that made buying you appealing to AOL.
We already had 148 journalists on payroll at The Huffington Post. I don’t know how you can say that.
I look at your writers much less than I find myself clicking on stuff that’s been aggregated or the more salacious, boob-related posts.
Nasiripour’s scoop was hugely popular on the HuffPo site: wonky news and grainy photocopies can still generate 1,173 Facebook shares, 1,627 comments, and 2,760 Facebook likes. Total pageviews were surely much higher than on the NYT piece in which Wyatt aggregated Nasiripour’s information without crediting him. But Andrew Goldman doesn’t seem to be drawn to that stuff: instead he “finds himself” clicking on boobs. Which surely says more about Andrew Goldman than it does about the Huffington Post.
What’s certain is that Goldman is taking his cues from his boss. Here’s Keller:
The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.
Goldman, before he starts talking about aggregation and boobs, asks the same question — “aren’t you left-wing” — four different times before finally letting it drop.(more at link and source enclosures) Via Columbia Journal ReviewThe N.Y.Time’s declared war on the Huffington Post shows no sign of dissipating,... more
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In a recent interview with The New York Times, Arianna Huffington revealed a bit of news that's not likely to show up on The Huffington Post's front page any time soon: the site is no longer "lefty" in its political bent.
That will likely come as a surprise to the massive audience of Democrats and liberals The Huffington Post has attracted over the years, who've turned the site into a powerful voice for progressive values and one of the largest online publications going.
Speaking to New York Times reporter Andrew Goldman, Huffington said that for the last three years she has been walking the post-partisan talk.
"The tag line that we’ve used a lot is 'Beyond left and right,'" she reportedly said.
The Times' writer fired back, suggesting that she was "trying to tell me that Smurfs aren’t blue" by claiming that The Huffington Post was not founded as a "lefty" publication.
"I’m just telling you that it is very clear that we have progressive views, but to call everything we’re doing lefty — it misses the whole point that American policy needs to be redefined beyond left and right," she reportedly said. "It’s a completely obsolete view of politics."
"Still, I’m amazed you’re trying to tell me that The Huffington Post wasn’t started as a lefty blog?" Goldman asked.
"I’m not trying to tell you anything," she reportedly replied. "I’m telling you things. I’m not trying, O.K.?"
The interviewer also claimed that "salacious," "boob-related" posts on Huffington's front page tend to get his clicks more than their original reporting -- a point Arianna said was "really a shame."
The published text of Huffington's interview was "condensed and edited," according to a tag below the piece.
Huffington has of late been feuding with Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor, who recently compared her business practices to "Somali piracy."
The Huffington Post has significantly more readers than The New York Times.
But in recent months Huffington has been under fire from liberals and progressives, namely due to AOL's announcement that it was purchasing the site and making Arianna the editor-in-chief of its new Huffington Post Media Group, under which all their editorial content now falls.
Some 900 of AOL's global employees were let go after the Huffington Post purchase, representing about 20 percent of its workforce. The majority were in back-office operations in India.
AOL reportedly paid $315 million for the site, sparking an outcry from a group of unpaid Huffington Post contributors who demanded to share in the proceeds.
That was a sore spot for many writers, who've targeted Huffington's business model of not paying most contributors as a factor leading to the decline of journalism. Numerous writers and a swath of readers even openly quit the site in protest, insisting that the failure to pay most contributors was a factor leading to the decline of journalism.
Challenged on this point by the Times, Huffington pushed back, saying there's no evidence to support claims that the site has negatively affected journalism.
Even after all that, Huffington came under heavy criticism yet again recently when a post by controversial right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart landed on their front page.
They defended the move, noting that it attracted an enormous number of page views, but later announced that Breitbart's posts wouldn't appear on the front page again after he made negative comments about former Obama appointee Van Jones to a different outlet.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/01/arianna-huffington-post-is-not-a-lefty-publication/In a recent interview with The New York Times, Arianna Huffington revealed a bit of... more
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This past Friday, my article “Meet the New Soviets: Gingrich, Walker, Breitbart”, was yanked from the Huffington Post after being up for 8 hours. (My article is still not up, but you can read it here.) The reasons it was pulled are troubling to me and should be a concern to anyone who wonders about the future editorial directions of Huffington Post.
As a bit of background, I’m a national security policy wonk from out West who has settled in DC. I’ve enjoyed a great relationship with the Huffington Post–where I have blogged on national security and politics for 4 years.
My post came down during the recent fracas over blogger Andrew Breitbart being demoted from the front page because of his anti-social habits (mostly lying and name-calling). Breitbart–a right wing darling–is a friend of Arianna Huffington and played a leading role in Huffpost’s founding. To their credit, an editor did call me and let me know my piece had been yanked. Yet for three days, people who linked to it saw my headshot with a note saying the article didn’t meet editorial standards. Ouch.
Feeling wronged, I called on Sunday to clarify the policy and request that they put the post back up. I spoke to one of the blog editors. Following the discussion I came away with serious concerns over who is driving editorial policy at the Huffington Post.
When I asked for specific reasons why my post had been removed, the editor seemed flustered. I sympathized with the chaos they must be experiencing given the site’s rapid evolution and purchase by AOL. He told me that it was because I compared three public figures to Soviets–which he described as a totalitarian regime (like Nazis or Fascists). What?! My Soviet-era comparisons in the article were about destroying public trust and the propaganda required to sustain such destruction. I wasn’t comparing any of the public figures to people who had committed Soviet atrocities, (read the article for yourself here.) I stand by what I said because I saw this government-propaganda hybrid in action, having actually worked under that regime in 1989.
My first thought about the reason for the article removal was based on the Millennial dominance in online industries. Maybe I needed to talk to someone older. The editor explained that he was senior enough, it was about my comparison and that this wasn’t blowback due to the demotion of Andrew Breitbart from the front page of Huffington Post last week.
However it looks like nobody told Andrew Breitbart that. Here’s the tweet-sheet:
Breitbart’s tweet within two hours of my posting:
Find the inappropriate ad hominems about me, Newt Gingrich & Scott Walker in this fresh @HuffingtonPost piece:http://huff.to/hf9ivc andrewbreitbart Highly Influential 3 days ago
And here’s what Breitbart’s loyal sidekick Lee Stranahan–who quit blogging for Huffpost over Breitbart’s demotion tweeted a short time later:
stranahan: HuffPost censors @loreleikelly Meet the New Soviets: Gingrich, Walker, Breitbart REMOVEDhttp://huff.to/dFINfQ ; is she banned from page 1?3 days ago retweet
And I’m not the only one who finds the timing odd. This tweet from Tim Karr of Free Press:
Did the Huffington Post pull this article (http://huff.to/fTyMRs) because @AndrewBreitbart tweeted this (http://bit.ly/eIYcnT) ?8:40 AM Mar 25th via bitly
And then there’s this one from Breitbart himself that mentions AOL:
Did Arianna really create arbitrary AOL content rule kicking me off @huffingtonpost front for telling truth about ‘dumb twat’ @vanjones68? March 26
It’s not as if I’m the only one to use comparisons, a quick search of the Huffington Post site yielded 343,000 references to “Soviet”.
I don’t know if this is internal chaos, new editorial overlords at AOL or a quid pro quo to appease Breitbart. What ever the reason, I hope that my experience will be seen as an opportunity to clarify editorial standards at the Huffington Post and to provide a qualitative benchmark about subject matter expertise in our new media environment. Readers deserve accuracy and writers deserve fair treatment. In so doing, we’d all benefit from a clear distinction between evidence based opinions about the direction of our own society and the human wrecking-ball tactics of Andrew Breitbart. An added benefit will be more rigorous debate about the misleading governing vision of Newt Gingrich and the anti-democratic leadership of Scott Walker.
If you no longer see my writing available on Huffington Post I think you will know which views have “won the day”. And if that is the case, other writers might also need to watch what they say, especially when it comes to talking about Andrew Breitbart and Soviet-style propaganda.
http://dirtyhippies.org/2011/03/29/what-did-huffpost-do-with-my-article/This past Friday, my article “Meet the New Soviets: Gingrich, Walker,... more
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bambuu
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This is a series of five new videos from the war in Afghanistan. Caution: Language is very explicit.
http://corksphere.blogspot.com/This is a series of five new videos from the war in Afghanistan. Caution: Language... more
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The Huffington Post is coming under mounting pressure from some on the left to stop giving Andrew Breitbart a front-page platform, with some wondering whether the granting of prime real estate to Breitbart signals that HuffPo is trying to broaden its ideological appeal.
But according to a statement sent my way, HuffPo will stand by Breitbart and continue publishing him. HuffPo spokesperson Mario Ruiz emails:
From the beginning, The Huffington Post has welcomed voices from all sides of the political spectrum, including conservatives such as Newt Gingrich, Frank Luntz, Tom Coburn, Laura Ingraham, Bob Barr, George Pataki, David Frum, Byron York, Mary Matalin, and Ken Blackwell. The idea being that dialogue -- from a wide range of perspectives -- is preferable to silence. The fact that Andrew Breitbart’s first post on our site drew over 1,635 comments, conducted in a civil manner, seems to validate the premise and the decision to publish his blog post.
Color of Change has launched a petition calling on HuffPo to drop Breitbart, arguing that Breitbart is a “notorious liar and race baiter” who “poses as a journalist and then uses his position to gin up race-based fears, protect racists, and demonize Black political leaders and institutions.”
“The Huffington Post has given him a prime space on its platform to do so,” Color of Change concluded. HuffPo’s publication of Breitbart has also generated a fair amount of angry commentary on blogs and left-leaning listservs.
But HuffPo will stick by Breitbart. In fairness to HuffPo, Arianna Huffington has long insisted that the mission of the site has been to move beyond old ideological catetories of right and left, and the site does post commentary from prominent right wingers like Luntz and Gingrich, with little to no criticism from the left. It’s also true that Breitbart had a relationship with HuffPo early in the site’s development, and prominently banning him could prove awkward.
But for many liberals, Breitbart has been revealed by the Shirley Sherrod affair and other dust-ups to be a particularly toxic and dishonest figure that has no journalistic standards whatsoever. It’s hard to see what he adds in value, beyond ginning up a lot of comments and traffic and noise.
UPDATE: Post edited slightly from original.
UPDATE II: Color of Change responds:
We agree that civil, honest dialogue is important — which is exactly why the Huffington Post should not elevate someone like Breitbart, who consistently lies and undermines honest debate.
This isn’t about Breitbart being a conservative, or whether the Huffington Post allows him to post on their site; it’s about the decision of its editors to give him top billing, while he repeats falsehoods that have been debunked. This is about whether or not the Huffington Post considers itself a credible news outlet that chooses to adhere to any basic editorial standards when it decides what to elevate. The Huffington Post claims to have a policy about posts being subject to removal for being untruthful -- but they haven’t applied that to Breitbart.
Andrew Breitbart has repeatedly twisted the truth and used deceptively edited videos to take down black leaders and institutions on false premises — as was the case with Shirley Sherrod, the NAACP, and ACORN. And when caught, he doesn’t apologize — he attacks those who seek to hold him accountable. For black Americans, this man is dangerous — not on his own, but when treated as legitimate by organizations like the Huffington Post that some have come to trust.
This lack of judgement by the Huffington Post harms them as a reputable source of information. Their apparent decision to validate and elevate someone who has repeatedly sought to harm our community using lies is deeply disappointing.
Arianna Huffington has sought to create “HuffPo Global Black” and is now at the helm of AOL Black Voices -- if she is willing to frontpage Andrew Breitbart, how can she be trusted to oversee either of these properties?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/huffington-post-will-stand-by-andrew-breitbart-despite-criticsm/2011/03/03/ABh5AELB_blog.htmlThe Huffington Post is coming under mounting pressure from some on the left to stop... more
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There are three new stories on my blog from Afghanistan including one that includes pictures of U.S. soldiers abusing Afghan citizens.
http://corksphere.blogspot.com/There are three new stories on my blog from Afghanistan including one that includes... more
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"I would watch all these women with all this incredible knowledge of the world," she tells HuffPo. Now, she's a Peabody Award-winning correspondent using her platform on Current TV to give voice to the "underdogs" all over the world.
Read the full post here as Mariana talks about reactions to the Peabody-winning "Oxycontin Express" and how her job on the air is impacted by being a woman.We've known for many years all about the greatness of "Vanguard"... more
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These are seven videos made by Al Jazeera and Russia Today on the war in Libya and not shown on AmericanTV
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HUFFPOST HILL -America appears to be lost in some sort of dissociative dirty hippie fugue state where it opposes intervention in Muslim countries and favors gay marriage.HUFFPOST HILL -America appears to be lost in some sort of dissociative dirty hippie... more
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I started a scrapbook of World War II when I was eleven years old. The contents include headlines of major battles, stories, pictures, cartoons and memorabilia. The scapbook was recently donated to the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago. You can see it here:
http://corksphere.blogspot.com/2011/03/my-world-war-ii-scrapbook.htmlI started a scrapbook of World War II when I was eleven years old. The contents... more
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