Huffington's Fake Post: Where's the Outrage?
Media Blog
Stephen Spruiell Reporting
Vaugn Ververs at CBS Public Eye makes an excellent point about Huffington's Fake Post:
If you replaced the words “Huffington Report” with “The
New York Times” or any other MSM organization in context
of the George Clooney flap of the last couple days,
Arianna Huffington would be leading the charge to skewer
and denounce that entity. Instead she, and the vocal
bloggers always scouring news reports for the smallest
mistake, have said, well, hardly anything. What are we to
take from this episode – that bloggers operate under a
separate set of rules than what they hold the MSM to?
If CBS News had quoted someone by name and that person
had later claimed it to be a false representation, we
would have been scrambling to find out what exactly
happened and would get no quarter from the bloggers until
we did (that’s basically what Clooney has said about a
post that appeared under his name on Arianna’s blog).
Just a couple months ago, The Washington Post ombudsman
made a factual mistake in a column which resulted in a
huge controversy – complete with cries of censorship, bias
and hate speech.
Arianna Huffington doesn't hesitate to accuse journalists of being unethical — not just sloppy, or biased, or hyperbolic, but straight-up crooked. So now that she's been caught faking a post on her Web site, what does she have to say for herself?
<<< First of all, is the blogosphere powerful or what? As has been endlessly noted, the Clooney blog was drawn from answers he had given in interviews with the Guardian and on Larry King. Neither of which garnered much, if any, reaction.
But when the same words and ideas were repackaged in the form of a blog, they were suddenly exposed to a new audience, infused with a new currency — and exploded into the public eye, drawing an overwhelmingly positive response and provoking a great deal of valuable discussion.
It was a testament to the power of blogging, and it's why I remain, despite the dustup, an unrepentant evangelist for the value of bringing to the blogosphere some of the most interesting voices of our time that are not already there. >>>
Even if it's without their permission? Even it's not really their voices?
Huffington's "power of the blogosphere" post is an attempt to disguise her embarrassment as a teachable moment. It is as corny as it is misleading.
There are two reasons the Clooney blog post in March got more attention than the original Guardian and Larry King interviews did in February. First, George Clooney won an Oscar in the intervening month.
Second, while left-wing actors share their half-baked political views with interviewers all the time, it is a much bigger deal when they actually write down one of their barely literate diatribes for publication. And when the actor is as big a star as Clooney and the forum is the vanity Web site of a social-climbing poser, it's going to generate buzz — if only in the form of head-scratching. Many of the bloggers who linked to Clooney's post had no interest in what Clooney had written. They were just surprised at the paradoxical combination cool and lame — along with Clooney himself.
Of course, if Huffington had informed us that the post was just a collage of soundbites from old interviews, it wouldn't have attracted nearly as much attention. Yet today, Huffington tries to change the subject and attribute the post's popularity to the power of the blogosphere. We might be stupid enough to care occasionally about what George Clooney thinks about Iraq. But honestly — how dumb does she think we are?
media.nationalreview.com
cbsnews.com
exposetheleft.com
huffingtonpost.com
film.guardian.co.uk
transcripts.cnn.com
gawker.com
stylescenes.latimes.com |
