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Lee Stranahan's post about lefty blogs ignoring the John Edwards affair was apparently the most highly trafficked story on the Huffington Post for at least two days. But when he crossposted the item to his "diary" on Daily Kos, it was suddenly not so popular! Go figure. The "liberal" militants there excoriated Stanahan in the comments, with one well-rated response declaring, "you are violating site standards referencing the Enquirer [and its Edwards coverage], a bannable offense." That's funny, because just a few years ago multiple Kos diarists trumpeted an unflattering Enquirer story about Bush, including one who said, "Sometimes the National Enquirer reports things better than the Washington Post." That person is still active on the site, but Stranahan is not so lucky!
The Huffington Post has a major scoop. It seems John McCain is partial to Ferragamo loafers, specifically the Pregiato Moccasin which retails at Neiman-Marcus for $520! They even have a slideshow to prove it, documenting every occasion over the past few weeks when he's worn the footwear on the campaign trail—in the company of his $100 million wife. [HuffPo]
Oh, hey, look who got a blog or column or whatever on the Huffington Post — Joe Dolce! How convenient that is for the thoroughly obnoxious former Star editor, because it turns out his new PR business, shepherded into existence by patron and fellow sometime slimeball James Frey, is promising clients it can "guide you through the new media landscape — ensuring that the attention you receive is the attention you want." The HuffPo slot will surely prove useful in that regard! Or at least it will once Dolce and business partner Davidson Goldin scare up some clients. For now, Dolce appears to be using his column to do some ambitious prospecting. He suggests a "summit" between celebrities and paparazzi, which will never work, especially given who Dolce suggests might host it:
Score one for speaking truthiness to power. Over at the Huffington Post, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Brendan Demelle have a column entitled "Unearthed: News of the Week the Mainstream Media Forgot to Report," which relies, in almost every instance of a supposedly ignored but worthwhile story, on articles that originated in such darkened regions of underground journalism as the New York Times, CNN and the Associated Press. How dare word of John Ashcroft's endorsement of waterboarding hide in plain sight like this? And if you had trouble sleeping Saturday, it must have been because no one bothered to inform you that gray wolves had returned to the Oregon wilderness. Dan Mitchell writes to Romenesko in an act of media criticism criticism:
An unexplained failure briefly knocked out Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service this morning, taking with it parts of Twitter, The Huffington Post, and many other sites. You can track Amazon status yourself — see the red "Service disruption" icons under Status History. Has anyone yet built RescueTime for sites instead of people? We could park a Web 2.0 Failboard on our front page.
The Huffington Post, that repository of crackpot rants and informed political debate (plus "verticals"! Lots of verticals) does not pay its bloggers. But they hypothetically might, sometime in the future. HuffPo CEO Betsy Morgan (formerly of CBSNews.com) was interviewed by her college alumni magazine. After the jump, probably the most obnoxious and telling new-media statement of our time about actually paying employees. (Hint? "So 1993.") (Mixed Media via CJR)
Wow, media baroness Arianna Huffington really knows how to lay on the cloak and dagger stuff. You'll recall how the recent death of NBC newsman Tim Russert, followed by the Huffington Post publisher saying very little about him, reminded everyone that Russert and Huffington had a big, 15-year feud involving a scandalous takedown of Huffington written for Vanity Fair by Russert's wife. Everyone was also reminded of allegations by Republican strategist Ed Rollins (denied by Huffington) that she once hired a private investigator to tail Russert's wife and also once launched a surveillance team of close to 12 "security operatives" to find the illegal nanny of her husband's opponent in his senate campaign. Well, now Huffington's given a wide-ranging interview to the Chicago Tribune titled "Snoop Patrol" that only makes her sound like even more of a shadow lurker.
The shrill cacophony of wealthy Democrats from Hollywood you've come to know and love on the Huffington Post will be coming to a major market near you soon enough, as the site will manicure content gardens for urban markets. Chicagoland bloggers now have any exciting opportunity to not get paid to contribute their opinions about local politics. [Guardian UK] (Photo by AP/Evan Agostini)
It was sneaky, unpaid, unidentified Huffington Post citizen "journalist" Mayhill Fowler who got Bill Clinton to call the author of that Vanity Fair slam piece a scumbag-and that's just not fair! Newsweek's Jonathan Alter weighs in: "'This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs. [...] If you don't have trust, you don't get good stories. If someone comes along and uses deception to shatter that trust, she has hurt the very cause of a free flow of public information that she claims she wants to assist. You identify yourself when you're interviewing somebody,' Mr. Alter added. 'It's just a form of cheating not to.'" Opposing view?
Presidential politics is but a blip on our radar most days at Defamer HQ, but every now and then a ping so rattles us from our afternoon stupor that we can't help but take notice. Today's wake-up call comes from angry activist and sometime actor Donald Sutherland, who just joined the stirring realms of downmarket punditry at The Huffington Post:
RedLasso, a Philadelphia-based startup which serves as kind of a universal TiVo for embeddable clips, was issued a cease and desist letter by multiple networks today. The company, which has been cagey about the obvious copyright issues since I first ran into the startup at PodCamp Philly last year, even managed to pull a fast one on TechCrunch — Reuters ran the report of the legal issues before TechCrunch's post about the company went live this afternoon, prompting a half-hearted update. (C'mon, where's Michael Arrington's temper when it's actually appropriate?) If I were RedLasso, I would have made friendly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation before making nice with the Huffington Post and other publishers (including Gawker Media), which now face scads of dead-embed posts in their archives.
"If all those geniuses working in Silicon Valley could come up with a way to screen for those vile comments," as Arianna Huffingon mused on KQED's Forum, would her Huffington Post blog empire be empowered to delete meanness from the blogosphere? Sounds like a challenge. Maybe Google can inspire its engineers by changing its slogan to "Don't be vile."
Google cofounder Sergey Brin is, two days away from his company's first-quarter earnings call, sunning himself in Tahiti. As is Greco-American blog tycoon Arianna Huffington and Wendi Deng, wife of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. Huffington is reportedly there on vacation, but it's a stretch to think Brin and Deng are also there by sheer coincidence. Anyone have a bead on what prompted the South Pacific power summit? Do let us know your theories.
The three women who dubbed themselves the "McCain Girls" and made a series of YouTube videos on behalf of the Republican presidential candidate were working for 23/6, the "humor" site from IAC/Huffington Post, and their entire campaign was a joke. To hear 23/6 President Sarah Bernard tell it, the first video was supposed to be an obvious parody of the Obama Girl videos, but no one understood that. Then 23/6 decided to keep the "prank" going as long as possible, which turned out to be one month. McCain watched the video repeatedly, he told Fox News in the clip after the jump, but his description of it as "very entertaining" hints that he knew something was fishy.
Now that Katie Couric is leaving the unwatched CBS Evening News before her contract expires, CBS CEO Les Moonves has little reason to keep pumping money into its putrefying corpse. Moonves "isn't a news guy, he's a showbiz guy," notes Huffington Post power-blogger Rachel Sklar. And Couric is hardly the first person to fail at anchoring the crappy program.
