The Huffington Post
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“”The Huffington Post... is never quite so happy as when it’s hyperventilating
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| —Time magazine[1] |
The Huffington Post (named after its founder, Arianna Huffington, a left-wing activist and socialist socialite), or "HuffPo," is a large online "newspaper" and blog site, and a good example of moonbattery in action. The Huffington Post was essentially a left-wing counter to sites such as the Drudge Report - although both Huffington Post and the Drudge Report had much of their techie work done by the same person, Andrew Breitbart, who went on to launch his own news aggregator site. Besides its relentless promotion of quackery and spiritualism, the site is known for blurring the lines between journalism and public relations. Its "Sponsor Generated Content" pages are very thinly veiled ads dressed up as news articles. Another means of boosting profit for HuffPo is its heavy reliance on unpaid bloggers to generate content for the site.[2]
The HuffPo has been named the "Most Powerful Blog" by The Observer[3] and is also the most popular blog on the web.[4]
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[edit] Arianna's political odyssey
Arianna Huffington supported the Newt Gingrich-led Republican Party takeover of the U.S. Congress in 1994, and Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996. She was married to Michael Huffington, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate.
An advocate of campaign finance reform, her 2000 book How to Overthrow the Government caught her right in the middle of a swing from right to left. In the 2000 election, she at first supported John McCain in the Republican primaries, then Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in the general election. Shortly thereafter, she became active in efforts to lobby for energy efficient cars and alternative fuels. She filed as an independent candidate for governor in the 2003 California recall election; shortly before the election, she dropped out and endorsed the Democratic Party candidate Cruz Bustamante. This point marked the effective end of her brief sojourn as a political independent, and since then she has been aligned with the Democrats and supported John Kerry and Barack Obama for president.
[edit] I don't know what you're talking about
The truth is not in them. HuffPo ran a long article condemning ChristWire's piece "Is My Husband Gay?" as a serious work. When they were busted having fallen for a satire, they quietly changed the article without notice... then tried complaining to the Atlantic Wire for misquoting them.[5] (The Atlantic refused to budge.)
[edit] Woo
HuffPo suffers the unfortunately common media delusion that science works like politics. Due to this, it is known for shamelessly pushing pseudoscience and woo (especially Deepak Chopra and the MMR scare), and has been caught deliberately lying about doing so.[6]
The site has pushed antivaccine woo in the recent past.[7] It was widely critiqued by science bloggers for this stance, with PZ Myers encouraging a boycott.[8] It was also criticized by Bad Astronomy, who described it as "still almost all alt-med, all the time."[9]
Upon its founding, the Post was quickly flooded by antivaccination activists.[10] David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine described 2009 as the year when "rank quackery emerged in the Huffington Post."
Other winners who have written for the site include:
- Self help guru and pseudo-"Native American" spirituality rip-off peddler James Arthur Ray.[11]
- John Morton, current spiritual director of John-Roger's Movement for Inner Spiritual Awareness, a New Age group. Arianna Huffington is herself a longtime follower of John-Roger's MISA.
- Alternative medicine woo-meister Andrew Weil.[12]
- Thoroughly hysteric anti-nuclear advocate Helen Caldicott.[13]
- Alec Baldwin with the pseudoscientific Tooth Fairy Project.[14]
- Notorious homeopath and internet troll Dana Ullman.
Of late, reality-based commenters have taken to linking to RationalWiki's skeptical articles. Which is nice.
[edit] External links
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ A Mars Announcement ‘for the History Books’? Not So Fast. Science & Space. Time. 2012 November 20.
- ↑ Nate Raymond. Unpaid bloggers lose bid to revive Huffington Post case. Reuters, Dec. 12, 2012
- ↑ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs
- ↑ http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/
- ↑ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Satirical-Christian-Site-Hoodwinks-the-Huffington-Post-4766/
- ↑ Smoking gun
- ↑ "Swine Flu: What To Do?"
- ↑ Die Huffpo Die
- ↑ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/09/28/huffpo-still-pushing-antivax-nonsense/
- ↑ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=473
- ↑ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-arthur-ray/conscious-capitalism-taki_b_193743.html
- ↑ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md
- ↑ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/helen-caldicott/the-election_b_775116.html
- ↑ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alec-baldwin/the-human-costs-of-nuclea_b_533516.html