LGF, ScienceBlog Expose HuffPost Lunacy

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This one's gotta hurt. From Little Green Footballs:

Apparently, physicians and medical scientists are just as disgusted with the Huffington Post as your average “right wing” blogger. Who knew?

Jim Carrey, husband of anti-vaccination kook Jenny McCarthy, has written a screed for Arianna advocating the latest Dark Ages fantasy of the left and the right: that vaccinations cause autism.

The story then links to a detailed expose' at ScienceBlogs.com, which dismantles both HuffPost, and Jim Carrey's pontifications therein, regarding vaccines and autism. Excerpt:

After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped—really hoped—that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there’s only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic circuits start shorting out and he has to shut down a while so that his self-repair circuits can undo the damage. Besides, I sometimes think that the twit who created HuffPo, Arianna Huffington, likes the attention that turds dropped onto her blog by quackery boosters of the like of Kim Evans. Certainly, the HuffPo editors seem utterly untroubled that, among physicians and medical scientists, HuffPo is viewed with utter contempt and ridicule.

None of this is news to anyone who with a shred of understanding of yellow journalism, and how it degrades the culture that embraces it.

And yet, HuffPost is the first venue that the most powerful Senator on the Armed Services Committee runs to, to publish his hyper-partisan diatribe against the Bush administration for daring to keep America safe from more attacks by militant Islamists for seven years, by roughly --- and lawfully --- interrogating the self-professed terrorists behind 9/11.

If this is the future of Internet "journalism," as seems to be the prediction of some industry insiders, and HuffPost's management, the Expedio staff will commence scanning the skies for four horsemen...


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4/26 UPDATE: UH-OH, THERE'S MORE

Again, from LGF... Phil Plait, astronomer, wrote in Discover Magazine:

I am embarrassed I ever wrote anything for HuffPo, which is now a cesspool of misleading misinformation.

Read it here. Talk about putting it mildly...


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4/26 UPDATE 2: ARIANNA HUFFINGTON ON "TRUTH" AND "OBJECTIVITY"

Oh, brother. From a June 2008 interview with PoynterOnline, here's Ms. Huffington pontificating on the need for accuracy in the media:

A lot of the discontent with traditional journalism is because too many reporters have forgotten that the highest calling of journalists is to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned. Unfortunately, this is a concept that has fallen out of favor with too many journalists, who are obsessed with a false view of "balance" and "objectivity" and have become addicted not to the tireless pursuit of truth, but to the tireless promotion of the misguided notion that every story has two sides. And that the truth is supposed to be found somewhere in the middle. But not every story has two sides and the truth is often found on one side or the other. The earth is not flat. Evolution is a fact...

Right. How does this pontification square with HuffPost's giving a platform to quacks and Hollywood actors who claim that vaccines cause autism --- not just on random website, but on one that's now been elevated to being a White House "insider"? Only Ms. Huffington can answer that one.

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