A Selection Of Articles About & Interviews With HuffPost

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The following is offered as a regularly-updated compilation of select articles about, and interviews with HuffPost and its management.

It is provided to give both newcomers and critical observers a convenient means by which to compare what HuffPost has said about itself, to the reality that one can discover upon visiting HuffPost, and reviewing the facts that have been documented here at HuffBusters.

Here are some additional sources that provide ongoing critical analysis of HuffPost (the following are convenient search-links):

• Little Green Footballs
  
  
• NewsBusters (also see the 2007 report on HuffPost by the Media Research Center, NB's parent: "Huffington's House Of Horrors")
  
  
• HotAir (more here)
  
  
• Michelle Malkin
  
  
• The Lie Politic

HuffPost's claims that its news coverage will be nonpartisan, and that its blogs will represent the left and the right

Can The Huffington Post Obsess Itself Into The News Cycle?
Online Journalism Review, Knight Digital Media Center, May 3, 2005

Excerpt:

OJR: What is the voice of the publication? If you're going to include people from different modes of political thought, what can people expect to see when they visit your site?

AH: They know it will be the news. I actually believe that the news is not right-wing news or left-wing news, it's the news. And that will be the sensibility, that will basically permeate our news coverage. (...)

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(...) Huffington has surrounded herself with a group that's heavy on satire, heavy on irony and heavy on controversy. She has comedian Harry Shearer doing a journalist-watchdog feature called "Eat the Press" and has tapped former Drudge sidekick Andrew Breitbart to edit the news headline section as he did for Drudge.

Breitbart has worked for Huffington before. He is in an interesting spot, as he co-wrote the 2004 book "Hollywood, Interrupted," a moralizing book on celebs and limo liberals that calls out various group bloggers from Huffington Post, including Rob Reiner and Norman Lear.

Breitbart wouldn't comment for this article, but did make a statement to the blogosphere through Roger Simon's blog.

"I like to go where the action is," he wrote. "Bringing my former boss and longtime friend Arianna's intriguing friends to the blogosphere, the ultimate level playing field, makes perfect sense to me, and I am thrilled to be committed to such a groundbreaking project. Will my pals on the right have a place to offer their two cents at the Huffington Post? Absolutely. Will I agree with everyone's written word? Of course not. But that's precisely the point. May the best ideas win."

Huffington told me Breitbart's news headlines would run on the right side of the home page while the group blog would be on the left side -- perhaps a not-so-subtle play on their political orientation. But the wild card could be the 200 or so people that will be included in the group blog but haven't been trumpeted to the media yet. They could be the swing vote that tips the Post in any direction. (...)

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OJR: Do you find it ironic that Andrew [Breitbart] co-wrote a scathing look at Hollywood celebrities and now will be helping run a site with the same type of celebs?

AH: I'm not sure I'd agree that these are the same type of celebrities. This isn't the Michael Jackson or Paris Hilton group blog. But, in any case, the fact that Andrew and I may not see eye to eye on every issue will not interfere with what we are trying to do. In fact, it will enhance it.

Huffington Posts A Profit
Conde Naste Portfolio, November 14, 2007

Excerpt:

As traffic has grown, so has scrutiny. Some critics dismiss it as shallow. Others have attacked Huffington Post for what they perceive as a liberal bias, favoring stories that tend to be critical of conservatives, Republicans, and especially President Bush and the war in Iraq.

The issue is particularly important because Huffington Post is in the process of ramping up its original reporting. How can it claim to be an objective purveyor of news when it has been so critical of the current administration?

"That really is a very important question," Huffington said, "because your assumption is completely wrong. The editorial stance of the Huffington Post is to debunk the right-left way of thinking, which has become completely obsolete." (...)

[Betsy] Morgan, the C.E.O., described the Huffington Post approach as "covering the news in a 21st-century kind of way." In addition to new ideas about balance and fairness, that approach includes a new business model too.

Accusations Of HuffPost Plagiarism And Bad Journalistic Practices

Huffington Post Defends Clooney's "Faked-Up" Blog Entry
Journalism.co.uk, March 20, 2006

Excerpt:

US celebrity blog the Huffington Post is in trouble with George Clooney after compiling quotes from the actor and presenting them as a blog entry. [...According to Clooney] "What she [Huffington] most certainly did not get my permission to do is to combine only my answers in a blog that misleads the reader into thinking that I wrote this piece. These are not my writings - they are answers to questions and there is a huge difference." [...]

Blogger and journalism commentator Jeff Jarvis said the credibility of the site's other star bloggers would be damaged by the 'faked-up' Clooney post. Ms Huffington's claim that re-purposed material still constitutes a valid blog is described by Mr Jarvis as a "fundamental misunderstanding of the medium". "If you're not really writing your blog, if you're having or allowing someone to do it for you, then you're gaming me, lying to me, insulting me," he writes.

Plagiarism At The HuffPo
National Review Online, September 12, 2007

Excerpt:

The current issue of Azure (for which I am an editor), features a piece by Jamie Kirchick on the decline of post-Aparthied South Africa, an essay that was reprinted by the Wall St. Journal’s OpinionJournal. Six days ago, a HuffPo blogger named Henning Andre Sogaard posted a piece on the same subject that reads like an op-ed length version of Jamie’s Azure essay — and in many places it is literally a line-for-line bootleg. [...]

One would think that such blatant, undisguised plagiarism would require little by way of investigation before the removal of the offending piece, the firing of its author, and, if the HuffPo gang is feeling magnanimous, perhaps a word of contrition to the offended parties. But it’s been three days since the HuffPo was made aware of the plagiarist in its midst, and despite promises to the contrary it appears that little is going to be done about it — the offending piece is still online and unannotated. One would hope that the HuffPo could enforce the basic standards of journalistic ethics more rigorously than it enforces, say, the intellectual seriousness of the commentary that it publishes, but apparently that’s not the case.

Stossel Talks Politics With Huffington
20/20, ABC News, April 25, 2008

In this interview, Stossel confronts Ms. Huffington on a variety of issues, points out the factual fallacies in her political arguments, and her hypocrisy in urging others to live enviro-friendly "green" lifestyles, while she epitomizes the gluttonous "limousine liberal": living in a mansion, flying around on private jets, and being shuttled to speaking engagements in a gas-guzzling, super-sized SUV.


The Huffington Post Slammed For Content Theft
Wired, December 19, 2008

Excerpt:

The Huffington Post [...]is being accused of slimy business practices by a handful of smaller publications who say the site is unfairly copying and publishing their content. Whet Moser, an editor at alternative weekly Chicago Reader wants to know why The Huffington Post’s newly formed Chicago-focused venture is stealing their copyrighted concert reviews and reprinting them in whole in order to get search engine traffic. And he found other examples taken wholesale from The Onion and Time Out Chicago.

Arianna Huffington: The Web's New Oracle
Time, March 19, 2009

Excerpt:

(N)ews organizations may not tolerate others cherry-picking their content and repurposing it for profit for much longer. "Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post," says Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. "It's not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates, it's about the value." There are other aggregators, but HuffPo is the most tempting. "It's a big player, and the site that has got closest to the line" between fair and unfair use of copy, Benton notes. [...]

(Huffington) is offended and bewildered by the suggestion that other news outlets think she's getting a free ride. She sees herself as the future of journalism, not the end of it.