The Huffington Post's Arrogant Silent Treatment

The AOL/Huffington Post is certainly doing a spectacular job of keeping their readers completely in the dark about the entire story of their caving to pressure from the group Color of Change and banning Andrew Breitbart from their front page. This story has been covered by Slate, Mediaite, the New Yorker and a host of conservative sites but there hasn’t been one single word mentioned about it in the AOL/Huffington Post, which has an entire section devoted to covering Media. (Paging Jason Linkins.) Not a peep. No stories, articles, statements of clarification.

As far as Arianna and her bosses at AOL are concerned THIS NEVER HAPPENED.

Furthermore, they are now in full hush-up mode to the outside world, too. Huffington Post’s poor flack Mario Ruiz has gone from simply giving nonanswers when pressed to explain this new policy to completely ignoring his emails on the subject.

You think the Arianna Huffington and editor Roy Sekoff don’t know what the reaction of their readers would be if they told them that they both knew Andrew Breibart wasn’t a racist? Do you think they don’t know the reaction of the anyone fair minded if they made it clear that they had ALWAYS known this but still let HuffPo serve as the platform for attack after attack on him?

This indicates to me that the reason the Huffington Post deleted a story by Loreiei Kelly that was critical of Breitbart wasn’t out of some sense of protecting his reputation but instead was trying to keep this story away from their readers even in the comment section, where would surely have been mentioned. Contrary to what Ms. Kelly said, it seems obvious to me that AOL and the Huffington Post are the ones acting like the Soviets here by treating their publication like Pravda.

This arrogance harkens back to the old media mindset that they hold an effective monopoly on the airwaves in printing presses, so what are you peons going to do about it? Compare this even to NPR’s coverage of it’s own recent controversy – NPR didn’t pretend the story didn’t exist. If HuffPo wants to move to the nicer neighborhood of ‘real journalism,’ they can’t act like Arianna’s house organ.

So I’m asking you that question – what are you going to do about?

The Internet means that there is no longer a communications blockade. If you have a blog, writing a post about what the Huffington Post did will add one more voice and make it that much harder for Arianna and AOL to keep their customers in the dark. If you don’t have a blog, maybe this is a good time to go to tumbler.com or WordPress.com and start one.