Huffington Post / AOL Buries #Weinergate Story
[Guest Post by Lee Stranahan]
Okay, this will get me in trouble but here goes..
The Huffington Post has finally posted something about this weekend’s evolving #Weinergate Story – but not on the national page, but buried in the much less read New York section.
And their judging by comments – readers noticed.
Huffington Post has buried next week’s top story. Amazing
and
Why is this a LOCAL story and not a headline story on the HP? That’s right, Weiner is the loudmouth liberal with a D next to his name.
and
It’s kind of shameful that HP is burying this story that broke on Saturday, and I have only heard about it because of comments in other stories. Clearly his account was hacked (Twitter seems notoriously easy to hack) but that doesn’t mean it isn’t news.
HuffPost Could Have Run The Story Two Days Ago & Chose Not To
This is the part that HuffPost won’t be thrilled with but I mention it because I think it proves some real bias going on…
After months of not blogging at Huffington Post because of their treatment of Andrew Breitbart, I decided this story was juicy / big enough that I wanted to get it out to the HuffPost audience. After all, Huffington Post had been great about publishing my John Edwards pieces.
So I submitted an article that I thought was good – my Would Your Spouse Buy It? article with an added introduction paragraph to explain the story…and note the date…
And I even emailed the blog team and HP editor Roy Sekoff…again, note the date
There’s no question in my mind that if the piece were about Paul Ryan or Michelle Bachmann sending out underwear photos, it would have been Frontpaged all weekend. But instead it got the spike
– Lee Stranahan
this is a totally unexpected reaction on the part of the MFM.
in fact, one might even go so far as to call in “unprecedented”, but only a bigoted racist teabagger would say it showed bias in how stories are covered….
redc1c4 (fb8750) — 5/30/2011 @ 5:55 pmHuffPo is playing “hide the Weiner”?
Icy Texan (5238a0) — 5/30/2011 @ 6:00 pmHoward Kurtz scoffs at the allegations of unequal treatment. And he knows these things. Because he’s Howard Kurtz.
MayBee (081489) — 5/30/2011 @ 6:07 pmIf HuffPo is unwilling to break stories and be on top of them as they unfold, why on earth would I want to read them in the first place? They are, literally, old news.
Dana (4eca6e) — 5/30/2011 @ 6:11 pmDo you want to leave your phone number visible in the screencap of the email?
interested (e24c16) — 5/30/2011 @ 6:13 pmHe says he was hacked so there should be a law enforcement investigation. Hacking a congressman’s account should be considered serious. Somehow I think he’s lying and everyone knows it.
Arizona Bob (aa856e) — 5/30/2011 @ 6:20 pmNot to mention, if he was really hacked, it would be very easy to prove to everyone that sent that photo from an IP not Weiner’s. It would be possible to track the intrusion, even if a proxy was used. Why would Weiner avoid the one way to prove with great certainty that he was hacked? He’s got nothing to lose, and everything to gain, unless he’s lying.
Instead, he doesn’t want an investigation. He’ll just hunker down and try to maintain a plausible possibility he was hacked across several accounts, and able to regain control of all of them 4 minutes after this picture was sent.
Dustin (c16eca) — 5/30/2011 @ 6:27 pmLee
You are a straight shooter… keep at it.
Be fair, be honest. Let the chips fall where they may.
Left, right… who cares.
Is it just me, or does Weiner seem to be grooming underage girls?
SteveG (cc5dc9) — 5/30/2011 @ 6:40 pmHowie Kurtz is kind of slow, huh?
JD (318f81) — 5/30/2011 @ 6:47 pmWatch out, Mr. Lee, you are approaching the dark side. You are becoming more enlightened every day.
Perhaps Weiner should be consulting with Bubba about legal advice. After all, he has been there, done that.
PatAZ (f23d3e) — 5/30/2011 @ 6:53 pmUnderage?! Under what age? Not the age of consent (which is 17 here in NY).
Milhouse (ea66e3) — 5/30/2011 @ 7:22 pmHuffPo is pretty much a filth word in my household anymore. They started running lib op-ed as news at AutoBlog (naturally sourcing back to HuffPo), ruining one of my favorite blogs. I stopped reading Joystiq out of fear that I’d snap if HuffPo added perennial gaming malcontent Leland Yee to Joystiq’s editorial board.
As a media mogul, Arianna Huffington makes Sir Denis Eton-Hogg look like David Geffen.
JR (dc08fc) — 5/30/2011 @ 7:48 pmWeiner World!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Weiner called it a prank on CNN today, sort of a downgrade from being hacked IMHO. CNN says the FBI and Capitol Police have confirmed they are not yet working on it.
It is sounding more and more like an inside job to me.
daleyrocks (bf33e9) — 5/30/2011 @ 7:53 pmUnexpected!
htom (412a17) — 5/30/2011 @ 7:53 pmThere was a story of high school girls… and grooming them when they are underage is different than banging them at 17.
Not that this has been proved… just conjecture
SteveG (cc5dc9) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:00 pmtake down your phone number!
oneisnotprime (e25cc0) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:01 pm“Twitter seems notoriously easy to hack” Is that true? If the definition of “to hack” is “to exploit an overlooked security defect in software or design,” then I’m skeptical. If the definition means “guessing a weak password,” then a whole lot of things are easy to hack.
gp (1e0d91) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:04 pmI am shocked ! Shocked to find that a Congressman is lying about his Twitter account.
Weiner knows if he filed a police report, it would come right back to him. Instead, left wingers, like Huffpo, will cover for him and he knows it.
Huffpo is well past the bias level and is into cultist territory.
Mike K (8f3f19) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:07 pmDoesn’t Twitter freeze verified accounts that have been hacked?
JD (318f81) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:08 pmHowie Kurtz says it was “faked”, so we don’t have to bother with any of FBI/CSI high falutin’ investigavie type stuff. A Congressman says his computer which uses government-issued equipment, software and servers which contain encrypted security clearances and liley secret and confidential government data.
Reality-either we have a serious security breach that needs to be investigated, or a silly goose Congress critter shooting out dick pictures to a co-ed. And I would wager if the latter is the truth and he simply said he had “poor judgment” this is a nonstory spare late night jokes.Sadly he is about as secure as a Congressman could be.
So if it is the former, we need to have Weiner demand an investigation, not retain counsel. He would only need to so retain counsel if he has made false statements to federal investigators. And if that is what has happened here, this stupid bastard’s career is over.
Bugg (ea1809) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:12 pmThe AP story ran in the “local” section of the Seattle Times this morning too.
sherlock (62f2cf) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:16 pmDon’t sweat the phone number — I don’t hide it.
Lee Stranahan (708cc3) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:21 pmhttp://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/05/help-me-bring-the-weiner-hacker-to-justice.html
ian cormac (72470d) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:22 pmNot surprisingingly, the LAT ran the article in the Nation section and it ended up being more of an indictment against Breitbart than anything else. Never waste an opportunity to smear a conservative – even when it’s a Dem who has apparently played dirty.
Ex: Breitbart, who has been involved in questionable tactics against Democrats and liberals in the past, said in a statement that the case warrants further investigation.
“What we know is that a link to a lewd photo was published from a sitting congressman’s Twitter account, directed at a female recipient, whom he was ‘following,’ but visible to everyone,” Breitbart’s statement said. “Two broad possibilities exist: (1) the congressman’s Twitter account (and perhaps other accounts) were hacked, or (2) the congressman or someone with authorized access to his Twitter account sent the photo.”
Last year, Breitbart posted online a heavily edited and incomplete video of a speech by U.S. Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod that suggested she refused to offer her full help to a white farmer. Sherrod was forced to resign, but a full version of the speech showed that Sherrod had assisted the farmer, who later came forward and credited Sherrod with helping save his farm.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack later apologized to Sherrod, and President Barack Obama called her.
Sherrod has filed a civil suit accusing Breitbart of defamation, false light and infliction of emotional distress, according to a statement issued by the law firm representing her.
Dana (4eca6e) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:24 pmjp, I don’t think twitter is notoriously easy to hack.
I’ve seen that asserted a few times, but no one is pointing out how it’s easy to hack. Some are just saying hacking happens sometimes, and pretending that explains it all.
When something like this is hacked, the victim wants some more scrutiny and information. Instead, Weiner is still using his twitter account. He’s refusing to ask twitter to investigate. He’s not acting like he can’t rely on them, and it would be really crazy for him to let folks suspect he sent this picture if he could prove hadn’t (and if he’s telling the truth, he easily could prove he hadn’t).
Also, twitter isn’t the only thing that would have to have been hacked. His yfrog account too, at least.
Dustin (c16eca) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:26 pmThis is an extremely dishonest characterization of the video. It wasn’t ‘heavily edited’. She really did admit to discriminating against a white guy. There’s no lie there. She just later helped him, but even then, that help isn’t what she would have given a black man. And it’s just her word that this is the same farmer who credits her with saving his farm. She’s already on tape being a dishonest racist scumbag, so why is her word worth anything?
Wow. LAT makes it sound like she didn’t discriminate against white people.
Dustin (c16eca) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:28 pmI guess I don’t see the Weinergate story at Salon either. But I didn’t look real hard.
gp (1e0d91) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:47 pmThis is just a distraction to distract from Justice Thomas not recusing himself from the healthcare decision, and distracting from epwj hating on Teh Palin.
JD (318f81) — 5/30/2011 @ 8:50 pm__________________________________________
The Huffington Post has finally posted something…
There also were some raised eyebrows from a few observers over the slow response time of the Huffington Post to running the story of the huge gaffe made by Obama when toasting Queen Elizabeth. IOW, his giving a spiel to the assembled dignitaries and VIPs right as the British national anthem was being played, and looking like the ultimate doofus.
I breezed through the hundreds of postings in response to that story and was surprised that a good number of them were fairly negative about the etiquette-is-for-old-fogeys attitude of Barack “bow-like-a-servant” Obama.
To be fair, I’m aware of the way that Matt Drudge and Drudgereport.com oddly and ridiculously played down the recent big story of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his housekeeper. I’m still POed about that, meaning that website’s treatment of Schwarzenegger with kid gloves.
Mark (411533) — 5/30/2011 @ 10:46 pmLee, Lee, Lee. If this story was about Michelle Bachman there is no doubt in my mind that the Huffing ‘n Puffinton Post would have put it right at the top of their Minnesota page.
/sarc
Have Blue (854a6e) — 5/30/2011 @ 11:32 pm