HuffPost Scandal Reveals Poor Command of Language
So it seems there's a little scandal brewing at the Huffington Post. We can't say we entirely understand it, but the facts — as reported in London's Guardian today — seem to be this: There's a dude named Peter Rost, a doctor and former Pfizer bigwig, who has been posting on the site. He noticed he was getting a lot of very antagonistic responses from a certain commenter, and he further noticed that those negative comments were quickly and, he thought, rather easily getting ranked as among readers' favorites. So he did some sleuthing and figured out that the flamer was actually the HuffPost's technology manager. The doctor wrote up his findings in a post to his HuffPost blog, and he hypothesized the tech dude was using his server access to somehow boost the popularity ranking of his comments. So what did Arianna and pals do in response? Can the techie attacking their contributors and allegedly mucking with the system, right? Wrong. Instead they suspended the doctor.
Of course, he's now been reinstated, so we're not sure any of this really matters. Nor do we know if this is the whole story. But it's a vaguely intriguing tale, and, more important, it gives us an excuse to say what we've been meaning to tell the HuffPosters for a while, at least since the Clooney controversy. Please, people, stop giving quotes like, "You have not been 'fired' but rather asked to refrain from posting as our editorial staff felt that your recent blogs were not in line with the mission of our site." (Emphasis added.) You run one, for crying out loud, so learn the difference between a blog and a blog post. It's getting embarrassing.
