Jun 6, 2009 08:23 PM
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So: remember that terrible, shocking video of the awful frat-tards spewing racial epithets, screaming and trashing President Barack Obama in ways so debase, they're really not even worth quoting here? Well, The Huffington Post actually censored it. Why?
Max Blumenthal, the filmmaker who took the video, contributed to The Huffington Post previous to this, so it's not a one-off thing, nor a user-submitted video (like the Euna Ling issue at Current TV). He's a contributor. And he notes of his experience:
Within a few hours, I received an email from a Huffington Post administrator informing me he had scrubbed my video from the site. "I don't see that it has any real news value," the administrator told me. "For me it only proves that one can find drunk people willing to say just about anything. Especially drunk, moronic people." For the first time, the premier clearinghouse for online news and opinions had suppressed one of my posts.
...Bringing new meaning to the word "clearinghouse," certainly. Any request for comment has had us referred to Blumenthal's post on Phillip Weiss's blog regarding the fiasco, something it now officially is.
Much of the outrage over the video - which we've re-posted below - falls in line with what The Huffington Post issued: that the guys in the video are drunk, that the video could be a crafted political set-up used to further an agenda, that the entire thing is too outrage-provoking to consider as anything but outright propaganda. That's ridiculous, especially for The Huffington Post, though.
Even though they're mostly just used to aggregating the news of others (or as 30 Rock so nicely put it: telling us what we already know), they're a news site, and this is news, and it's their job to - at the very least - provide some kind of context for this kind of thing. The video's clearly not fake or staged in any regard: why would these very clear faces expose themselves to the world like that? It's the worst kind of "viral" there is. And yes, they're drunk, but as we all well know by now, being drunk doesn't necessarily invalidate the kinds of things you say when you're trashed. Sometimes, in fact: the opposite.
If anything, The Huffington Post's deletion of the video looks like a political maneuver on their part. Maybe they just don't want to be a part of something so hot-button as this, or don't want to chance it on any of the risk that this story may or may not hold. Or it could be agenda-based.
It's probably none of those things. It's probably the equivalent of some tight-assed S & P person over there who thinks they're taking the initiative with their job. What we want to know: Who is this person censoring things over at the Huffington Post? And what would Ariana think?
Censored by the Huffington Post and Imprisoned By The Past [Mondoweiss]
Send an email to Foster Kamer, the author of this post, at foster@gawker.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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