Posted on 03/21/2006 5:55:13 PM PST by SmithL
LOS ANGELES -- Commentator Ariana Huffington apologized to readers for a blog posted on her Web site on March 13 that was attributed to actor George Clooney but was actually a compilation of his views.
Huffington acknowledged on her Web site Saturday that she was "blinded" to the issue of assembling a blog in which the source of the material wasn't clear, as was the case with Clooney.
"I now realize that I made a big mistake in posting a blog without clearly identifying that the material in it didn't originate as a blog post, but was pieced together from previous interviews," she wrote. "I'm sorry I didn't see this earlier."
Last week, Clooney issued a statement denying he wrote the blog, saying he only gave Huffington permission to use a compilation of his critiques of the Iraq war from interviews with Larry King and London's The Guardian.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
"I now realize that I made a big mistake in posting a blog without clearly identifying that the material in it didn't originate as a blog post, but was pieced together from previous interviews," she wrote."
If George Looney wrote or said what she posted, what is the big deal? He is the still the author or source. Looney was making it sound as if he had nothing to do with whatever it was she posted.
Do I actually care about this? No.
Huffington Lied, Clooney cried.
In other words, she tried to pass off a journalism style compilation as an authentic blog piece. For shame. She's singlehandedly dragging down the entire blog community.
Back to the journalism purgatory, knave!
Seriously, this is a major reason blogs become the paradigm of future publications. Anybody who's ever been quoted or published in the newspapers or other media, realizes the tremendous amount of manipulation and distortion by the media (intermediary) -- so that one is claimed to have said what he didn't say, and they won't allow him to say what he wants to say -- in his own words, in his own way.
With blogs, everyone is responsible for what they say -- with the possible exception of those blogs and forums that are "moderated" by the usual suspects, the mainstream media/press, and other control freaks. In the new world of information and communications, they cannot compete on authenticity and information integrity, and their credibility has long since been eroded. She tried to pull a typical journalism stunt on a blog -- that is a higher degree of reliability and truthfulness.
That's why the blogs win -- and the old mainstream media/press gets blown away.
That's why old media fails -- it can't handle real-time information; it has to be contrived, edited, manipulated, distorted, massaged. It's their fatal flaw.
Real-time information and data processing wins. We're in the front seats at one of the great turning points of history -- that changes the course of humanity irrevocably and decisively.
They tied their fortune and fate to every losing cause -- without being able to recognize that. They manipulated the polls to give the impression that the anti-war protests this past weekend, would be massive -- rather than virtually non-existent. They pronounced Kerry the victor before the votes were closed. They pronounced this to be the worst economy ever. They totally shot their credibility telling us what was untrue -- hoping for a self-fulfilling prophecy of the kind they used to be able to fabricate, manipulate, control.
Huffy is one of the unfortunate victims caught straddling both worlds -- and inadvertently manifesting and revealing how the world has changed.
They can't be real and authentic; they have no vocabulary and emotions for it.
They have to be the phony, trite, contrived, disingenuous; it's in their genes -- in a shrinking gene pool of the sort that leads only to congenital defects.
It's time to pull the plug on them.
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