Posted on 09/22/2010 8:23:10 PM PDT by kristinn
The Internet giant AOL libeled Free Republic as "hosting child pornography" in an article published Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at their Daily Finance news site. The site's masthead reads: Daily Finance An AOL Money & Finance Site.
Authored by Daily Finance media columnist Jeff Bercovici, the article entitled Muzzled Reporter Says 'Maw of Yahoo' No Place for Journalism tells the story about John Cook's reasons for leaving Yahoo News and returning to his previous gig with Gawker. According to the article, Cook was the senior national affairs reporter for Yahoo's The Upshot news blog. Bercovici notes that he and Cook are friends and former colleagues.
In the article, Bercovici writes that among Cook's reasons for leaving Yahoo News was that he was not allowed to write about Free Republic:
"But Cook offers a different interpretation of his move, saying that Yahoo's corporate conservatism repeatedly got in the way of his attempts to report the news. In one instance, Cook was forced to bowdlerize a quotation from New York Times reporter James Risen; he was told that referring to masturbation, even euphemistically, was unacceptable. On similar grounds, he was prohibited from writing about the conservative website Free Republic hosting child pornography. Most glaringly, he was told that a proposed story on the Obama Administration raising the salary of White House staffers by 9% lacked the necessary balance; it was killed."
The original paragraph includes a link to a Salon.com article about a scammer creating a user account at Free Republic and posting a link to an alleged child porn site on his home page.(Salon reports it did not directly verify the link.)
The article explicitly exonerates Free Republic of "hosting child pornography" and instead cites the site as being "lax" in its registration process:
"Now FreeRepublic.com is not hosting or even "condoning" child pornography. It's just that it's so ridiculously easy to set up a profile and get your own FreeRepublic page that apparently anyone can and will do it. Theoretically, someone could do this at Kos or OpenSalon. (But, as far as we know, no one has.)"
"...Free Republic appears to delete profiles started for spamming purposes (unless user "freehoodia" was "banned or suspended" for some other reason, like supporting TARP), so, again, all we're accusing it of is being somewhat lax in its moderation of the user registration process."
AOL's Daily Finance presents itself as a professional journalistic enterprise with a full editorial staff overseeing their reporters.
Yet even with a link to the article that flatly refutes AOL's claim that Free Republic hosts child pornography, AOL printed the libel anyway.
Corrective action will be sought.
Nail these bastards.
Well, I think the mods are doing a great job of monitoring as I have never seen any porn pics here.
Yummy! A slam dunk! Cook their a$$es!
Not only was FR slandered, but all of us long-term FReepers. I think a class action suit is warranted. I could sure use $2-3 mil. of AOL’s ill-gotten gains...
...FAIL
Take em to the cleaners
I’ve been here since 2000...and I’ll tell you, if any site keeps porn OFF of it, or even the illusion of such, it’s this one.
Get ‘em, JR...
I'm very glad to hear that. I feel like we regular users/posters have also been slandered. I'm surely not the only one who has acquaintances who don't share my political views, don't read FR, and are aware that I'm a contributing member here. These same people are more likely to read something like AOL's Daily Finance or the Washington Post repeat of this slander. I now expect to field questions about why I support a website that hosts child pornogaphy. Unreal.
This is easy enough to counter:
Go to Yahoo News and re-post a full article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Then drop a dime to Righthaven and you’ll have exacted your revenge.
Oops. I mean, AOL, not Yahoo.
I actually remember the week that poster was here.
It was a scammer who was posting links to scammer websites “selling” hoodia, cialis, viagra and maybe a few other things.
It was probably a semi-automated attack... lots of new identities created and started spamming lots of threads simultaneously.
Was the week or so before Memorial Day.
Once JR owns AOL, will he try to fix it, or just throw it on the trash heap where it’s always belonged?
Do we really want the kind of readers who would be attracted to FR based on the claim that we host child pornography? I think that’s just another layer of damage.
AOL still exists? Who knew...?
“You’ve got Mail!”.............
>>Is than an Apple?
That is a Commodore 64.
Commodore also made some serious scientific calculators *way* back in the day (late 70s). Serious enough to compete with the high-end TI and HP models.
I have lurked since 99 and have never seen any porn.
Aw H*ll no! Go Get them for that!
Can you find it and send me the link?
Do you remember the subject?
Mail me and i’ll look around.
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