Huffington Post

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HuffPo is a mockery of new journalism. The rules to get published seem to be (1) be popular (2) be wrong on everything you post (3) be sensitive to any corrections (4) have a flock of trolls.


Bad Journos

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HuffPo is often wrong. Heck, every publication makes mistakes, but HuffPo pretends to be a newsite, while actually just being a liberal celebrity blog site instead. And since educated liberals are often wrong, and celebrity liberals are usually wrong, you know that a blog aggregator is going to get more than their fair share of crap-stories, and since their egos are involved, their willingness to correct them, is nearly non-existent.

An example is read this headline and crap story on Ted Cruz: "Ted Cruz, Longtime Foe Of NASA And Science, Will Oversee NASA And Science In New Congress"

Every one of their points is an exaggeration, mistake or lie: (1) Ted Cruz is in charge of NASA and Science, (2) Ted Cruz is anti-Science and anti-NASA.

Despite the fact that he isn't actually in charge of NASA, the foundation of the article is that Cruz is anti-NASA because when the U.S. was running the largest deficits in history, the Republicans tried a grand compromise. The idea was a 50/50 spending cut to tax-increase ratio. A had a deal made, but at the last minute, Barack Obama changed the deal, thinking he could force the new Republican congress into more tax increases -- but he blew up negotiations, lead to a shut-down, and the media blamed that on the Republicans, instead of Obama's last minute changing of terms. Their conclusion, this was all Cruz's fault, and because NASA was shut-down (or part of the sequester that did across the board cuts), then Cruz hates NASA. So HuffPo omits context and just infers, "Cruz didn't want more deficit spending, and he opposed The Obama, so he's a bad bad man".

It helps to remember that the cuts weren't really cuts, just decreases in spending growth. And this "austerity' the democrats/press predicted would result in doom and gloom and the destruction of our economy, instead lead to many quarters of growth. But if you understood context, you wouldn't read HuffPo.

And it doesn't stop there. NASA stopped being about space, and started being about politics, and diverted billions form exploring space, into furthering the Global-warming scare that the left is bonkers over. Because Cruz implied NASA should focus on their charter (space exploration), and he'd like to give them $50B more money if they would get out of the Climate Change charade and back to exploring space, HuffPo's claim is he's anti-NASA, anti-Science and anti-Climate. If you believe that crap is journalism, then you and HuffPo belong together.

Even when right, they're wrong

HuffPo wrote a good article on problems with Sweden.... so they pulled it. Can you imagine what the media would do if a right wing publication released and then pulled a story favorable to an Obama position? Sweden is a clusterfuck, no go zones, violence, rape capital of Europe, crime has gone up astronomically. That doesn't mean all muzzies are bad, it means that some are... and if you let in huge waves of one culture, you'll get a huge, undigestible sub-culture that you'll have to deal with. And it may take them a while to learn to walk upright and chew with their mouths closed (and stop raping tall blonde women). Welcome to life.

Gender Pay Gap

HuffPo (or PuffHo) gets it wrong, again. They so want to propagate the myth that there's a huge gender pay gap (implication: based on discrimination), that they'll run just about anything that feeds that confirmation bias.

To dispute accurate articles like these:

Jillian Berman (with no economics background that I could find) writes an OpEd challenging economists that disagree with her agenda, that women are discriminated against:

The problem is that polemicists don't try to normalize for career field, risk, geography, demography and so on. And since she seems to not be very good at reading the very studies she quotes from. (Since they don't seem to say what she implies they said). And the economist authors of the article she's refuting, try to explain some of the problems in one of the more recent studies:

In the end, you either believe that businessesmen, HR, and companies are too stupid to save 23% on payroll by focusing on attracting an equally talented all female staff (for a major costs savings) -- or you think that these claims of a gender pay gap are exaggerated (at best). And HuffPo either has no fact checkers on staff, or they are all idiots and polemics to not demand wiggle-words and counter-balance for crappy articles like that one.

That's not to say that women don't face unique challenges over men in the workforce. Quite a few in fact. But salary disparity is nowhere near the top of the list. And the implication that Uncle Sugar (Uncle Sam), needs to protect the fair ladies from negotiating their own salaries, is quite a bit patronizing towards the Women they claim the want to protect-- and ignores the consequences of bad legislation. (Which is often to suppress employment).

Examples: 6 items

  • Trump's sexual assaults - List of women who claimed that Trump sexually assaulted them: E. Jean Carroll, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searle. Most of them are not credible, and the media that reported them were reporting on FakeNews to try to swing an election (as proven how differently they write about Democrats sexual assault accusations, or how many stories they suppressed despite more evidence).
  • 2019.03.14 Christchurch Shooting - 🇳🇿Christchurch, New Zealand: a left wing eco-nationalist (who hates Capitalism, Conservatism, and is Chinese Communist sympathizer) shot-up a couple mosques because immigrants were over-populating the planet and causing Global Warming. Because the shooter said he didn't like Donald Trump's politics or leadership, the media said he was a right wing Trump supporter. He had illegally modified guns, used guns instead of more effective bombs because he said that would turn the left into his tools in dividing nations like the U.S. over gun-control, and he was stopped/slowed at the second mosque because a good guy was able to get a gun and scare him off. (It was one the shooter had dropped). So the media does his bidding, calls for division and gun control, and ignores the role that a good-guy with a gun had in reducing the carnage. NZ threatens to punish anyone that makes the info about his true motives available.
    Dead/Injured: 50/100
  • 2019.01.27 Learn to Code - ❄️ The left is angry because after the Obama administrations anti-business/anti-coal policies put many (10's of thousands) out of work, the reply by media outlets like NPR, Wired, NYT against the cries of anguish was, "Learn to Code" (the meme trended starting in 2011-2015). Implying lifetime coal miners or manufacturers targeted by the lefts policies, could just get retrained, and get new jobs in the tech sector. Well, last week, massive layoffs hit HuffPo, BuzzFeed, and Gannett News, hitting a small fraction as many workers as under Obama. And since turn-about is fair-play, some reflect the "Learn to code" information right back at the newly unemployed's cries of how life is unfair. The left had a melt-down calling their own message a hate meme (as did Twitter), but only when their sentiments were directed back at them. "How insensitive and cruel". Ya think?! If they were self-aware, they'd be getting a very important life-lesson from this, but instead they're too busy banning things that hurt their feelings to learn.
  • 2018.11.24 Nooses in Mississippi capital were Democrats - There was an uproar (AP and twitter) about a warning from white supremacist leaving 7 nooses... 12 hours later it came out that signs with the nooses, admitted Democrats were warning against electing Mississippi Republican Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith (jn a run-off election).
  • 2015.12.08 Muslim Ban - After a series of coordinate Paris Terrorist attacks, the San Bernardino attack, and various other islamic extremist attacks, during the campaign, Candidate Trump says we should consider a temporary Muslim ban until our leaders can figure out how to address the crisis. After elected and consulting with lawyers, he does a far more moderate thing. Before doing journalism (interviewing and asking what does he mean), NBC (Tom Brokaw) spun the story with half truths and compared this to various leftist atrocities (without offering that context). Trump's implementation (a couple years later) was just to require extreme vetting from a list of countries that the Obama administration flagged as being unable to effectively vet people from. Oh the horror. The left and FakeNews continue to call this a Muslim ban anyways, not letting truth get in the way of their agenda.
  • 2014.11.19 UVA Rape on Campus -
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    💩 Rolling Stone magazine published "A Rape on Campus" that describes a purported gang rape of Jackie Coakley by 7 frat brothers (Phi Kappa Psi) at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville, Virginia, as part of an initiation rite. This fed a false "Campus Rape" lynch-mob that suspended the fraternity, vandalized their FratHouse, started marches against them (and all men, especially fraternities), and impugned the character of many innocents: who sued and won. A few piled on (HuffPo), but a few other outlets were mixed or skeptical, and later broke stories putting her version of events in doubt. Rolling Stone apologized (5 months later) and retracted the story in its entirety on April 5, 2015, long after the harm had been done. They were sued, and settled.


Not ALL Bad

They're not wrong on everything, just their signal to noise ratio is weighted towards noise.

Even broken clocks like NYT or HuffPo get one right every now and then. It's just the quality control and averages that help us form our opinions. HuffPo is fun to read, in the same way it would be "fun" to be Amy Schumer or Samantha Bee's therapist, just to see what broke those self-deluded little dimwits.

Conclusion

I'm not horribly against HuffPo, they created a reasonable bog platform, and by ignoring quality control, had a huge progressive audience, until they were acquired. Now they are the NYT of the web: mostly full of crap and shoddy written clickbait to attract their readers. But occasionally a real piece of journalism, or at least something that challenges their status-quo slips through, to prove that they're not ALL bad.

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📚 References

Written: 2012, 2014, 2018.