Here on Daily Kos, if we don't like what's going on we can diary about it. If we still don't like it, we can end our involvement. This site is not a journalistic one -- it's a place for the exchange of opinions and information, and alerts to relevant news and events among people with similar interests and often similar views. And it belongs to one person with strong opinions, no matter how involved the rest of us are. We all know that, accept it if we want to stay and, at least in my case, enjoy interacting with this strongly biased and passionate-advocate community.
Huffington Post is similar in that it's the progeny of one person, and her views and preferences are what count. However, it differs greatly from Daily Kos in that it presents itself much more as a news site (though a liberal one), and has journalists and supposed journalists reporting and running certain sections. One of those supposed reporters is Mayhill Fowler.
I'm one of a number of people who has been greatly offended by Mayhill Fowler's pieces on Obama. I viewed them as clearly biased and ethically questionable. She got her "in" to the campaign through contributions, presented herself not as a reporter but as a supporter, and then proceeded to write highly negative and biased pieces about Obama.
The last piece of hers I read was the one in which she claimed that an elderly Obama supporter chastised Obama for attacking Hillary, and that the audience of Obama supporters applauded this woman for criticizing Obama. Fowler had other "details" including comments that Obama did not remember this lady and appeared not to know where he was at any given time (in contrast to Hillary who always knew where she was, according to Fowler).
I saw the entire clip of that incident and Fowler's description was so distant from the facts that I felt a little like I was watching one of our local homeless schizophrenics talking to imaginary friends. I wrote to Huffington Post -- the the editor in charge of Off the Bus (the section Fowler writes for), I wrote a diary here about her mis-reporting:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
and I wrote Fowler an email. She wrote me back claiming that she had accurately described the incident and that I hadn't seen the whole thing -- that I had missed the chastisement part. So I went back and watched it on Youtube from the very first statement the lady made until the end when she hugged Obama (not reported by Fowler), and again was struck by how totally devoid of facts Fowler's report was.
I no longer read her (why read someone who is so dishonest!), but on TPM this morning, Josh Marshall referred obliquely to a Fowler piece in which she reports ugly statements made by Bill Clinton referring to a Vanity Fair article written about him.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/...
Josh's link led to a NY Times article on this which had an interesting sentence.
An audio recording of the encounter revealed that the reporter did not identify herself as a journalist and called the article a "hatchet job" before asking for Mr. Clinton’s reaction.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Now I'm no defender of Bill Clinton these last few months. He's undermined any respect for him I ever had and deserves all the criticism lobbed at him. But this behavior by Fowler is part and parcel of her cavalier approach to journalism and I simply don't understand how her editor, who has a journalism background, can justify her behavior. I read his defense of her after the last incident and it sounded like a rationalization without justification.
I think that sites which purport to be news or journalism should provide an ombudsman to monitor the site's reporting. Huffington Post, while not the New York Times or even the Washington Post, makes some pretense of being a "newspaper" type of site and should afford readers the opportunity to criticize the coverage and have a staff person who will publicly respond to the criticism.