The Huffington Post’s decision to ban Andrew Breitbart from its front page for…
Andrew Brietbart’s ad hominem attack on Van Jones in The Daily Caller — right down to calling him a “commie punk” and “a cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak” — violates the tenets of debate and civil discourse we have strived for since the day we launched.
I trust you were not drinking when you read that, otherwise your computer would have shorted out from the water.
Lee Stranahan decided that this is the final straw and has quit the Huffington Post:
…as a writer, this latest move by The Huffington Post of banning Andrew Breitbart from their front page (because of comments he made to a different website) is both unprecedented, arbitrary and deeply offensive to the intellectual openness that Arianna Huffington has purported to believe in.
He also comments on the strategy
One very loathsome aspect of this story is something that Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff told me in a long phone call about Andrew Breitbart several months ago. Roy knows and worked with Andrew and when the issue of Andrew Breitbart being a racist came up, Roy told me “No, of course Andrew isn’t a racist.”
Roy went on to say that while both he and Arianna Huffington knew that the charges of racism being hurled at Andrew weren’t true based on their years of personal dealings with him that they were in a ‘bad position’ to say anything about it.
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…however it is a question of their base, evidence about Jones not withstanding they will not risk upsetting the liberals who follow them. As Stranahan has already found dissent from the liberal base carries costs.
Dave Weigel notes the absurdity of the statement:
He didn’t write or say any of that at HuffPo, a site he helped develop in 2005. Is the Huffington Post’s standard that contributors can be to some modified limited hang-out if they use ad hominems in other forums? Boy, good thing Breitbart doesn’t have an army of contributors who can comb HuffPo authors’ published and spoken work to see if they’ve done that.
He is exactly right. The number of examples of this kind of stuff that will be dug up this week will be interesting.
In fact Lee Stranahan has already started and the Daily Caller goes long on ad hominem actually at the huffpo:
It will not matter in the closed world of the left its conformity that matters.
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