General

AOL Blogger Firing Fiasco Update - Who Deleted Tommy’s Post?

Last time around we learned that AOL’s Politics Daily has fired basically all of the bloggers and kept only professional journalists.  Today we found out why.  Melinda Henneberger wants it that way.  And she says so, in her own words.

90% of the column is dedicated to “How dare anyone think we would bow to corporate pressure or financial linkage to Playboy.”  Which leaves a scant few paragraphs to answer the obvious followup question,  “If Playboy wasn’t the problem, why were all the bloggers fired?“

The paragraph below is the closest we get to an answer, but it reveals plenty.

Why did I hire these veteran reporters, when the prevailing wisdom is that grown-ups are too expensive and too dull, and that kids hired on the cheap – or else not paid at all – are the way to go? Because experience matters – and it shows on the site every day, from Cannon’s D-Day article putting Obama’s Saturday speech in Normandy into historical context, to Wood’s recent piece on the threat of rogue-state nukes. All of these reporters are old pros who have been at this for decades — and would sooner hang up their press passes than work for an outfit that would cave to corporate pressure. We intend to raise the bar on standards on the web, and this incident reinforces both how important that goal is, and all that we’re up against.

OK let’s get beyond the obvious howler about sooner hanging up their press passes than work for an outfit that would cave to corporate pressure.  (Quick! think of an example where a journalist quit for ethical reasons!).

Note the contrast…

Bloggers:  Kids, cheap, inexperienced
Journalists:  Veterans, grown-ups, experienced.

By the way, cheap inexperienced kid is a real nice way to describe a 39 year old network administrator nearing the top of his profession who, by the way, has been following politics his entire life.  Not that I’m bitter.

Tommy Christopher picks up the glove:

Another Huffington Post blogger, Lee Stranahan, was way ahead of traditional journalists on the John Edwards affair, and got pilloried for his trouble.  What did Melinda’s keen journalistic instincts tell her?

I think that’s how a lot of us felt, too, that particularly at a time when resources across the industry are being slashed to the bone, this didn’t seem like a high priority. I still think that’s true—but I also think John Edwards should have known the story would come out and spared his family and his party the embarrassment—and potentially, the loss of the White House.

Ouch!

And then there’s the point, made above and further in the Newsbusters piece that directly challenges Melinda’s direct assertion that she did not delete Tommy’s post about the Playboy article.

NewsBusters.org

Henneberger also claims that she had never read Christopher’s article regarding the Playboy controversy and implied that she was not, in fact, the one who deleted it from Politics Daily:

I never even read the Playboy post I supposedly fired Christopher for writing. It was killed because the editor who handled it said it contained profanity, which Christopher had been asked not to use in his work. (To be perfectly precise, what the editor wrote was, “Hey chief, whole lotta f*** in this Christopher piece; that OK?” And what I replied was: No, it isn’t.)

However, NewsBusters has obtained a screen shot (edited to remove unrelated parties’ names) which confirms that it was Melinda Henneberger who deleted Tommy Christopher’s Playboy story from Politics Daily (click to enlarge):

It seems that the internet runs on servers, and these servers have these things called logs…double ouch!! and Uh-oh!

Seems that Melinda might need a veteran old-pro journalist to fact-check her column…

Yeah, yeah lame obvious joke, but so easy I couldn’t resist.

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