Here's a funny one for you. Arianna Huffington has
done more damage to the reputation of blogging as a medium. She says she asked actor George Clooney to
write a post for her blog and he said he didn't know how a blog worked. So she, or her people, slapped together a
bunch of quotes from interviews he had done and made it look like one coherent blog post! It's titled "George
Clooney: I Am a Liberal. There, I Said it!" Except he didn't say it, at least not in the post with his
byline on top.
Apparently his publicist said it was cool, but now he's upset. I read the
original post (it's offline now) and thought it was a mildly amusing public declaration of liberal political leanings
by Clooney and I thought it was cool that he posted on the site. Turns out he didn't. Can you believe
that?
Huffington says she's taken the post down, but
it's still up at Yahoo! News. Go save your copy in Furl or some other cache
catching social bookmarking tool, just for posteriety.
1. I've been following this one pretty closely, and it really isn't a matter of whether or not Huffington had Clooney's permission to publish the blog, but that the whole thing was a faux blog culled from out of context statements from various news sources (larry king and the guardian mostly).
Whether or not the mess was appoved--who cares? the fact that she had the audacity to concoct a faux blog and try to trot it out as the real thing is what's bloody well annoying and a true slap in the face to those of us who take what we do rather seriously.
Posted at 12:08PM on Mar 17th 2006 by Tish Grier