Posted on 09/22/2010 8:23:10 PM PDT by kristinn
The Internet giant AOL libeled Free Republic as "hosting child pornography" in an article published Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at their Daily Finance news site. The site's masthead reads: Daily Finance An AOL Money & Finance Site.
Authored by Daily Finance media columnist Jeff Bercovici, the article entitled Muzzled Reporter Says 'Maw of Yahoo' No Place for Journalism tells the story about John Cook's reasons for leaving Yahoo News and returning to his previous gig with Gawker. According to the article, Cook was the senior national affairs reporter for Yahoo's The Upshot news blog. Bercovici notes that he and Cook are friends and former colleagues.
In the article, Bercovici writes that among Cook's reasons for leaving Yahoo News was that he was not allowed to write about Free Republic:
"But Cook offers a different interpretation of his move, saying that Yahoo's corporate conservatism repeatedly got in the way of his attempts to report the news. In one instance, Cook was forced to bowdlerize a quotation from New York Times reporter James Risen; he was told that referring to masturbation, even euphemistically, was unacceptable. On similar grounds, he was prohibited from writing about the conservative website Free Republic hosting child pornography. Most glaringly, he was told that a proposed story on the Obama Administration raising the salary of White House staffers by 9% lacked the necessary balance; it was killed."
The original paragraph includes a link to a Salon.com article about a scammer creating a user account at Free Republic and posting a link to an alleged child porn site on his home page.(Salon reports it did not directly verify the link.)
The article explicitly exonerates Free Republic of "hosting child pornography" and instead cites the site as being "lax" in its registration process:
"Now FreeRepublic.com is not hosting or even "condoning" child pornography. It's just that it's so ridiculously easy to set up a profile and get your own FreeRepublic page that apparently anyone can and will do it. Theoretically, someone could do this at Kos or OpenSalon. (But, as far as we know, no one has.)"
"...Free Republic appears to delete profiles started for spamming purposes (unless user "freehoodia" was "banned or suspended" for some other reason, like supporting TARP), so, again, all we're accusing it of is being somewhat lax in its moderation of the user registration process."
AOL's Daily Finance presents itself as a professional journalistic enterprise with a full editorial staff overseeing their reporters.
Yet even with a link to the article that flatly refutes AOL's claim that Free Republic hosts child pornography, AOL printed the libel anyway.
Corrective action will be sought.
ROFL! That darned spell check strikes again!
Ping to the inmans
Good. Give it back to them.
This is really an indicator of the effectiveness of FR, that someone is willing to go to such questionable lengths to shut us down.
They hate us and can’t silence us with anything legitimate, so they make up about the worst they can think of throwing at us.
;-)
That must have been the one of Obama's Mamma. Repulsive indeed. :-)
Was that during the MD4Bush and other n00bie poster days?
;-)
I remember that but few others seem to. They weren’t just posting pics in threads, they posted threads and filled the sidebar with the same thread, one right after another. It was a pic of an old homosexual, naked, and what he thought was inviting. It was so gross that I still remember it!
Reference Ping on this.
Where ever this one goes I will want to know.
I clearly relate to many people my superior grasp of politics and current events is directly AND SOLELY from Free Republic and that I have been reading and posting there for over ten years.
If the dirt bag in question is going to have justice kick him to the curb I want to know.
It is absolutely correct that ALL of us have been harmed by his actions and his punishment should reflect that.
.
It’s in Wikipedia too, apparently stemming from this article:
“Can a child pornographer last longer at Free Republic than a Giuliani supporter?”
In salon.com. The article now appears to be gone.
Hope I don’t get in trouble for this but we should know where it originates.
Dang!
I can’t get the kiddie porn forum to show up!
How do I set my paramenters??
Memories...
It was really KITTY porn!!
Anybody can post it, but you have to be in the dollar-a-day club to actually VIEW it.
that is wrong, but funny!
Got a cigarette?
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