All day yesterday, Glenn Beck was worked up about some article that appeared on The Huffington Post entitled "The Uniting Principles Glenn Beck Should Have Talked About." He railed against the article on his radio broadcast and again during the monologue of last night's television show, repeatedly accusing The Huffington Post of having written the piece, apparently completely unaware that it was little more than a blog post written by a random user of The Huffington Post's "The Blog" forum.
Like many websites, The Huffington Post has dedicated a section of its website to hosting blogs written and maintained by anyone who signs up for an account. The section literally has thousands of users and The Huffington Post explicitly states that the views posted by users in no way reflect the views of the Huffington Post itself:
We are an Internet Service Provider, e.g., We are Not Responsible For and Do Not Necessarily Hold the Opinions Expressed by Our Content Contributors: Opinions and other statements expressed by users and third parties (e.g., bloggers) are theirs alone, not opinions of The Huffington Post. Content created by third parties is the sole responsibility of the third parties and its accuracy and completeness are not endorsed or guaranteed. You acknowledge that by providing you with the ability to view and distribute content through our site, The Huffington Post is not undertaking any obligation or liability relating to the content. The Huffington Post and its affiliates, successors, assigns, employees, agents, directors, officers and shareholders do not undertake or assume any duty to monitor our site for inappropriate or unlawful content. The Huffington Post and its affiliates, successors, assigns, employees, agents, directors, officers and shareholders assume no responsibility or liability which may arise from the content thereof, including, but not limited to, claims for defamation, libel, slander, infringement, invasion of privacy and publicity rights, obscenity, pornography, profanity, fraud, or misrepresentation. Notwithstanding the foregoing, The Huffington Post reserves the right to block or remove communications, postings or materials at any time in our sole discretion.
But apparently nobody at Beck's network understands this rather simple and common practice, because they spent yesterday's morning meeting collectively trying to figure out why "The Huffington Post" would write something like this, eventually concluding that progressives know that there is a massive backlash coming against them and so they are desperately trying to get on the side of the values and principles that Beck has been preaching all along:
What is even more amazing is that Beck's own website has the very same feature where random individual contributors can post their own content, which carries a similar disclaimer:
TheBlaze contributor channel supports an open discourse on a range of views. The opinions expressed in this channel are solely those of each individual author.
In fact, anti-gay activist Matt Barber regularly posts his columns on Beck's contributor network meaning, if we were to operate by Beck's logic, that we could attribute Barber's bigoted anti-gay views to Beck and his The Blaze website.
If we were to attribute to Beck and The Blaze the views of random contributors on his website, he'd laugh in our face ... and rightly so. But that won't stop him from cluelessly doing the very same thing on every program on his network.
