Does any journalist have the courage to ask Arianna Huffington these three questions?

Now that Huffington Post has been accepted into the White House Correspondent's Association, and attended its debut WHCA dinner on May 1, 2010, we at HUFF-WATCH ask:


Does any journalist have the courage to ask Arianna Huffington these three questions?

(1) Ms. Huffington, you claim that HuffPost is a "nonpartisan" source of news, that it is "not positioned ideologically in terms of how we cover the news,” that it seeks “to debunk the left-right way of thinking,” and its purpose is “to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned" (Section A here). You've also claimed that HuffPost "prohibits inflammatory claims." I have a two-part question on this:

(a) How do you square those claims with the fact that for the past three years, HuffPost has been consistently smearing and inciting hatred against Israel, and conservative individuals and groups, through the use of inflammatory, false and misleading headlines, and egregiously biased "reporting?"
(Special report on HuffPost's incitement and tolerance of hatred towards Israel here; related archives here, here)

(b) Since November 2009, HuffPost has been waging what amounts to a "journalistic jihad" against the Tea Party, its leader, and event attendees. It has published false, misleading stories containing incendiary libels against Tea Party leaders, claiming they incite and tolerate hate speech and calls for violence, and against the movement itself, as being "racist" and "anti-immigrant." Not only was there not a shred of evidence to support these allegations, the available evidence shows that these charges are untrue.
Are you now prepared to publish corrections and retractions to the false claims that HuffPost made about the Tea Party --- especially being that its management is far guiltier of the acts it has accused Tea Party leaders of perpetrating?
(Special report documenting all this, here.)

(2) Ms. Huffington, you have repeatedly claimed that HuffPost works diligently, 24-7 against abusive users, and that it "has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to abusive or hateful language or comments" (here, here). How then do you explain the fact that for the past several years, HuffPost has been enabling and protecting certain users (all radical leftists) to violate all the terms of its Comment Policy and Terms of Service at will, and even post threats and calls for violence --- while at the same time, censoring and banning non-violating users who challenge, mock or complain about them?
(See special report here.)

(3) Ms. Huffington, on April 29, you announced that to help keep HuffPost's comment threads free of "objectionable, offensive" material, and to preserve a "civil" commenting environment, it is making certain users "Community Moderators," and giving them the power to "flag," and even to delete other users' comments. How do you square that with the fact that HuffPost has now empowered some of the worst-of-the-worst, most egregious, longest-term violators of your Comment Policy and Terms of Service (and possibly even the law) to be "Community Moderators"?
Here are but three examples:

"Postman66": A radical leftist whom HuffPost permitted to:

• Claim that President Bush "should be put up against a wall and shot"
  
  
• Claim that Justice Clarence Thomas is "the original Watermelon man," and an "Oreo"
  
  
• Post more than 33,000 comments in 18 months
  
  
• Essentially "live" on the site, posting 100-300 comments over 10-18 hours a day, practically every day
  

"Rampage": A radical leftist whom HuffPost has permitted to:

• Arrange a fistfight with another user, and to threaten to beat him so severely that he'd require
  hospitalization
  
  
• Repeatedly post graphic, vulgar homophobic insults
  
  
• Obsess over other users
  
  
• Post more than 50,000 comments in less than two years
  
  
• Essentially "live" on the site, posting 100-300 comments over 10-18 hours a day, practically every day
  

"Rich Misty": A radical leftist whom HuffPost has allowed to:

• Continuously, viciously attack any user who dares disagree with him, primarily with accusations that they engage in or otherwise support the sexual torture/murder of children
  
  
• Continuously post blood libels against the U.S. military using phony pictures, which are hosted at a notoriously anti-American, anti-Semitic hate site. HuffPost even protected his ability to engage in this abusive behavior, by censoring, on a minute-to-minute basis, then banning a non-violating user who attempted to expose the truth behind these libels, and the fact that the photos are fakes. Report here.
  
  
• Post more than 45,000 comments in two years
  
  
• Essentially "live" on the site, posting 100-300 comments over 10-18 hours a day, practically every day (with a maximum of 500 comments in a 24 hour period --- an average of one comment every three minutes, straight through)
  

We hope that at least one enterprising journalist has the courage to ask Ms. Huffington about these glaring contradictions between her and HuffPost's public statements and actions --- and the reality that has been documented in meticulous detail here at HUFF-WATCH.


===========

ADDENDUM, May 1: Obama shills for Huffington Post in commencement speech

Perhaps this may act as an added inducement for a reality-oriented journalist to ask Ms. Huffington the above questions:

Obama: "If You're A Fan Of Glenn Beck Or Rush Limbaugh, Try Reading A Few Columns On The Huffington Post"

.