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HuffPost Blogger Makes Up Facts About MRC Report in O'Reilly Spoof

By Tim Graham | September 17, 2007 | 13:05

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When we put together a packet of the Greatest Hates of the Huffington Post, we didn’t focus on the issue of the blog’s accuracy. Over the weekend, HuffPost blogger Steve Young decided to address my appearance on The O’Reilly Factor to create a fantasy in his mind of how I would crumble under the weight of O’Reilly’s pro-Huffington Post questions. The headline was "O’Reilly Lauds HuffPo as the Most Principled Website on the Internet; Condemns MRC Report." Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Nowhere in this blog does it actually say it’s a bad satire, other than an asterisk, leading to this self-amused sentence at the end: "Apologies if I may not have caught some of the segment's quotes exactly, but I'm sure I got the gist of the truth behind them."

In the middle of this routine, he was right I goofed in dating the nasty John Cusack blog post as 2006 rather than 2005. We’ll fix that. But then he adds his own errors:

FAKE O’REILLY: Mr. Graham. Even if there's any validity to your report, it all seems to be ancient history. Don't you have anything more recent? Except for one blog, everyone listed in your report is from 2006 or earlier. You're making my show come off as a history lesson, and as I proved with Ron Paul, we shouldn't learn from history. At least not on my show.

If Young had read the entire report, he would notice there are actually four quotes from 2007: Peter Mehlman in June, Charles Karel Bouley in March, Larry Beinhart in April, and Cliff Schecter from July 13. It's also quite odd to suggest that quotes from October, November, and December of 2006 are now "ancient history."

I could have done more from this year, easily. But where do you stop? How many quotes do you need to prove the basic point: the blog is ablaze with wild-eyed talk about "Dictator Bush" and his fans being believers in "Dictator Christ," and those conservatives are all Nazis and Klan members. And this website thinks it can lecture (or even spoof) about "truthiness"?