Comments on: Bad Journalism In Huffington Post

By: indi.ca » The Mona Sarika Saga

indi.ca » The Mona Sarika Saga — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:22:54 +0000

[...] Sarika once cited me as a proud Tamil and made up a bunch of quotes for a Huffington Post article. I complained and that article got [...]

By: Roy Lawson

Roy Lawson — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:37:33 +0000

Her lies were finally uncovered. In some places, misattribution could result in inprisonment or death so what she did was serious. In the case of her last story, she wrote a political puff-piece that harmed a political cause I am involved in.

You can rest easy because her career as a journalist is over now. Perhaps she should consider fiction. She’s really good at that.

By: Aamina Nizar

Aamina Nizar — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 12:53:38 +0000

By: Drunken Economist

Drunken Economist — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 12:34:22 +0000

Looks like the HuffyPo is not content to just bar her from their site:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/virginia-moncrieff/plagiarism-mona-sarikas-d_b_380880.html

Basically, the internet is exposing what a joke these ‘newspapers’ — BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, as well as that rag the HuffyPo really are. Retraction? In new media? Sorry, it’s black humor to me.

Please keep this page up. This women should never work in “journalism” again. Bearing in mind that she was probably hired to write a “story” (read: PR piece of sensationalism) for an agenda. Facts? What are those? Not needed.

Anyway, they (WSJ, HuffyPo, etal) all got caught with their pants down. Business as usual in the “mainstream” media of the west.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:13:50 +0000

For what it’s worth, Mona Sarika has been revealed as a plagiarist at all the outlets for which she wrote, including Huffington Post, Foreign Policy, and the Wall Street Journal. It seems that pretending to have access to people far from the United States led editors to publish her work without checking her bona fides or confirming any of her quotes.

By: groundviews » Confessions of a Digital Immigrant

groundviews » Confessions of a Digital Immigrant — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:03:29 +0000

[...] at how we can strengthen anyone, anywhere who takes up communicating in the public interest. As I said in a recent online discussion concerning one of the world’s top citizen media platforms: “Just as journalism is too [...]

By: Angilee

Angilee — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:04:18 +0000

I was contacted by her too — didn’t say much though because her questions seemed uninformed. But I’m disappointed that HuffPo seems to have just deleted the article, rather than issuing a retraction or acknowledging error. I see a “Report Corrections” button on their homepage, but no corrections for the reader to see.

By: Dee

Dee — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:07:49 +0000

Yep, I think it’s been removed..

By: Nayagan

Nayagan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:07:44 +0000

the huffpo is chock-full of ace reportage:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/21/the-sexiest-peta-ads-of-a_n_217731.html

By: SahaSamvada

SahaSamvada — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:12:50 +0000

Please don’t pull it down…. It should stay on record. Obviously by pulling it down Huffpost is attempting to sweep their bad journalism under the carpet.

By: pathi

pathi — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:09:03 +0000

she contacted me, too.. what a inexperienced graduate student from india trying to poke into our problems.

By: Sami

Sami — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:29:31 +0000

You can imagine how “good” her other aritcles are:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mona-sarika

By: Sami

Sami — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:24:04 +0000

Indi,

Even your comments to her in the email you provided carries this aura that all Tamils live in perpetual fear. They do not. Not all of them.

I don’t know how many Tamils you know, but even your generalisation of things in Sri Lanka on this blog doesn’t help anyone.

“They are basically keeping quiet. In private I think some do regret the LTTE losing. ”

Maybe you don’t see it, but you are doing very little to help those in need in Sri Lanka. Visiting camps, taking photos, and publicising grief for the benefit of your blog and not for the genuine concern for people, has done little to help Sri Lanka.

I don’t know how long you have lived in Sri Lanka, or what your background is, but what I have read and seen so far, you squashed the chance to put things right when the Huff contacted you.

She didn’t ask you what you thought as a Tamil, she asked you what Tamils in Sri Lanka felt like. Because you are in SL.

By: ramanan

ramanan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:05:39 +0000

I’d keep this post up. It points out some stupidness on their part.

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:25:18 +0000

You don’t have to pull your post down in the current absent of the other. Blogs are snapshots of milliseconds, not bronze statues.

By: Gini Appu

Gini Appu — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:08:14 +0000

Can somebody please invite Sinha to this blog?

By: Nalaka Gunawardene

Nalaka Gunawardene — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:00:41 +0000

Indi, the decision is yours, but I’d ask you not to pull down your – and our – reaction because it’s a cautionary note for uninformed, careless bloggers who write on serious issues that they know nothing about, and take no trouble to find out either. If you can locate the original post from some cache and post it, that would complete the discussion here.

If Huff Post has indeed pulled the post, I’m disappointed. In the spirit of discussion and debate, they should have kept it on, along with irate reader comments and protests.

Just as journalism is too important to be left solely to full-time, paid journalists, citizen journalism is too important to be left simply to irresponsible individuals with internet access who may have opinions (and spare time) without substance or clarity to make those opinions count.

By: Nayagan

Nayagan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:56:01 +0000

please do. i’m about to split my sides laughing.

By: indi

indi — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:43:32 +0000

Huffa Post’s coverage was better than most during the end of the war, cause they actually cited SL blogs and twitter and stuff. It’s too lefty and cacophonous for me, but I still think it’s OK. It’s just a bad writer.

The article has been pulled. Perhaps I should pull this post too.

By: Chanuka Wattegama

Chanuka Wattegama — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:25:39 +0000

Indi and Nalaka,

This is an occupational hazard faced by bloggers. You get exposure for your opinions but sans control. This is one reason I don’t blog. Love my low profile.

I too cannot access original article. (from Ottawa)

By: chandare

chandare — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:19:31 +0000

There is a big brouhaha about Obama taking a question(a setup) by a Huffpost guy.I think you did the correct thing.They are not doing journalism.Most part they are a big news agrregator plus opnions of celebrities .Most people who visit the site knows that.They get insane amount of trafiic .If the post is still up,You could have asked them to posta correction.
(I think they are trying to setup a investigative journalism unit as well so these kind of incident are birthing pains of the medium).

By: Nayagan

Nayagan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:47:25 +0000

dude,

HuffPo is respected by no one. They may get one individual news aggregator with access to a timely subject but it’s so far from a respected outlet that it would be more accurate to call the Wall Street Journal a communist rag.

By: Nalaka Gunawardene

Nalaka Gunawardene — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:36:18 +0000

Indi,
The original post is no longer on Huff Post as at Thursday June 25 at 7 am Sri Lanka time – taken down? Did anyone save this?

Mona contacted me through my own blog earlier this month with a set of questions, and I too very clearly told her accident of birth placed me in the Sinhala camp even though I don’t wear that label in everything I think, say and do. I felt uneasy speaking for Tamils, and even though she kept asking me to do so, I didn’t — and in hindsight, it was just as well. I did introduce her to a prominent Sri Lankan blogger who is ethnically Tamil, and I know he responded to her questions briefly.

Bad journalism can appear anywhere…even on the respected Huff Post or NYT. But now it’s harder for them to get away with it.

By: Nayagan

Nayagan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:50:59 +0000

am i wrong or has it already been taken down?

cached?

huffpo is the lefty version of the drudge report, helmed by Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbat, and can not, in any reasonable argument, be considered a vehicle for delivering reliable hard news reporting. It’s not ProPublica.