Blogger Lawsuit vs. Huffington Post Not Covered by Huffington Post

Uri Friedman 373 Views Apr 12, 2011

As we mentioned earlier today, blogger and labor activist Jonathan Tasini filed a class-action lawsuit today against The Huffington Post and its new parent company, AOL, for not paying freelance bloggers while benefiting financially from their work. We weren't the only ones who wrote about the case. News outlets including Forbes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Observer, and The Los Angeles Times also had coverage and featured the story on their landing pages.

But The Huffington Post itself has remained conspicuously silent on the topic, as Fortune's Dan Primack pointed out this afternoon on Twitter. When we searched for "Tasini" on The Huffington Post at 7pm tonight, we only found one result mentioning the lawsuit: an Associated Press story that may very well be automatically generated by a wire feed, though we can't confirm this. Most of the rest of the mentions, were ironically his blog posts presumably written for free. And the Huffington Post homepage and section landing pages--including its Media and Technology sections--did not have the story.

The Huffington Post probably isn't happy about the suit. But as Primack tweeted, if the Huffington Post "wants to be credible news org, it's got to report on uncomfortable things." The site has stayed mum on previous stories involving itself, such as the controversy that followed The Huffington Post's decision to publish a post by conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart and then promptly end the short-lived relationship with Breitbart.

We asked The Huffington Post for comment but have yet to hear back. If we do, we'll be sure to update.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at ufriedman at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.

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