Robot Sex Poll Reveals Huffington Post Uses Slave Plantation Argument as Business Model to Convince Writers to Work for No Pay:
“You Are Lucky to be Our “House Negro” or You’d be Picking Cotton in the Fields Like the Rest of the Slaves”
Or How I Got Invited–And Then Uninvited to Appear as a Guest on the Huffington Post Live National Television News Talk Show
By Nate Thayer
April 11, 2013
Two days after my email exchange with the Atlantic magazine, of which I posted unredacted and verbatim on my previously obscure blog, which went viral sending several hundred thousand readers to my website (a 39,000% increase in traffic over the day before. I checked), I received the following email from the Huffington Post:
xxxxxxx@huffingtonpost.com>
to: thayernate0007@gmail.com
date: Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 1:40 PM
subject: Interview request from the Huffington Post for tomorrow
mailed-by: huffingtonpost.com
Hello Mr. Thayer,
I’m a producer with HuffPost Live, the webTV network of the Huffington
Post. As someone who’s followed your work for a long time (I lived in
Phnom Penh for several years in the early 2000s), I was happy to see
your response to The Atlantic, and the attention it’s been getting.
Would you be interested in appearing on HuffPost Live tomorrow
afternoon to discuss the issue, and the larger questions around how to
make freelancing work sustainable? We’ve got a 30 minute discussion
scheduled for 3:30 pm New York time, and would be happy to have you
join via webcam, or, if you are in New York, in person. I’d be happy
to provide more details or answer any questions. Thanks for your time.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
HuffPost Live
xxxxx
P.S. Yup, I am aware of the irony of the Huffington Post covering this issue…
The very pleasant and professional Huffington Post representative will remain unnamed.
The only single regret I have regarding the Atlantic magazine kerfuffle is that the unfortunate woman who was tasked by her employers with the job of calling me and requesting I write for them for free was the focus of any of the resulting negative reaction.
She, like the Huff Post fellow, was, also, very cordial and professional, as was I, and all three of us were just doing our jobs. All three of us did nothing wrong or different than say, a used car salesman on the car lot does, or a U.S. telephone service provider’s complaint representative who happens to based in Bombay does.
The initial email was followed a couple hours later by a text message at 4:24 PM March 7:
“Hello Mr. Thayer:
This is xxxxxxxxx ssssssssss from the HP, following up on an email. Would love to do a webcam interview tomorrow if you are interested and available. Thanks for your time.”
This was followed a few minutes later by a phone call from the gentleman from the Huffington Post reiterating their request that I appear on a live television debate panel on the topic of the dust kicked up by the Atlantic brouhaha on the topic of for profit media companies increasing their profit margin by refusing to pay the writers of the stories they sell.
The discussion was both pleasant and frank. I accepted, but made sure to add:
Thayer:
“I would be happy to appear on the show, but let’s be frank here. You guys are the very poster child of using unpaid writers as the equivalent of slave labor as the very core of your business model to provide news to news consumers. If you are under any remote misimpression I won’t be required to mention, and probably focus rather vigorously on, that fact, you would be mistaken. The Huffington Post is perhaps the most logical example and proof of the merits of why I refused the Atlantic’s request in the first place, and you should be aware that you would very mistaken to think I would not raise that issue for discussion on your show. I would be both happy to appear on your television show and I most certainly will raise the topic of the Huffington Post being perhaps the starkest example of the type of media organization I refuse to enable.”
“The very fact you are inviting me on the show to talk about the issue of journalists not being able to make a living under the current financial models of corporate media is newsworthy as a standalone story itself. The irony is not going to elude anyone. I just want to be sure that it hasn’t eluded the executives at Huff Post who signed off on the request to invite me on as a guest to discuss the topic. You best double check with them”
The producer, to his credit, broached that reality in his initial email, and we had no differences of opinion.
Huffington Post producer:
“That is a good point. Let me recheck and run this by my bosses and I will get back to you in a few minutes.”
Exactly 30 minutes later I received the following text from the Huffington Post at 4:54 PM on March 7. They had reconsidered and retracted their invitation. I was cordially dis-invited to participate in the debate, prompted by my blog post, which they deemed sufficiently newsworthy to merit devoting their television show to discuss the topic. They just didn’t want me to discuss THE topic. Which would be them.
Huffington Post Text Message 4:54 PM March 7:
“Thanks much for making time to talk. Sorry this one isn’t going to happen, but I’ll reach out again for others stories. I’ll just say good luck.”
I didn’t think so.
Today saw another example of how the Huffington Post is in the business of delivering faux news to attract readers, and those readers page view statistics to advertisers. They are not in the business of delivering credible journalism to news consumers.
More precisely, they are the poster child for delivering page clicks to advertisers in the guise of being a serious media organization.
Their argument to those who produce the product they sell–news– boils down to the false premise of “You Are Lucky to be Our “House Negro” or You’d be Picking Cotton in the Fields Like the Rest of the Slaves.”
The fact that the 13th amendment to the constitution was meant to abolish that economic logic remains unchallenged.
Give the headline writer a gold star and the assignment editor cum marketing huckster a black mark for creating a non-story from a brilliant headline:
The April 10 headline, Robot Sex Poll Reveals Americans’ Attitudes About Robotic Lovers, is an example of creating a non story from thin air, a la the National Enquirer of old, via a sensationalist, misleading headline.
But the Huffington Post went to remarkable acrobatics, even for their rather starkly transparent absence of standards, and took it one unethical step outside the out-of-bounds marker, which they usually try to keep their tippie-toes from straying across, to maintain the fiction they are an actual provider of a product resembling serious news content.
They constructed their aliens-abducted-my-mother story by trying to attach the mantle of credibility of a Stanford University research study to the article that had exactly zero to do with the story the Huffington Post published.
From the Huffington Post story which I refuse to link to as a matter of principle because:
1/It is a bullshit story that was created to drive readers to their site by misleadingly citing entirely unrelated Stanford University research and then ‘conducting’ a Huff Post poll, whatever that means to fit their headline.
And
2/ because it is the Huffington Post, whose entire business model is based on using slave labor with the 3-card Monty, marketing-trick sales pitch to convince their unpaid writers to work for free using the same argument slave owners on the plantations used to convince the ‘House Negro’ that s/he had a bright future compared to the false premise alternative; the slaves working the fields to pick cotton.
The Huffington Post used this successful business model to sell the company for $315 million in 2011. None of that went to those who actually produced the product they then sold for that profit: the writing.
And now back to the story of sex with robots.
Here are the opening lead three paragraphs:
“A provocative new poll shows that Americans have little trouble imagining a future full of personal service robots — at least when it comes to robots tasked with cleaning our homes, driving our cars, and even helping fight our wars.
But the HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that we’re a bit squeamish about bots in especially personal roles, such as caring for elderly people or replacing a human sex partner. These findings are consistent with research conducted by Stanford University’s Dr. Leila Takayama, an expert in robot-human relationships.
“We’ve been finding that people prefer the idea of working with robots instead of having robots work in place of people,” Takayama told The Huffington Post in an email.”
The above three paragraphs were constructed to encourage the reader to blink and not recognize that that the first reference to a “provocative new poll”, which was citing the second reference to a “HuffPost/YouGov poll”, which was entirely unrelated to the third reference to “research conducted by Stanford University’s Dr. Leila Takayama, an expert in robot-human relationships.”
And then we get to the eye-catching part of the story that relates to the headline, with the readers having been attempted to be snookered to thinking these were findings by Stanford University.
“And what about robotic sex partners?
“Eighteen percent of respondents indicated that they believed sexbots will be available by 2030. Nine percent indicated that they would have sex with a robot if they could (though perhaps they wouldn’t have been keen on admitting that if they could).
Sex with a robot raises some thorny ethical questions — including whether a married person who hooked up with a robot would be guilty of infidelity. What did the poll find? Forty-two percent of Americans indicated that such a dalliance would constitute cheating. Another 31 percent said it wouldn’t, and 26 percent said they were unsure. Respondents under age 30 were almost as likely to say it wouldn’t be cheating (34 percent) as that it would (36 percent). Americans over age 65 were far more likely to say that it would, by a 52 percent to 24 percent margin.”
The Huffington Post claimed the poll had a margin of error of 3.7%
“The poll was conducted Feb. 20-21 among 1,000 U.S. adults. It used a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling.”
Are there any further questions why a news organizations that has as its very essence a business model to increase its profit margin by eliminating the expense of paying for the product they market for sale is not an acceptable alternative to providing quality news that is worthy of labeling itself as journalism in a free society?
I didn’t think so.
