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Well, things started off so well; I barely snuck into the first round of HuffPo’s new citizen journalism project and landed my first project right on the front page, if only for several hours. Who knows, maybe this thing would turn into a portfolio that could mutate my engineering resume into an advocacy one.

But now I’ve got all kinds of problems with the kids at my new virtual lunch table.

On an organizational conference call with the project leaders for Off the Bus, the new Editorial Coordinator Marc Cooper — a faculty member at the USC Annenberg School for Communication — made the distinction between the kind of “venting” that belongs on a blog post and the somewhat more even-keeled approach we’d like to take with OTB pieces in the interest of “citizen journalism.”

Now, I’m not entirely clear on the makeup of the larger Huffington Post proper; sometimes it seems like it’s just a fancier, more highbrow version of DailyKos with more “credentialed” bloggers, because a lot of what I see on HuffPo is precisely “blog posts,” a term that Cooper seemed to use to differentiate it from our ostensibly less biased OTB products. Still, the fact that they’re kind of selective about what gets promoted to the front page of HuffPo leaves me with the impression that there’d be some kind of editorial scrutiny for what gets such high profile face-time, and I’m just not sure what the standard is.

When it comes to telling the facts, that standard is, apparently, pretty low. I first saw the kerfuffle about wacky young Andrew Meyer getting tased on Blog for Democracy, and Catherine kicks things off by being legitimately concerned about the level of force used in restraining a paranoid screamer with his stupid pants down around his ass (to paraphrase liberally). I myself fall more in GriftDrift’s camp, especially after looking at all the video angles he’s collected there to see just how erratic Meyer was behaving — including some post-tasering footage of the guy talking about how the police are going to turn him over to the government to kill him (weee!). This clip is particularly illuminating, and the poster explains that he (presumably like all the other amateur videographers) busted out his camera because Meyer ran into the room already in crazy mode with the police in tow. Starting off on the wrong foot, Meyer only makes things worse by brushing off the cops, causing quite the disturbance when asked to leave, attempting several times to flee from officers, and spending a good minute and change physically struggling with the officers as they attempt to eject him. Once he saw the taser drawn from its holster, he chose to struggle more and ask not to be tasered instead of, oh I dunno, going limp and putting his hands behind his back.

So what does this have to do with me and HuffPo?

Not one but two posts spent the day on the front page of the Post that tried to address a legitimate issue by starting off from the position of complete fallacy. First, Greg Lukianoff kicks off the oversimplification with

take a look at this University of Florida student who was manhandled and tasered by university police for taking too much time asking a question at a John Kerry speech.
…
And, of course, common sense (which too often differs from legal sense) will tell you that the threat of being tasered if you talk too much could certainly have a chilling affect on speech! Good lord. Half the people I knew in college would have been tasered routinely if this was response was considered acceptable back then.

I’m almost willing to forgive his complete cluelessness if that highly truncated CNN video he linked to was his only exposure to the event, because that does kind of jump straight from the question to the tasering — except that basing an article on one edited source (particularly from ADD-stricken CNN) is just crappy research, so no, no credit for that half-assed effort. Next!

Naomi Wolf comes along five hours later to shill the same oversimplified misrepresentation for the sake of shock value over accuracy — that way she can call it a “shock moment” (har! har!):

Today’s news shows a recognizable shock moment in the annals of a closing society. A very ordinary-looking American student — Andrew Meyer, 21, at the University of Florida - was tasered by police when he asked a question of Senator John Kerry about the impeachment of President George Bush. His arms were pinned and as he tried to keep speaking he was shocked — in spite of begging not to be hurt.

Yeah, but no, not so much, Naomi. No matter how many times you try to parrot the “tasered for asking a question” meme, it won’t make it true. Fox News tries to do that all the time but it doesn’t make global climate change go away, either.

I don’t watch Fox News because I prefer my news with a reality bias. Why would I want to contribute to the online left-wing version of Fox?

Freakboy was tased for physically struggling with police officers after being generally disruptive. I’m sure he had a legitimate beef with the officers for raining on his parade, but there comes a point when you have to realize you’ve lost this battle, and you’d be wise to cut your losses and take it up with the media after you’ve been processed. That point, for the record, is right before, “Don’t tase me, bro!”

So maybe these are only “blog posts” where “venting” is allowed (hello, you are reading a giant vent sandwich here), but when they are put on the front page of something like Huffington Post — which I thought was supposed to be something more than just a community blog — that changes things, or so I assumed. Snark and slanted analysis is fine, so long as you start from the facts, not simplistic and truncated versions of events. I’d expect this kind of distorted screed on DailyKos, which is why I don’t hang out there. And now, I’m not sure I want to hang out with the HuffPolians, either.

Not without a Taser of my own, anyway.