Huffpo and the Blue Scrotum Monkey Story

Those not familiar with the Huffington Post, a blog unaffectionately nicknamed Huffpo, founded and owned by Ariana Huffington and Kenneth Lerer in 2005, aren’t missing much.

The muckraking Ariana’s website, known mostly for leftist hate speech and distortions, outdid itself the other day with a tape involving radio commentator John Gibson and the latest monkey news.

Monkeys certainly seem very much in the news lately what with that Connecticut chimp which ate a woman’s face and was killed and the monkey cartoon in the New York Post which Al Sharpton interpreted as racist. This story involved a third monkey, on the loose in a Seattle zoo, identifiable in the wild by its bright blue scrotum.

Since that was part of its description, the woman reporters on Fox News felt they had to incorporate that color facet in the story but did so gingerly and with a touch of embarassment, probably wishing the vervet monkey bore a vivid blue nose instead.

That should have been it, reported and done with but closure was not to be. The Huffington Post decided to run with and distort the video so that it would appear Gibson was monkeying around with colorful racial politics.

Huffpo doctored and published the last few seconds of the Fox video so that Gibson seemed to be saying that the new Attorney General Holder had a bright blue scrotum. After a blogger caught the alteration, Huffpo offered a less than abject apology: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/19/john-gibson-compares-eric_n_168377.html.

It was indeed fortunate that the doctoring by Huffpo was discovered and admitted before Al Sharpton was forced to interrupt his Post protests in order to picket the Fox News HQ for its allegedly blue slander of the AG.

The whole story about the scrotum scandal can be found here in an extended video, [http://homepage.mac.com/mkoldys/blog/jdp.html]. For primate scholars, the biological explanation for the color of vervet scrota is provided here: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/humor/random_scholar/vervet_scrotal_color_2007.html