Clooneygate Comes to an End
Posted on March 22, 2006
The Associated Press attempts to make sense of the Great Arianna Huffington-George Clooney Blogging Disaster. In a nutshell, Arianna posted an essay on the Huffington Post that purported to be an essay written by George Clooney. In reality, the piece was a collection of different quotes uttered by Clooney in other interviews. Arianna said his publicist okayed it, Clooney said he didn't write it, he never okayed it, and that Arianna misled her readers. Now Arianna has aplogized -- to her readers. But not to Clooney.
Huffington acknowledged on her Web site Saturday that she was "blinded" to the issue of assembling a blog in which the source of the material wasn't clear, as was the case with Clooney.Arianna was wrong to post an essay on her site without revealing the true nature of the piece: that's misleading. But she seems to understand that what she did was wrong. But she really ought to send George some wine and a handwritten apology, don't you think? Otherwise, how in the world will she ever get any scoop about the upcoming Brangelina Baby?"I now realize that I made a big mistake in posting a blog without clearly identifying that the material in it didn't originate as a blog post, but was pieced together from previous interviews," she wrote. "I'm sorry I didn't see this earlier."
On Monday, Huffington said she considered the misunderstanding a "major lesson learned" and would put future snippets from interviews or conversations into her own blog. She also maintained that while she sent Clooney a sample blog "to show how it's done and encourage him to join the blogosphere, I will curb my enthusiasm and not do this in the future." Clooney's publicist, Stan Rosenfield, wasn't entirely satisfied. "She didn't apologize to George, did she?" he said Tuesday. "An apology to the readers was appropriate. But to my knowledge, she has not apologized to George." Clooney's comments in the Web posting faulted Democrats for muting their views before the start of the Iraq war.