link:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
FEATURED BLOG(GROUP 6) THE HUFFINGTON POST
The Huffington Post is a blog that focuses on every aspect of American life. It offers different topics of choice from politics and business to sports and style. This website is unique because it is relatable to everyone regardless of ethnicity or gender. Although the website offers information from different news sources and columnists the founder of the website is Arianna Huffington. What I would like for everyone to pay attention to is the credibility of the blog, are the creators of this website utilizing specific forms of rhetoric to try and sway the audience? I hope you guys enjoy :)
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I read the article called "The Man Who Shattered our Economy." The article is not terribly well-written. The entire purpose of the article is to slander a businessman, Sandy Weill. The article says that this man supported legislation to repeal government restrictions on big businesses, and therefore was able to keep his large personal fortune while his employees lost millions of dollars. The article plays on pathos, trying to get the reader angry at this man. However, there is little ethos and logos. There is no call to action, no offered solution. Just slander.
ReplyDeleteIn glancing over the main page of the Huffington site, the advertising style for many of the blogs is very effective. One reoccuring topic that seems to be buzzing interestingly concerns the world of women and activism for women's rights (as the creator of the site is a woman). One provocative picture from the blog site illustrated a topless Ukranian women's rights group protesting. Then, on another topless spree, an article uses a picture of an animated protest from Taiwan focusing on "TSA Pat-Downs." The blog site does a great job with utilizing eye-catching images to attract readers.
ReplyDeleteAnother good thing about the site is keeping visitors updated with the latest and most heat filled topics. Every couple of minutes, the site changes gears with a new headliner blog; most of them addressed American politics. I think this builds on the ethos of the site to fulfill its duties as a place for "Breaking News and Opinion."
Overall, I like the site and its incorporation of diverse topics ranging from politics to celebrity media to foreign activism; and the controversies wrapped around each topic. An unbiased reader can leave the site more educated and liberal by researching the blogs from Huffingtonpost.com.
I read the article about 4 Lokos playing a role in a college student's accidental suicide. A college student partied for 30 straight hours and drank at least 3 cans of 4 Loko. He was acting crazy, grabbed a gun and accidentally shot himself, thinking the safety was on, and killed himself. His parents are suing the makers of 4 Loko for their son's death. I HATE hearing about people suing others when it wasn't the other person's fault. Did the makers of 4 Loko kill him? No, they made a an alcoholic drink and the college student was stupid enough to drink multiple cans AND stupid enough to grab a gun and accidentally shoot himself. It is the college student's fault, no one else's. I like this site because it has articles that make you think and can actually get you passionate about a cause or an event, such as the article I read. I also liked that the site had many different topics such as sports, comedy, religion, politics, college, media, and multiple different cities in the United States. This site offers alot of variety to keep anyone entertained.
ReplyDeleteI read the article about "George Soros Tells Progressive Donors Obama Might Not Be The Best Investment." The article talks about how George Soros told a group at a Democracy Alliance gathering (millionaire progressives were attending) that if Obama was not going to do what "[they] need," then they should support someone else. This article plays on the ethos of George Soros. He has, for a long time, supported liberals and Democrats with millions of dollars and has started groups such as "Media Matters" to combat conservative television (FOX really, MSNBC and CNN aim for a different audience). Back to the ethos, they are using the fact that he usually supports liberals to show how much has erroded in the current President's popularity from the 2008 election. The people reading this article would get the impression that if the richest progressive in the country is questioning his support of Obama, then other people might follow suit. However, I feel it is right to point out that the article switches its arguement towards the end to focus on campaign funding and corporations. I felt this hurt the overall argument since it was off topic and almost to the point of hypocricy.
ReplyDeleteI did not read a specific article but I looked around at all the different areas of the site. The interface of the Huffington Post is like a newspaper, which it is trying to strive for since it is "the Internet newspaper", since it has 3 very, very long columns. The beginning of the front page usually is a giant picture with a giant title, it's sort of overwhelming, but catches your attention. They also do this with most of the articles by using a provocative picture.
ReplyDeleteWhat I thought was cool was that some hot topic issues or people have their own sections with all the articles, photos, blog posts, and etc that mention her. Then I thought of an idea, because I had been on the site before and know that Arianna Huffington is a democrat decided to look up a page of any democrat, so I picked Nancy Pelosi, and in all the photos of her on her specific news page were nice, acceptable, formal photos. Then I was like what about a republican? What about John Boehner? And in all his photos he's making a dumb face or is Photoshopped. The site uses bad/good photos of people to influence their opinions in an implicit way.
I couldn't find anything about anyone who writes posts and works for the Huffington post to find out their ethos, although Arianna does have lots of credibility.
A lot of traffic on the site goes to the comedy section of the site (which makes me doubt the seriousness of the site even before this post), but a lot of the commenting is on political issues. And most of the "news" somehow is bashing republicans.
The main page of the website covers a large array of topics, but the tabs with categories at the top makes it more manageable to find what you are looking for. I scrolled down the page and found an interesting article about Warren Buffett the billionaire. In it he states that the rich should be taxed more. This is an odd point of view because people rarely want to be taxed more if instead they could keep their money. It also states that Bill Gates has come out in favor of Washington state passing a measure to raise taxes. And the title of the article is meant to look like this is the consensus opinion of all the wealthy in America. "Rich - have it better than we've ever had it - Millionaires to Obama: Tax US!" With a title like that you would assume that all rich people want to be taxed more and trying to play the rhetoric like that is typical of the liberal view of taxation on the wealthy. However, to claim that all the wealthy want to have higher taxes just because two of the wealthiest men in this country want higher taxes is a hasty generalization and logical fallacy.
ReplyDeleteI read an article about the reaction of a christian rights activist to the recent awarding of the medal of honor. In the article, the activist describes the honor as becoming too feminist. The writer argues against this perception using various techniques. The first of these aspects was putting a biography of the writer right at the beginning of the article. This is obviously an attempt to show the reader that this is a reliable author. Then the author gives a short summary of the situation so that the reader has background knowledge of the argument. Then the author uses strong language and visualization to grab a hold of the reader's attention. The author paints the picture of the activist as a purely emotional character in order to damage his credibility. Finally, the author gives another example of the activist in the essay making controversial statements. This is used to reiterate the fact that the word of the activist isn't to be trusted and acts like a final point to the author's argument.
ReplyDeleteAfter looking through a couple articles it was fairly obvious that the huffington post has a very large liberal user base. Even the authors themselves took a very anti-conservative approach to some of the topics. Regardless, this blog has a multitude of topics displayed at the top of the front page which makes navigating the website easy. However, I thought the front page itself was a bit cluttered and could use a more organized layout in order to attract visitors into the website. I read a few articles and noticed each user on the website has a "fan" count displayed on every post they make. I'm not sure how the fanning system works entirely but I have seen people "fan" other users after seeing a post that they thought was well-constructed or proved a good point. I think this is the websites attempt to use logos in giving credibility to posters that contribute to the blog. Users with plenty of "fans" are easily seen as credible and in that comes logical appeal to the posts those users make.
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ReplyDeleteI agree with davis3214 that the main page of the site is very very clustered. However, I scrolled down the page and immediately found something interesting to me; “How Hazardous are Laptops to Your Health?”
ReplyDeleteThis article, originally from AOL Health, gave information about a few specific things that laptops can do to our health. Have you ever put a laptop on your lap? I have, because it's a laptop! This article talks about the “toasted skin syndrome” in which the vent of your laptop, which is usually on the bottom left corner, might cause spongy PERMANENT discolorations on your left leg over time depending on how hot the vent of your laptop gets. Now I'm pretty glad I stopped working on my laptop on my bed (I would have it on my lap). It really does warm up till it starts to hurt. Furthermore, if I do this for a couple of days in a row, my left leg actually starts feeling a burning sensation that's quite irritating. Thus, I agree with this article completely.
With that aside, let's get back into the format and layout of the website. After reading the article, I checked out the cool stuff around it (excluding the advertisements). The Huffington Post lets you do typical things with an article such as printing it out in a printer-friendly format, rating it (not from 1~10, but with “weird” to “amazing” to “crazy”), commenting on it, “liking” it on Facebook, etc. One thing I really liked was how this website helps you find what you want to know or read. Compared to the clustered main page, after you find an article you like, it's much easier to find more articles you would like from the same page for the reason that The Huffington Post provides many links to precisely related topics or whole articles for you to read.
One thing I do want to question about The Huffington Post is whether or not it's an activist site at all. Every time I question this, I go to the “about us” page to figure that out. Unfortunately, this site does not provide information about its purpose on that page. What do you think? It does focus on a couple of activist-able issues in the US but it doesn't seem to contain any articles that would encourage people to “activate” upon those issues.
I read the article "Warren Buffet: I'Should be paying a lot more in taxes'" and just found it really funny. What he says is completely true; taxes should be based on the availability of money a person can pay, meaning, if you have more then pay more taxes. Also this shouldn't stop at 200K incomes it should be a higher limit because there are people that have a lot more money than that. I am 100% in favor of what Warrent Buffet says.
ReplyDeleteOn another matter, this blog is a very highly resourceful place for news. They have a lot of sections including an entertainment, politics, sports, business and religion sections among the other 27 sections. They have very credible sources like reporters that have worked for other types of news sources. Some of the writers are also leaders of activism groups or CEO's of non-profit organizations with a cause. One thing that I didn't like about this blog was that there was just too much information on the first page and that was overwhelming. On overall, this is a very good news blog.
I read a few articles in on the Huffington Post and also looked at the overall format of the website. And what i found interesting that for a so called internet newspaper it is not laid out like a newspaper at all if you compare the new york times online to the Huffington Post the look nothing alike Huffington has a lot of attention grabbing headlines and bold font a lot more like the Drudge Report then the Times which has all the font the same size and has accurate headlines not sensationalized ones. Also from reading the articles it becomes more apparent that this is more blog then anything else because the articles are very short especially if your comparing it to the average newspaper. Plus this is clearly a liberal website like the Drudge Report is clearly a conservative website and the problem i find with that is that it caters to a small audience on one side of the political spectrum which causes the members of the other end of the political spectrum to attack it and as for moderates they are one again left in the middle without a voice.
ReplyDeleteI read the article about the banning of 4 Lokos and discontinuing of shipments to New York. While I have my own opinions about that subject, I can't help but notice that the statements in this post were pretty much just factual without any opinions being offered which I found interesting.
ReplyDeleteThe rest of the blog seemed to be interested in stating facts as well and while there were opinions stated, they weren't prevalent throughout the blog.
As I read the blog and the stories that were being posted, I too noticed that the articles did not have any voice. They all just stated the facts, nothing more, nothing less. This made me think that this site was less of a blog and more of a news website. Honestly I like these sites more than blogs just because they allow the reader to form their own opinions about the subjects instead of an author forcing their own opinion on the reader. All in all I found this site to be very informational but not very opinionated about what they post.
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