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As a regular blogger on the Huffington Post / Chicago’s website, I recently encountered a situation which I believe is censorship for failing to have a proper “line” on next Tuesday’s elections. As allies of […]
Co-founder of the Chicago Coalition Against War & Racism and the Gay Liberation Network (www.GayLiberation.net), a Chicago-based LGBT direct action group which has been at the forefront of gay rights, anti-police brutality and anti-war organizing. He’s been one of the lead organizers of most of the city’s large anti-war protests for the last several years, including a march of 15,000 on Lake Shore Drive at the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He’s been arrested numerous times in various protests and was recently found not guilty of two felony counts from a January 2008 protest against a Chicago visit by then-President George W. Bush. In May he was among a handful of Western LGBT activists arrested along with dozens of Russians activists at a government-banned gay pride demonstration in Moscow, Russia. He currently is among the activists organizing a march on the Obama 2012 National Campaign Headquarters in Chicago on the 10th anniversary of America’s longest-ever war, the Afghanistan War. He and other activists are also helping organize the huge protests that will confront the May 2012 NATO/G8 meetings in Chicago.
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Comments
Hi, I’m the Chicago Editor for the Huffington Post. I gave Andy a blog in the first place and consistently post stories about the GLN’s work and activism. I think it’s pretty astounding that instead of contacting me for what was likely an oversight by the NY blog team, he went all over the internet trashing the Huffington Post. I have always immediately responded to any questions/concerns from bloggers, and am insulted that Mr. Thayer chose to do this instead of trying to resolve the matter with The Huffington Post.
I think we don’t have all the relevant information on what truly went down here. I’d imagine there’s a bit of a backlog of election-related posts from the thousands of HuffPo bloggers and I really hope that had more to do with the piece being “censored” than Andy’s point-of-view on the issue. Our community is too small for queer-on-queer censorship, but I don’t doubt there are many LGBT folk out there who would rather not see this blog posted anywhere.
I’m really not sure one can accurately paint this as “censorship” given the facts as they lay, Feast/Andy.
As soon as the blog team was notified of the error (which I had to learn about here) the post was published. They had emailed Andy asking about a photo credit. That is it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-thayer/who-cares-who-wins-the-el_b_774265.html
Jen, Joe, et al,
While I certainly accept that particularly non-profit operations have their share of hick-ups, the fact remains that the post, now three days after submission, is no where readily visible on the Chicago HuffPo home page, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chicago/
Yes, you can google it and get it that way, but you have to know it exists in the first place. Several other later posts by others went up “on the wire” in the left hand column.
Re: the request for info about the photo, I responded quickly to the request for info about it even though my submission of it noted that I was the photographer, and thus presumably like anything that I have written, had already released the rights on it to HuffPo.
The fact remains that anyone just looking at the HuffPo Chicago home page would not know the submission exists.
My irritation arose out of the fact that if a submission was going to be rejected or hidden (which is your right), I would have appreciated a straight-forward communication of that fact, so that I could “shop it” elsewhere, rather than waiting with things so close to election day already.
Andhy
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Honestly andy by saying ‘vote green’ and such, you are still attaching us to a party. The simple fact is even if somehow you get every gay to vote green it’s not enough for them to do anything but split up the ticket and let the republicans take over again. The cold truth is that while we can’t be bound to one party slavishly, we also should make sure bigots don’t get in, and pretty much any option that involves ‘and let the republicans take the election’ is going ‘and let the bigots in’.
Obama is the centrist, corporation-centric, president he vowed to be when he fought so hard against that oh so horrid and wicked title ‘socialist’, but I’m not ashamed to say I early voted democrat and did a lot of legwork for them, because here in Texas it’s either that or go ‘well ok Republicans you can have it again’ and resign myself without even trying.
In some areas you do have Green party guys doing decent, but most of us don’t have that luxury, and I’ll take apathy over hatred any day.