Newsbusters: AOL is lying about the Playboy Rape List firing.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Hot Air readers.  Also: nice job scoring the interview, Ed.

Full disclosure: Mark Impomeni, who had been previously fired from AOL, is a RedState colleague.  Caleb Howe, who no longer writes for AOL, is a RedState colleague.  I have previously banned Tommy Christopher from RedState – and now follow him on Twitter and have linked to him when appropriate, because that banning was strictly business, nothing personal.  I used to buy Playboy when I was much younger, but only for the pictures of naked women.  I used to use AOL, back when you got charged for the amount of time that you spent online.

I think that covers it.

So, to review: a misogynistic writer for Playboy’s website wrote a column (screenshot here) listing the top ten conservative women who he’d like to rape*. The conservative blogosphere, not expecting this sort of story to start appearing before, say, October of 2011, reacted with a snarl; joined in by several liberal members of the blogosphere. Then one of the liberal critics (Tommy Christopher) got fired by AOL. Meanwhile, Playboy pulled the article…

Yes, a liberal blogger for AOL got fired, right after he published a swiftly-removed criticism of the Playboy piece.

Needless to say, AOL (in the form of their political site’s editor, Melinda Henneberger) is doing its level best to push back against even the suggestion that there was any causal relationship between Tommy Christopher’s Playboy criticism and his firing.    First Ms. Henneberger claimed that Mr. Christopher was going to be let go anyway.  Newsbusters quickly published an article that indicated that they had emails showing that Christopher was on good terms with AOL up to the very day of the firing.  Newsbusters also addressed Henneberger’s claim to not have even seen the article in question with a screenshot of the record of her deleting it** (and here’s another one of an internal AOL email indicating that the whole subject should be dropped).  Henneberger is now claiming that while she apparently did delete that article, after all, she didn’t actually read it; and that any internal/external emails out there that indicate that Christopher wasn’t getting fired until after this happened are not reflective of what was going on in real life; and how dare anyone criticize the motives of somebody who has worked for such bastions of journalistic integrity and couth as the New York Times, Newsweek, & Slate***.  And oh, yes: she wants you to know that Playboy is disgusting.  The exact quote is “Everything they do degrades women!”

Good to know, given that AOL/Time Warner has been doing business with the women-degraders for some time now.

At any rate, you may decide for yourself whether Ms. Henneberger and AOL Politics Daily has dug itself out of its hole.  Or whether either is going to be worth debating, linking to, reading, advertising with, or be taken seriously in the slightest.  It will be interesting to see who decides that the answer is yes…

Moe Lane

*See here for why I’m using that word.

**This is personally where I would have stopped digging.  Assuming, of course, that I would be the sort of person in the first place who would fire a blogger for not liking the fact that my company’s business associates were publishing rape lists.

***The Dallas Morning News we may have to grant her.

Crossposted to RedState.