GAWKER HIRES A MOLE TO SPY ON FOX NEWS

There’s a mole working at Fox News and feeding inside information to the often snarky Gawker.com website. In this person’s inaugural column, the focus is on the Fox News website in general and the Fox Nation blog in particular. The blog features reports from Fox reporters, then invites readers to comment on them. The blog’s moderators, the mole writes, on realizing that they had a problem with racist comments about President Obama, hired “one or two college kids to comb the comments for the most egregiously racist postings, and putting in automatic text filters that blocked various key words. Of course the intrepid commenters quickly found ways around these filters using letter substitutions and spacings, which is why many comments complain about our ‘n@gger president’ and the ‘M u s l i m in the White House.” The final straw, the mole writes, came when Fox Nation posted a story about President Obama’s 50th birthday party, featuring a montage of Obama with Charles Barkley, Chris Rock and Jay Z (who attended with White House staffers, DC politicians, and other celebrities). The headline: “Obama’s Hip Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs.” Commented the mole: “The post neatly summed up everything that had been troubling me about my employer: Non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts; and so on.” Clearly the mole expects to be found out. “But I can’t just leave quietly, can I? Where’s the fun in that?”