While ABC News might be in bed with Arianna Huffington, her neighbors most certainly are not. According to a recent listing on Zillow.com, they’ve packed up and left Brentwood, where Arianna makes her home when she isn’t dodging plagiarism issues or faking stories by George Clooney. If you can stand the whiff of being downstream from Arianna’s huge ego, why not make her your very own girl next door?

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Reporting news is becoming ever more tricky for the liberal Huffington Post blog. One of their writers has dissected a recent piece in the Politico, saying that the words the authors of the piece use to write about Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama indicate a conservative bias. The words, in fact, do support that contention, a contention that we’ve made several times in the past. But the Huffington Post noting that a publication is biased is just another pot calling a kettle black, and will give conservatives fodder to ignore and even mock the serious allegations.

By calling itself liberal from the outset and now attempting to beef up its reporting of serious journalism, the Huffington Post leaves itself open to criticism. Why Arianna Huffington, a longtime conservative who only converted to being a Democrat after her Republican politician husband admitted he was gay, felt it was necessary to become a publisher of a liberal blog is an issue that deserves more exploration. Still, maybe the issue can be summed up best with one word: opportunism. And that’s sad, because Huffington’s opportunism now casts a serious shadow over all of her staff’s work.

Earlier: ABC News Now Works With the Huffington Post

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Howie Kurtz, the media writer for the Washington Post, today uncovers a fishy relationship between a journalism giant and a liberal blog. While Kurtz didn’t make much wind about it, he reveals within an item about GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee that the Huffington Post and ABC News have teamed up to report the news.

“ABC, working with the Web site, interviewed a former parole board member who said Huckabee had pressed the panel to release the convict, Wayne Dumond,” Kurtz writes regarding a well-referenced story the Huffington Post published last week.

The quote raises an important question: How common is it for an apparently nonpartisan news source to team up with an admittedly liberal Web site in reporting a news item? Isn’t this a case of liberal media bias at its worst?

Also raising questions about the news relationship, Kurtz quotes Huckabee as saying he’s “amazed” that ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross ignored information he provided to him.

Earlier: Top ABC News Investigative Journalist’s Tactics Called Into Question

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“How is Paul getting so many activists to New Hampshire?” the Huffington Post is asking about the popular insurgent GOP presidential candidate. “It’s simple — he isn’t.”

The liberal blog seems to be insisting that the only reason Paul is getting support in New Hampshire is that a person who used to work for Google is organizing in-state and out-of-state activists to support him there.

Several New Hampshire-based supporters of Paul are expressing outrage that HuffPo is making it appear as if Paul doesn’t already have strong support in the state.

The scandal comes on the heels of GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee saying that the items the Huffington Post calls “news” can’t be trusted because the publication is biased.

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“I’ve just spent two weeks travelling (sic) and speaking with media elites in L.A., Chicago, NYC, and D.C. and among other things, I was repeatedly told that The New York Times and The L.A. Times are ’sitting on a BIG Clinton story,”‘ Huffington Post blogger Bill Robinson reports. “What concerns me is that this story has nothing to do with Hillary, her policy positions, her record, or her presidential potential. The ‘big story’ everyone is sitting on apparently has to do with the many current affairs of Bill Clinton, whom (sic), they will allege, has a gal in every port. I know, I know, you roll your eyes, you yawn, you wonder how anyone could possibly care about such things, true or not, when there is so much at stake in this upcoming election. But then you see what is going on with today’s Trent Lott/gay hustler rumors, this week’s Hillary/lesbian aide rumors, and you remember that the ghost of Karl Rove still haunts us.”

Related: LA Times Sitting on Explosive Prez Candidate Story?

And: Steamy LA Times Story About New Bill Clinton Affair?

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Max Follmer, a writer with the Huffington Post, is reporting that the alleged Sen. Trent Lott / Benjamin Nicholas affair never happened — and that there is no documenting information to support it. However, in no uncertain terms, there is — as Nicholas, Big Head DC and Larry Flynt know. Indeed, the denial posts from Nicholas that Follmer mentions in his piece as appearing on Nicholas’ blog are simply not there. Big Head DC also stands completely by our previous story that ABC newsman Sam Donaldson’s number appears in the records of alleged “DC Madam,” and that the ABC network covered up that fact when it reported Palfrey’s story in May.

Related: Known Libelist Now Works for Huffington Post

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A person who walks a lot and talks a lot like Wonkette publisher Nick Denton today weighed in on a Portfolio item about the Huffington Post apparently turning a profit (despite not paying a vast majority of its bloggers, we might add):

First off, if you look at the Nielson numbers, her traffic has been falling off during the past few months. (And if you look at the alexa numbers, it’s clear the site peaked about a year ago, and has seen a slow but steady erosion of it’s audience.) Second - and here’s the really key thing: According to Nielson, she has 1.4 million unique visitors a month. This number is always suspect, on all web sites, as it doesn’t take into account people who clear out their web cache and cookies every night - which means that one person visiting 20 times can be counted as 20 unique viewers.Moreover, remember this: 10,000 people, clicking 5 times a day is 50,000 hits a day, or 350,000 hits a week, or 1.4 million hits a month. In other words, a very small number of people quickly adds up to what appears to be a large audience, but isn’t.

Denton always likes to talk about how well his Gawker blog network is doing, so that’s why, we assume, he chimed in. However! Another commenter added an embarrassing little data point after Denton’s missive. “NickD, if you’re the NickD whom I think you are, can you elaborate on your own site’s traffic?” asked the commenter. “How does it compare to HuffPo’s, and portfolio.com’s for that matter? I’ve heard mixed reports.” And then the commenter linked to this nifty little chart: Read more…

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In celebration of the launch of Arianna Huffington and Barry Diller’s 23/6 news/snark blog today, we already copied one of their items. And now it’s time for us to copy Gawker’s gossip about the new site: “Also we hope the 23/6 kids don’t hate working for 23/6 as much as we hear pretty much everyone currently can’t stand working at HuffPo.” Wait, we’re not copying, since we’ve heard that, too. In fact, we think Jason Linkins might have mentioned that to someone we know!

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Jason Linkins has recently gone from being an unpaid HuffPo freelancer to a paid political blogger for the site. Arianna Huffington must not have a very good background check in place because the blogger, who goes by the DCeiver name online, tends to libel his colleagues. Here’s just a sampling of proof from his personal blog: Read more…

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Sure, Valerie Plame can afford to blog for free at Huffington Post, but is potential exposure enough of a reason for most people to contribute to the site without pay? Arianna Huffington, is, after all, rich, and it’s suspected that the site is putting plenty more dimes in her pockets. Not that we think Candy Spelling deserves any extra bucks, but still.

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