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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged The Huffington Post

1. May 19, 2011 07:43 PM

   A HuffPost Scoop, Overlooked By the Mainstream Press

   HUD finds big banks defrauded taxpayers, but few follow the story

   By Ryan Chittum

   Shahien Nasiripour scored a foreclosure-fraud scandal scoop for The Huffington Post on Monday, reporting that audits of the mortgage industry conducted by HUD's inspector general found five giant banks—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial—defrauded taxpayers and violated the False Claims Act. HUD sent the findings to the Justice Department, which will now have to decide...

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2. April 15, 2011 12:54 AM

   Audit Notes: HuffPo Shines, Libor Lineup, An FT Slip

   By Ryan Chittum

   I don't know about you, but the best news story I read today on the Levin-Coburn Report wasn't in the Journal or the Times, Bloomberg or Reuters. It was by William Alden and Shahien Nasiripour in The Huffington Post. It's a clear presentation of the report's findings on Goldman Sachs, led by the fact that Senator Levin wants to refer...

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3. August 15, 2011 08:15 PM

   Audit Notes: One Termer, HAMP Dwindles, The Crisis Narrative Shift

   By Ryan Chittum

   These two graphs from an NYT story this weekend pretty much show why Barack Obama is going to be a one-termer: Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, want him to maintain a pragmatic strategy of appealing to independent voters by advocating ideas that can pass Congress, even if they may not have...

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4. December 16, 2011 06:20 PM

   Audit Notes: Walmart Rewrite, AMR’s Strategic Default, Debtors’ Prison

   By Ryan Chittum

   When The Huffington Post's Lila Pearl Shapiro wrote a critical story about Walmart's labor practices earlier this week, the company gave it a sort of reprint in its internal news service. It just happened to leave out all the pesky critical parts: A day after The Huffington Post published an article that examined a new effort to organize workers at...

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5. April 13, 2012 06:58 PM

   Bloomberg Scrutinizes JPMorgan Chase

   By Ryan Chittum

   Bloomberg News has an important story today showing how press favorite Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase has ramped up risk in its chief investment office, which has become a major profit center for the bank. The CIO is supposed to be, in the words of The Huffington Post's Mark Gongloff, "an unassuming, harmless operation that makes sure all of the bank's...

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6. January 13, 2012 12:00 PM

   Critical Juncture for HuffPo Science

   With new section, David Freeman has an opportunity to raise the bar

   By Curtis Brainard

   The Huffington Post’s announcement last week that it had launched a new section intended to be a “one-stop shop for the latest scientific news and opinion” incited a flurry of circumspect commentary about whether or not the site was turning over “a new leaf” in science coverage. Over the years, The Huffington Post has drawn widespread criticism for publishing misleading...

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7. August 1, 2011 01:32 PM

   Follow a 99er Through the Press As the Money Runs Out

   The long jobs crisis, with no end in sight, should prompt us to revisit older stories

   By Ryan Chittum

   Now that it's certain that our leaders have gone all in on austerity, despite a 9.2 percent unemployment rate and an economy that looks like it's sliding back into recession, it's time for the press to redouble its focus on the unemployed, and particularly the long-term jobless. Actually, it was already long past time for that. Now it's really time...

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8. October 14, 2011 06:46 PM

   HuffPost Finds the Pain in Goldman’s For-Profit Education Firm

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's not hard to imagine that letting boiler rooms push poor folks into taking out impossible-to-shed federal loans is a really bad idea, particularly when it's to pay big bucks to attend your crappy for-profit "college." The Huffington Post's Chris Kirkham has a long look today at how one for-profit education company, EDMC, went downhill after Goldman Sachs & Co....

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9. April 8, 2011 05:15 PM

   HuffPost: An SEC Wrist Slap for Fleecing an Indian Tribe (UPDATED)

   Wachovia dinged with a small settlement, and no individuals are charged

   By Ryan Chittum

   Good for The Huffington Post's Shahien Nasiripour for giving us a closer look at Wachovia's settlement for defrauding an Indian tribe—the Zunis—with toxic CDOs. Surely this is a story that deserves more coverage. This is what we've suspected happened all along in the crash: That Wall Street had it's "oh, shit" moment in 2006 and 2007 and unloaded as much...

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10. May 3, 2012 04:55 PM

    Memo to Kevin Drum

    Mediocre stories about Social Security are not okay

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Dear Kevin: I have not written to you before, but I do know your work from the health reform debate. Since your comments about my recent CJR post have made it to the thousands who devour words on The Huffington Post, it’s fitting I respond to your piece. In the post in question, I criticized both the gloom and doom...

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11. May 9, 2012 03:10 PM

    OffTheBus takes a ‘breather’

    New technologies and partnerships in the works

    By Alysia Santo

    OffTheBus, The Huffington Post’s citizen journalism program for campaign coverage, hasn’t posted new content in almost a month. But the company says, though it may look like the wheels have popped off the bus, it’s just taking a pit stop. “It’s giving that brief breather before the rush begins,” says HuffPost Media Group’s chief of staff, Jimmy Soni. The lull...

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12. April 16, 2012 05:15 PM

    Six degrees of aggregation

    How The Huffington Post ate the Internet

    By Michael Shapiro

    Of the many and conflicting stories about how The Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous...

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13. April 15, 2011 01:33 PM

    Skimpy Coverage of Levin-Coburn Report From WSJ, NYT

    McClatchy, The Huffington Post, and Bloomberg are much better

    By Ryan Chittum

    If you're looking for second-day coverage of the Levin-Coburn report in The Wall Street Journal or New York Times—as I was—prepare to look elsewhere. The Journal gives us all of three paragraphs of boilerplate in the middle of yet another A1 story about how the SEC is going to settle with the banks on CDOs. The Times puts a few...

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14. May 17, 2011 11:14 AM

    The Big, and Little, Mortgage-Fraud News

    By Felix Salmon

    Shahien Nasiripour had a very important scoop yesterday—a set of confidential federal audits has found a pattern of mortgage fraud at the nation’s five largest mortgage companies. The victim? Uncle Sam. The findings have been passed to the Justice department, which could prosecute the banks under the False Claims Act, which Shahien describes as “a Civil War-era law crafted as...

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15. April 14, 2011 05:50 PM

    The Levin-Coburn Report Coverage

    The WSJ and NYT whiff on possible Goldman Sachs criminal referrals

    By Ryan Chittum

    There's all kinds of stuff to chew on in the new Levin-Coburn report, which looks like the toughest such report we've seen to date on the culprits of the financial crisis. But the coverage is hit or miss. Check The Wall Street Journal, which puts its story on C1. This one probably hould have gone on A1 of the nation's...

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16. May 9, 2011 12:40 PM

    U.S. Oil Is Limited and Fungible, the HuffPost Reports

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Huffington Post's Michael McAuliff has a good piece of reporting on the potential impact of a bill the House passed last week that would make it easier to drill for oil. The HuffPost pulls a couple of quotes from Republican House members to show the flawed thinking behind the bill: "I think high gas prices and high energy costs...

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