Has the Huffington Post Jumped the Shark?

Back in my high school days, I remember taking a study break in the school library when a friend notice something unusual for the setting.

"They're playing Metallica on the radio," he said.

It would have seemed unfathomable: heavy metal in a high school library! Alas, this was 2000. It wasn't 1992 anymore. Once something becomes mainstream, it loses some of edge.

Do you want your tax dollars paying for this nonsense?

The same can now be said of the Huffington Post. What started as a combination of sledgehammer headlines about the major news stories of the day, coupled with new left commentary, is slowly but surely joining the ranks of the mainstream media that it for so long has protested.

It's not just the merger with AOL or the birth of Huffington Post television that marks this occasion. Rather, it is quality of Huffington Post's new found homegrown reporting that recently has made a disturbing editorial statement.

In an exclusive write-up, Huffington Post's Lia Shapiro covered a story about the State of California's decision to outlaw gay therapy. Fair enough. It would seem that anything advertised as a "medical treatment," yet provided absolutely no value, should be illegal. The fact that gay "conversion therapy" results is numerous suicides is even more cause for condemnation.

But that's not quite how Ms. Shapiro sees it. "There aren't any scientific studies showing that the practice [gay conversion therapy] actually causes harm" opines Shaprio.  Yet in the following sentence, she contradicts herself: "Anecdotal reports of depression, even suicide, abound, and a task force convened by the American Psychological Association found the practice to be both harmful and ineffective. "

Harmful. Ineffective. Might cause sudden death. If gay conversion therapy were a consumer product, the public would be screaming to take it off the shelves. But hey, if Huffington Post is going mainstream, it has got to present both sides of the story. 

I can only wonder if Ms. Huffington, herself once a prominent political conservative before she discovered that her husband of 11 years was bi-sexual, believes that gay therapy is the harmless practice that should be unregulated. All I can say, I sincerely hope not.