Insulting Mexican women… just another day at the Huffington Post

I’m in a snit about the Huffington Post right now, so rather than directly link, I’ll point you to the NON-COMMERCIAL MEXICAN site, Burro Hall for the first clue as to what brought on this bout of snititude:

… a marketing consultant named Betsy Perry … in the Huffington Post last week and … manages, in fewer than 500 words, to incorporate so many offensive and idiotic remarks about Mexico that, really, it defies our ability to excerpt it and still do justice to the author’s ignorance.

Ms. Perry, who was forced to resign from the New York City Commission on Women’s Issues, in part because of her offensive and idiotic remarks (I guess she somehow thought New York City’s large Mexican community did not include women, or — more likely — she just didn’t think at all), wrote a lame “apology” on the Huffington Post, which said the offending essay was being taken down… and then was followed by the offending essay!

This is not the first time the Huffington Post has published outrageously racist and boneheaded know-nothing material on Mexico. I was not the only one who complained back during the 2006 Presidential Elections about an article by some college kid (it was supposedly humor) saying “I didn’t know Mexican had elections… I thought the guy with the biggest mustache got to be president.”

Part two of this snit goes back to last December, when I was solicited by some third party, Global Post, which said “Do we have a deal for you!” … which came to mean THEY would profit from my posts here, by sending them to the Huffington Post.  I would get something called “exposure” … which I believe is a fatal condition afflicting those lost in the Sierra Madres or Chihuahua Desert.

It worked like this.  “Global Post would repost my material on commercial websites (and get paid for doing so) and I’d get…. squat.  My mama din’t raise no fool, and we had some back and forth correspondence, between myself, Global Post and “Nino Pitney” about the matter.

Pitney wrote, in an e-mail I received 31 December 2008:

Just to be clear, it is against our policy to run any of your material without your permission. As far as I know, we have not done that, but if we have, let me know and we will immediately remove it.

OH?

They did run my material today without a “by your leave.” It was short enough to be called an excerpt, and it does properly credit “Mex Files,” but a story about prostitutes (which I made damn sure was noted as a translation of a short AFP article) under a picture of high school kids is an insult to Mexican women, to Mexicans… and a violation of my authorial rights to boot. While I don’t mind the extra “hits”, as I said back in December, “if you plan to make a profit off my work, you damn well better pay me.”