Topic: WorldNetDaily
So it's come to this: Aaron Klein complaining about masturbation.
Klein devotes an entire July 4 WorldNetDaily article to an attempted hit job on AOL for publishing "an item on its main page about how men fake orgasms, recommending any male engaged in the practice should masturbate to help 'discover what stimulates you.'" At no point did Klein explain why masturbation is a bad thing; of course, he really couldn't since the AOL article (to which he failed to offer a link) he attacked was "medically reviewed" by a physician.
The ostensible goal of Klein's article was to paint the article as a consequence of AOL's merger with Huffington Post, where, he claims, "some have noticed a shift in AOL's content toward the Huffington Post's notorious liberal bent." Of course, this is a extremely poor example of it; the previous article in the "sexual health" section of the AOL EverydayHealth site that Klein is attacking, as listed at the end of it, carries the headline "The Anatomy of an Erection," and it was published in October 2009, well before the AOL-HuffPo merger. Klein does not explain what a "sexual health" website should be talking about in place of these subjects.
And while Klein is eager to identify Huffington Post as "liberal" -- which he does no less than five times in his article -- at no point does he cite the critics he describes as attacking HuffPo, such as American Thinker and the Media Research Center, as conservative. Klein even references the MRC's 2007 attack on HuffPo, which we've pointed out is utterly useless as "media research" because it cherry-picks 19 posts out of the tens of thousands on the website in order to attack HuffPo as "loaded with profanity and crude sexual and excretory metaphors." Of course, the point of such shoddy work is precisely so that right-wing hacks like Klein will mindlessly repeat it without examining the MRC's crappy methodology.
But let's look at the larger issue here: Why is someone stationed in Jerusalem writing about an American website publishing an article about masturbation? Isn't he supposed to be covering, you know, the Middle East?
Of the 23 articles Klein has written since June 1 only six carry a Jerusalem or Tel Aviv dateline and are devoted to Middle East issues. Nearly all of the rest are attacks on the Obama administration or other Democrats and liberals, which could have been written anywhere. Also, most of his Middle East-themed articles of late are anonymously sourced, so those are of marginal journalistic value as well.
Paying to keep Klein ensconced in Jerusalem seems like a needlessly expensive way for WND to pursue such right-wing hack work, since he's obviously doing little these days to justify being located there.
