Clooney vs. Huffington: Who Wants a Celebrity Death-Match?

Remind me to never, ever, fake a blog post from George Clooney here at Cinematical, because he really does not take kindly to that. Arianna Huffington knows that firsthand now - she posted a "blog post" purported to be from Clooney on her Huffington Post Blog on Monday, in which Clooney supposedly slammed Dems who voted for the war in Iraq as being afraid of being labeled liberal. 

The post, however, wasn't actually written by Clooney at all - it was compiled from quotes from interviews Clooney did with The Guardian and Larry King Live. Clooney reacted by issuing a statement calling Huffington's methods "purposefully misleading", and in an interview with New York Daily News' Lloyd Grove, reportedly said of a conversation he had with Huffington, "She said some things I won't share, but she did tell me that this could be bad for me -- bad for my career.  Well, screw you!"

Huffington, who characterizes the whole thing as a "misunderstanding", sent Grove emails from Clooney's PR rep backing up her assertion that she had permission to cobble together the blog post. Pay attention, Ms. Huffington, and you might just learn something from this little kerfuffle: in the blogosphere, it is considered very bad form to write a blog post that you claim to be written by someone else, even if you insist someone else gave you permission to do it. When you do that, you are lying to your readers, and that tends to piss off your readers, in addition to the movie star whose name you use to boost your traffic with the fake post. It might also have the undesirable effect of making people question the veracity of your site overall - after all, if you thought it was ethical to do this once, who knows how many times it's happened that the person whose name was used didn't speak out?

Some movie stars might just sit back and let Huffington get away with this rather than risk the backlash that could come from speaking out, but thankfully Clooney is not among their number. Huffington has managed to score a slew of interesting people, including Deepak Chopra, Eric Alterman, Harry Shearer and David Mamet to write for her blog, which some initially blew off as a giant ego-trip. This kind of controversy will serve more to hurt Huffington's cred than Clooney's, though. In the future, Ms. Huffington, remember what your grandmother told you: honesty is the best policy.