Huffington Post hits back at Murdoch’s Leveson Inquiry remarks

The Huffington Post today brushed aside accusations from Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch that its success was largely due to “stealing" content, according to Politico.

Murdoch was again appearing today before the Leveson Inquiry into allegations of unlawful invasion of privacy and bribery in the gathering of information by News Corporation media outlets.

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The Huffington Post was the most visited website for political news in January, with 11.5 million unique visitors that month, according to Quantcast data cited by the Poynter Institute’s MediaWire. The site has pioneered the technique of aggregating information from other sites, a practice that is now widespread.

The news site won a Pulitzer prize this month for its coverage of the lives of military personnel after active duty.

The Guardian reported today that Murdoch had said in passing that HuffPost had “quite cleverly” evolved into a general interest news site but he alleged that it had done so by “mainly just stealing stories from existing newspapers.”

In an e-mail to Politico, HuffPost Executive Editor Tim O’Brien wrote that the news site was a powerful engine generating its own reporting.

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“I know that Rupert's having a hard time remembering everything these days — as the Leveson inquiry shows — but we are busily and happily employing and deploying over 400 journalists, and we recently won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, so I'd like to invite him to drop by our newsroom sometime for a visit,” O’Brien was quoted as saying.