Just In Case You Were Starting to Respect Henry Blodget...
Just when it looked like Henry Blodget was heading toward redemption with his Facebook coverage, his latest Business Insider troll bait is so over the top he's lost whatever goodwill he might have accumulated, and then some.
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The post is headlined "Why Do Some People Hate Jews?" Compounding the crass-seemingly headline was the post's illustration: a photo of two smiling ultra-Orthodox Jews. An updated version replaced the men with an image of Natalie Portman, as if that helped make the post seem less offensive.
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What's strange is that Blodget's post doesn't really say anything. It links out to a Telegraph story about that same inappropriate question getting pulled from a British national exam, and then asks the question of readers, "seriously." Clearly, it's troll-bait, designed to entice readers with scandal and rack up clicks for all the wrong reasons. It's also the end of Blodget's short stint as a reformed bad guy. "This had to happen right after I praised Blodget," tweeted Slate's Farhad Manjoo, in reference to his boosting of Blodget and Business Insider in Slate last week. Gizmodo's Sam Biddle made a PDF of the post so you can read it without giving BI the traffic. The Verge editor Chris Ziegler tweeted that "if there's a "nuclear option" in the desperate search for pageviews, blodget just selected it." That seems about right: Blodget's post is a little more than an hour old and has 10,000 views and counting, but it's a safe bet most of them are not from admirers. Sure, Blodget offended people, but he wins on traffic. Makes you wonder, in the words of Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski: Why Do Some People Hate Henry Blodget?
