ARGH!

I received an innocent looking email this morning... it had just my email address in the 'To' line and did not appear to be too spam-y... it was addressed to me as 'a writer' who might be interested in their site. Now I have my email address on my web site because, hey, I WANT people to contact me with things related to writing...

Well this particular site was a "news" site. And you would be correct if you assumed that my use of "quotation marks" there implied total sarcasm.

Let's just say they were on the opposite political spectrum from me. If I'm FOX, they are CNN. If they are Condi Rice, I'm Hilary Clinton.

There's nothing wrong with that... there are plenty of positions to take in politics in this world. I'll read just about anything because I like to stay informed and hear both sides of a story. If I try view an event from both sides... or from every side possible, then I think it helps me to form my own opinion. I don't just take the common stance of my political party of choice without thinking it through...

But here's what irritated me... the web site (no, I'm not linking to it...) was so very one sided with heds (headings) that screamed total bias. Then to top it off, they had a section titled 'Publishing Standards' which stated "The reporting must be fair and unbiased."

Yeah. Ok. The 'articles' listed were just opinion and propaganda. It was just one side trying to take the form of a 'respectable news source' ... when in reality they are just trying to validate themselves.

And then there was the kicker under their Use of Material heading:

Payments for any submitted work are not available for any Contributors under any means. The work that is sent to the XXX is submitted freely, and voluntarily. The XXX does not own any submitted work but essentially 'borrows' the contributed material for a period of one year of date of submission. This allows the Editorial process to view any sent material and use it in the best situations possible, a year is given for this to take place. The authors of submitted material fully own their work and are clearly free to do what they want with it outside of the XXX.

Yeah, they are 'borrowing' the material... what crap. If you publish something... pay for it.

I'm a little irritated. Can you tell? So I sent them a slightly testy email and made sure they knew to remove me from their email list.