I am pissed.

So, yesterday I posted a comment about a piece by one Andy Borowitz at HuffPo.  In it, he supposedly quoted Newt Gingrich:

"She's only wearing that fake cast to help her rack up votes," Mr. Gingrich said. "The minute she's confirmed, she'll whip it off and start dancing a jig."

While Ms. Sotomayor reportedly broke her ankle while rushing to catch a plane, the former House Speaker said, "The fake-ankle-cast thing is the oldest trick in the book."

I posited that Gingrich must have been joking, since the quote seemed pretty unhinged otherwise.  Well, thanks to a comment left by the Communications Director for Gingrich Communications, I now know that the whole HuffPo piece was satire.

This makes me angry.  I will admit that part of my reaction is embarrassment at having fallen for a piece of satire, though at least I recognized that a joke of some sort was at play.  But nowhere is the post marked as satire, unless you happen to read all of the article tags and notice that the last one is "comedy news."  Perhaps I should have been more eagle-eyed, but I missed it.  Their "read more" link redirects you to a subscription page for the "Borowitz Report."  If you aren't interested in subscribing, as I was not, then you aren't given any information that would indicate that the piece was satire.  Admittedly, I could have looked into more articles by Mr. Borowitz and gotten an indication that he was a comedian, but the burden to figure out the joke was on the reader.

The piece was flagged on the HuffPo main page along-side all the other "news," and thus there was no reason not to take it as seriously as anything else that they are ostensibly reporting.  And I think that this is inappropriate for a page that purports to be a source of news.  The Onion doesn't mix actual reportage in with its parody articles, all of which are comedy prima facie.

At the end of the day, haha, I fell for a joke.  I admit it.  But this does nothing to improve my already pretty abysmal opinion of the Huffington Post as news source.