You’d think something called Human Rights Headlines would be more concerned with the truth. I mean the thing quotes Montesquieu at the top of the page: “An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.” Well, on behalf of everyone, let me just say, Thanks, Human Rights Headlines, for the latest injustice perpetrated on the late Ryan Skipper and, by extension, everyone.

Posted on the site is a “story” “bylined” Janvieve Williams that “reports” the facts of Skipper’s murder and the subsequent arrest of his alleged killers. But Ms. Williams didn’t write the piece. She didn’t interview anyone for it. She merely cobbled together newspaper reports — complete with the lies, smears and distortions Pensito Review has been pointing out in coverage of the murder for weeks — without attributing her sources.

And you wonder why weblobgs don’t get no respect.

Human Rights Headlines just regurgitated the bad reporting that’s been done by the Lakeland Ledger and other outlets in covering this case, compounding the inaccuracies and distortions by lumping them all together on one long rambling document. This headline thing is the work of something called Human Rights Network, which describes itself this way:

Underlying all human rights work in the United States is a commitment to challenge the pernicious belief that the United States is inherently superior to other countries of the world, and that neither the US government nor the US rights movements have anything to gain from the domestic application of human rights. Rather, in the view of a growing number of US activists, the US government should no longer be allowed to shield itself from accountability to human rights norms and the US civil, women’s, worker, immigrant, lgbt, prisoner and other rights movements stand to benefit, perhaps now more than ever, from an end to US impunity in this regard.

Such an avowedly internationalist and multi-lateralist stance has not been common to domestic rights advocacy in the United States since the Cold War. Its current resurgence in US rights work, from the death penalty to economic justice, signals a fundamental shift in the politics of US rights activism.

The resonance of human rights with progressive trends in US rights work ensures its increasing relevance to domestic activists. The movement for human rights in the United States is here and plans to stay.

After reading that, I’m kind of glad they didn’t write a real story about the Skipper murder because they probably would have really screwed it up. I can’t even tell what they supposedly do or stand for.

In the hope that they will remove their inaccurate and distorted piece of copyright infringement from the Web, I’m going to post a comment on the site with a link back to this post and Pensito Review’s other coverage of the Ryan Skipper murder. Maybe then they’ll do the human right thing.