Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, yesterday admitted to his role in allowing AIG to pay its executives bonuses with taxpayer money. He told CNN that he was responsible for adding language to the stimulus bill that would allow such contracts to retain their legality, despite saying Tuesday that he had nothing to do with the language.

The news isn't great for Dodd, who is already stumbling in his home-state polls. But one place you'd never suspect that is The Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post -- or "HuffPo" -- has long been a Democrat-friendly news aggregator and blog hub, known for its screaming, all-caps banner headlines pertaining to the issue du jour. So yesterday, following Dodd's admission, the Huffington Post decided to instead put the blame on the Federal Reserve.

"WHOSE SIDE ARE THEY ON?" HuffPo asked, above the more specific headline, "Fed Failed To Tell Obama About AIG Bonuses." That second statement has certainly been a talking point from the White House, which has insisted that Barack Obama did not know about the bonuses until just before the public found out.

That's not all, though. Below the website's main picture of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the AIG building and Obama, another sub-headline reads, "Dodd: Treasury Insisted On Weakening Bonus Provision," again playing to the Democrat's spin that he was pressured by the administration to add the language to the stimulus bill.

This should not be a surprise to many people, and this is by no means the first time such selective headlining has appeared in the Huffington Post. Yet with nearly 8 million visitors per month, the Huffington Post is trailblazing the way for online opinion molding.

Arianna Huffington, the founder of the website, has said that her creation is the new form of journalism. Yet most of the site's content is from other news sources, such as breaking news from The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Associated Press. Often, HuffPo will scream a headline that links to a page on its site with pasted text from another news publication's story. For example, in HuffPo's headline about the Fed not telling Obama about AIG bonuses, the website links the text to this page, which reads: "ABC News: Sources in the Obama administration Thursday said ..." before another link to ABC that says, "Read the whole story."

And in its current headline, "ADDING INSULT TO INJURY," HuffPo skips itself as a middleman and links directly here, to Bloomberg.

Yet despite this method of newsgathering -- called aggregation, because it is not original reporting -- the Huffington Post has defended itself as being a real form of journalism, like newspapers. One major difference, though, is its lack of fact checking. An embarrassing consequence of hasty cut-and-pasting hit the HuffPo in February when it linked to a YouTube video that had been digitally altered to make it seem as if media host John Gibson referred to Attorney General Eric Holder as a monkey. After attentive viewers pointed out the mistake, the Huffington Post put up this seemingly awkward apology, "John Gibson Did Not Compare Eric Holder To Monkey With Bright Blue Scrotum (UPDATED)."

The Huffington Post, seen as a liberal alternative to Matt Drudge's aggregating website, also defends its sense of journalism by pointing to its presidential campaign scoop during last year's primaries. A contributor, Mayhill Fowler, had attended a private fundraiser with Obama in San Francisco and taped his now-infamous comments about how Pennsylvanians "cling to guns or religion." If the Huffington Post is biased, it argued, then why would it post such a damaging piece to Obama?

The answer lies in timing. Obama made the closed-door speech April 6, and the HuffPo contributor -- who donated to Obama's campaign -- mulled over the story for five days before posting it. In objective, tried-and-true journalism, reporters don't wait for their prejudices to decide if they should post up a snippet or not, no matter whom it praises or condemns.

"Our highest responsibility is to the truth," Arianna Huffington told the Bay Guardian at the end of last year. "The truth is not about splitting the difference between one side and the other. Sometimes one side is speaking the truth. ... The central mission of journalism is the search for the truth."

It would be nice to see Huffington follow her own advice every day. The Observer has ranked the Huffington Post the world's most powerful blog, but it is simply that -- a blog, with a clear ideological preference to who benefits and who doesn't. The hub is a good source for breaking news from a variety of places, but almost always news that favors liberals -- or, more likely, items that embarrass Republicans.

"Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post," Joshua Benton, the head of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, told Time. "It's not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates. It's about the value."

We can all admit that the news media is transforming as the Internet eclipses disintegrating newspapers. As Arianna told the Bay Guardian, "We're all basically trying to reinvent journalism."

But let's leave the reinventing to the journalists.