Are New York Times staff supposed to steer clear of The Huffington Post?

Really? This can’t be right.

It’s been clear for some time that The New York Times’ Bill Keller was not especially fond of the The Huffington Post.

But could it have reached the point where Times employees aren’t allowed to call up The Huffington Post at their desks, as Reuters’ Alex Leo asserts in a blog entry?

Leo says an anonymous source at The Times told him “we weren’t allowed to read The Huffington Post—they say it’s the least reliable source on the Internet.”

Leo’s piece is titled, “Bill Keller’s war on the Internet keeps The Times down,” and the accusation from the Times’ Deep Throat is down at the bottom. He also accuses the paper of bewilderment in the face of competition from a popular Internet aggregation and reporting site like Huffington. The newspaper is also guilty of boring headers that won’t fly on Twitter or Facebook, and it hasn’t cultivated blog stars, he says.