I think it's interesting that Arrington assumes that humans remove objectivity. The BBC for example was always seen as an objective observer of news in the UK. If an editor merely caught "temporal" errors then I don't see a problem.
I had always assumed it was setup this way, via an algorithm selecting newsworthy stories with an editor pushing out the best ones, that would at least explain the bias and lack of spam.
Misleading headline, don't you think? Techmeme never tried to be fully automated.