the progressive blogosphere (and a good portion of the business media) is still buzzing from the news that Arianna Huffington is selling Huffington Post to AOL for a hefty $315 million plus signing on as head of AOL political news, essentially monetizing a site that some considered the biggest progressive media site around. navel gazing aside, they're wrong, imo and here's why.
the eponymous site was never intended to be "progressive"; at least, not in the "what is the fundamental basis here" kind of way. it was all about pushing Arianna's star and making money - there was a niche out there that wasn't filled, not even by the real proggy kind of sites like MyDD or DailyKos.
HuffPo wasn't about original reporting to start with, it was about aggregating from other sites and using Arianna's rolodex to get her Hollywood friends to break through the infotainment clutter. she built up from there, using free original content from obscure and not-so-obscure bloggers looking for eyeballs to build the site's content. with the addition of some stellar paid talent, she did build a place that provided the type of "breaking" news or investigative reporting on major issues most of us used to get from formerly solid journalism founts like the Washington Post (remember Watergate? now look at what's left).
over time, many in the democratic wing of the Democratic Party came to see HuffPo as "their" site. partly that's because we like to believe that truth has a liberal bias, and partly it's because Arianna is -- if nothing else -- an astute promoter. remember i said it was about pushing Arianna's star? look back on the past six months or so at the home page and the number of self-serving articles run by or about Arianna - here's Arianna announcing the "Divorce" section, here's Arianna being interviewed, here's Arianna on that talk show, here's Arianna expounding on another political or social issue. there's a reason the place is named HUFFINGTON Post, you know.
are you noticing a slight negativity here about Arianna? well, i hope so because quite frankly i had my fill of the lady a long time ago - back when she was married to Michael Huffington before he came out of the closet, she had the Republican talking points down pat and pretty damn sanctimonious about it, courting the religious conservatives, supporting Gingrich's "Republican Revolution" and other conservative efforts. then came the divorce making her wealthy in her own right, the run for CA Governor in 2003, and the move away from her former conservative Republican bent and toward the new "cool kids."
and if you're still not convinced of her more than well-documented right-wing foundations, look no further than her first effort on the intertubes: Resignation.com, a site dedicated to forcing Clinton to resign - the antithesis of MoveOn.org.
so while i listen to the moaning of many of my progressive colleagues, i wonder if they ever bothered to look at Arianna's background or question her surprising and supposed shift from right to left -- or if they even realized she used to be hard right.
i guess i should be celebrating how Arianna Stassinopolous rose from the young Greek girl who moved to England in her mid-teens, made her way from Cambridge to the US by way of London's media world, and landed as the charming wife of one of the Republican Party's rising star. marrying well (i.e., $$) led to her ability to continue pursuing her desire for attention through minor acting roles and publishing books on non-political figures (note that Wikipedia points out that she has been accused of plagarism on more than one occasion). looking at her history as a whole, there is a singular theme and it has always been "Arianna."
now with $315 million in the bank, in large part because of a business model that rested largely on the unpaid work of hundreds, Arianna moves to the next phase of her life. she lives very well, moves in the well-heeled circles, and lip-synchs the post-partisan mantra. i expect we'll continue to hear more from this woman who has succeeded well in carving out a niche for herself.
but at what point might we hope that she shed the Greek accent after over 40 years of English being her every-day language?
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