The many faces of Arianna Huffington
The truth is that The Huffington Post is not just supplementing a print media that has long been dominated by newspapers. It is also helping to destroy newspapers. The trials of print media have been explored at length recently in a number of settings, both print and digital, and for good reason. But some tough questions must be asked also about the powerful digital interlopers. For the blogosphere and the news aggregators that dominate cyberspace are completely reliant–completely parasitic–on the very institutions they are driving to bankruptcy. As my cursory summary of an afternoon’s content at The Huffington Post showed, the site is thoroughly dependent on the reporting that Huffington has spent three decades bashing. Fire up the site on your computer some evening, and see how many of its main stories are from The New York Times or The Washington Post. (One of the site’s habits consists of taking the first few paragraphs from another news story and using it on a Huffington Post page. In an extreme case from a couple of years ago, The Huffington Post ran an entire Chicago Reader story on their site. They invited readers to click through and “read the whole story,” although they had merely reprinted the entire thing.) Moreover, during last year’s presidential campaign, when the site sometimes broke news, it was often with the type of reporting that Huffington claims to detest. Its biggest scoop was the revelation that Obama had referred to certain white working-class voters as “bitter,” which is just the kind of story whose appearance on the front page of The New York Times would have provoked fire and brimstone from Huffington.
