Okay, I have no opinion on the merits of the case, although the allegations comport with other things I have heard about Huffington’s launch. But, I have a question:
Peter Daou and James Boyce charge that Huffington and partner Ken Lerer designed the website from a plan they had presented them, and in doing so, violated a handshake agreement to work together, according to a lawsuit to be filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
The complaint is a direct challenge to the left’s most important media property from two stalwarts of the progressive movement.
Is the Huffington Post the “left’s most important media property”? Really? Because I have never opened the Huffington Post unless directed there by someone else. I have almost never linked to them (probably less than a dozen times in six years). I don’t think I’ve ever been to their home-page. I think if they were really so important, I’d find I couldn’t blog effectively without knowing what was going on there. But, for the most part, the Huffington Post doesn’t even exist for me. It’s like the Drudge Report. I know it exists, and occasionally someone points out to me that they have some interesting material, but that’s it. And why is the Huffington Post considered a left-leaning site? I don’t consider Arianna Huffington to be left-leaning. She’s a critic of President Bush and the current brand of know-nothing politics of the right. But she’s certainly no liberal. Above all, she’s a business woman and a celebrity. She’s not a part of any movement I am aware of. I’m not knocking her, but I just don’t get why her site is supposed to be important to the left. For what?
More BS from Drudgico. HuffPo is just like any other mainstream newspaper(or would be if it had a dead-tree edition). She allows a wide range of people to post there stuff there. Hell, I know Ken Blackwell had some anti-Obama screed up there last week. And I know other Pukes have had columns up there in the past. So no, it isn’t important to the Left.
And, assuming the allegations are true, they were pushed out of the way in favor of…wait for it…Andrew Breitbart.
And just today, there is that ignorant tool Ron Christie:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-christie/sorry-charlie_b_783839.html
HuffPo liberal? Hahahahahaha!!!!!
I’d never trust Huffington, ever. Anyway, there’s always anti-science bullshit being posted on there so I don’t see it as important to the left at all.
I only read stuff when I’m linked to Sam Stein usually.
I came to the conclusion that the real purpose of Huffington Post is to tempt those people, who normally aren’t that interested in celebrity gossip, to glance at an article or two.
I feel like Huffington Post is the most important left-wing blog for people who generally don’t like left-wing blogs. And I don’t mean that negatively- just that a lot of people in the democratic establishment looked at blogs with disgust from 2003-2005, particularly because of the netroots’ support for Howard Dean who really rubbed the establishment the wrong way. When HuffPost came along, it was a chance for the cool kids to get on the blog bandwagon without having to admit they were wrong about blogs. They were just waiting for the right one to come along.
I rarely read Huffpost, but I think it has its place in the leftwing blogosphere. I recognize my tastes are a bit idiosyncratic (Im on this cruddy blog more than any other), to each his own.
They generate a lot of pageviews, and are vaguely left-leaning … but a lot of their traffic based on is celebrity gossip.
That’s the way she gets revenue. She wouldn’t be able to on political stuff alone. I guess you could say MSNBC plus the celebrity gossip. Vaguely left-leaning.
That’s the only way for a big site to function without huge money backers.
HuffPo inhabits a niche on the internet somewhat like The Daily Show does on cable. It has a left persona and it has a healthy demographic that finds it more accessible than the stalwart pillars of the progressive blogosphere. It aggregates some progressive voices and “sweetens” their menu with alot of crap. You won’t find Greenwald (or Booman) there. Others, like, Hamsher (for example) do show up.
I forgot answer Booman’s question: “Yes, kinda.”
During the Bush years and the presidential campaigning, HuffPo distinctly tilted toward the Democratic Party and gave space to “kooky” California Leftists. They appeared to be genuinely delighted by and supportive of Obama’s election. Since then there have been subtle–and not so subtle–signals of an ulterior conservative agenda. A bold front page headline bashing Obama often bears no relation to the content of the attached article. I think I stopped regularly scanning HuffPo’s self-generated content about the same time I deleted my link to FDL.
As far as being the “left’s most important media property”… Well, they are because they say they are, ya’know. What other newspaper-style web site even pretends to be liberal?
Ms. Huffington strikes me more as an opportunist, which is no big surprise as that is what is reinforced in American society. The bits you mention of a latent conservative agenda also don’t surprise me in the least. I lived in California when her then-husband was trying to buy a Senate seat in 1994, and her rhetoric at the time was the standard Bush I-Dan Quayle rubbish. Deep down she’s an elitist who likely holds nothing but contempt for the rest of the rabble – which of course puts her in good company with the rest of the CEO class.
Don’t you get it? HuffPo is a good spokesorgan for the left as far as received knowledge is concerned. You and I are the ones who don’t exist. Bear in mind that that means that HuffPo is the left which is held to be equally extreme and partisan with the Republican right, again in the received wisdom.
Part of village propaganda is to target something and attribute all negative things on earth to it, magnify it and draw up the proposition that, say, all lefties (lefty politicians, lefty rich people, etc.) are “this”.
Thus, while I realize that Obama was only old enough to be in the Cub Scout division of the Weathermen, I know he was building bombs in the Weathermen’s Greenwich Village hideout. Perhaps he was sent to fetch the plyers so Uncle Bill could connect the dynamite to the alarm clock. And we know that Obama is a white-hating racist like his (former) minister. And while he didn’t knock up Rielle Hunter he was undoubtedly part of the gang rape.
It’s called “bad jacketing” and when it’s propaganda one size fits all.
and I almost never read it, either. Certainly they have the most page views.
The most page views for left-content? I don’t think so. Half their content is TMZ-crap from what I’m told. And much of the rest is right-wing crap.
I’m just glad more people are starting to call into question Arianna’s role in basically undermining progressive politics.
Perhaps it was that appearance by Arianna at Ykos 2006. /snark
Interesting … their top keyword is “sex”, they rank #2 in google for the term. Right under wikipedia.
Any news aggregator–and that is what Huffington Post is doing except for publishing folks like Sam Stein, Arthur Delaney, Ryan Grim, and other original content–that aggregates AP is not the “left’s most important media property”.
End of story. The reporting material that Huffington Post originates tends to be better than most web sites and provides a middle-of-the-road alternative to Politico. That that sort of reporting is not useful just to “the left”, whoever that is supposed to be.
She is a lefty. For instance like most of the left she was appalled by the no strings bank bailouts. She is not a democrat, but why would a modern lefty be a democrat? Her publication is most certainly left leaning and widely read!
Obama loyalist are not good arbiters of leftyness, since their hero is not lefty in any way! He is merely to the left of the far right republicans.
Yes, there are people on the left that not only believe the Huffington Post is an important site for progressive news, they also believe Arianna Huffington’s a strong progressive voice. I used to believe both until mid-2008, when I noticed every column Arianna wrote was “Obama better do this or he’ll lose” and every glaring red lipstick headline was floating right wing memes. Unfortunately, many people still think those things. They also think Jane Hamsher isn’t really racist. Heh.