Even though the Huffington Post can hire Howard Fineman, they can’t pay Mayhill Fowler, the woman who wrote the “cling to your guns” story. The Huffington side of the story is that Fowler was a freelancer who pitched a couple of stories that they didn’t bite on, just like many other freelancers.
Perhaps Huffington is right in this instance. Still, it’s more than a little distasteful that she’s completely unwilling to play pay bloggers at the same time that she’s happy to shell out the kind of salary that a hack like Fineman demands. But maybe I’m just letting my disgust for Arianna Huffington and her Hollywood tabloid get in the way. I’ve never understood the appeal of her or her site, and the fact that it gets so much traffic looks like yet another indicator of national stupidity.
For example, the banner there at the moment is “Feds Sue Fox News“. If you bother to read the story under the huge red headline, the substance is that one reporter has filed a discrimination claim that the EEOC (“the Feds”) picked up. The headline and play of that piece is essentially a lie, yet 4,500 people have commented on it.
As far as I can tell, the Huffington Post is the Drudge Report for liberals, with a side helping of Star or the National Inquirer for celebutard gossip. Yeah, they pay a few reporters who got White House press credentials, but so does Fox News. If they’re the future of media, which I doubt anyone under 50 who isn’t bamboozled by Arianna Huffington believes, we’re in big trouble.
someguy
The future of news?
People who are bamboozled by Arianna or Drudge’s sensationalism aren’t smart enough to know there’s a future, or for that matter a past. They live in the present and respond only to stimulus, like a paramecium with reliably partisan attitudes and a range of responses that fall within acceptable norms.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Although I suppose “play” works as well.
Kristine
I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid visiting that site–I click on a celeb story every so often, but I hate myself later. Their headlines can be misleading at best, fraudulent at worst. I was very disappointed to see AH as a guest on Rachel M’s show the other night. She metered out her usual line of Obama bashing, and as usual didn’t offer anything useful or new. She and Fineman deserve one another.
The science and medicine pages can be especially bad. It concerns me that they may serve as a primary source of info for so many folks.
So, so overrated. Junk. I just don’t get it.
WereBear
And there you have it. Liberals have just as big a pull towards celebrity, meaningless froth, and diet schemes as anyone else.
I’d just like to think we are kinder about it.
mistermix
@kommrade reproductive vigor: Thanks. I think she’s completely willing to play bloggers, so I updated the post.
Xenos
Everybody’s favorite nutcase, Andrew Breitbart, was instrumental in setting up both the Drudge Report and Huffpost. Both use lousy formatting, decontextualized quotes, and misleading headlines as part of a scheme to shape coverage by more legit news organizations. Both should be as discredited as Breitbart is, or at least should be.
Trinity
Yeah – stopped reading HuffPo in 2008. Total crap.
Scott
Yeah, I took ’em off my favorites list a while back when I realized I was learning nothing and not even having fun on their site. Their blatant woo-pitching doesn’t make it any better…
eemom
To start my day off on a nice bitchy note, I completely agree with you.
As a Greek woman who has proudly dragged around my clunky Greek last name all my life and never traded it in for the much simpler name I married, I have an especial sneering contempt for a “Stassinopoulos” calling itself a Huffington and still passing itself off as an actual Greek. As a woman in general, I have an additional contempt for opportunistic twits who marry gay Republicans, soak them for all they’re worth and then use their abundant divorce settlements to purchase glitzy “liberal” blogs. And as a human being I just tend to dislike rich phonies who wear political affiliations like reversible fur coats.
Last but not least, she is totally full of shit with that accent. Trust me on this.
mikefromArlington
Arrianna Huffington stated that after the election, the site was going to change to a new angle, one of criticism and so far that’s what it’s become overwhelmingly. They’ve hammered the financial team from day one. They paint Obama as a corporate sellout the majority of the time. Sure, there’s the occasional neutral article but the headlines have almost a Drudge conservative slant intended to piss people off. Remember that Breitbart helped her start up and he also ran Drudge.
Having similar style headlines at both sites shouldn’t come as a surprise.
schrodinger's cat
Huffpo sucks and so does Arianna. Off late TPM has been tending towards the melodramatic also.
Remember November
Arianna’s a Neo-Liberal.She was callow enough to pay Andrew Breitbart to help develop her site.
That said I don’t read anything she personally writes on her site.
She’s like a Hungarian Jane Hamsher.
Linda Featheringill
I gave up on Arianna when I noticed that she became flushed and breathless in the presence of Joe Scarborough. And the next time I saw the two of them in the same room, it happened again. And she thinks he is so moderate and so reasonable and so intelligent.
Sickening.
I realize that it is a common cliche that many men don’t think with their brain. This is also true of many women.
Again, sickening.
However, her behavior led me to believe that she isn’t liberal at all. I think that is where her niche is, where she can bring in money and attention and where she has chosen to stand.
Arianna is not a comrade-in-arms.
eemom
in a moment of inspiration I shall just add that if there’s a Hell in which Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington and Sarah Palin get to be roommates for all eternity, that would be, like, totally awesome.
Tom Johnson
Huffington Post is a media company. The value of its writers is not based on quality, but on the number of readers they attract and the credibility they bring to the organization.
Mayhill Fowler may be a wonderful human being and a gifted writer — in which case her star will rise in time. But Howard Fineman is a known quantity that brings readers and credibility with him. Also, he’s regularly featured on television news programs, which is of huge publicity value to Huffington Post.
You may not like it, but that’s the real world.
lamh32
Anyone hear Obama speech to Gen44 last night? I hear it was a good one.
“You Elected Me To Do What Was Right”
stuckinred
@eemom: How do you really feel? Opa!
stuckinred
@Linda Featheringill: Nothing compared to him this morning with that fucking idiot Noonan on!
liberal
OT: Obama bailout screwing taxpapers?
Ryan
When it first came out Huffington Post was quite readable and had several insightful columnists; then for some reason the quality quickly declined until it resembled a domain-squatting portal.
liberal
Huh? I hardly go there unless someone links to an interesting article, but IIRC it occasionally features moran right-wingers and (as you note) celebrity BS.
So AFAICT maybe it started out as a liberal outfit, but it’s morphing into something else.
lamh31
Anyone hear Obama speech to Gen44 last night? I hear it was a good one.
“You Elected Me To Do What Was Right”
Guster
You’re right that it’s about the little people.
http://agonyin8fits.blogspot.com/2010/09/get-off-your-knees.html
Svensker
@Remember November:
Corrected for ethnicity, but otherwise, spot on (as the pseud-Brits would say).
geg6
Meh. I haven’t even glimpsed HuffPo since about mid-October 2008. It’s nothing but a tabloid and I have never trusted Arianna. She’s an attention whore and will do or say or print/post anything if it gets her face time on a cable news show or Sunday morning wankfest.
I never laughed so hard as the day I saw that Fineman (one of the ultimate Village idiots even though he loves to brag about being a down-to-earth Pittsburgher) quit Newsweek to go to HuffPo. I’ll give Howie this, he saw the writing on the wall at Kaplan and got the hell out while the getting was good. But I don’t know anyone from Squirrel Hill who brags about Fineman being a homeboy. Wonder why?
Punchy
I think it’s interesting how the Huffington Post and Arianna Huffington have the same name in their title.
Linda Featheringill
@lamh31:
Obama:
It was similar to his speech in Wisconsin [my favorite of this year’s speeches] except that the audience was younger. I don’t think he mentioned Social Security but did spend a good deal of time on support for education.
And yes, he seemed to place more weight than he has previously on doing not what would get him reelected but what is right.
Sigh. My hero.
Michael Goetz
From the late, great David Foster Wallace:
“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”
I regard Huffington as an agent of those entrenched Establishments.
PeakVT
What baffles me about HuffPo is that stories can attract 7000 or more comments. 7000?!? And what compels the 7001st poster to hit submit? And the 7002nd? Do they really think they are going to say something that hasn’t already been said 6800 posts ago?
chopper
i gave up on her when i saw her interviewed during the election and she argued that obama needed to become the angry black man(tm) to win. yeah, that wasn’t concern trolling.
lamh31
Here’s a little of the Gen44 Speech from Rachel Maddow show!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908//vp/39449979#39449979
Bobby Thomson
And? The last I heard, the EEOC is a federal agency.
That’s incorrect.
Xenos
@eemom: The other thing to keep in mind about the former Miss Stassinopolous is that she went through the same Oxbridge debating society education that produced Andrew Sullivan. Combining that with the fact that she took England by storm with money and connections from her father’s media empire – said media empire that was damn complacent and profitable during the time of the Junta.
She wore out her welcome in London, and then found that poor sucker Huffington, and went through the whole process again here. Some good background here… from 16 years ago.
Suck It Up!
Stopped reading that site more than a year. Once I couldn’t tell the difference between it and the New York Post’s headlines. I don’t think that site is liberal anymore and I believe she is trying to capture the right wing audience. Got more evidence of that from her recent appearance on The Daily Show.
I had to roll my eyes at the fact that she’s providing free buses to the Return To Sanity rally. This from a woman who pushes the crazy 24/7.
Guster
@Bobby Thomson: That’s like saying, ‘The Feds drive by my house every day! They stop at the end of my driveway and look around. Five or six times a week.”
Because the post office is a federal agency.
bemused
@stuckinred:
I heard Noonan quoting Jane Hamsher this morning. I wasn’t interested to hear what the topic was.
Xenos
@Bobby Thomson: Care to fill us in on the role of the EEOC– is it the plaintiff here?
No, it is not. The EEOC acts as a gate-keeper that certifies cases that have sufficient factual basis and a valid legal posture to proceed. They act to make it more difficult to sue an employer, not easier. This does tend to give plaintiffs a better negotiating position once they survive EEOC scrutiny, but one can better compare the EEOC to the medical boards that need to certify medmal suits in some states.
Bobby Thomson
@Guster: No, it’s not like that at all, because the U.S. Postal Service is not in the business of taking over as plaintiff in complaints that it deems to have sufficient merit.
Suck It Up!
Stopped reading that site more than a year ago once I couldn’t tell the difference between it and the New York Post’s headlines. I don’t think that site is liberal anymore and I believe she is trying to capture the right wing audience. Got more evidence of that from her recent appearance on The Daily Show.
I had to roll my eyes at the fact that she’s providing free buses to the Return To Sanity rally. This from a woman who pushes the crazy 24/7.
JAHILL10
I just find the EVERY DAY THERE IS A GIANT CRISIS IN THE WHITEHOUSE!!!!!! arc so wearying/maddening. She is isn’t a liberal. She’s Rupert Murdoch in a dress. Yet another media connected foreigner playing on the stupidities of our culture for fun and profit. She just plays it from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
Blotto von Bismarck
God, the Huffington Post is full of shit. It’s been a major voice in the anti-vaccine movement, including the writings of the odious Jenny McCarthy on the website. They also had some fucker from the Discovery Institute on their website.
Oh, and they refused to admit their mistake when they got hoodwinked by ChristWire (which, while funny, is obviously satire).
It’s generally just an absolute breeding ground for New Agers and other woo promoters.
stuckinred
@bemused: They were going on and on about how “dangerous” O’s narcissism is. How he thinks he is a god and can never be wrong.
arguingwithsignposts
HuffPo went off the cliff when she gave aid and comfort to the anti-vax crowd and that twit Jenny McCarthy.
mclaren
You’re being a little hard on Arianna here. She’s a damn good writer, she’s intensely committed to progressive causes, she saw where the wind was blowing with print journalism and made a smart move to online publishing and has made it pay… That’s a pretty impressive track record.
Compare with Murdoch’s idiotic pay wall. You might not like Arianna, but at least she’d got a clue. You might despise her bloggers, but she’s forging ahead with a viable alternative to print journalism and instead of being far-right reactionary (like so many media franchises today), it’s progressive. I think that’s a good thing on the whole.
Bobby Thomson
@Xenos:
Fail.
The EEOC is the named plaintiff in the complaint. That’s why virtually every news outlet in the country is reporting that federal authorities are suing Fox News. Because they are.
stuckinred
@mclaren: You are consistently full of shit, that is good.
eemom
@Suck It Up!:
Yeah. Kind of taints the whole thing to have her pointy claws in it, though it’s good to get more people there, I guess.
@bemused:
Noonan can be a Hell-roomie with Jane et al. too. Complete the quad.
Xenos
@mclaren:
You have been punked. If you believe that, would you be interested in a nice boat ride with O’Keefe?
Dennis SGMM
I opened an account with HuffPo when it first went live five years ago. At that time, the blog was largely an aggregator with a modest tilt toward the left. It was a handy place to catch up on items of interest. Over the years it became more and more sensationalistic and oftentimes the headlines were more than a bit misleading. As for the commentariat, phooey! That place has more cut-and-paste trolls than any blog I’ve ever seen, bar none. Over time my visits to the place dwindled down to zero.
stuckinred
Here’s an important piece from this mornings post
stuckinred
@eemom: taint is right!
Guster
@Bobby Thomson: Are you claiming that the post office doesn’t drive by my house five times a week, or that the post office isn’t a federal agency?
A federal agency does send someone to park outside my driveway almost every day of the week. That’s just the truth, exactly like the EEOC.
Betty Cracker
I’ve got no love for HuffPo, but I wouldn’t pay Mayhill Fowler a farthing either. I think she’s a crappy writer, and much of her “reportage” is apparently based on her faith in her psychic abilities.
That said, it does suck that HuffPo cuts checks to well-known hacks while screwing the less renowned.
eemom
@Xenos:
That’s interesting. Not surprised to hear that she was spawned in the Greek emmessemm.
Ptoooo. [Greek spitting noise]
Suck It Up!
@eemom:
is she providing free buses to the 10-2 rally?
Suck It Up!
@stuckinred:
??????!!!!!!!!!??????????
Anya
@lamh32: this is what Sullivan said about the speech
Speech was so good that Sullivan has forgiven Obama for making all the republicans vote against repeal of DADT.
eemom
@Suck It Up!:
doubt it. That one is sadly not going to be a media circus.
stuckinred
@Suck It Up!: I report, you decide
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/30/50-cent-kill-yourself-if-_n_745797.html
Suck It Up!
@stuckinred:
UGH! I’m not a prude, but seriously, wtf?
lonesomerobot
Arianna Huffington is an opportunist. She saw the need for a left-wing Drudge Report, and she filled it. At least she’s hired people that know how to design a web site (unlike Drudge, whose website has always had a Homer Simpson as Mister X quality, minus dancing Jesus, of course).
My main problem is that she will present herself as a psuedo-feminist, (recall her Courage book pr campaign) yet her site will traffic in the “what’s Michelle daring to wear this week?!” dreck at least once a week. The shame of it is, had Hillary (or some other woman) somehow ended up president, we’d still be seeing it, but not about Bill…
Huffpo = editorial decisions made by people with junior high school mentalities: “Oh my god, did you see what she was wearing??”
Lynn Dee
Drudge Report for liberals? Maybe. But ya gotta square that with the fact Huffington has, in recent months, gone “firebagger.” Did you see her on Rachel Maddow the other night? Even with Rachel Maddow trying to talk about how blue dog Dems are running against the White House this campaign, all Arianna wants to talk about is how Obama just isn’t that “into” the middle class or progressives. And some of the images she evokes — e.g., Obama would rather hang out with Larry Summers and play war games with David Petraeus — are just inexcusable, IMO, one month before the mid-terms. Is it her ego? Is it to sell her book? Here’s the link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-tv/arianna-obama-progressives-middle-class_b_744685.html
Mind you: I think pushing Obama from the left is great. Lord knows he gets pushed enough from the right. It’s the too cute by half stuff and all to stroke her own ego that I don’t care for.
Anyway, I tried to post a response at huffingtonpost, but that site is so heavily “moderated” these days, that nothing I tried got through and I was actually banned from the site. And I am not a rude or obscene commenter! Here are a couple comments of mine that were censored:
“Firebaggin’. It’s not just for Jane Hamsher anymore.”
“Is it wrong to shout firebagger in a crowded theater?”
Now mind you — they’re a private enterprise and can enforce whatever guidelines they want. It’s the lopsided enforcement of those guidelines, even as they claim to be a forum for open discussion, that I have a problem with.
Mrs. Polly
But what are you people saying! I know Huffpo is full of celebrity silliness, but serious progressives like that Jean Hamquist person post there!
(I know, I just posted a link to a site that doesn’t deserve the traffic. I feel like Yogi Berra: nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.)
Blue Gal / Fran Langum
Driftglass still has his satire site up:
http://driftingtonpost.blogspot.com
BE SURE to read the SEO whore labels for the posts therein…
And Arianna has vay cayed with Newt Gingrich:
http://bgalrstate.blogspot.com/2010/08/dangerous-liasons-with-arianna.html
And now has a radio show with Mary Matalin:
http://bgalrstate.blogspot.com/2010/09/arianna-huffington-mary-matalin.html
There is no progressive there, just celebrity seeking and little people exploiting.
bemused
@stuckinred:
What a surprise!
Out of the usual Morning Joe panel, Noonan is probably the one most personally familiar with narcissism.
Bill H
Please note also that anything of a medical nature on HuffPo should be regarded as highly, highly suspect. Arrianna supports all sorts of quackery posing as medical practice, and a great deal of faux medical practicioners post and are featured there.
maya
@PeakVT:
I find the same thing happens here at BJ when a story goes past 90. Which further supports my belief that there is no such thing as infinity.
Vlad
Sure. Give the people what they want. Even if it’s anti-vaccination nonsense. Or homeopathy. Or “distance healing”. Or pretty much any other sort of snake-handling crystal-waving anti-science twaddle you can come up with.
We’re supposed to be the reality-based community. You’d think someone “intensely committed to progressive causes” might remember that.
With friends like the HuffPo, who needs enemies?
bemused
@stuckinred:
At least mclaren got it partly right. Arianna is a pro cloud sniffer. In her quest for self promotion, if she had to kiss a baby or hug a puppy and hugging puppies was the attention getter dujour, she’d drop the baby on it’s head in a nanosecond and run for the puppy.
pickledjazz
At last, the people have been enlightened!!!! Huffpuff IS the National Enquirer of the internet. Misleading headlines, decimating people’s character, untruths, smears, a constant downer on the president.
Miss Arianna ‘smells herself’ daily as she props herself up in all this negativity. She feels she knows it all, and don’t get me started on this 3rd world America stuff!! I put it to you she doesn’t know a monkeys about the 3rd world.Her streotypical version is just that stereotypical. She is a great pretender and will do or say anything to be in high visibility.
The funny thing is I used to spend an awful amount of time there everyday in the earlies(primaries),but now I desist because it is way too negative,and I find I get angry all the time and she has encouraged the commenters to be as nasty as they can. Poor,poor Arianna.
And too, why is it the leading undermining voices in America are an Australian and a Hungarian/Greek through their media houses? What’s up with that people?
P.S The president rocked the house last night. Yeah for inspiration 101.
D-Chance.
I find the same thing happens here at BJ when a story goes past 90. Which further supports my belief that there is no such thing as infinity.
More like 70…
EDIT: ok, more like 71, because no one wants to be a thread ender.
Bhall35
“Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
fraught
@mclaren: this.
BombIranForChrist
According to my calculations, it would take me 36 hours to document all the reasons I dislike the Huffington Post and Arianna Huffington personally. Every time she gets all puffy in the face about her progressive independent blogowhazit, I want to force her to sit down and watch all the babbling she did during the Clinton impeachment saga. She believed Clinton should be removed from office, btw.
Also, for all her bitching about the mainstream media, her site is about 75% mainstream media aggregating.
She may no longer be a Republican, but she has retained a lot of her slime. I think Taibbi’s blood funnel comment re: GS applies to Huffington as well.
Joel
Everyone I work with (myself included) is 30 or under, save for the boss, who’s 40. There are two other people in my workplace that follow the news openly; one reads CNN and the other reads HuffPo.
Anecdote, FWIW.
Kevin
To be fair, there are still a few gems amid the dreck, you just need to know who’s worthwhile reading. Jason Linkin’s Sunday talking heads columns are always treats, and through Huffpo I’ve discovered talented, funny, informative blogs such as Chris Weigant, Bob Cesca, and Cenk Uyghur (sp.?). I thought they did fairly decent coverage of the 2008 campaign, but they seem to be devolving into a slightly upscale National Enquirer. I first heard of the Greek diva through Doonesbury many years ago, and as usual Garry Trudeau accurately skewered her from the start.
agrippa
That site is basically a waste of time; shallow pandering.
stassinopoulos [ aka Huffington] is a troll.
Help
Agree that HuffPo is ridic, a la Drudge for the left.
But what sites do BJ readers like for good headline summaries of the news of the day. CNN? AOL? (ducks)…
Frank
I stopped reading HuffPo about two years ago. The signal to noise ratio became unbearable.
Malron
Yeah, I was one of those who woke up to Arianna sometime during the summer of 2008, but the hit piece by Mayhill “dey iz clingin to deyz gunz” Fowler should have sent up a red flag to every so-called progressive that something wasn’t right. Sadly, during the health reform debate I had progressives at another site attacking me non-stop because I dared suggest Arianna wasn’t a progressive and her site was a Drudge wannabe.
Nice to know people are finally waking up to her fraud.
Ella in New Mexico
@Xenos:
Absolutely agreed. And yet, don’t you find it kinda creepy that our side knows this, but the Righties don’t? I stop by HuffPo for the briefest overview of what the most talked about headlines are, but I always know they’ll give me some distorted version of the real story, Enquirer style.
But the average reader on the Right who traffics “their” sites–they really DO believe those headlines are the absolute truth! You know because you’ll hear them repeated verbatim by some putz in front of you in the checkout line as fact. And, how else can we explain the popularity of World Net Daily, which pretty much writes/makes up the stories to match the headlines over at Drudge–and goes even further with it’s own completely bizarre conspiracy fantasies?
Angry Black Lady
Huffpo is great for me because it’s a dumping ground for political and celubutard news. I can go there, find out what might be worth writing about, and then go to the source.
Every time I click on the site as of late, I feel like THE UNNECESSARILY MISLEADING, SHOUTY, AND COLORFUL HEADLINES are shooting in me directly in my own eyeballs.
She’s trying to take over the internet which is fucking up my plan to take over the internet.
I’m going to have to challenge her to a duel, methinks.
Pistols at dawn!
Innocent Bystander
Jeez….after reading all of the posts on this thread, I guess I’ll have to offer up a contrarian opinion. I like HuffPO. Ok, I do have 2 main complaints-
(1) They have awful lede editors.
(2) The Entertainment section seems to permeate through all of their forums.
What I like…the picture-centric composition of the stories. I can scan the sections quickly and check out a story whose picture piques my interest. Sometimes it’s misleading, but overall I personally like the site layout.
In general, I think it portrays our viewpoints pretty well. And if it gets more views by otherwise uninformed or worse, misinformed, readers…I think that’s a win. Of course, the bigger HP gets, the pressure to moderate their message may also increase. But I’m not about to forsake a relatively progressive internet media asset that does influence our national conversation in our direction.