I never liked Huffington Post. It always seemed like a dumber, more celebrity-obsessed version of Politico. So this doesn’t surprise me (via):
Bloggers have been coming and going very rapidly over at Huffington Post since Arianna Huffington sold out to AOL last month. There has been mounting speculation about the death of the once liberal-leaning HuffPo in light of editorial changes. Well, we can now confirm that the old HuffPo is dead and something hideous is sprouting in its place. We know this because of the revelation today that right-wing extremist Andrew Breitbart is now blogging for Huffington.
And what has Breitbart chosen to write about in is premiere post? His friend James O’Keefe.
The latest James O’Keefe success story against NPR has taken a predictable pattern — panicked press releases and firings, followed by denunciation of O’Keefe in a belated attempt to discredit him. Naturally, conservatives are crowing about it, but I wanted to give a little perspective to those Huffington Post readers — whatever your political stripe — who share my passion for free speech, honest debate, and fairness in the media.
jharp
I too, never have cared for the Huffington Post. A few tidbits here and there but I rarely visited.
No loss for me.
BGinCHI
Oh Jesus Fucking Christ:
And I thought having Frank Asshole Luntz was bad.
Whores gonna whore.
Walker
This is just sanctioned trolling. The comments section will be filled with angry posts and the controversy will guarantee tons of page hits.
cathyx
I scan the headlines for interesting or funny items, like I would The USA Today if I were at an airport, but otherwise, I haven’t gone there for substance for a couple of years.
Steeplejack
__
I threw up in the back of my throat a little bit.
trollhattan
Dear lord, that’s not a death knell, it’s self-immolation with a half-twist. She need the money that bad?
SteveinSC
Oh well, no more HuffPo for me. It is becoming a dumping ground and cluttered to say the least. AOL will find out they’ve bought a loser. For me one of the latest smarmy additions was Fineman. I hadn’t even heard about the reptilian breitbart.
Alex S.
Damnit, I need a new link aggregator.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Steeplejack: You know, in the same way Pilgrims were for freedom of religion.
Elizabelle
@Walker:
Walker’s got it right.
Won’t make any difference to me because I don’t read the dam* thing.
Unless someone credible sends me a link. And then only if they’re likely to ask what I thought.
Hey, it’s hard enough checking in with the Washington Post. (Incidentally, elegant site redesign there. Looks more like a newspaper. Maybe they remembered their mission.)
Litlebritdifrnt
Wait did I dream it, but I could have sworn I saw Tina Brown on MJ saying the Sully was going to The Daily Beast.
Max Peck
On the bright side at least now the BS he writes will be in a place where people will refute it. Maybe
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Alex S.: Start your own. Maybe you’ll get bought out by Yahoo! in a year.
freelancer
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Nope. That’s a fact, Jack.
Elizabelle
Incidentally, Andrew Sullivan is becoming unreadable with the Mitch Daniels worship (The Man who should be King) ….
I fear he’s changing his style, bit by bit, for his new corporate masters to be in April.
No matter what he says.
PS: Yippee! Edit’s fixed. Thanks.
BGinCHI
@Steeplejack: No luck on WYCC with the Montalbano show. It was not there and a search revealed no Int’l Mystery.
Will keep trying.
Angry Black Lady
Fanned and Faved!!!111lol
Ash Can
So much for HuffPo. However, I seem to recall that AOL had a right-wing bias when it came to news reporting, so maybe this is just part of the plan. Maybe AOL meant to turn HuffPo into another Big Hollywood in the first place.
Bubblegum Tate
@Walker:
Bingo.
I feel like that should be mentioned in the site eulogy, which will be delivered before too long.
Roger Moore
In other words, those who care nothing for those things. Orwell wept.
licensed to kill time
Andrew Breitbart keeps using those words. I do not think he knows what they mean, or he is just a brazen big fat stinking liar.
Violet
On the rare occasions when I’d visit Huffington Post, I’d find myself aimlessly clicking on celebrity “news” or some other stupid time wasting links. So I quit going. I’d rather waste my time in other ways.
Doesn’t surprise me this has happened. You don’t sell out to AOL and expect nothing to change.
Comrade Mary
Not just dumb, ugly, and cluttered (did they get a fifth grader with ADD to do the layout?) but they offered space to the destructive before when they made themselves a soapbox for anti-vaxxers. They’ve been on my shot list for ages.
FlipYrWhig
@Steeplejack:
Well, I guess hatred and contempt are _kinds_ of passion.
(edited after posting)
TooManyJens
@Comrade Mary:
Awesome typo.
Johnny Gentle (famous crooner)
Team of rivals and all that, don’chuknow?
Besides, does anyone really read HuffPo for political coverage anymore? I just check it for wacky celebrity antics and slideshows of new sandwiches.
Litlebritdifrnt
@freelancer:
Thanks for that, for a second there I thought I was going into early senility.
Violet
OT – In other news, there are more flames at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant. This time in reactor number 4.
henry
I removed HP from my bookmarks when I noticed a pattern for advocacy of Homeopathy and denial of Peak Oil.
freelancer
@Elizabelle:
Ugh. Yes. This morning, he wrote, as a counterpoint to vocal GOP whackjob Presidential candidates,
Presidential or not, you KNOW that’s a lie Andrew. As one of the “conservatives” who claimed to shout loudly in protest against the “deficits don’t matter” aspect of the Bush Administration, the amount of balls, denial, and willful blindness with which you talk about Daniels is stunning.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@trollhattan:
She need the money that bad?
She’s GOT the money – why should she care if AOL’s purchase dies and rots?
David Hunt
@trollhattan:
As I understand matters, it’s more they offered her that much money. You can argue how much of a liberal she actually was, but I think I remember hearing HuffPo got bought up for $300 million! I’m not sure how much of that goes into her pockets, but I suspect I’d sell out for a quarter of that without even thinking about it. Of course, I’m poor and the amounts are all unthinkably high to me, but most people have a price tag. Now you know what Huffington’s is.
FlipYrWhig
@henry: Peak Woo is a lie!
J
or rather ‘my passion for lies, slander and calumny’
I suppose the people who hired the ineffably loathsome Broadbeard thought it would be ‘edgy’ and ‘contrarian’ or whatever.
TooManyJens
I finally did what I’ve been threatening to do for months: I aliased http://www.huffingtonpost.com to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file so that even if I unwittingly click on a link, I still won’t be able to load their site. I feel better already.
dr. bloor
@Walker:
You have Yahtzee. It’s all about the eyeballs.
MikeJ
It’s always interesting when Big Company buys little company because little company is fresh and different and has a unique voice and Big Company wants some of that. Then Big Company decides they don’t want to scare the straights and tells the little company division of big company, “keep doing what you’re doing, but make sure you don’t offend anyone. Or throw in some ‘balance’ to your editorial pov.”
piratedan
get back to me after Breitbart has set himself afire, then I can go over and watch him burn.
Scott
I used to read it more, but finally realized I could find smarter stories almost anywhere else on the web. And Ariana’s past associations always rubbed me the wrong way.
I suppose it’s nice to see she’s finally discarded the mask.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
I stopped looking at anything other than the Style section when the anti-vax/homeopathology took over, but I can’t reward this kind of shit with even a single pageview (just like I don’t click on links to the truly repugnant here, either). Guess I’ll have to get my Princess-Letizia’s-latest-fashions fix elsewhere.
James E Powell
The Huffington Post is a vehicle to promote Arianna Huffington. For her, it has been a big success. I guess we should be impressed and, if so inclined, a little envious. No one, however, should confuse HuffPost with liberals, progressives, or any policies advocated by such people.
stuckinred
And now, March Madness begins!
Dan
Ick.
Never have liked HuffPo either–their site was hideously slow for me (IE8 at the time).
Anyway, Breitbart writing there about O’Keefe’s “success” is like gagging on someone else’s puke.
GregB
AOL’s polls are always a cesspool of reactionary old fools. Eff Arianna Huffington, she’s a hack and her loyalties shift with the wind.
Her and Breitbart make for the sleaziest pairing since Carville and Matalin.
David Koch
That Arianna is a piece of ass.
Alex S.
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I just realized the address http://www.aggregator.com is still free… hmm…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Didn’t Breitbart help Arianna Huffington set up the whole thing? I think he’s been there from the beginning, he’s just become an increasingly vocal and paranoid winger since the Birth Certificateless Kenyan usurped the White House.
As for Huffington…. The older I get, the more recent the past seems, so between her telling me last week (or was it 1996?) that Phil Gramm should be President and Newt Gingrich was a brilliant political visionary, and the other day (or was it 2000?) when she was telling me that Al Gore was insufficiently liberal, I say “meh”. IIRC, her divorce settlement from Huffington was about $20 million. She’s not in it for the money, but the attention. She’s a more polished version of Donald Trump, with better hair, a better accent and a better personality.
David Koch
Don’t be hard on Zsa Zsa, she made $300 million on the backs of free labor, and without having to bang a self-hating, closeted gay trust fund baby.
freelancer
@FlipYrWhig:
Now that I actually do believe.
David Koch
Beck says God punishing Japan because Obama is a muslim.
http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/03/glenn-beck-on-japanese-earthquake-a-message-from-god/
Beautiful.
JGabriel
Doug Hill @ Top:
I wouldn’t say I like it, but it has been my go-to site for a quick rundown of the day’s internet memes and topics.
Veracity Stew:
Then again, maybe knowing the latest internet topics du jour is something I should be investing a lot less time in.
.
Brachiator
Huffington was trying to corner (and monetize) new media through her editorial takeover of AOL. Ideology was probably a secondary consideration. But it doesn’t matter much since her empire is already starting to crumble. One of AOL’s brightest lights has been endgadget:
Between this and HuffPo’s love of pseudoscience, the political direction is the least of their worries.
El Tiburon
Seems like Dan Froomkin got sucked in that gaping vortex.
Hope he got some of that aol money.
xian
i realize no one wants to link to the great green satan, but i can’t find that breitbart article or byline at huffpo.
cleek
@FlipYrWhig:
that was beautiful.
Comrade Mary
@TooManyJens: You can thank my iPhone.
Zifnab
/shorts AOL stock.
My god, that meltdown didn’t take long at all.
Amanda in the South Bay
Hehe, here in the SF Bay Area, Caltrain, the regional commuter rail, has been running ads on the sides of its cars saying by AOL saying “come work for us before your boss does.” Seriously, AOL is hiring?
Dee Loralei
Hahaha Cole, D. Aristophanes of the Sadly Naughts has thrown down a gauntlet in your general direction!
jrg
The best part about this is that Huffpo is probably censoring every response to Breitbart that contains the word “fuck”… You know, to keep it civil.
xian
nevermind, found the link.
as i’ve mentioned before, i work for AOL (and yes, my team is hiring)
kindness
Can we take Breitbart’s interview and re-arrange it like O’Keefe does with his videos? Honestly, that would make a damn fine contest.
EvolutionaryDesign
It is to laugh.
ItAintEazy
They don’t call it AOHell for nothing.
Rob
Breitbart :
“free speech” – OK
“honest debate” – Um…
“and fairness” – No
Bland, rhetorical sleaziness.
In all fairness, the HP has always been a rather aimless mixture of different politics and entertainment, all put on the same site. It never really had any true politics or point of view, more of a “content farm”. This whole story is no real surprise.
Southern Beale
Best healthcare system in the world! You betcha!
KV Pharmaceuticals buys sole rights to drug that was developed with help of National Institutes of Health … price goes from $10 to $1,500!
Yessirree our for-profit healthcare industry really keeps costs down! And it’s pro-life, too!
/sarcasm
Midnight Marauder
In what world is this a surprising thing for anyone?
More and better cynicism, please.
jazzgurl
Um,Shocker of the day (snark) !!!Ms accuser of sellout is a sell-out herself. Americans have been punked! Always knew this woman was a sham.
Every day she talked about wall st sellout, and was devilish anti-Obama …and what did she do? Little did we know she was she was humping Mr Corporate all the while.
What is sad is that these kind of folksies who scream the loudest and turn up everywhere talking talking, dividing,dividing are undermining the public, claiming they are liberal, fermenting the outrage and smiling at the idiots savant who help to get them to where they want to go.The National Enquirer of the internet is a walking bed of total inane nothingness ranging from third world Arianna herself,to headlines and sensational stories that lack substance.
Another total disappointment in a list of a thousand repugs. And yes, she is a repug as is ed schulz and co.
Citizen_X
@jrg:
I’m sorry, there’s a response to Breitbart that doesn’t contain the word “fuck?” That’s not possible!
Amanda
Have deleted them from my bookmarks. should have done it long ago. What a freakin tool is Ariana, eh? Lesson learned…
Citizen_X
@kindness: Wow–seriously, that would be a great idea!
El Cid
I don’t go to the site that often anyway, because the big front page headlines are just the big media headlines anyway, and it’s the sort of thing you’ll see on Yahoo News or Google News.
Likewise, their blog commentators can be good, but certainly isn’t the only place you’ll find that, or similar, and you have to comb through reams of blather to find them.
Chris Grrr™
The humility – so heartwarming.
Matt
@Roger Moore:
That’s not true at all: Breitbart and his ilk share *lots* of passion for those things, just like a pedophile has a “lot of passion” for small children…
b-psycho
Really, there’s people who’ve been reading HuffPo as a wonderous bastion of liberalism? How odd…
I’ve just been going for when some ongoing shit happens for the live feeds, occasionally drifting to entertainment stuff. The columns I always ignored completely until Froomkin joined, then only reading his.
Anya
i hate everything about Arinna. Her fake smile, fake liberalism, fake populism, but most off all the antiscience and the celebrity worship her site fosters drive me crazy. She pretended to be a progressive during the Bush years to cash in on the passion of opposition to Bush, and now she’s cashing in on Obama hatred from the left and right. What an opportunist!
thomas Levenson
I’m not too worried, though I’ve been way wrong on this stuff before. It’s just that I think AOL can turn just about anything to sh*t.
lllphd
noticed right away little subtle things, but whoosh, breitbart!
i’ve occasionally gone there for the running coverage of events, like the earthquakes, but never again. i mean, BRETIBART.
just left a comment for arianna on their contact page. felt good. perhaps if they get enough of those they’ll put some brakes on it.
meanwhile, all those writers? are they gonna stay where breitbart farts? ish; very creepy.
jazzgurl
@llphd – you mean the writers that were blogging for free?
What a gal!
Steeplejack
@BGinCHI:
Okay, I gave it my best shot. Montalbano is available on DVD, and when I get my Netflix streaming set up (hopefully by this weekend) I’ll see if I can ferret it out on there. Will say one last time that it’s really good.
ETA: What’s your cable system? I have a database of on-line listings that I might be able to sift through.
quaint irene
Hasn’t Charlie Sheen been signed up as a contributor?
lllphd
@Midnight Marauder:
holy. crapola. i’m…. speechless.
i can honestly say i had no earthly idea.
i mean, the whole concept always struck me as particularly tacky and just way too celebrity/pop obsessed. but …. arianna’s been in bed with breitbart all this time???
i mean, how does bill maher feel about that, exactly?
PIGL
@Matt: yes. Like Newt Gingrich’s passionate desire to fcuk America within an inch of her life. And then cum in her eyes.
You can’t even parody this stuff.
Dennis SGMM
I signed up for an account the first month that HuffPo was available. I watched it turn from a tolerably left-leaning blog with a dollop of celebrity news into a celebrity-obsessed pseudo-Drudge monster. You’d think that with $315 million on hand Ariana might do something crazy like pay for original reporting but the whole thing is still just an aggregator designed to Hoover-up as many clicks as possible.
I haven’t been back in years.
Tehanu
O’Keefe doing a sting, pretending to be something or someone he’s not, is “honest debate”? It wasn’t the Japanese earthquake that just knocked the earth’s axis off true; it was George Orwell spinning in his grave.
lllphd
@MikeJ:
shorter version:
big old company tells fresh new company, become like big old company. easiest way to remember who you’re not supposed to offend.
lllphd
@xian:
you have to do a search. or at least i did. it wasn’t visible on the home page.
which in itself is kinda interesting. i suppose this means the post will be there for rightwing sites to link to, but won’t scare off the libruhls.
which leads me to suggest not just a boycott (which i know for most of us is like giving up big macs for lent), but a complaint slam. just inundate the living eff outa them about the breitbart connection, making specific note of the distinct disgust at associating with someone of such lowlife deception and racist hatred, etc.
be sure to use a ‘creative’ email when you contact them. it’s at the bottom of the page.
or better, to keep hits to the homepage and their ads to a minimum:
have at it; you know what to do.
lllphd
@Rob:
ya gotta wonder how breitbart felt about arianna footing the bill for all those buses to DC for the sanity reality. especially since it was estimated at nearly triple the size of beck’s biggest tea party gunfest in 09.
which brings us to breitbart’s just pathetic offering in madison a couple weeks ago, the more than 150,000 last saturday also must sting.
ooh, ouch. careful, he’s really nasty when he’s ticked off.
lllphd
@lllphd:
sheez; my bad. have no idea why this didn’t work; will try again:
huffpo contact page
give ’em civil hell.
AAA Bonds
I’ll do you one better – I never liked Arianna Huffington.
Read David Brock’s Blinded By the Right. You might know him as the turncoat who founded Media Matters. The book explains much of what we didn’t know about the Republican scandal machine in the 1990s, and Arianna Huffington was their most useful idiot.
I don’t trust wealthy dilettantes when they put on my team’s jersey. Brock had everything to lose when he bailed on the right (and quit the job of “token gay”). Huffington, on the other hand, had everything to gain.
lllphd
@jazzgurl:
only discovered that free blogging crap with the aol merger. pretty disgusting.
this is all making me want to scrub down with lye soap for a few hours. ick.
Southern Beale
Neocons ask Obama can they pretty please have their war in Libya ….
Stephen E. Biegun
Max Boot
Ellen Bork
Paul Bremer
Scott Carpenter
Elizabeth Cheney
Eliot Cohen
Seth Cropsey
Thomas Donnelly
Michele Dunne
Eric Edelman
Jamie Fly
Reuel Marc Gerecht
William Inboden
Bruce Pitcairn Jackson
Ash Jain
Robert Kagan
David Kramer
Irina Krasovskaya
William Kristol
Tod Lindberg
Ann Marlowe
Cliff May
Joshua Muravchik
Michael O’Hanlon
Martin Peretz
Danielle Pletka
John Podhoretz
Randy Scheunemann
Gary J. Schmitt
Dan Senor
William Taft
Marc Thiessen
Daniel Twining
Ken Weinstein
Leon Wieseltier
Rich Williamson
Damon Wilson
List of Neocons who asked Clinton can they pretty please have their war in Iraq….
Elliott Abrams
Richard L. Armitage
William J. Bennett
Jeffrey Bergner
John Bolton
Paula Dobriansky
Francis Fukuyama
Robert Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad
William Kristol
Richard Perle
Peter W. Rodman
Donald Rumsfeld
William Schneider, Jr.
Vin Weber
Paul Wolfowitz
R. James Woolsey
Robert B. Zoellick
A few of the same names ….
Triassic Sands
I already had so many reasons not to read Huffington Post this doesn’t even register. In the past year, I’ve probably visited HuffPo a total of three times, all as the result of blind links. I’ve never liked Huffington herself and the site is one of the ugliest and most cluttered sites around.
I must admit to being amazed by the inability of either Breitbart or O’Keefe to get themselves totally discredited since they have done enough to get a hundred dishonest hacks discredited. But for some reason, the MSM just can’t figure out that they are both unprincipled scumbags, whose next act will be just like the last act.
The success of Huffington Post mystifies me.
mikefromArlington
I’ve been saying she’s a fraud for a while now trying to warn people to beware…http://liberaldefenderoffreedom.blogspot.com/2010/10/arriana-huffington-is-trying-to-hijack.html
I was banned some time ago for badmouthing her on the site.
She’s a phony trying to divide the Democratic party.
Ed Drone
@David Koch:
No, she’s the whole thing, not just a piece.
Ed
Tim
I am now embarrassed to say I have gone to HuffPo at least once a day since its inception. I had no fucking idea the Breitbart was in any way involved in its creation, or I would not have been clicking that link.
Anyway, now that the lizard is actually blogging there, it’s done. Just removed HP from my favorites list. Anybody got suggestions for replacements?
S. cerevisiae
@lllphd:
GAAAAHHHH! Not enough brain bleach in the world.
EnoughIsEnough
Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing – Arianna Huffington and Ed Schultz. Both former Rethugs. Both bashing the President and the Democrats. Both attempting to create a split in the Democratic Party.
lllphd
@S. cerevisiae:
hm. not quite sure how to interpret your angst, but sheez – arianna’s habits simply haven’t been of any interest, so not on the radar. about all that registered was the bus offer for the sanity rally. breitbart’s role in the conception of huffpo just never made my radar. for his role in all this to have registered at all at any point, i would have had to have watched her and cared. seeing it here for the first time. evidently i’m not the only one who missed that memo.
still, i guess – excuuuuuse me.
Xenocrates
Last time I will click on ANY of their links. I mean, they were on the downhill slope, but hiring Breitbart? That’s a dealbreaker…see ya, Arianna! Love you as a bear on the Cleveland Show…
Orac
This is more why I’ve always detested HuffPo:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=473
JNagarya
Arianna Huffington has been pretending to he “liberal” for ages — that’s where the largest market it.
She came out against Feminism in the 1970s, defending the traditional role in which the male pays the gills. Latter she divorced her husband and came away a multi-millionaire.
CayPDX
I am an internet news/politics addict and up until a week ago my homepage was HuffPo. I gave it up when I heard Arianna wouldn’t pay the graphic artists. Haven’t been there since. Feeling incredibly prescient and virtuous right now.
CayPDX
@JNagarya: I knew the history about Arianna, but I thought her take when she was on talking head shows was often spot on. I am guessing she is some sort of sociopath.
CayPDX
@Orac: Orac – thank you for your work which I read regularly: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/
I am a skeptic, but I ignored the “Life” and “Green” and other BS parts of HuffPo. Unless a truly annoying post would show up on the front page and then I would comment nastily.
I have abandoned HuffPo now and am wandering in the internet.