MARRIAGE IN HELL: HuffPo + AOL \ three critical views
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Huffington Uncorks a New Wine
By Elizabeth DiNovella, February 7, 2011
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Back in 2008 at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, Arianna Huffington was on a journalism panel entitled, “A New Media System? Or Old Wine in New Bottles?”
Huffington said that the bottles are definitely new, but it’s not entirely new wine. It’s a mixture. “There’s an awful amount of good that we want to keep from the old media: accuracy, fact checking, ferreting out the truth,” she said.
The main problem with old media is fake neutrality, she said. “They’ve given up the pursuit of the truth for the pursuit of fake neutrality, which means that they present every story and every issue as if it has two sides,” said Huffington. She said we’ve wasted years debating global warming this way. The two sides don’t deserve equal weight under the guise of reporters covering both sides of the issue. “The Earth is not flat,” Huffington said. “Evolution is a fact. Sorry Mike Huckabee—there is no other side to this issue.”
And what does the new media bring to out public debate? Transparency, accountability, and community, she said.
So what does the Huffington Post AOL merger mean for progressives?
In her blog post today, Huffington assures us the transformation will be positive.
“Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet,” she wrote. “We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.”
HuffPo is known for its brash approach to news. Huffington told The Progressive as much in an interview in the May 2009 issue. “I think people are attracted to The Huffington Post’s blend of up-to-the-second news and thoughtful opinion, delivered with an attitude,” she said.
Will HuffPo keep its progressive slant in its new incarnation? The New York Times reports, “AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.”
We’ll have to wait and see what will come of an AOL and Huffington Post blend. Will it be an intoxicating Beaujolais? Or a boring corporate varietal of Shiraz?
Follow Elizabeth DiNovella @lizdinovella on Twitter
(2) Arianna used us to launch her site
and now she sells us out
Crossposted with adbusters, 07 Feb 2011, which is the original site
WITH SELECT COMMENTS
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For more info on adbusters counteroffensive, see this page: http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/huff-puff-it-down.html
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Op-Ed
AOL ♥ HuffPo. The loser? Journalism
To grasp the Huffington Post’s business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.
The L.A. Times
Arianna Huffington‘s astonishing commercial achievement in taking her Web news portal from startup to commercial success in less than six years.
Tim Armstrong on where his company’s journalism is going. It’s fairly chilling reading, ordering the company’s editors to evaluate all future stories on the basis of “traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turnaround time.” All stories, it stressed, are to be evaluated according to their “profitability consideration.” All AOL’s journalistic employees will be required to produce “five to 10 stories per day.”
television networks that pay journalists to gather and edit the news.
SELECT ORIGINAL COMMENTS
Try this site, for Chrissakes…!
https://www.greanvillepost.com/). IMHO it’s places like this that should have been growing, not the celebrity circus of Huffington Post, but then again Arianna had the millions and the fame to put her site on the map at the very start…as usual money and connections count in this rotten capitalist society.
— Scipio Gracchus