Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
The huge--and shocking--media story of the week has been AOL's purchase of The Huffington Post for an incredible $315 million. According to one report, Arianna Huffington--who has been described as the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus--scored nearly $20 million in the deal.
But at what price? This is the question that progressive die-hard fans of The Huffington Post are asking. Did Arianna just sell out? Did she just sell them out by transplanting the young and hip forward-looking news site into the corporate culture of a company, AOL, that was so yesterday?
"This powerful liberal voice is formally joining the 'corporate media' its writers have long disparaged...the evil 'MSM' of 'HuffPo' blogger ire," Dana Milbank writes today in the Washington Post.
Howard Kurtz, writing in The Daily Beast, adds a twist:
Its liberal ethos—there are few conservative columnists—has morphed into a kind of populism that often challenges President Obama from the left on such issues as financial reform. Huffington maintains that in the last two years, she has been trying to move beyond “the knee-jerk way of looking at every issue as a left-right issue. It doesn’t help our debate. It doesn’t help in finding solutions. Now I have a much larger platform to keep pressing that point of view.”
But Milbank sees more nefarious implications in Arianna's post-partisan tagline.
"It's time for all of us in journalism to move beyond left and right," Huffington said Monday on PBS's "NewsHour." "Truly, it is an obsolete way of looking at the problems America is facing."
That is almost exactly what Huffington said in 2000, when she was making her last ideological transformation, from a conservative Republican into a liberal icon. "The old distinctions of right and left, Democrat, Republican, are pretty obsolete," she told Fox News then.
It's a stock line for Huffington, but if she and Armstrong are taken at their word, they are planning a radical reshaping of what had become an important voice for liberalism and a gleeful participant in the left-right game.
So does Arianna, who will now be in charge of all of AOL's editorial content, plan to take the HuffPo in a more politically neutered direction? She gives a hint in this interview:
AOL is not a political site. AOL has Politics Daily, a section which covers politics, but it's not a political site. I was always clear that HuffPo would not just be a political site. I always wanted it to be an Internet newspaper, covering every aspect of life.
She also has been fond, recently, of repeating the statistic that only 15% of her site's traffic is driven by politics. So all in all, Arianna has been downplaying the political bent that has defined the Huffington Post brand (that, and its smutty slideshows and celebrity gossip). It's a move that makes sense if she wants to expand the HuffPo brand to reach a more centrist market of readers--ie the AOL crowd--but it's a risky undertaking nonetheless.
Can the Huffington Post expand its brand without fundamentally changing it? That's a question that media-junkies will be debating in the coming weeks.
But I doubt that it's a question keeping Arianna up late at night.
If news reports are to be believed, the AOL-HuffPo deal went down swiftly--in about a month, over a couple of lunches. Arianna just cashed-in in a major way. A close friend of hers says, "she is ecstatic. It's been a life of hard work." And Arianna told The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz that the AOL gig will be her "last act."
Arianna has always struck me as more of a mercenary than an ideologue, and I bet that will be reflected in how everything shakes out with the HuffPo.
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Comments :
Jun '10
Re: Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
Knowing when to take a profit is part of investing. Too bad her customer's don't understand market economics. Bahahaha!
Re: Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
Zing!
Jun '10
Re: Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
Arianna likes leftist ideology, but I think she likes money even more. Leftist ideology doesn't pay the bills...in any context.
May '10
Re: Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
A right turn? AOL hit the skids after the Kool Aid drinking editors from Time/Warner perverted the content. This purchase is more like Kmart buying Sears: now I can find Craftsman and Die-Hard brands sprinkled around the Chinese-made junk. So what.
May '10
Re: Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
Truth is that editorially, AOL has catered to the left for awhile before Arianna arrived. Despite the tired reputation of AOL, the news site has found a second life through its popular instant messaging site and skews very young and hip. In fact, it has been an unlikely source for stand-alone editorial comments from administration spokespeople defending policy or attempting to blow a dog whistle for the 20-something crowd. No one over 30 really goes there, but editorially the fit makes a lot of sense and aside from softening the more radical elements of HuffPo I don't see that they will need to make much of a change at all.
Re: Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
Say what you will about AOL, but they've been good enough to host a Ricochet widget on their Politics Daily page since a few months after our launch, and we send a fair amount of traffic to each other. As business partners, they've been a pleasure to deal with.
May '10
Re: Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
Interesting observation Logo. Have you attempted any similar arrangement with HuffPo?
Jul '10
Re: Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
There should be an opera about Arianna. The first act would include her marriage to Michael Huffington, a homosexual, and persuading him to run for political office while still in the closet. As time goes on, she reminds me more and more of a character in "I, Claudius." When that blond head of hair morphs into snakes, head for the exits.
Edited on Feb 9, 2011 at 9:47amRe: Will the HuffPo Take a Right Turn?
Trace Urdan
Interesting observation Logo. Have you attempted any similar arrangement with HuffPo? · Feb 9 at 8:54am
Not yet, but we've been discussing it.