Arianna the unethical and illiberal

People who want examples of Arianna Huffington both being unethical and not being that liberal need read no further than this excellent Columbia Journalism Review article. Among its items of note:

1. Andrew Brietbart in at the foundation of HuffPost;
2. Long before plagiarism of newspaper stories, she was sued, back in the U.K., for plagiarism in a Maria Callas bio;
3. Outsourcing coding for the HuffPost website to places like Ukraine and South America;
4. The fact that, for early "pushers" at HuffPost, "stickiness" mattered more than either content quality or design quality.

There is plenty more. There's one more point, on the illiberal side. The bloggers who sued her after the AOL merger should have seen that something like that was the business plan all along. We're in the Net.com world, the next step past dot.com, and probably waiting for a similar bubble to burst.

And, beyond unethical and illiberal, the CJR story also raises the question about how munch she really may not be about "ideas." Her move from the National Review, itself,  isn't indicative of that. David Brock did that, and it's clear he IS a person about "ideas."

But, she had little in the way of deep ideas then or now. Rather, it's about "stickiness," and having people who know more about the web than her make the stickiness happen.

I personally, as a secular humanist and skeptic, have other reason to question her "depth." Her long-term interest in "spirituality" seems to be of the flighty, New Agey variety. If there's a core to her, it probably starts there.

#HuffPost bloggers get #DarwinAward, legal equivalent

A U.S. District judge has dismissed with prejudice (note that) a suit 9,000 bloggers filed against Huffington Post, rejecting their claim to be entitled to a $105 million cut of the pie from the Greek Goddess' merger with AOL.

This is why it's a Darwin Award, legal equivalent. From the story:

U.S. District Judge John Koeltl said "no one forced" the bloggers to repeatedly provide their work with no expectation of being paid, and said they got what they bargained for when their works were published.

"The principles of equity and good conscience do not justify giving the plaintiffs a piece of the purchase price when they never expected to be paid, repeatedly agreed to the same bargain, and went into the arrangement with eyes wide open," the judge wrote.

Koeltl also dismissed claims that AOL materially misled the bloggers about how often their works were being viewed, and how much revenue they were generating. 

Bingo.

To go into more detail.

First, the bloggers were blogging for free before a merger. To riff on Yeshua bar Yusuf's vineyard, you blog for no denarius earlier, you blog for no denarius later.

Second, Arianna had a history of things like plagiarism before the merger. You knew who you were dancing with all along.

Third, before her (fame and finance driven) self-reinvention, she was married to a rich conservative. More "history."

Fourth, from the story, more Drwin Award level stuff:

Jeff Kurzon, a lawyer for the bloggers, said, "We are reviewing the decision and considering our options."

Really? Are you, as a lawyer, too dumb to get the "with prejudice" part of the ruling? Or, are you gambling that a fair chunk of the 9K suing bloggers are that dumb? In that  case YOU are the one who should be sued, Mr. Kurzon.

Per friend Leo Lincourt, there may  be moral issues here, but they were evident before the merger. I think a fair chunk of the bloggers are probaby less idealistic than they claim, perhaps a bit like a fair chunk of OWS supporters who suddenly discovered how evil Wall Street was when it wouldn't hire them.

Fact is, these bloggers have a bit of recourse, at least, still today.

First, how many of you 9K are STILL blogging for HuffPost? STOP IT! You're now part of the problem, not the solution.

Second, take the next step. If you still read any paid blogger on HuffPost, STOP IT! Even if you can't read their particular thoughts anywhere else. 


Third, tell your favorite paid bloggers what you're doing, and why.

Obama lies and fact check July 19

"Obama lies, people die?" Many people who would have said similar with the name of (George W.) Bush a few years ago are silent as Obama and his administration lie about drones killing civilians in Pakistan, CIA black sites in Somalia and more.

Jeremy Scahill says on MSNBC that Obama is able to get away with stuff that McCain wouldn't have been able to, because he had been elected. Essentially, the antiwar movement was defanged by Obama's election, with a fair chunk of it being Obamiacs.

Scahill adds that, in terms of things like lack of secrecy, the CIA is as much a clusterfuck as ever.

Meanwhile, in the fact check world, the Pea Party gets a name. It's the "austerians," led on the right-neoliberal/now-neoconservative Democratic side by ... shock me ... Robert Rubin and acolytes and on the GOP side by Pete Peterson. All of their major claims about the debt are partially to totally wrong, yet Obama still worships them.

More fact check. Obama mangles Lincoln's relationship to the press over the Emancipation Proclamation. I don't know whether he's that historically uninformed, or this was a deliberate play to compare himself to Lincoln, mixed with his typical thin-skinnedness about criticism from the "left" that he once, for public consumption at least, welcomed. That said, "left" is in scare quotes because Arianna Huffington ain't Left.

Dear HuffPuff: I agree with the Greek Goddess

"Go on strike," indeed, HuffPuffers.

Now, I do agree that Arianna Huffington is a pseudoliberal, but I'll say it again -- you can always start your own blog if you want to keep vanity blogging, HuffPuffers. Or, if you want to be part of a "network," go apply to one of the Examiner ads on Monster and CareerBuilder. You might make a few pennies a month.

First, note that many of you have been writing promotional content, not editorial content. In other words, SEO spam.

Second, take a look in the mirror at your vanity quotient. If you really believe in it that much, start your own blog and put a PayPal tip jar on it.

AOL buying HuffPost for $315M — ugh

Really? For $315 million?

Ugh in many ways. Among them:
1. This is surely another case of overvaluing a social media-type company. (I'm convinced we're due for Net Bubble 2.0 to crash in about 4-5 years.)
2. AOL + The Greek Goddess? Isn't this going to be like the wedding of a craptacular failure with a still-to-be-realized craptacular failure?

The story says the money was really just a "finder's fee," if you will, to get Arianna Huffington's alleged genius to AOL.

Well, she's about as overvalued, IMO, as is HuffPost.

Beyond value issues, I dread the idea of a B-grade Oprah now having AOL as a vehicle to "brand" herself.

And, this all said, will the bloggers which produce much of HuffPost's comment for free now want to get paid for their work, if the company is worth $315 million?

Eventually, as more and more people realize that the fragmented Internet doesn't guarantee you 15 minutes of fame any more, the novelty of writing online for the hell of it will wear off for at least some.

Per Business Insider, this move is part of a larger AOL master plan. And, that master plan sounds like it involves even more use of Examiner-type writing serfs, probably more efforts to crack/bollix up Google/Bing/Yahoo search rankings, likely some AOL search engine effort and more.

An example from "The AOL Way":

• AOL tells its editors to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations: traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.
• AOL asks its editors to decide whether to produce content based on "the profitability consideration."he documents reveal that AOL is, when the story calls for it, willing to boost traffic by 5 to 10% with search ads and other "paid media."
• AOL site leaders are expected to have eight ideas for packages that could generate at least $1 million in revenue on hand at all times.
• In-house AOL staffers are expected to write five to 10 stories per day.
• AOL knows its sites are too dependent on traffic from AOL.com, and it wants its editors to fix the problem by posting more frequently, with more emphasis on getting pageviews.

Some of the topics on that "AOL Way" document make clear it wants to go down some sort of Examiner-type route. So, no, free bloggers at HuffPost, you will NOT get a cut of Arianna's $315 million. That said, it's called WordPress or Blogger. Start your own blog and sign up for Google AdSense. A buck, while working for yourself, isn't that better than zero while working for an ugly corporation?

Salon's Scott Rosenberg has more on this, based on the participants' backgrounds:

Maybe Huffington and Armstrong will prove a great team: The queen of low-cost SEO-driven content paired with the guy who built the Google ad machine that made SEO-driven content pay.

But he goes on to express his doubts:

Fitting in with that? People who think The Greek Goddess is "progressive" (and she really isn't), should note carefully that politics, especially opinion/commentary, will NOT be a big feature with the merger.

Salon spells out the options:

People think of Huffington Post as the leading popular liberal-Democratic news site. Huffington is now at least suggesting that the progressive point of view isn't a part of what she'll be pursuing at AOL. "Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business," says the New York Times story. Really? This strikes me as strange, disingenuous, and about as credible as Roger Ailes claiming that Fox is not a partisan-driven institution.

One possibility is, Huffington is just saying what the corporate script requires and actually the plan is to position AOL as a sort of Democratic alternative to Fox News/Drudge -- which I think would be a really interesting move. I have to assume Arianna has big TV ambitions. ...

The other, more likely possibility is that this whole thing is about the money, the investors needed to cash out, HuffPo's numbers weren't looking good enough for an IPO, and Huffington is basically improvising. She'll spend a couple years at AOL and then move on. This means that, in 2011, Huffington Post will be playing the same role in relation to AOL that AOL played in relation to Time Warner back in 2000.

So, you serfs who've been writing for free on that issue, you've got yet more reason to quit.

A friend of mine pointed out that AOL's Armstrong has been doing this for a year, already. What he gets from HuffPost? The stable of Examiner/Demand Media serfs he didn't have before. Only thing is, the pay, if any, will be Examinder-style and based solely on blog post hits — no advance money.

So, congrats, HuffPost serfs — you just got sold like cattle. At least it's likely you'll be primarily SEO-gaming entertainment news and consumer tech, and what's left of allegedly political commentary at HuffPost will fade further away.

Dan Lyons also doesn't like it, and compares the HuffPost serfs to Ben-Hur's galley slave compadres.

But, it may not be just blog posts.

One other thing, that will make this even more craptactular? With Memeorandum, etc., now aggregating Tweets, not just blog posts ... I think you can follow all the ways in which that could go. And why stop at Twitter? If Ted Armstrong is really going to go balls to the wall, he's either going to:
1. Work with Facebook;
2. Try to "crack" FB in some way;
3. Work with MySpace;
4. Buy MySpace from Murdoch.

Oh, another question about the HuffPost-AOL merger — will this new conglomerate spam CareerBuilder and Monster with as many help wanted ads as does Examiner?

And, finally, a rhetorical question to people like David Dayen at FDL who touts HuffPost's progressive bona fides — how does a company with a business model like that (not to mention its repeated plagiarism) qualify as "progressive"? In a neolib world, where holding the right positions on one or two social issues qualifies, maybe so.

Froomkin to Huff Post – will it work?

Glenn Greenwald rightly says it’s a good move overall, but given the Greek Goddess’ own inside-the-Beltway connections, and Huffington Post’s often bald-faced Obamiac cheerleading, there could be tensions.

Supposedly, Froomkin has full editorial freedom. But, didn’t he have that at the Washington Post, too?

So, I will not hold my breath too long over him and Arianna.

For example, what if the Huff Post starts cheating on “fair use” issues again?

Doesn’t the Greek Goddess have the money not to fund plagiarism?

Because that’s the accusation now being made against a new Arianna Huffington/HuffPost spin-off venture.

HuffPost Editor Jonah Peretti says, no, it’s all a big misunderstanding, that HuffPost is just trying to send traffic in the direction of The Onion and alt-weekly Chicago Reader, among others.

Bullshit in spades. Both of those folks are plenty big enough, and at least the The Onion, have had well-established website presences long enogh before Arianna came along, they don’t need HuffPost’s “help.”

Also, people who complain about this and similar shenanigans at HuffPost are getting cybercensored.

I hope the scandal “helps” HuffPost continue to tumble down the stairs of worthwhileness (as it already has), with a good, swift cyberkick in Arianna’s solar plexus.

Hypocrisy alert – Schmuck Talk didn’t vote for Preznit, Airhead Huffington says

At least, that’s the word from the Greek Goddess. Arianna Huffington says both John and Cindy McCain told her in a post-2000 election party that they didn’t vote for George Bush. (Cindy says she voted write-in for John.)

Yet, today, Schmuck Talk Express™ whores after the Preznit’s support, despite the fact that Schmuck Talk has never even obliquely commented that he got so much as a quarter of an apology from Bush.

At the same time, Arianna reveals herself as a fucking ditz:

McCain's fall has been Shakespearean -- and really hard to watch for those, like myself, who so admired and even loved him. His nobility and his true reformer years have given way to pandering in the service of ambition.

Arianna smoked either crack or John McCain body parts after finding out her hubby was gay, I think.

If McCain ever had a reforming bone in his body, it died on the Charles Keating scrap heap and was never resurrected.

All the problems the Athenian Airhead lists with Big John in the past year or two were there 20 years ago. They’ve just become more outsized now.

Arianna Huffington wrong AND clueless on Alcoholics Anonymous

While the Divine Ms. A has done a lot of good in supporting the growth of the liberal blogosphere, it comes as no surprise, knowing her NewAgeish tendencies in some areas, to know that she totally misses the boat with blank-check support for AA. That, in turn is part of a larger and sadder blank-check support for “faith-based initiatives” in general. (Oh, BTW, what would the Bush Administration, or the Greek Goddess (snark again) do, if a Wiccan or Satanist applied for a faith-based grant?)

Here’s the nut grafs of how she’s wrong:

The evidence is overwhelming that it's infinitely harder to rebuild shattered lives without acknowledging the spiritual dimension of human nature. No, this doesn't mean accepting Jesus as your personal savior. It simply means that, as Alcoholics Anonymous and its many offshoots — including Gamblers Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, etc. — have shown, acknowledgment of a higher power is central to recovery.

First, Bill Wilson only inserted more religion (yes religion, not “spirituality”) into AA because Dr. Robert Smith’s AA group in Cleveland was growing faster than his own in New York City. Wilson was a former stockbroker, and like most salespeople, didn’t care WHY something was selling, just that it was.

But, the more serious claim that AA, and the other 12-Step offshoots, “work”? Not at all. Here’s some of the dirty little secrets AA doesn’t like to admit:

According to AA’s own Triennial Survey of its membership (conducted every three years, of course), of 100 people who join AA today, only about five of them will still be there a year from now. In five years, that figure will shrink to a mere 1.6 to 2.6 percent. These figures have remained consistent for decades. Compare this with the figures describing the natural outgrowth of a substance problem: of Americans who say they’ve ever had a substance problem but have since solved that problem, fully 80 percent claim they either outgrew the problem naturally, or buckled down and took care of it on their own, without any outside help whatsoever.

In other words, AA and other 12-step groups don’t work. And, for the Athenian Airhead to cite AA as a success model so blithely shows she didn’t do any research on her subject. (And, her dissing of atheists in the same column only underscores that; it also puts her broader credibility on the line.)

Of course, as the person above notes, and, as the Greek Gidget sneeringly dismisses, the bigger issue yet is that enforced AA (as for people convicted of alcohol-related offenses) is illegal, per multiple U.S. District Court rulings.

Besides, Huffington is ignorant of Bill Wilson’s real “higher power” when he got sober — belladonna. It’s easy to hallucinate all sorts of spirituality shit when, well, when you’re on a hallucinogen! She apparently also ignores Bill’s late-life jaunts into the world of LSD.

Oh, no. The Athenian Airhead utters this instead:

Leading the nitwit parade on this issue are two very strange bedfellows: Barry Lynn, who has made a career out of warning people of imaginary threats to the separation of church and state, and Pat Robertson, who is worried about “opening the floodgates ... of the federal treasury to aberrant groups” like the Church of Scientology, the Unification Church and the Hare Krishnas.

I guess Rev. Pat doesn't know that the Hare Krishnas have provided help to homeless veterans, recovering addicts and prison parolees with the help of government money for close to 20 years.

First, seven years later, I wonder if Miss A. has admitted that many of these threats aren’t “imaginary.” (I suspect many fundamentalist backers of Bush, if they do worry about things like climate change, simply assume they’ll be “elevated” during the Rapture to serenely watch the world bake. Heck, some may substitute Chinese CO2 output for Soviet tanks and say global warming is the prophesied Armageddon.)

Second, I don’t care whether the International Society for Krishna Consciousness is “aberrant” to Pat Robertson or not, it’s still unconstitutional for it to get money like this.

The ruling of liberal faith-basers’ “favorite” Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, and his blatherings about “civil religion,” aside.

Arianna Huffington disses secularists

While the Divine Ms. A has done a lot of good in supporting the growth of the liberal blogosphere, it comes as no surprise, knowing her NewAgeish tendencies in some areas, to know that she totally misses the boat with her higher-power babble . (Yes, the post is seven years old, but I’ve never heard the Huffmaedchen withdraw her general tenet.)

That, in turn is part of a larger and sadder blank-check support for “faith-based initiatives” in general. (Oh, BTW, what would the Bush Administration, or the Greek Goddess (snark again) do, if a Wiccan or Satanist applied for a faith-based grant?)

Here’s the nutbarrery of her nut grafs, though:

In the same way that astronomy wasn’t able to move forward until Copernicus posited that it was the Earth that revolved around the sun — also an unpopular view at the time — our society will not be able to reclaim its proliferating human casualties until it comes to terms with the fact that healing revolves around the acceptance of a higher power.

Of course, there will always be people who believe there is no God, just as there continue to be flat-earthers, convinced that Copernicus had it all wrong.

So, we’re as stupid and contrary as flat-earthers.

First, possibly the most horrific war in history, in terms of total civilian suffering, was an inter-Christian religious war, the Thirty Years War. Even today, and not just among or by Muslims, or Jews, or Christians, wars are fought in the name of religion.

The Tamil Tiger separatists are Sri Lanka, for example, are mainland-India oriented Hindu “religious nationalists.” (Given the nature of Hinduism, and a comment about to follow, that’s the best handle I can devise.)

Speaking of that, India has its Hindu Nationalist Party. Oh, Goddess, you remember it, don’t you? The party that won Indian parliamentary elections in 1998 on a promise to start nuclear bomb testing? And then doing so.

Or, let’s not forget the Japanese militarists of World War II praying at Shinto shrines, or the kamikazes thinking their missions were divinely supported.

I then got to thinking, I could have updated Arianna’s column myself and fictitiously bylined it under an even bigger rectal irritant’s name. All I had to do was go to Washington Monthly, crib a few quotes from some of Amy Sullivan’s more insipid posts, insert them at the right points in the Divine Miss A.’s original column slap Amy’s byline on it, and, voila!

Oh, and welcome any readers of Kevin Drum’s “liberal, godless blog.” Not.