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LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE MAY 2011 ‘HOW CAN YOU RESIGN FROM A JOB YOU NEVER HAD?’ Arianna Huffington meets Citizen Kane When AOL bought out the Huffington Post, new US journalism merged with old US journalism in demeaning journalists in the pursuit of profit BY RODNEY BENSON When Arianna Huffington chose to support John Kerry as presidential candidate against George W Bush in 2004, a dispirited Democratic Party won an unlikely ally. Huffington’s public career began as a Republican; in the 1990s, after her (now ex-) husband lost a race for the US Senate, Huffington joined a thinktank associated with Newt Gingrich, the Republican House leader. Her first internet project was Resignation.com, a website attempting to push President Bill Clinton out of office after the Monica Lewinski affair. By the early 2000s her politics had veered to the left. The Huffington Post, launched in May 2005 as an alternative to the Drudge Report website, quickly became the place for the left to complain about the right. From the start HuffPo was controversial, and not just for its politics. Its mixture of posts from 15,000 bloggers, aggregated content from other media outlets, emphasising sex and celebrities, and some original content from a full-time staff made it the envy of traditional media. Its monthly unique viewers rose from a million in 2008 to more than 25 million in 2011, placing it among the top 10 US news sites. It led the fight against the war in Iraq, when much of the media, notably the The New York Times, did not investigate the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction; partnered with the non-profit Center for Investigative Reporting to support more than 50 full-time journalists; and issued a call for Americans to withdraw their money from the big banks to protest the return to the high-risk financial strategies that brought on the financial crisis. It shouldn’t have surprised when Huffington announced this February that the behemoth AOL (originally America Online) was buying HuffPo for $315m. Even as it sponsored a popular tent at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, with scented candles and back massages, Huffington was telling everyone that the site was moving beyond just politics (1). In 2010 it turned its first profit – $30m – and there were rumblings that the venture capitalists who had financed HuffPo’s expansion were impatient to cash in. ’Time to move beyond left and right’ There was disappointment and soul-searching; the sale raises questions, about how much, in political or journalistic principles, should be sacrificed in the quest for a larger audience. What are the longterm consequences of American journalism’s subservience to the needs of corporate advertisers, market investors, and a consumer-driven commercial culture? “It’s time to move beyond left and right,” said Huffington to The Washington Post (9 February 2011) at the time of the AOL sale, which is exactly what she said almost a decade ago when she made the shift from right to left. Just before the WashPo story, HuffPo’s labour writer Mike Elk had helped 200 union members storm into a Mortgage Bankers Association conference in Washington, DC to protest against the alleged misuse of government funds by the banker chairing the meeting. When it was discovered that Elk had allowed a union member to use his press card to gain access, this professional lapse was used to justify his immediate firing by business editor Peter Goldman. In Elk’s view, the line between journalism and activism at HuffPo had never been clearly demarcated; the filmmaker Michael Moore, for whom disruption was an essential part of the creative process, was a regular HuffPo blogger. Elk’s main ethical concern was (and is) HuffPo’s failure to hire a single full-time, paid labour reporter (2). Before his “firing”, Elk was one of the army of unpaid bloggers. Now other bloggers have joined Elk to demand that Huffington, author of Third World America: How Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream (her 13th book), match her words with actions. Visual Art Source, a writer’s collective, and the National Newspaper Guild, which represents US communication workers, called for a strike. Her response was to say: “Go ahead, go on strike – no one will notice.” Her position has long been that bloggers are amply compensated in their visibility, and that this has increased exponentially with the merger. As part of AOL, the combined audience will be 117 million unique monthly viewers in the US, and an estimated 250 million globally. In Huffington’s words: “We’re going from a train to a supersonic jet.” Prominent writers, such as former Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, have made this argument in coming to her defence (3). Latino activist Roberto Lovato, while disappointed at the merger because of AOL’s reputation for conservatism, professes no illusions: “Arianna has always been about change from within.” For his own political projects, HuffPo gave him a prominent pipeline for his “Basta Dobbs” campaign that pressured CNN to fire political talk show host Lou Dobbs because of his anti-immigrant rants (4). Using each other The chance to reach so many people is the decisive factor for many bloggers, especially established writers like Scheer and Lovato who don’t need fees. If Huffington is using the bloggers, they are also using her. But who is getting more out of the deal? Relying on bloggers for content may have been a tenable position when HuffPo was a start-up. Once Huffington cashed in, though, the obligation to reward the bloggers’ role in making the HuffPo brand so valuable seems harder to ignore. Mayhill Fowler blogged a citizen journalist account of presidential candidate Barack Obama’s remark about working class people “clinging to guns and religion”. About a hundred blogs later, after HuffPo had twice nominated her work for a Pulitzer Prize, and after she repeatedly asked to be paid for her writing, Fowler resigned. HuffPo editor Mario Ruiz said: “How can you resign from a job you never had?” Yet the line between paid reporters and unpaid bloggers is unclear. Mike Elk’s blogs were so numerous (105 in all), and so filled with real reporting, that many of his readers assumed he was on the payroll; inside the organisation, he sometimes consulted with news editors while researching his blogs. Though HuffPo’s journalism makes room for progressive or left viewpoints, ultimately it is part of a refeudalisation of the US social and economic order. According to the most recent state of the media report published online by the Pew Foundation, more than a third of professional journalists have been laid off during the past 10 years, 10,000 of them in the past three years. In a critical essay, “Huffington’s Plunder” on Truthdig.com, former New York Times foreign correspondent and now Nation Institute fellow Chris Hedges wrote: “Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter members of the exploitative class. Dust off your Karl Marx. They are the enemies of working men and women. And they are also, in this case, sucking the lifeblood out of a trade I care deeply about.” In response to the argument that HuffPo bloggers “had a choice”, Hedges writes that this is the argument made by “the managers of sweatshops in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, the coal companies in West Virginia or Kentucky and huge poultry farms in Maine” (5). Digital feudalism Anthony de Rosa, a Reuters product manager, has called the emerging online information ecosystem dominated by HuffPo and its social and amateur media cousins Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr “digital feudalism”: “The technology of these sites is seductive, and lulls people into contributing: we are being played for suckers to feed the beast, to create content that ends up creating value for others” (6). Huffington said however that bloggers should be pleased to work for free since “personal expression” had become a source of accomplishment (7). We know what follows. As time and attention move to these websites, advertisers follow. The result, as the advertising model continues to dominate, is a sharp devaluation of content, providing an incentive to produce news as quickly and as cheaply as possible, using the latest in search engine optimisation. AOL has been at the forefront of these. As an anonymous AOL journalist said to the website Business Insider, “The AOL Way is mainly about ramping up volume and, largely through technological manipulation, squeezing out as much profit as possible from each piece of content regardless of its quality” (8). AOL chairman Tim Armstrong, dismissing criticisms, said: “Arianna has the same interests we do, which is serving consumers’ needs and going beyond the just straight political needs of people” (8). Huffington noted that political news now attracts less than 15% of her site’s traffic, down from 50% during its early years. (The shift into non-political news began in earnest in 2008 to attract more advertising.) The post-merger hiring of more professional journalists is a positive move, but most come from mainstream outlets, including The New York Times, reinforcing the shift to the centreright. Progressive bloggers have to ask themselves whether they are on the site to spread their views or provide the illusion of ideological diversity for a site becoming more like any other largescale commercial enterprise. The net has done nothing to remedy the ills of US media. The story of the Huffington Post sums it up – hypercommercialisation, an almost exclusive reliance on advertising funding, Wall Street ownership that makes profit maximisation the highest priority, and a regulatory environment that encourages mergers and acquisitions that have left leading media companies billions of dollars in debt.