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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.