The New Republic

Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded
the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need To
Know To End The Madness)

By Arianna Huffington

(Alfred A. Knopf, 388 pp., $24.95)

I.When did you last read a book or an essay or a post that claimed
America, or modern civilization, or "the West," was in decline, or
that the United States had "lost" its innocence, or that it was
"falling behind" in its educational standards, or that comity has
tragically disappeared from a partisan and polarized Washington,
whereas once upon a time representatives came to the capital only
to do the "people's business"? Not too long ago, I suspect. But one
may read exactly such laments from fifteen or thirty or even eighty
years ago. Earlier prophets of doom were humming the same rueful
tune. Maybe doom is just a trope. And yet the staleness of American
punditry from one generation to the next is disturbing. It numbs
our language, and blinds us to the ways in which our institutions
are changing, or even disappearing.

In 1978, in England, Arianna Stassinopoulos published her second
book, called After Reason. In it she proclaimed that modernity had
failed us. The world was overflowing with spiritual yearnings that
our trivial and materialistic society could not satisfy. Who, or
what, was responsible for the malaise? A part of the blame was laid
at the feet of a craven and soulless media. "For the first time in
history," Stassinopoulos portentously began, "an opinion on
everything has become an indispensible accessory of modern living,
and everybody goes about in the cast off clothing of the latest
media gurus." After approvingly quoting Kierkegaard, she
continued:

The world is reduced into flat, surveyable, two-dimensional world
events; and we can all enjoy the illusion that we know exactly what
has happened in the last twenty-four hours and what precisely to
think about what has happened. Except that the meaning and
significance that even the most averse to thought among us need,
remain lost. The news and opinions, the perishable, ephemeral and
valueless facts with which alone we are bombarded is as much of a
substitute for the truths we long for, as a telephone number is for
its subscriber. So it is not so much that we know more and more
about less and less, but that we know more and more about the less
and less important; and the more the precision of our knowledge
increases, the more trivial the questions we seek to answer.

Arianna Stassinopoulos is now Arianna Huffington, and she is best
known as the proprietor of The Huffington Post, and as a
personification of the hyperactive up-to-the-nanosecond
news-and-opinion universe of the web. Her fame now approaches her
immodest ambitions. And more than Huffington's name has changed
since she wrote those early premonitory words. She is now a
steely-- "bleeding heart" somehow does not fit--liberal, rather
than a politically incorrect conservative. She has been, as
Americans like to say, on a journey. Her historical timing has
always been exquisite. If she is herself some sort of institution,
she is an exceedingly adaptable one.

Now comes her twelfth book, lyrically entitled Right Is Wrong: How
the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and
Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need To Know To End The
Madness). It is only the most recent example of Huffington's
tireless ability to inhabit different places on the political
spectrum. In the early 1970s, she made herself a star by rubbing
outrageously against the liberal grain. A well-turned-out young
woman in articulate recoil from feminism, a woman disputing the
reigning ideologies and dogmas of her day--or at least the reigning
ideologies and dogmas of college and university students--was
ideally suited for the role of right-wing contrarian. But that may
have been the last time she moved against the wind. Now
"progressivism" reigns supreme in cyberspace and in the Beltway,
and noisily progressive she is. No courageous heterodoxy this time
around. Now she is a "player." A look at Huffington's career
reveals someone uncannily--no, cannily--adept at recognizing and
navigating the social and political currents, a zeitgeist artist,
even though she has written nothing that requires her to be taken
seriously as a thinker.

Huffington's work is not intellectually consistent, but there are
two strains that run through much of what she has written. The
first is her limp spirituality, which never moves beyond fatuities
and banalities. ("Our purpose is to make religion a continuous
living experience, to lead us toward a resurrection not of the dead
but of the living who are dead to their own truth. ") The second is
her frequent and caustic criticism of the Fourth Estate. Here is
her earlier quotation of Kierkegaard: "In the world of opinion,
newspapers demoralize men, by disaccustoming them from having an
opinion of their own, and from developing themselves by carrying it
in the face of opposition to the opinion of others, and by
accustoming them, on the other hand, to have the guarantee for any
opinion they may have that a significant number of men have the
same opinion." Unpacking all the ironies here is a formidable task.
Newspapers have changed considerably in the past two centuries. They
currently stand as one of the very few barriers to a media universe
that is comprised of almost nothing but outbursts and opinions. The
Internet, Huffington's universe, too often serves as a powerful
instrument of conformity ("communities of interest"). And
Huffington has thrown in her lot with precisely the sort of shallow
discourse that she once railed against. Her latest venture, and
others like it, are contributing mightily to the death of the media
institutions that she has long despised. At last her resentments
are bearing fruit.

It takes a particular kind of intelligence to understand when to
swim against the current and when to ride the wave. In 1973,
Stassinopoulos, then a Greek immigrant and Cambridge graduate
living in London, cleverly decided to pen a response to one of the
era's most controversial feminists, Germaine Greer, and Greer's
bestseller The Female Eunuch. Arriving seven years after The
Feminine Mystique, Greer's book was released in the middle of
"second-wave" feminism's heyday. Her argument was multifaceted, if
unsubtle. She claimed that women needed to come to grips with how
much men disliked them. The nuclear family was constricting women;
they were trapped into hating themselves. Greer desired that women
would embrace their bodies and their sexuality, even if she did go
so far as to suggest the drinking of one's own menstrual blood.

In retort, Stassinopoulos's The Female Woman called the women's
movement "repulsive," and went on to claim that "it is not a
movement calling for equal opportunities, equal pay, equal status
for woman's role in life, in fact as well as in law; instead it
attacks the very nature of woman, and in the guise of liberation,
seeks to enslave her." Stassinopoulos espoused women's
"emancipation" because it would allow women to play distinctly
female roles, as opposed to women's liberation, which demanded
"identical patterns of behavior."

The Female Woman is a strange and unappetizing book. Stassinopoulos
launches a confused attack on Mill, and writes that feminists and
Nazis are ideologically simpatico because both groups wish to
abolish the family (a bizarre claim for many reasons), and permits
herself even a few homophobic digressions. Of lesbians, she writes
that "their inner confusion is often expressed in arrogance, a
conspicuous exhibitionism, in an attempt to compensate for the
femininity they have denied and the masculinity they have failed to
attain." This passage is probably the book's best example of
Stassinopoulos's hypocrisy in condemning the women's movement for
limiting women's roles: she, too, had a rather circumscribed idea
of what constitutes femininity. Other passages appear designed
simply to infuriate, in the manner of a certain sort of
attention-grabbing British journalism: "Women's Lib claims that the
achievement of total liberation would transform the lives of all
women for the better, the truth is that it would transform only the
lives of women with strong lesbian tendencies."

Huffington's evolution from bombastic reactionary to pious
progressive has not occurred linearly. In the years after the
release of The Female Woman, she continued to write frequently and
controversially. There was a gossipy biography of Maria Callas and
a shabby and utterly philistine "life" of Picasso. In 1986, she
married the wealthy up-and-coming Republican politician Michael
Huffington, who was elected to the House of Representatives from
California in 1992 and then defeated in a Senate run two years
later. Huffington's notable effort in this period was a spiritual
guide called The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul. As she
explained, "the charge of our Fourth Instinct is to move us from
the tyranny of our fight-or-flight mechanism to the liberation of a
practical spirituality that transforms our everyday life." Some of
the themes in The Fourth Instinct built on notions that she had
advanced in After Reason, which claimed that the "spirit of man"
had been firmly rejected by modern society. This book, like so many
of her books, is, well, dumb. A hunger for the holy is never
conducive to clear thinking. The Fourth Instinct reads like a mix
of Deepak Chopra and Milton Friedman. "Many modern intellectuals,"
Huffington writes, like a good Reaganite, "are incapable of
conceiving of social renewal that is the result of human action,
but not of government design."

Huffington began writing a right-wing syndicated column. She
fervently supported the Contract with America and the rise of Newt
Gingrich, while at the same time preaching compassion for the poor.
She became a figure in mid-'90s Washington, using her new
megaphone, and her dining table, to speak out more loudly on the
same issues that had occupied her for years. Reading Huffington's
columns from this period is disagreeable, because her mixture of
spiritualism, libertarianism, New Right dogmatism, and concern for
the downtrodden does not amount to anything coherent. In 1995, she
wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard declaring that Gingrich
should challenge Bill Clinton for the presidency because the
Speaker was the only national figure who truly cared about poverty
and inner-city turmoil. "Precisely because Gingrich is right about
the moral crisis the country is facing--millions of lives and
entire communities destroyed by drugs, alcohol, gangs, and
violence--there is a moral imperative for him to fill the
leadership vacuum and address the growing devastation." Another
column made the claim that the White House feared Gingrich because
he could "paint vivid pictures both of the crisis and of what life
will look like after the revolution," while other Republicans could
not.

It is hard to know how seriously to consider Huffington's work in
those years. She was a vocal critic of Great Society efforts to
address social problems, but her anti-government instincts
prevented her from articulating any sort of tangible blueprint that
addressed real-world conditions. She may have been sincere in her
concerns about poverty, but how could anybody in their right (or
left) mind have believed that Newt Gingrich was the white knight
sent to cure urban destitution? One is struck, again, by the
discrepancy between the mediocrity of her work and the skill with
which she consolidated her fame.

As the right's revolution began to cool, Huffington's revolutionary
fervor started to wane, too. The Huffingtons divorced in 1997, and
the following year Michael Huffington announced that he was
bisexual. In 1998, Huffington published a book called Greetings
from the Lincoln Bedroom, a lame anti-Clinton satire--Huffington is
painfully unfunny--that nicely coincided with a general disgust
with Washington. Her columns also became increasingly, and
shrewdly, non-partisan. By the time Gingrich resigned as party
leader in 1998, it was clear that Huffington was ready for her next
move. After the GOP lost seats in the midterm elections in 1998,
Huffington concluded that Gingrich and company had failed because
they had abandoned their agenda of, in Gingrich's words, "coming to
terms with what's happening to the poorest Americans," an electoral
analysis that at least had the advantage of being original.

And so she made herself over as an enemy of power, a tribune of the
people, an A-list populist. In 2000, Huffington published How to
Overthrow the Government, which urged Americans to rise up and take
back Washington from two corrupt political parties. Her newest
campaign was perfectly timed to tap into the disappointment
emanating from the dreariness of the presidential campaign of 2000.
In a year in which Ralph Nader received almost 3 percent of the
vote, and in which both major party candidates were neither much
liked nor admired, Huffington held "shadow" political conventions
and managed to play to the general anomie. Her criticism of the
Clinton years evolved from concerns about the president's personal
failings to a critique of his policies from the left. And she
continued to demonstrate a rare gift for articulating the
prevailing mood without ever saying anything especially probing or
memorable. In 2003 there appeared Pigs at the Trough, a slightly
better written jeremiad against political corruption, which was
blurbed by John McCain, then Washington's reigning "maverick." That
same year Huffington ran as a populist in a gubernatorial recall
election in California, and succeeded only in seeming ridiculous.
The election was ultimately won by a celebrity much more famous
than she was.

By 2004, the Iraq invasion was starting to look like something less
than a brilliant success, and liberal disgust with the Bush
administration was reaching its zenith. Meanwhile the rise of the
so-called "netroots," coupled with grave concern about the
possibility of a second Bush term, had destroyed almost all
momentum for insurgent political movements. The only threat to the
status quo could come from John Kerry and a Democratic Party whose
principal argument was that they were better at Washington than
Bush was. This was the year that saw the publication of Fanatics
and Fools, Huffington's "game plan for winning back America," which
signaled that she had made her peace with the Democratic Party.
Many of the book's problems--particularly its over-the-top
criticisms of Schwarzenegger--were owed to her old habit of pushing
any argument a demagogic step too far, of wanting too much to be
noticed. There was something almost comical about the insistence of
this sudden liberal that she be regarded as some kind of leader of
American liberalism--that her latest incarnation be treated as her
whole story.

Right Is Wrong, Huffington's newest book, is a useful document of
her current version, in which progressive politics seem to come so
naturally to her that one almost forgets that she has been
traveling the whole time. The result is a book that is less genuine
and more tiresome. "Yes, the Republican Party has always had its
far-right cowboys, its Jesse Helmses and Spiro Agnews," Huffington
says near the beginning of the book, explaining her transformation.
"Yet they were removed from the party's more sober core. But these
days ... it has become impossible to tell where this core stops and
the fanatical fringe begins." You have to re-write a not
insignificant amount of history to describe the Republican Party's
second postwar vice president and one of its most powerful
senators--the latter a man who did the country an untold amount of
damage in the realm of foreign affairs, at a time when Huffington
was an active member of the GOP--as "removed" from anything other
than, respectively, respect for the rule of law and common sense.
There is some truth to her account of the party's evolution, even
if, in a bid to make the book appear timely, locating it in the
willingness of Republican primary voters to vote for their longtime
bete noire John McCain is odd. She also addresses her erstwhile
affection for Gingrich by saying that although he "talked a good
game," his heart was "never in it." This is odd, because if there
is anything that can be said for Gingrich's intellectual and
political wildness, it is that his heart is in it.

Right Is Wrong is one of those books that is completely irritating
even when it is correct. Like all people who have discovered their
own importance, Huffington has become dull. Consider this bit: "In
this time of Lilliputian figures it's clear that to end the
hijacking of America by the Right each one of us needs to take up
the gauntlet and stand up for truth, no matter how many in the
corridors of power or at the top of the media food chain would
prefer to maintain the status quo. Leadership is a risky business
requiring wisdom, courage, and fortitude--and as my compatriot
Socrates put it, courage is the knowledge of what is not to be
feared." Her compatriot Socrates! Maybe she should have him over
for dinner with some other really interesting people.

Huffington is one of those writers who mistakes press criticism for
the entirety of social and political criticism. Her condescension
toward the press is endless: "Someone please alert the media: not
every issue fits into your cherished right/left paradigm. Indeed,
that way of looking at the world is becoming less and less
relevant--and more and more obsolete. And more and more dangerous."
After reading these sentences, I checked the book's cover to make
sure that I was reading a book called Right Is Wrong. That looks
pretty binary to me. To understand Huffington's current place in
the media universe, it is necessary to recall that a visceral
dislike of the traditional press has always been the animating
feature of so much of her work.

In After Reason, Huffington's enmity for the press took the form of
the tired conservative lament that we are becoming a nation of
softies and whiners. "In an age as deprived of greatness as ours
is, saturated with mediocrity, cynicism and compromise, the unease
that the appearance of someone great has always produced, turned in
Solzhenitsyn's case into an outpouring of undisguised censure and
distrust that can only be explained by the pundits' fear that any
phenomenon of a higher order would degrade us--or at least diminish
them and disturb our sacred egalitarianism." (The italics are
hers.) From the talk of "greatness" to the whack at "compromise"
and the sneer at "sacred egalitarianism," this could hardly be
improved upon as a parody of the conservative mentality of the
day.

One of the requirements of membership in Gingrichian circles in the
1990s was an infatuation with bashing the liberal media, and
Huffington's critique of the press in this period was the same one
that now pays Ann Coulter's bills. "Having witnessed the liberal
orthodoxy's stunning defeat in the war of ideas, its allies in the
media will not change course or change sides, but rather change
tactics," she wrote in 1994. "Over the next year we will see a
rapid increase in 'negative stories'--character assassination
masquerading as investigative journalism and rumor-mongering
masquerading as 'informing the readers.'" More controversially, she
attacked a Washington Post editorial that criticized extreme verbal
attacks on the federal government after the Oklahoma City bombing.
"Those in the media who genuinely seek a calmer, more productive
debate about our nation's challenges might begin not by censoring
angry voices, but by listening and learning from what those voices
have to say," she instructed the establishment from her
inside/outside perch.

In How to Overthrow the Government, Huffington's rage at the media
boiled down to the conventional--and not altogether
implausible--criticism that it is overly obsessed with politicians'
personal lives. The political media was becoming a celebrity media:
imagine that! "Our national political debate," Huffington wrote,
"threatens to become nothing more than a Beltway version of The
Jerry Springer Show." In the Bush years her central criticism of the
press was of its presentation of news in a "he said/she said"
format, as if every issue had two equally valid sides. This, again,
was ironic, in the light of her own immense profiting from the
polarization of those years. Huffington is not exactly a paragon of
complexity in political discussion.

But something else was amiss. Consider, for example, Huffington's
attack on CNN's Candy Crowley in Right Is Wrong. Near the beginning
of 2007, Crowley reported: "What Senator Kennedy is going to do is
lay down the liberal view of things, which is to say, he will say,
look, no additional troops [in Iraq] and no money for additional
troops, unless Congress approves." According to Huffington, this is
misleading. Kennedy, she says, is expressing not the "liberal" view
but the mainstream view, because two-thirds of Americans wanted to
end the war. She adds: "The opinion of the American people was
clear. A CBS/ New York Times poll had 63 percent opposed to
continuing the war. The Democrats running for president and trying
to win their votes were clear as well. But far too many in the
media were still in a fog."

Huffington, you see, wants the media to reflect the zeitgeist. After
the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, Huffington lamented
the media's unwillingness to fall in line behind the new majority,
which was then a conservative majority. Now she implies that
reality in Iraq is at least partially defined by what percentage of
Americans oppose the war. But why should reporters who cover the
war or politics care a whit for the results of opinion polls?
Huffington is here blissfully (or cunningly) unaware that this is
exactly the type of coverage that she decries for having misled
Americans into supporting the war in the first place. (She is much
more interested in quoting public opinion surveys from 2007 than
she is in recalling the country's mood when America was set to
invade Iraq.) Huffington, the queen of seizing the moment, who
fears nothing so much as the wilderness, is rattled by the press's
unwillingness to keep its finger in the wind.

This same servility to public opinion manifests itself in her
discussion of the press's response to Hurricane Katrina. "The
media's coverage ... demonstrates the same attention deficit
disorder," she remarks. "Even though the media did a good job of
capturing public outrage at the time, they quickly moved on, with
Katrina becoming a news afterthought suitable for occasional
anniversary pieces and ribbon-cutting video." One can wholeheartedly
agree with Huffington's overarching point about evaporating
coverage, just as one can bravely oppose murder. But everything
that Huffington knows about the outrages of Katrina she knows from
the media. And more importantly, is it really the media's job
during the worst domestic natural disaster in generations to
capture public anger? The old distinction between facts and values,
between empiricism and expressionism in journalism, is lost upon
the eternally crusading (that is, positioning) Huffington. Is all
journalism to be opinion journalism? And if so, what makes one
opinion more decisive than another--its popularity?

Huffington even botches the obligatory takedown of William Kristol,
which is the equivalent in basketball of missing an open layup.
Huffington found herself on a train with Kristol where she
overheard him talking on his cell phone (there is safety only in
the quiet car): "'"Precipitous withdrawal" really worked,' I
overheard him say, clearly referring to the president's use of the
term in a July 12 press conference. 'How many times did he use it?
Three? Four?'" She has no idea, of course, who was on the other end
of the line; but this does not prevent her from courageously
speculating. She decides that Kristol was discussing political
strategy with the late Tony Snow, then the White House's press
secretary. After all, Kristol and Snow were once colleagues at Fox
News. And this sort of "political" chatter, of which she herself is
of course never guilty, strikes her as objectionable. Do
Republicans not know how to be patriotic in wartime?

II.

Nothing represents Huffington's hostility to the press more
perfectly than her largest endeavor to date. The Huffington Post is
a tremendously popular news aggregator that doubles as an outlet
for a number of liberal bloggers. Huffington co-launched the site
in 2005 with a former AOL executive named Ken Lerer, and four years
later The Huffington Post receives as many as nine million hits per
month. (I worked as an editor at The Huffington Post in 2007 for
just under a month. I left because of a misunderstanding over the
nature of the position I was hired for. My few interactions with
Huffington were polite.) The site--which is divided into a number
of sections, or "verticals"--overflows with videos, blog posts, and
news. The sheer volume of information is impressively rendered and
easily navigated.

Last year, in a great concession to the dustbin of history,
Huffington published a book about blogging, called The Huffington
Post's Complete Guide to Blogging. In her introduction she lays out
some of the ways that her site fills in the gaps left behind by the
mainstream media, or MSM. "I am frequently asked, " she writes, "if
the rise of New Media is the death knell for Old Media. My answer
is that Old Media isn't dead; it's critically ill but will actually
be saved by the transfusion of passion and immediacy the New Media
revolution has inspired. Blogging and the new media are
transforming the way news and information are disseminated--serving
as a wake-up call. A wake up call the traditional media--after
years of hitting the snooze button--has finally heeded. But it took
awhile."

So the old media are in fact in her debt. Her warm words about old
media here are surprising--except of course that she needs old
media to endure as a foil for the wonderfulness of new media, in
the way that the New Testament needs the Old. Huffington continues
in this cordial vein with a discussion of a panel she sat on with
Larry King and Sam Donaldson, who defended "Old Media" after
Huffington launched an attack. "My fellow panelists, on cue, leapt
to the defense of their mainstream brethren, pointing out that many
of the stories I mentioned had, in fact, been covered on TV or in
the big daily papers. And indeed they had. Sometimes in
ninety-second news packages and sometimes even on the front page of
The New York Times--above the fold. But that, until the rise of the
bloggers, was that. Issue noted. Let's all move on. Meaning, no
follow up, even as more details would come up. For too long,
reporters for the big media outlets have been fixated on novelty,
always moving all too quickly on to the next big score or the next
hot get."

I was taken aback by her implication that bloggers are not fixated
on novelty, that digital media do not move all too quickly on to
the next big score or the next hot get. So one afternoon, with a
solemn seriousness, I went on to The Huffington Post and clicked on
the "Politics" vertical. Here is what I found. The top link was to
a video mash-up of various conservative personalities calling Obama
names. Another headline linked to a video of Keith Olbermann
scolding Bill O'Reilly. A third video linked to Condoleezza Rice's
appearance on The Tonight Show. On the main page of the site, in
red, was a "Conservadems" headline about the centrist senators
trying to scale back Obama's spending proposals. If you clicked on
the headline, you were taken to a Huffington Post story about these
senators, which made the perfectly reasonable point that they did
not suggest what to strip from the budget (in other words, that
their complaint was politically inspired). Beneath the photo was a
link to a New York Times piece on the budget. Yahoo and AP stories
were also available. There was another link to a New York Times
op-ed from that morning, written by a former AIG executive who was
fed up with "bonus rage." A little below was a video of Morning Joe
hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski discussing vibrators (no,
really). On the left side of the screen were a number of blog
posts. The first was from Huffington herself; another was from Henry
Blodget, a third was from John Kerry, and down below was one from
the television actor Steven Weber, who offered the insight that
"the government is itself a Ponzi scheme and the citizens which
empower it its born-every-minute suckers."

On the "Entertainment" vertical was a video of Jenny McCarthy
explaining her beauty secrets, which, the headline explained,
included "Botox and Good Sex." Above this link was a picture of
Natasha Richardson, and if you clicked on the photograph you were
whisked to a People Magazine article about her donated organs. On
the "Media" vertical, the vibrator story was given even bigger
play: "Vibrator-Gate Round 4," the headline thoughtfully announced.
There were also links to a video of Rachel Maddow on Jimmy Fallon,
in which the MSNBC host told the late-night newcomer that he "needs
to drink more manly drinks."

I have gone into this taxonomic detail to give a sense of the
dizziness of the site, its attention-destroying cascades, its
addiction to entertainment-- and also to give a sense of why it is
popular. It has something for everyone, which is of course the most
ancient of print aspirations. It can be fun and it can be helpful.
Ryan Grim's article on the budget was a useful corrective to the
fetish that is generally made out of elected officials who consider
themselves "centrist." Stories about the economic crisis, even if
taken from other sources, were accessible and useful. It should be
noted, though, that one of The Huffington Post's tricks is to link
to a mainstream news story by means of a politicized headline. In
this way, readers can get hard news even as it is spun for them;
and in this way digital media like The Huffington Post can live off
the MSM even as it denounces them.

But new media, an ally of thoroughness and reflection? Come on. The
new media does nothing if not "move on." In 1978, Huffington noted
that "our world may be in short supply of a long list of
commodities, but it will have been sunk by experts long before it
runs out of expertise. As for the vaunted information explosion, it
actually seems to have led to an atrophy of mental nerves." I
cannot imagine a better description of the experience of her own
site, with its bold colors and kinetic busyness. The goal of The
Huffington Post is emphatically not to sustain a focus on anything
other than The Next Thing. Huffington charges that the press is too
distracted, too unwilling to dig deeply, too easily dispersed by
gimmicks and trivialities--if this is so, then what she is up to is
just about the furthest thing possible from a remedy for these
ills.

The truth is that The Huffington Post is not just supplementing a
print media that has long been dominated by newspapers. It is also
helping to destroy newspapers. The trials of print media have been
explored at length recently in a number of settings, both print and
digital, and for good reason. But some tough questions must be
asked also about the powerful digital interlopers. For the
blogosphere and the news aggregators that dominate cyberspace are
completely reliant--completely parasitic--on the very institutions
they are driving to bankruptcy. As my cursory summary of an
afternoon's content at The Huffington Post showed, the site is
thoroughly dependent on the reporting that Huffington has spent
three decades bashing. Fire up the site on your computer some
evening, and see how many of its main stories are from The New York
Times or The Washington Post. (One of the site's habits consists of
taking the first few paragraphs from another news story and using
it on a Huffington Post page. In an extreme case from a couple of
years ago, The Huffington Post ran an entire Chicago Reader story
on their site. They invited readers to click through and "read the
whole story," although they had merely reprinted the entire thing.)
Moreover, during last year's presidential campaign, when the site
sometimes broke news, it was often with the type of reporting that
Huffington claims to detest. Its biggest scoop was the revelation
that Obama had referred to certain white working-class voters as
"bitter," which is just the kind of story whose appearance on the
front page of The New York Times would have provoked fire and
brimstone from Huffington.

If print media disappear, what on earth will digital media write
about? What happens, as newspapers keep closing, when the new media
can no longer rely on the reporting that Huffington has for so long
pilloried? The hope is that other sources for investigative and
in-depth journalism will come along. (And also sources for funding
them: good journalism, real journalism, is not cheap.) The fear,
and it is well founded, is that the proliferation of opinionated
content will replace hard news reporting even more than it already
has. I remember a colleague at The Huffington Post saying that he
had been "out of pocket" for a week, and found it depressing that
he missed The New York Times more than The Huffington Post.

Given Huffington's erstwhile concern that the citizenry would go
around in "the cast off clothing of the latest media gurus," her
own ubiquitous presence on her site is rather amusing. What is she,
if not a media guru? Her blog posts are given prominent play, as
are her frequent television appearances. She is an accomplished
self-aggregator. No print magazine or newspaper would permit itself
such a cult of personality. But the focus on Huffington herself is
congruent with the site's other great obsession, aside from
progressive politics: its adoration of celebrities.

The celebrity-as-citizen-journalist is one of Huffington's products.
Lerer, in his foreword to the site's blogging guide, admits that
when The Huffington Post was launched, it lacked certain resources,
but what it "did have was Arianna's unique rolodex." (Translation:
not enough journalists, but plenty of boldfacers.) There is nothing
wrong with reading blog posts by Larry David or Alec Baldwin--this
is a free country; but the space and the prominence given on The
Huffington Post to the rich and the famous does not mix easily with
its other stated ambitions. The results are contributions to the
national conversation such as this one, by Sean Penn: "While I'm
not a proponent of the Death Penalty, existing law provides that
the likes of Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice, if found guilty,
could have hoods thrown over their heads, their hands bound, facing
a 12-man rifle corps executing death by firing squad. And our
cowardly democratically dominated House and Senate can barely find
one voice willing to propose so much as an impeachment." I agree
that this is not a view that is frequently heard, and so perhaps
its author and its publisher may justly flatter themselves that
they are travelling to the beat of a different drum. The problem
with Penn's view is not that it is heterodox, but that it is
stupid.

The celebrity focus helps to enforce the site's ideological
conformity, too. The supposedly liberal newspapers of America still
publish conservative columnists and offer a wide range of
viewpoints. But the ideological orientation of The Huffington Post
is monolithic and overwhelming, and this cements the impression
that the site, for all its excitement about diversity and dissent,
is just another one of the internet's like-minded communities. This
accounts for The Huffington Post's remarkable inability to surprise.
It is just glitzy edification for the progressive congregation.
Huffington is not so much a leader as a cheerleader. In the same
blogging guide, The Huffington Post's "community manager" instructs
that "a blog is only as good as the people who read it." That is
exactly backward--a formula for good merchandising, not for good
journalism. Uniformity is an odd way of honoring democracy. Just
look at Fox.

Thirty years ago Huffington wrote in indignation that "when the
focus of life becomes as narrow and as journalistic as ours has
become, then there is no more room for the spaciousness of myth,
the saga, the legend, the chronicle, the geste or any of the other
forms to which previous cultures have turned to account for 'what
really happened,' and to give the individual reference points for
what was happening in his time. Instead we are bombarded with
monumentally unimportant information, with prewrapped commentary
and predigested interpretation, and with accounts of what has
happened, to the nearest dazzling minute, and sometimes nearer, at
which it happened." Well, yes. Bombarder, heal thyself. But perhaps
it is a mistake to hold Arianna Huffington to any real standard of
intellectual or journalistic rigor. She is just an adventuress,
ideologically and socially; an impresario, with a practiced eye for
the main chance; a media phenomenon, which is among the thinnest
phenomena of all; a nimble brand. The other day I opened a book and
came upon an epigraph that reminded me of her and her hunger: "I
wanted to do business faster than the ordinary mercantile
transactions would admit." That was said by P.T. Barnum.

Isaac Chotiner has written for The New York Times, The Times
Literary Supplement, and The New Republic.

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