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Posts Tagged ‘Arianna Huffington’
February 10th, 2011 at 7:49 pm
AOL-HuffPo Merger Shows Hypocrisy Behind ‘Citizen Journalism’

Leave it to liberals like Arianna Huffington to treat the little people she champions exactly like a corporate stooge.  Debra Saunders highlights the hypocrisy fueling this week’s announced merger of AOL News with The Huffington Post:

Remember HuffPo’s big scoop during the 2008 presidential election? Writer Mayhill Fowler recorded then-presidential candidate Barack Obama as he told swells at a San Francisco fundraiser that blue-collar voters “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Last year, Fowler quit writing for HuffPo because the website refused to pay her. “Citizen journalist,” Mayhill Fowler discovered, has a very specific meaning: Free.

The savings Arianna realizes from not paying many of her contributors undoubtedly helps make her website more profitable.  It also lets her hide her lust for money behind the guise of anti-corporate rhetoric.  Saunders continues:

Fowler keeps waiting for the moment when high-profile Democrats realize “that they cannot say one thing and do another: to talk sympathy for working people and yet blog at a site that treats its writers badly.” Fowler should not hold her breath.

Huffington is an entrepreneurial genius at self-promotion. She fiercely surfed the left’s discontent with mainstream – read: corporate – journalism by promising to keep mainstream – read: paid – news media “honest.”

So, on the one hand Huffington lets ‘citizen journalists’ like Fowler do the heavy lifting of reporting breaking news while leveraging the resulting readership into a $315 million payday.  Not a bad day’s work for the divorced wife of a multi-millionaire.  Maybe now folks like Fowler will remember that liberals like Arianna are just as eager to make a buck as anyone else – they just aren’t as up front about it as the rest.

H/T: San Francisco Chronicle