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Posts Tagged ‘Huffington Post’
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

January 4th, 2011 at 6:03 pm
HuffPo Hating on Jerry Brown

According to a blogger at the Huffington Post California just inaugurated a “Right-Wing Republican” as governor.  He’s referring to Jerry Brown, aka ‘Governor Moonbeam’ and the man proposing sharp cuts, tax increases, and budget raids to balance the state’s deficit-ridden balance sheet.   In HuffPo world, that combination merits being tarred and feathered as the second coming of another rock-ribbed fiscal conservative, outgoing governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Please.  If Brown’s budget proposal looks suspiciously similar to Schwarzenegger’s it’s because there are precious few options for governors of any party to try.  Sure, nobody thinks they’ll actually solve the problems, but that’s because actually solving California’s budget woes will take some serious undoing of cherished political prizes.

Republicans want to hang onto the 2/3 requirement for passing a budget and maintaining Prop. 13’s cap on property taxes, while Democrats act as though rich (i.e. working) people will pay any price to live within a 100 miles of a beach and subsidize a green welfare state.  Neither party is serious about making investments in the state’s infrastructure (e.g. road, power, and water grids), a precondition for economic and social improvement.

The only way California heals its self-inflicted budget wounds is if it repeals all of the constitutional amendments mandating budget appropriations.   To do that, Republicans will likely have to agree to end Prop. 13’s property cap, a move that would likely increase property taxes.  Though unpalatable to many, removing the cap would return discretion to counties and cities (historically better than Sacramento at balancing budgets) while giving voters an outlet for their displeasure with the next Election Day.

None of this will be easy or popular.  Then again, neither is California politics.

September 28th, 2010 at 11:56 pm
I’m All In … With Your Money
Posted by Print

Today’s quote of the day comes from former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who — in a remarkably dishonest attack on conservative economics at the Huffington Post — pulls out one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book, making a prediction he’ll never be held accountable for:

Look, I used to be a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. Believe me when I tell you Social Security is basically okay. It may need a little fine tuning but I guarantee you’ll receive your Social Security check by the time you retire even if that’s forty years from now.

Put aside that the substance of Reich’s argument is “trust me”. The 64-year old Reich is writing a check that his actuarial table can’t cash. May Secretary Reich live to be 104. That’s a good age for humility to kick in.