A Choice Between Education and Meth

In 2005, Arianna Huffington launched herself into the frontier of news aggregation—that is, not reporting the news, but accumulating news from a panoply of sources and presenting them alongside relevant blogmentary. Along with Kenneth Lerer, who presumably is less interested in consuming the media’s attention, she co-founded The Huffington Post, which quickly became the most-visited website featuring liberal political media. The combination of blog-based commentary and linked news coverage made the website a one-stop shop for liberal-leaning internetists, and the site quickly attracted millions in investment to fund a staff, 24-hour updates, and an expanded interface. Within a year, HuffPo featured content from congresspeople, Hill insiders, and activists from an array of industries and interest groups.

At some point in 2006, Arianna Huffington met with Maureen Dowd and Perez Hilton at The Waverly Inn for drinks (two gin and tonics and an appletini). Dowd seethed about recent developments in the Clintons’ relationship as she secreted—dirtily, naughtily, I-fucking-hate-that-Rodham-bitch/why-didn’t-I-go-to-law-school??—beneath the table. Hilton expounded on the MTV reality slate as he cried on the inside, and a perplexed Huffington, marveling at the two scions of internet fame, got drunk and brought the two back to her apartment for further inspection into their success.

And then they had a three-way. They smushed. The result was a sexually-transmitted infection that produced a puss of tabloid political coverage, clips from The View, and slideshows of the fashion of women in the Democratic party mixed with a meager quantity of white cells comprising legitimate political commentary.
Whope! Hang on—The Huffington Post has just reloaded itself to feature its 1:22 a.m. update: “Mischa Barton Naked… Report: A-Rod Hooked Up with ‘Real Housewife’ [from Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York].” Thank God, because I was just about to click on the adjacent, non-cooch-censored link to an AP story about the Treasury pushing GM towards surgical bankruptcy. And here we may have evidence of the aforementioned three-way…

The Huffington Post was developed as an alternative to the Karl Rove of the internet: Matt Drudge, whose drudgereport.com linked to ridiculously headlined stories pretending to be objective news (although I think we all appreciate his links to videos of bear attacks and John Wayne DVD collections). Arianna Huffington succeeded at first in her goal, but perhaps found herself egging to lead the pack. New competition emerged from the right when realclearpolitics.com, a reasonably conservative aggregator founded by Princeton alums in 2000, found itself becoming more and more popular in spite of its imageless, rather boring interface and links to entirely relevant, entirely clothed political content. They even distinguished between news and editorial content. And then there were dailykos.com and firedoglake.com to deal with on the left.

Sections such as entertainment, style, and living soon sprouted up on The Huffington Post, and its home page was speckled with pictures of celebrity break-ups and speculation on the private lives of politicians. Policy contributions from experts on spec issues were squeezed into the left margin without any sensational images to attract the lowest common denominator of eyeballs. Before you knew it, the “internet newspaper” resembled the New York Post more than it did the Washington Post, and its visitors found themselves being told that celebrity news belonged next to politics.

When the Democrats took Congress in 2006, The Huffington Post found itself the beneficiary of a renewed interest in politics, and it drove full steam ahead with a new video applet and a slideshow feature! So how did it cover the new establishment? It talked about Nancy Pelosi’s shoes, which were often photographed alongside her grandchildren. In 2009, HuffPo shocked-and-awed me with a slideshow of the haircuts of the women in the newly minted Obama administration. They favor short, cropped haircuts, if you needed to know. As HuffPo was busy undermining women in leadership, I found myself spending more time looking at HD movie trailers on apple.com.

The issue at stake, of course, is the political discourse of the United States. In March 2008, The Guardian declared The Huffington Post the most influential blog in the world. Meanwhile, newspapers are folding or trying to figure out how to survive as non-profits, and Fox News is still number one in cable news. And so what can it mean for our political dialogue that The Huffington Post is the pinnacle of politics on the internet?

It means that the commies capitalists won. It’s no longer about the news; it’s about the clicks. The original mission of presenting an accessible collection of political news seems to have been overwhelmed by the hunt for unique hits. Regardless of the forces that motivated the degeneration of The Huffington Post, we find the website at present straddling that line between presenting information and presenting information as entertainment. Said line may be best understood as a choice between education and meth.

The Huffington Post should leave crotch-shots to Perez Hilton and the secretions of political voyeurism to Dowd. Somehow, though, I doubt that change will come.