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HuffPost Goes Corporate

Arianna Huffington has sold the Huffington Post (and herself) to AOL for $315 million. Arianna will control all of AOL's on-line material. AOL spent 40% of its cash reserves in the acquisition, which it hopes will reverse last year's 26% revenue loss.

AOL is following the MSNBC model, driving to the left in hopes that a liberal niche or name recognition, however infamous or notorious, will save them from insolvency. The most amusing coverage of the merger has been questions of whether HuffPost will abandon its far left ideology now that it is part of the "MSM." The obvious answer is that it doesn't need to move right - the MSM has already moved far enough leftward to meet HuffPost just where it is.

I previously worked for AOL's politics blog Political Machine (now Politics Daily). PM's producers, Coates Bateman and Michael Kraskin, as well as lead editors such as David Knowles, strove to keep the site above mere partisan ranting and struggled to retain ideological balance. All of the fine bloggers with whom I wrote (with the exception of the odious Cenk Uyger) delightfully played their parts in the agreed upon larger drama. But reports indicate that the blog may soon be folded into HuffPost - and with it, I fear, any semblance of ideological balance or journalistic integrity.

Watch AOL follow in the footsteps of MSNBC toward the echo-chamber of liberal lunacy.

Then again, if anyone is looking to buy up No Left Turns for a 9-digit sum . . .

Categories > Journalism

Discussions - 2 Comments

There's still an AOL? And one able to cough up $315M?

Honestly, I'm astonished to learn this. I thought they were long ago marginalized to nothingness.

I've never trusted anyone who could change their ideological stripes in adulthood. Such people are either mercenary or lazy-thinkers who failed to examine their deep assumptions earlier in life. Neither characteristic inspires confidence in their political opinions.

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