Inside Politics Weekend: Hating Huffington

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By Jennifer Harper

Should we fear Arianna Huffington and her mighty HuffPo? Dunno. Should we praise her? Nope, says one critic who examined the underpinnings of the Huffington media empire and emerged unimpressed.

"What is the Huffington Post, really? It likes to pretend that it's a respectable voice in the mediasphere, but it shamelessly pumps up its traffic by being just as trashy as, say, Maxim. It also likes to masquerade as a forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting journalistic institution, but it pays only a handful of actual journalists, and its idea of 'journalism' is often downright parasitic of the work of real journalistic institutions," says Simon Dumenco of Ad Age.

He was vexed that on the very day he was interviewed by the Swedish press about Ms. Huffington's prowess as a journalist, the most popular story on her Web site was something called "Heather Graham: Tantric Sex 'Works For Me.'" The story quoted 13 sentences from the Daily Mail, with a little flourish of 58 staff-written words.

"And that, folks, is HuffPo's true business model," Mr. Dumenco said.

He also chastised Syracuse University — my alma mater, by the way — for bestowing a serious "lifetime achievement award" in journalism upon Ms. Huffington.

"My annoyance had to do with the fact that the Newhouse School, which trains journalists, was rewarding a woman who has helped to further devalue content. … In fact, at the rate we're going, if the Newhouse School can stay in business by continuing to sucker students into paying tuition, I fully expect this course to end up on the curriculum:

Building Value by Devaluing Content: How to Make Your Investors Rich By Being Cheap, Trashy and Parasitic."

Lest we forget

Life goes on in the "sand box," despite the fact that most of the press carries little substantial news about Iraq and Afghanistan these days.

Simple Defense Department numbers say much, though — like these from a recent, one-day search-and-clear operation conducted by American troops and Afghan National Army commandos in Khost and Zabul provinces in southeastern Afghanistan.