The collapse of liberalism as a strong political voice got a new shove with Arianna Huffington selling her liberal readers to the corporate conglomerate AOL.
The news came just about two weeks after the New Yorker revealed that 80% of AOL's profits come from subscriptions and, as Consumerist put it, "75% of those users are people who subscribe to the dial-up service and don't need. Basically we're talking about folks who have another kind of ISP and don't realize that you don't need to pay AOL anymore if you're just using it for email. The group can be further divided into two sub-groups, the old, and the lazy."
Consumerist then went on to give a step by step process for canceling AOL "and saving some cash while still keeping access to your AOL email account."
In Daily Beast, Dan Lyons adds to the story, quoting Nick Denton of Gawker: "Is this a fearsome Internet conglomerate or simply a roach motel for once lively websites?"
Lyons continues:
|||| Much of AOL’s dysfunction was laid bare just one week ago when Business Insider, a blog, got hold of a leaked AOL memo called “The AOL Way,” which purports to instruct AOL’s hacks on how to practice their craft. It’s all about making stories based on traffic potential and profit potential. It’s all about numbers—and volume. It’s a depressing, sickening, embarrassing document. AOL’s hacks are expected to write five to 10 articles a day. . . Business Insider quoted one AOL 'journalist' as saying, “AOL is the most fucked up, bullshit company on earth,” and then adding that joining AOL was “the worst career move I’ve ever made.” ||||
This development also seems like another step in turning the Internet into something more resembling closed door cable TV - which has, for example, saved Americans from the curse of Al Jazeera - than the free and open system that cyberspace was supposed to be. AOL - like its younger version, Facebook - basically aims at keeping readers away from the full glory of the web and on its limited pages instead.
But there are political implications as well. As we have pointed out for a couple of decades, American liberalism has been in steady decline, trading in past goals for the illusion of power - e.g. Clinton and Obama - and becoming far more an elite iconography than a broad-based ideology.
Key to the shift has been the desertion of the former emphasis on economic concerns of most Americans in favor of a pseudo admiration of social equality that in fact mainly favors those well enough off to break glass ceilings but not those of the same gender or ethnicity stuck with cleaning wooden floors.
For example, the Huffington-AOL merger was announced just a few days after Arianna Huffington returned from participating in the Davos conference, perhaps the largest annual gathering on those most culpable for the world's problems. Or consider the fact that liberals went wild over Obama becoming president and didn't even notice that the Senate ended up without a single black member.
Huffington Post has some very progressive contributors and readers, but the overall tone of the operation has become increasingly merged in soul with the sort of people with which it has now become merged in legal agreement.
The sooner we recognize the true difference between today's liberalism and that of true populist, progressive, socialist and Green movements we will begin to recreate a left of meaning rather than of merely nice words.
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http://ctka.net/2009/huffpo.html
Arianna Huffington, Tina Brown and the New Media: Death at an Early Age?
By James DiEugenio
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This straddling of both sides has been a clear syndrome of Huffington Post, which is the top-rated news/blog for liberals. The key to profitability for that site has been the utilization of free content. And lots of it. This means that the editors there don't seem to really care what goes on the site. As long as it's free, and as long as it either has some kind of celebrity attached to it, or it addresses a topic with name recognition. (Which the editors like to play up with either visuals or flashy headings.)
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As I noted in my previous series on Hamsher and Moulitsas, at the start – around 2003 – everyone had high hopes for the blogosphere. We believed that without the pervading pressure of corporate sponsorship, without the inevitable ties to government officials at higher levels, this was a great opportunity to return American journalism to the days that the late Angus McKenzie recalled in his book Secrets. The days of sixties and seventies alternative journalism, hallmarked by Ramparts and the LA Free Press. So far, it hasn't happened. If one cannot feel free to deal with the bête noire of modern American history – the assassinations of the sixties which altered the face of America – what can you be trusted with? And how are you fundamentally different than the MSM? To me, the difference would be at the margins. I mean, Huffpo and Talking Points Memo now want to send correspondents to the White House press room. Why? If there is one thing we have learned from the MSM its that the story is not in the press room. That place is a time and space filler that is meant to indoctrinate reporters into the "conventional wisdom" of the Beltway. Which, more often than not, isn't what is actually happening.
HuffPo is a good match for AOL -- establishment liberal politics + celebrity gossip.
There is an even greater gulf between true conservatives and those radicals who call themselves conservatives. Any true conservative who read Adam Smith would regard the present financial system as radical and dangerously out of control, and apologists for it would be deemed wild-eyed radicals, one inch from anarchists. Any true conservative would regard the continuing rise of corporate power as radical and dangerous, and apologists for it would be deemed fanatical fascists.
(Just for those who don't know 20th century fascist ideology, the fasces is a bundle of sticks. Each stick represents a corporation, so the fasces represents the combined power of the corporate state. The radical majority of the Supreme Court seems determined to see to it that increasing corporate power remains unchecked.)
The only true conservative voices remaining in America today are among the populists, progressives, socialists and greens! The "left-right spectrum" has become completely divorced from reality. Of course fantastic unreality is what the corporate media are selling.
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