A welcome note from our friend and neighbor, Arianna
First of all, I’d like to welcome Tucker and The Daily Caller team to the digital neighborhood.
Predictably, your site has been positioned in the media as “the conservative answer to The Huffington Post,” just as, when we launched, we were positioned as “the progressive answer to Drudge.”
When you asked me to write something for your opening day, I was particularly glad to do it — and not just because you told the Wall Street Journal you read HuffPost every day. But because I’d read that you are “trying to think through what comes next in journalism.” As you are thinking that through, I hope you’ll keep in mind that one of the greatest contributions the digital media can make is to counter the traditional media’s obsession with looking at every issue through the cobweb-covered lens of right vs. left.
Last year at CPAC, you said that journalists “need to get out, find out what’s going on, and not just analyze things based on what the mainstream media has reported.” That’s particularly true when the mainstream media are reporting and analyzing the news of the day in terms of right vs. left — the fallback canard of lazy journalism everywhere.
Anyone looking at today’s political landscape with clear eyes can see that on issue after issue — the war in Afghanistan, the bailout, health care, the war on drugs, etc., etc. — the binary division of the debate into right vs. left obscures more than it reveals.
John McCain and Maria Cantwell are joining forces to bring back Glass-Steagall-type banking regulations. Ron Paul and Alan Grayson are pushing through legislation to audit the Fed. George Will agrees with Russ Feingold that we should not escalate in Afghanistan. Howard Dean and Michael Bloomberg are both down on the health care bill. And on and on it goes.
The outrageous news last week that the New York Fed under Tim Geithner told AIG to withhold from the public key details about payments that put billions of dollars into the coffers of major Wall Street players, including Goldman Sachs, offers a perfect example of just how archaic the right vs. left framing is.
Many progressives, including me, have been very critical of the administration’s coddling of Wall Street. Indeed, I called for Geithner’s resignation back in March. But, as of late, the loudest calls for further investigation of the AIG bailout — and Geithner’s role in it — have come from Republican lawmakers including Rep. Darrell Issa (who blogged about it on HuffPost) and Sen. Charles Grassley.
Yet, afflicted with a kind of mental Tourette’s, the traditional media just can’t help shouting “Right!” or “Left!” any time a contentious issue arises.
Take Ron Brownstein. Writing about the fight over health care in the National Journal, he declared that those who oppose the bill — which he admits “bears all the scars and imperfections of its arduous advance” — are either members of a furious right or of what he dubs, by turns, the “aggrieved left” and the “Internet-based left.”
Sounds pretty extreme. And fringe-y.
But according to a Quinnipiac poll taken last month, 53 percent of the country disapproves of the health care bill. So, is over half the country furious right-wingers or aggrieved lefties? Or are they, y’know, the majority of the American people?
Of course, it’s so much easier for the mainstream media to designate themselves as being in the center and assign anyone who disagrees with them to the fringe — the fringe right or the fringe left. Even if that’s over half the country.
We should be used to this — after all, for years now most of the country has been opposed to the war in Iraq yet, in the traditional media, that opposition is assigned only to the left.
In the New York Times, Adam Nagourney writes of “a time of strains between Mr. Obama and the left. Mr. Obama has come under fire on several fronts, like health care [and the] escalation of the war in Afghanistan.”
According to a CNN poll, 55 percent of the country opposes the war in Afghanistan, but the strain is only between Obama and “the left”?
Or does the left now include George Will, who recently chided “Obama’s halfhearted embrace of a half-baked non-strategy” in Afghanistan or former Bush State Department official Richard Haass, who says, “If Afghanistan were a war of necessity, it would justify any level of effort. It is not and does not.”?
Tucker originally supported the war in Iraq. But a year after the invasion, he told the New York Observer: “I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it. It’s something I’ll never do again. Never.”
Does this make him part of “the left”? The “aggrieved left”? Or, given his new endeavor, “the Internet-based left”? Or does it just show how ridiculous this framing is?
I have no doubt that there will be many things on The Daily Caller that I disagree with, just as I am sure there are many things on HuffPost that Tucker disagrees with. But I hope that there will also be many things that we can agree on — the kind of things we file on HuffPost as “Beyond Left and Right.” Like the Move Your Money campaign we launched, in which we encourage people to take action to change a broken financial system by moving their money out of too-big-to-fail banks and into local community banks and credit unions. It’s neither left nor right. It is populism at its best, appealing to the bedrock American values of community and competition.
Good luck, Tucker and The Daily Caller Team. And happy linking!
Arianna Huffington is the founder of The Huffington Post.
(40 votes, average: 4.63 out of 5)
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Actually I have to apologize. I did not know that he had been writing for Huffpo AFTER he had been arrested for this kind of thing twice already.
Well, then address the issues brought up here. This is real life. Huffpo is a pretected zone for left wing haters. You would see these comments on Huffpo if it weren’t for their rabid fear of opposing opinions.
I enjoy reading the HuffPo and find Ms. Huffington to be refreshing. The comments section on the other hand? Well, not so much.
NEWS FLASH! SCOTT RITTER, HUFFPO CONTRIBUTOR, CAUGHT MASTURBATING FOR A 15 YEAR OLD GIRL (undercover officer) ONLINE! ARRESTED!
Let’s see Arianna put THAT on her site!
Well put lamecherry. Well put.
In fact, the very notion that Tucker would describe her as a “journalist” or a “friend” is depressing. Makes me wonder how this site will turn out.
Arianna runs one of the dirtiest, mot moderated hate sites on the web. Most of the time the content is smug and trite. When you meet with people who use that site as a source for their news they are so confused and poorly informed that it makes debating with them as hard as if they were speaking in alien languages.
She is the proponent of hateful attacks on Palin.
As you said, her ‘bloggers’ are among the most vile from the left.
Let’s take Maher. I remember watching his horrible show one night and the punchline of one of his joke was to hold up the famous photo of that poor naked Vietnamese girl who had run from her napalmed village where her family was just killed. From then on I knew he was a low life and never watched him again. But people at Huffpo don’t have that kind of morality. They go on and on and on fueling their own hate. The perpetual hate machine.
How to act likeyou are keeping up with the news and still stay illiterate!
Odd that Arianna Huffington is given by a rather large purchased position to promote leftism is afforded a place on Daily Caller, when my experience with Ms. Huffington has been she banned me from HuffPo, but then often was emailing me to add content to the site.
Ms. Huffington has foul mouthed Bill Maher, the rather incoherent Steven Webber, the wife of an ABC anchor who once stating handing out porn to pervert peeping toms was an answer to crime and numerous other drama which is tasteless as Al Franken routines, in or out of the Senate.
This facade of the media which is all one grinning group who has Letterman cocktails together at his parties is the problem with media. Ms. Huffington is part of the problem which created Barack Hussein Obama in massive debt, massive slaughter of American Soldiers and as Rush Limbaugh stated the destruction of America in Obama change.
It is a little late for Ms. Huffington to appear here and sound intellectual when she is part of the elitist problem of herding those leftists into line, whipping them up in hatred of Bush43 and then sending them on a cause to install Obama.
Let us look at who was savaged in this from the Hillary Clinton supporters, John Edwards filleted and his wife tortured by “someone” leaking information on Edwards to the press to keep that same press from investigating Mr. Obama’s sexual activities and the lipstick on a pig savaging of the entire Palin female household which is still being fed today to this same press by Steve Schmidt.
Ms. Huffington makes her living off of the left in America. Keith Olbermann was a washed up announcer of sports until he signed on to be the counter to Rush Limbaugh. Al Franken rode this to the Senate. All the money train and there are those on right accomplishing the same thing for 7 figure salaries.
Sites like HuffPo are only interested in Molotov fire starting and those on there pointing out the facts, find themselves like in Tehran Iran censored with no trial as it is all dictatorship.
isn’t it amazing that none of these news people and webmasters like Ms. Huffington never write about their colleagues, but are all just friends.
>>we ain’t talkin bout “future” debts, are we ???
Wow.. talk about clueless. Have you been paying attention to what Obama and the democrats are doing? I can’t believe you wrote that.
>>partisan bickering has lost it’s appeal because the left equals truth, and the right equals lie
Another Huffpo Jihadist Hypocrite.
ever notice that the “Left versus right” debate is also the “truth versus lie” debate, n that order
partisan bickering has lost it’s appeal because the left equals truth, and the right equals lie
pick any topic, and the republicans are on the side of the lies
birthers, deathers, teabaggers
in the past month, republicans have tried to convince me that the republicans support MediCare, Civil Rights, and political correctness
last month the republicans were trying to convince me they hated MediCare, Civil Rights, and political correctness
I’m not sure what is funnier, republicans telling me Obama caused all the problems, or republicans telling me that I shouldn’t dwell on the past
if we’re talking about the nation’s debt, we kinda HAVE TO dwell on the past
we ain’t talkin bout “future” debts, are we ???