With the news that Arianna Huffington is taking over AOL’s editorial content, suddenly conservatives nationwide are putting a long overdue item on their to-do lists: “Cancel America Online account I haven’t used since I first heard about Google.” Her army of unpaid contributors must be looking at the $315 million price tag and feeling like suckers. The smarter ones among them, anyway. So, okay, scratch that last one.
And it’s creating some strange bedfellows. For example, the Daily Caller just got what sounds suspiciously like praise from… New York magazine?!?
No doubt having read the news that Politics Daily and some other branches of AOL’s online network were going to get killed off after the merger with the Huffington Post, conservative columnist Matt Lewis announced today on his blog that he’s jumping ship to Tucker Carlson’s site, the Daily Caller. But it wasn’t just the impending demise of his site. It was the spirit of the thing. “I have no personal issue with Ms. Huffington, and that I am not a ‘Huff-hater,'” he wrote. “However … it occurs to me that AOL has vastly underestimated the public perception (I would argue the accurate impression) that Huffington is a far-left liberal. Obviously, I am more than happy to write for a mainstream news outlet where differing opinions are allowed to flourish, but I am less comfortable with the notion of being permanently affiliated with an overtly left-of-center (sometimes activist) outlet.” Lewis isn’t off base — the heartland readership of AOL’s news sites is bound to sit somewhere to the right of Arianna’s. And there’s a definite possibility they might be as shocked by the change in editorial tone as, say, your grandmother is going to be when she gets the first issue of Tina Brown’s Newsweek. So, probably a good move on Lewis’s part. Wonder who’s next?
“Probably a good move.” How do you make us blush? It’s up to you, New York!
P.S. Another upside to the AOL/HuffPo deal: It’s making Andy Borowitz unhappy.
P.P.S. As Jim Geraghty writes in today’s NRO Morning Jolt e-mail: “It seems somehow appropriate that one of the preeminent media voices of liberalism relies on an economic model of many folks laboring for no compensation. The Democrats were the party of the Confederacy, after all.”
P.P.P.S. Speaking of which…
P.P.P.P.S. You know a point is glaringly obvious when even Tim Rutten of the LA Times gets it: “The Huffington Post is a brilliantly packaged product with a particular flair for addressing the cultural and entertainment tastes of its overwhelmingly liberal audience. To grasp its business model, though, you need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates. Given the fact that its founder, Huffington, reportedly will walk away from this acquisition with a personal profit of as much as $100 million, it makes all the Post’s raging against Wall Street plutocrats, crony capitalism and the Bush and Obama administrations’ insensitivities to the middle class and the unemployed a bit much.”