Don't Bother Me, Dahling, I'm Defending the Poor

She's always seemed to me to be a strange candidate for dahling of the left, despite her Gabor sisters accent.  Arianna Huffington first became visible as the face of her very wealthy and decidely right wing husband's campaign for U.S. Senate from California.  Her ideology-change operation happened little more than a decade ago.

Lately she's been running the Huffington Post, which was the first to apply the Rupert Murdoch journalism principle to an online magazine: a combination of heavily ideological politics and tabloid entertainment.  She tilted Huffpo to Hillary as hard as she could in 2008 but despite that failure the site emerges as probably the most powerful of its kind.  Even the Daily Beast couldn't kill it.

And possibly because she kept the overhead down so well with the simple expedient of not paying writers.  This was pretty common for even the name blogs at first, and of course remains common for those of us dumb enough to contribute or do this on our own.  It also owes a certain lineage to the alternative press, where just getting published was supposed to be the reward.  Plus some swag (as it's called now.)

 Some of the alternative press, which includes some papers more prosperous than the so-called established press, continues to exploit its freelancers.  I'm being exploited by one such right now.  But Arianna has taken this to a whole new level.  First she doesn't pay anything, and brags about it.  Second, she announces a multimillion dollar deal with AOL at the Super Bowl.  Champagne all around.

So now some of her writers are suing her, and I'm here to cheer them on.  Heading the suit is Jonathan Tasini, who I remember as the president of my union--the National Writers Union--back when I could afford dues.   Tasini still has a way with words--he calls her a slave owner.

Huffington counters that she pays a staff of reporters and editors, she just doesn't pay mere bloggers, who get exposure.  It's familiar stuff--for newspapers who don't pay for opinion pieces, and for the general treatment of freelancers.  Publications may depend on us, tell us they can't afford to pay more, but staff gets salaries and health care, and suddenly they've got spanking new offices to go to, while freelancers are paid what freelancers were paid in the 1970s--not adjusted for inflation mind you, but literally the same dollar amount.

Of course Arianna might have to pawn some of her jewels to pay her bloggers, but life is tough all over.