Thursday, January 28, 2010

Noted Blogger Here to Beg For Handouts




Somehow, I was at the Arianna Huffington thing last night.

Rather like an alien abduction, I'm not sure exactly how it happened, or how I got there, but an hour of my life went missing and my ass hurt. (Then I apparently ended up at a bar where the President of the United States talked for awhile, after which David Fucking Brooks was all over my teevee like genital warts for no good reason.)

Ms. Huffington made it through the Chicago cold and snow all the way to the tippy top of Columbia College's 1104 S. Wabash building, where she spoke to a two-thirds-full auditorium about media, business, politics and so forth. She made a few comments (she is apparently on a never-ending hunt for “storytellers” who can turn dry data into moving, vivid prose) and then took several questions.

And based on my haunted, fragmentary recollections of the evening, I saw nothing to disabuse me of my impression that while Ms. Huffington's clothes may say "Vogue", and her vocabulary may sound like a Mario Savio mix-tape, her heart is pure J. Pierpont Morgan.

Arianna, if you want to pair your lovely rhetoric about the future of America with something tangible to help save the middle class, how about paying those “storytellers” fair market value for their labors?

Or, as Bob Heinlien once succinctly put it:

"Money is the sincerest form of flattery.
Women love to be flattered.
So do men."

12 comments:

Int'l Assoc. Of Gential Warts said...

Sir, we demand an apology for being compared to David Brooks. ;)

Int'l Assoc. Of Genital Warts said...

"Genital", that is. *headdesk*

Fran / Blue Gal said...

Did she say our system only works when we CARE FOR EACH OTHER? Oh she has GOT to be kidding me.

Pay the writer Arianna. I can't feed my kids with a hitcount.

darkblack said...

Speaking as a former HuffPo 'employee' (and one of the few who actually got a pittance for their labors, as opposed to a volunteer), it is my opinion that Arianna bears the same compensatory relationship to the creators under her aegis as a music-crazed teenager with Limewire does to the recording industry.

'I wouldn't work for her for free if she paid me' - Swami Yogi Berra.

;>)

dettion said...

Anyone reading this knows where Airy can find a “storyteller who can turn dry data into moving, vivid prose", but it's way too vivid for the Huff 'n Puff (even the Lifestyles section...)

ossinons said...

waaay too vivid....

botopig (really: botopig) said...

“storytellers who can turn dry data into insipid, precious comfort food for yups."

'join me on Facebook' ads on every page?... That did it - de-bookmarked.

tanbark said...

Don't know about her payscale for her writers, but she got off a pretty good line (if it was hers) about Obama's SOTU spiel.

With it's a-dog-yummy-for-everyone! character, she called it:

"Obama's State of the Focus Group speech."

:o)

tanbark said...

His problem is that, after all of his talk about "change", during his campaign, now that he's basically been in centrist-stasis for the past year, he's about at the point where he can't change a damn thing by just talking about it.

After his speech, the operative response-phrase, all the way from pissed-off progressive bloggers, to moderate rank-and-file democrats, to the independents who helped him win, was:

"Talk is cheap".

He's got some work to do, and it's been made a lot harder by his OWN actions, or lack of them, than by anything the republicans have done.

Interrobang said...

Until Arianna Huffington stops promoting the kind of medical woo that kills people, I have zero reason to believe anything else she puts on her festering cesspool of a site. (Arianna, your credibility called. It's wondering when you're going to at least let it back into the house so it can pick up its stuff.)

Anybody who publishes Deepcrap Chopra and similar other high-tech snake oil salesfolk doesn't get my eyeballs.

safici said...

I get my SOTUs all confused with my STFUs (doesn't everybody?)

Anonymous said...

Love the business card... :-)