Over time, Huffington Post also featured gossipy articles about popular celebrities. Like other left-of-center sites, such as Salon.com, those stories often emerged as the best-read, encouraging a further drift in that direction as a means of securing advertising dollars.
The commercial success of Huffington Post -- resulting from its low overhead due to the work of some 3,000 bloggers writing for free and from Huffington's effective self-promotion -- caught the eye of Wall Street investors and obviously AOL.
Though AOL generally provides right-of-center news content to subscribers -- for instance, AOL joined in last week's hagiography of Ronald Reagan -- its management concluded that it could do business with Arianna Huffington.
The sale of Huffington Post to a corporation that positions itself in the right branch of the mainstream media -- what many on the Left deride as the MSM -- upset a number of the site's bloggers, including some who vowed to withdraw their work.
The broadside continued:
"Socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists. She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she's cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp."But the Huffington Post is not Arianna's to sell. It is ours: the lefty writers and readers, environmentalism activists and anti-corporate organizers who flooded the site with 25 million visits a month. So we're going to take it back. We'll stop going to her site. And we'll stop blogging for her too."
In another big disappointment to progressives, Olbermann abruptly left MSNBC last month, announcing his departure in a brief signoff at the end of his regular Friday broadcast of his "Countdown" program. Olbermann's unceremonious push out the door would never have been matched by Rupert Murdoch's right-wing Fox News toward its media stars.
In that way, Olbermann's treatment was a reminder to the surviving liberal hosts on MSNBC -- the likes of Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz -- that they are expendable, too, and that MSNBC experimented with liberal-oriented programming only after its attempts to out-Fox Fox had failed.
In his nearly eight years at "Countdown," Olbermann was the brave soul who charted the course for other mainstream media types to even mildly criticize Bush. More typical of NBC Universal's cable shows was the fawning treatment that Chris Matthews afforded Bush in 2003 during the heady days of what was viewed as the victorious invasion of Iraq.
Fish to Fry
NBC's owner, General Electric, was a charter member of the military-industrial complex and -- as a major international conglomerate -- had more corporate fish to fry than the modestly higher ratings that Olbermann provided MSNBC. Comcast, the cable giant which is assuming a majority stake in NBC Universal, similarly has more lucrative interests amid the regulatory world of Washington.
This week, Olbermann announced that he would become "chief news officer" at former Vice President Al Gore's "Current Media," a struggling media operation that is available mostly over the Internet and in households with digital cable connections.
"Nothing is more vital to a free America than a free media, and nothing is more vital to my concept of a free media than news produced independently of corporate interference," Olbermann told reporters. "In Current Media, Al Gore and Joel Hyatt have created the model truth-seeking entity."
Though Olbermann may draw new attention and more viewers to Current, the overall impact of his departure from MSNBC is that far fewer Americans will have access to Olbermann's influential commentaries which were important in rallying progressives especially during the peak of Bush's power.
A lesson for progressives from AOL's purchase of Huffington Post may be that they should be a bit more leery of converts from the Right, especially those who don't explain adequately what led to their ideological switch.
While liberals seem especially eager to reward ex-conservatives by lavishing them with financial and other support, progressives might consider showing their generosity more to people who have proven their commitment to worthy causes or honest journalism with years of hard work.
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