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Her Serene Highness Queen Ratfucker Omnipotent of Medialand, otherwise known as Arianna Huffington, came to Philadelphia yesterday to address the convention of theNational Association of Black Journalists.

Why, I don’t know; but there’s nothing Arianna ever does that doesn’t include promotion of that one thing she loves most in the world (herself), and – true to form, she was on a plug, announcing the start of a special news section at The Huffington Post, exclusively for African Americans, entitled Huffpost Black Voices.

Now, that struck a chord with me, and I’m a white woman born and raised in the South. It seems to me that HuffPo seems to grow like the weed it is and spread like a cancer through the media world, and at the most opportune times. The week that Rupert Murdoch was testifying in Parliament and getting slammed in the smacker with ashaving foam pie, Arianna turned up in London to launch – you guessed it - HuffPost UK Edition. Yep, no sooner than that lying liar tabloid tripe News of the World gets shut down, Arianna gives the Brits a totally online version of her version of yellow journalism. I even speculated that she was in the UK on the off-chance of interviewing Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s titian-haired enforcer, for the job of overseeing the British version of her rag – that is, if Brooks doesn’t go to jail.

But then, I would imagine Mrs Brooks would scare the living cack out of the fragrant Mrs Huffington. In a previous life, Brooks (then Rebekah Wade) was married to the absolute biggest star in British television, Ross Kemp, who’s built like the proverbial brick one, and she was arrested and fined for domestic abuse, when she beat the cack out of Kemp one night. On second thought, I hope Huffington hires her.

So now the fact that The Huffington Post has opened up a spic-and-span, banging, brand new section with articles for black people by black people, hit me as being – well, just a wee bit like Jim Crow … Plessey v Ferguson … separate but equal.

It also struck me as a bit strange, and slightly patronising, that Huffington’s message should be subtly divisive. According to the NABJ’s blurb, itself …

she also urged attendees at NABJ’s opening ceremony to examine the “split-screen world” the nation lives in when it comes to black communities.

“Depending on which of the screens you look at, you have a very different view of what is happening, and what the future is going to be like,” said Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of The AOL Huffington Post Media Group. “Nowhere is this more true than it is when it comes to the African-American community.”

And how appropos that this was given on our President’s birthday, a man who, depending on the time of day or year, she’s variously described as weak, ineffectual, spineless, cowering and out-of-touch.

On the other hand, another speaker at the NABJ convention, and one who got little publicity and fanfare (not that she’d expect it), was the marvelous Carole Simpson. I well remember Carole Simpson during her stint at NBC in the mid-1970s. I’ve read her book, about how she literally had to fight her way to the top of her profession, whose mandarins not only looked down at her because of her race, but also because of her gender. She was the first African American woman to anchor a network news broadcast and the first of the same to moderate a major Presidential debate in 1992.

When you look at these two women, there really is no comparison. Simpson was born in an age where, for a large section of the country, she couldn’t get served in a restaurant or get a room in a major hotel. She lived through the Civil Rights’ era of Bull Connor, George Wallace, Little Rock, water cannons, Freedom Riders and police dogs. She lived through the bra-burning era of the feminists, and she never lost sight of her goal, whilst retaining all her core principles and professionalism.

Huffington was born into a wealthy family of corrupt politicians. Her money bought her a place at Cambridge. She got a foot in the door of the British politcal media, in her twenties, by sleeping with a well-known, high-profiled British journalist, author and broacaster, Bernard Levin, considered by all to be the most famous journalist of his era. He was forty years her senior and although he managed to get her first two books published (although the second was pulped due to a plagiarism suit), she was never considered to be anything more, in Britain, than an intellectual lightweight, a dilettante and a bad writer.

She fanagled her way onto the edges of the American media machine, by carefully nurturing a friendship with Barbara Walters and later married a fabulously wealthy corporate oilman, spending years as his beard whilst they both tried to climb the political ladder, and then, when he came out of the closet and they divorced, she spent his money.

For all the plethora of books she wrote during this time, they never sold a bundle. It says something, to this day, that Ann Coulter’s books top The New York Times best-sellers’ list (puke), but Huffington has to resort to giving her tomes away.

The Huffington Post was created for one reason and one reason only – well, two, but the minor reason was to ratfuck the Progressive community – and that was the promotion of Arianna Huffington as a bona fide journalist. That’s right, the woman who couldn’t get a byline in The Telegraph, The Guardian, The New York Times, or The Washington Post, had to found an online newspaper in order to publish her snarky op-ed articles.

Her past associations (for career advancement) include Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge, Newt Gingrich and Darrell Issa, with whom she partied in Las Vegas the weekend Gabby Giffords was shot and he should have been at home in his California Congressional District with his constituents and his wife.

Now, in this day and age, who’s the best role model for a young woman aspiring to a career in journalism? Fight your ground and stick with the game or sleep and smarm your way to the top. I shudder to think what the choice would be in this generation whose ethos seems to be instant gratification.

Part of Huffington’s brief at the convention, was to field questions from actual attendees and online participants. (Arianna loves anything “online”; look for HuffPo Porn to be her next creation, and look for it to be interactive).

Lester Holt, the weekend NBC Evening News anchor and host of The Today Showmoderated, and here’s the big fail.

Arianna crafted The Huffington Post into the corporate conglomerate it’s become off the backs of unpaid workers – not just the ubiquitous intern (most of whom came from well-off families who subbed their salaries), who not only had to moderate comments, cut and paste from original works to form another aggregate article and man the phones, but also, on occasion, had to unblock toilets, arrange for washing machine repairs, vacuum Madame’s carpets and pick up Arianna’s daughters from their exclusive Brentwood schools; but also legions of bloggers, ordinary people from all walks of life, to whom Arianna, in her malevolent benevolent dishonesty, promised exposure of their work in a positive light, which just might lead to a paid position someplace in the journalistic/media world.

These latter poor bastards wrote alongside their celebrity betters – people like Alex Baldwin, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Huffington’s pet gnome, Bill Maher (you know, expertsin the field of politics and sociology) – who really didn’t have to worry that they were writing for free just to show the world that entertainment people were capable of stringing a sentence or two together coherently.

And, lo, when the day came, that Arianna sold out to the corporate interests she’d heretofore (for radically chic purposes) decried, when she went from being media whore to corporate whore, she dropped “the little pipple, dahlink” like the proverbial hot potato, or – more likely – as though they’d given her a vast cootie infection.

And there’s the rub: Arianna’s empire, her wealth, is based on something that’s just actually a euphemistic form of 21st Century slavery. Odd to think, that, in the cyber age of technological advancement, a moghul like Arianna depends on good, old fashioned plantation slavery to get her message to the people. A message that’s often a screed against anything and everything that our first African-American President does or says.

But, you see, Arianna - brave Arianna! – didn’t flinch at the fact that, at first, Lester Holt appeared to be doing his job in broaching the subject of her use of free, unpaid labour inHuffPo’s production. I mean, that was provocative – this white woman of privilege, who dared to use unpaid slave labour, who brushed off the threat of a strike by all her unpaid, common-and-garden moment with a true “Let them eat cake” moment which would have made Marie Antoniette blanche.

Huffington did not shy away from controversial topics during the quick question and answer session, moderated by NBC News anchorman Lester Holt, and fueled inquiries from Twitter users.

Regarding the Huffington Post practice of using unpaid content, Huffington said while the company employs more than 1,300 journalists, it is also a platform.

“People can choose to participate in the platform, if they have something they want to write that requires wider distribution, or not to participate in the platform,” Huffington said. “We are not dependent on them.”

Oh, so that’s what slavery was all about then. It was a “platform,” where “participants” (read: slaves) could choose to do something for the wider good and comfort of the masters they served, or they could choose not to participate.

Can you imagine Prissy telling Miss Scarlett that she didn’t choose to cook breakfast for Miss Scarlett and Lil’Wade, because she simply didn’t choose to participate?

And the massive fail to this absolutely brassneck example of class and racial privilege, in this setting in particular, arrived when Holt, at the top of his game in his profession, simply passed on challenging her front, which was grossly insulting to her audience, to say the least. In the meantime, protestors from the National Writers’ Union picketed outside.

This incident puts Reverend Sharpton’s take-down of Pat Buchanan’s derogatory and racist reference to the President, into a whole different perspective. I wonder if Al Sharpton had been moderating that session, instead of Lester Holt, if Reverend Sharpton would have let that explanation pass so easily?

Somehow, I think not.

In light of the prospective deal on the debt ceiling, all of the propaganda machines are churning at full capacity, from Huffington Post to Fox News, Obama haters of all stripes and alleged political positions are joined in a chorus of furious, self-righteous bleating, like a flock of sheep with gas pains.

It’s quite a buffet of attacks to choose from, Obama betrayed Dems, was weak, outmaneuvered, is destroying the middle class, is ignorant, incompetent, a terrible negotiator, etc.

This deal marks the death of Keynesian economics, guarantees the death of the middle class, destroys Social Security and Medicare, assures a double dip recession or another Great Depression, will kill the entire bee population in the US, create an epidemic of impotency and make zombies rise from the dead to eat our brains (clearly not a threat to Republicans).

It’s easy to be a slanted pundit, just follow these easy directions:

1. Only recognize information that supports your pre-determined opinion (facts that don’t cooperate with already held opinions are not really facts, they are “Faecties”, imaginary things that only exist if you choose to believe in them).

2. Use your mind as a magnifying glass. Use it to burn those you see as ants then place it over any information that even tangentially supports your views to distort and exaggerate it and its impact on the future.

3. Never apologize. Sure, yesterday you may have said the world will blow up by the next day but just because it didn’t, that doesn’t prove you’re wrong, you may just be one day off. Instead, insist that despite claims to the contrary, the world is blowing up then quickly turn to another outrage which will surely be an even greater disaster (somehow).

4. Talk over others and ignore what they say or ask. You’ve spent all that time creatively carving up square facts to make them fit the round hole of your opinion (I’ll let you guess where it’s located), it’s just plain rude for others to interfere and insist square pegs should fit in square holes. Drown them out or wait for them to finish talking or asking questions (while ignoring what they say and instead humming the old Supertramp song to yourself, “Bloody Well Right”). When they’re done, just spout out your talking points as if they’re the answer to the question or statement you didn’t even listen to.

5. There is no such thing as “too hysterical”. Your category may be Politics but never forget that this is Show Business, emphasis on the “Show”. You’ve got to show outrage, frustration, smugness, cynicism and indignation. Often you’ll find that the day’s events thoughtlessly deprive you of legitimate reasons for giving your audience the emotional display they rely on.

That is why the InstaHowl 3000 from Outrage Manufacturing may be the most valuable investment in your career. Just input the day’s news into it, press the big red panic button and it will manufacture a variety of outrages that you can spout to whip up your audience (requires high decibels or big red fonts – not included).

Then there is the Mini-Me to this Dr. Evil, the herpes to this Black Plague…Troll Blogging.

Troll Blogging is a public pool where everyone is welcome from every part of the community to jump on in. And peeing in the pool is not only permitted, it’s encouraged.

As to the cast of characters in Troll Blogging, on the right, there are the earnest Dittoheads and Tea Partiers who have had megaphones implanted into their heads so their GOP authority figures can speak through them at will.

Then there are the paid and unpaid Arsonist Trolls who simply try to spark fires at moderate and Progressive sites to keep them busy stomping out tiny embers and disrupt their coming together to build or accomplish something.

Next are the Concern Trolls, Republican bloggers masquerading as Democrats and generously sharing their disappointment and disgust at how Obama has failed and betrayed “them” and all other Dems. They vow to never again vote for or support Obama, just as they vow to never again ride unicorns naked. These are the electronic equivalent of Trojan Horses only once inside the gates of Dem castles, they are evacuated out of the rear end of the horse.

Coming off similarly and resembling these horse’s asses are the so-called Dem Purists. They sing in chorus with Concern Trolls and are nearly indistinguishable except for the knives they leave in the backs of others.

Purists are fighting for your Democratic values…by trying to bring down the Democratic President and prepare the way for a right wing Republican to take over the White House. Only then can we return to the purity of Democratic principles and have all of them reunited in one safe place…a wish list.

After all, if there’s anything worse than not getting all the changes you want now, it’s getting more of them later. Their motto is “All or nothing!” and they’re not too sure about keeping the “All or” in there.

If President Obama killed Bin Laden, he’d be attacked for how he did it. If he passed health care reform that would insure most of the 50 million Americans who aren’t insured and those with pre-existing conditions, he’d be attacked for betraying Democratic values. If Obama saved the nation and the world from tumbling into a Great Depression through stimulus spending and loans to major industries, he’d be attacked for not doing enough. At least, that’s my guess.

For the types of people described above, Obama is playing the Purgatory version of Jeapordy, no matter how many answers you get right, you can never win.

-Text: Truth; Illustration: B. McCue -

Last week we had an extensive look at Huffington Posts’ headlines concerning President Obama and the Democrats and observed the eroding influence the headlines had on the general public, as well as on several shades of the Left spectrum. Having seen that, it is not hard to tell that Huffingtons’ support for both Democrats and the President drastically waned since 2008, if it ever truly had been there in the first place. About the reasons for this we can only guess – however it looks quite a bit as if the sell-off to a big corporation may very well have been in the offings for a long time and Huffington systematically worked on becoming more “centrist”, “mainstream” or whatever vocabulary is currently fashionable to her, in order to attract the highest bidder with an audience as vast as possible.

Yet another reason may be that nobody is sure as to what political convictions Ms Huffington really has, if any, or if they just randomly shift with the wind. As the late Green Party politician Peter Camejo, with whom she collaborated briefly in 2003 – in a last ditch to save her bid to become governor of California – put it: “My experience with her was that her ego plays a big role in her life, and her commitment to her political principles seems to vary depending on what wind is blowing and whatever might benefit her in the short term”. (Collins, Lauren: The Oracle; The New Yorker, 2008)

Whatever the reasons for her actions are, many regular commenters on Huffington Post expressed on various blogs that they sensed for at least 1.5 – 2 years before the sale to AOL that something quite unhealthy was going on. The quality of the site declined rapidly and I felt compelled continuing to comment simply in order to defy the headlines that drew an utterly false picture of the President. His image at Huffington Post seemed gradually to morph from that of the greatest President ever into that of a spineless, brainless wimp and moron who has only his own interests at heart and worse, whose real, but somehow hidden goal is to strengthen plutocracy. (Though this picture matches much more a certain Greek Trojan horse, in my opinion).

Here some questions crop up: Anyone remembers how in 2008 the Right couldn’t find any ammunition against the President, how annoyed they were about that and how they then started to paint him as the “Other”, the  “Un-American” and the “Un-trustworthy”? Nobody thought that they would be successful with those ridiculous accusations. Yet with the relentless support of the Left, they were. Isn’t it shocking how deeply these memes seeped in and how not only fearful tea-baggers but even completely reasonable people fell prey hook, line and sinker to these powerful suggestions?

So how did this come about? Of course first there was a constant and relentless repeating of these memes from the Right. To their credit goes that they have a very sophisticated propaganda machine. Yet on of top of that, thanks to missing media laws, as we know they have even a “fair and balanced” network dedicated not to the truth, but to repeat their falsehoods unfiltered and unquestioned.

Now as if that was not enough, on the Left Pandora’s box got opened first at the powerful Huffington Post, which at that time was considered to be the strongest progressive voice.

Their constant unbridled, disrespectful and often unfounded criticism from Day 1 of Obama’s presidency opened the door and set the tone to a barrage of criticism of the Left. This constant undermining and second-guessing his every move from almost every side now has the President in some circles as the “Un-trustworthy Other”. Who really needs the Right anymore when the Left is so adept at defeating themselves?

I don’t advocate not to criticize at all, but I do advocate to be careful with the tone and how far to spread the criticism. Moreover I think it’s advisable to check where the weirdest criticism is coming from. For example, is a loudly shrieking Jane Hamsher, who teamed up with the right winger Grover Norquist a reasonable progressive voice? For real? And is a Bill Maher offering any workable ideas or is he just trying to increase his plummeting ratings? What about an Arianna Huffington who changes her political affiliations more often than her Blackberrys and who still gives a platform to Andrew Breitbart, with whom she founded the Huffington Post?

Just to have a look at some of the people Ms H is surrounded with on the main page should give a hint as to how progressive she really is. I assume she cleverly sensed that there is money to be made with something similar to Drudge report for progressives. If there was an intention from the beginning to split the Left in due course of time is hard to tell, but is a possibility that certainly should be considered.

So far we highlighted in this series already several media manipulation methods and we were talking about the repressive moderation, which for example didn’t allow even very mild critique at Ms Huffington, which gives an impression that other discussions too may have been blocked. This too is not all that progressive, it sounds more a bit totalitarian to me. Anyhow, to take up once more the subject of media manipulation, Noam Chomsky’s Top 10 media manipulation strategies do deserve some extended mention here:

“Renowned critic and always MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, one of the classic voices of intellectual dissent in the last decade, has compiled a list of the ten most common and effective strategies resorted to by the agendas “hidden” to establish a manipulation of the population through the media.

HISTORICALLY THE MEDIA HAVE PROVEN HIGHLY EFFICIENT TO MOLD PUBLIC OPINION. Thanks to the media paraphernalia and propaganda, have been created or destroyed social movements, justified wars, tempered financial crisis, spurred on some other ideological currents, and even given the phenomenon of media as producers of reality within the collective psyche.”

1. The strategy of distraction

The primary element of social control is the strategy of distraction which is to divert public attention from important issues and changes determined by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information. (…)

(…) Maintaining public attention diverted away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance.

2. Create problems, then offer solutions

This method is also called “problem -reaction- solution. “It creates a problem, a “situation” referred to cause some reaction in the audience, so this is the principal of the steps that you want to accept. For example: let it unfold and intensify urban violence, or arrange for bloody attacks in order that the public is the applicant’s security laws and policies to the detriment of freedom. Or: create an economic crisis to accept as a necessary evil retreat of social rights and the dismantling of public services.

3. The gradual strategy

acceptance to an unacceptable degree, just apply it gradually, dropper, for consecutive years. That is how they radically new socioeconomic conditions (neoliberalism ) were imposed during the 1980s and 1990s: the minimal state, privatization, precariousness, flexibility, massive unemployment, wages, and do not guarantee a decent income, so many changes that have brought about a revolution if they had been applied once.

4. The strategy of deferring

Another way to accept an unpopular decision is to present it as “painful and necessary”, gaining public acceptance, at the time for future application. It is easier to accept that a future sacrifice of immediate slaughter. First, because the effort is not used immediately. Then, because the public, masses, is always the tendency to expect naively that “everything will be better tomorrow” and that the sacrifice required may be avoided. This gives the public more time to get used to the idea of change and accept it with resignation when the time comes.

5. Go to the public as a little child

Most of the advertising to the general public uses speech, argument, people and particularly children’s intonation, often close to the weakness, as if the viewer were a little child or a mentally deficient. (…) Why? “If one goes to a person as if she had the age of 12 years or less, then, because of suggestion, she tends with a certain probability that a response or reaction also devoid of a critical sense as a person 12 years or younger (see Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”

6. Use the emotional side more than the reflection

Making use of the emotional aspect is a classic technique for causing a short circuit on rational analysis , and finally to the critical sense of the individual. Furthermore, the use of emotional register to open the door to the unconscious for implantation or grafting ideas, desires, fears and anxieties, compulsions, or induce behaviors …

7. Keep the public in ignorance and mediocrity

Making the public incapable of understanding the technologies and methods used to control and enslavement. “The quality of education given to the lower social classes must be the poor and mediocre as possible so that the gap of ignorance it plans among the lower classes and upper classes is and remains impossible to attain for the lower classes (See ‘ Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).”

8. To encourage the public to be complacent with mediocrity

Promote the public to believe that the fact is fashionable to be stupid, vulgar and uneducated…

9. Self-blame Strengthen

To let individual blame for their misfortune, because of the failure of their intelligence, their abilities, or their efforts. So, instead of rebelling against the economic system, the individual autodesvalida and guilt, which creates a depression, one of whose effects is to inhibit its action. And, without action, there is no revolution!

10. Getting to know the individuals better than they know themselves

Thanks to biology, neurobiology and applied psychology, the “system” has enjoyed a sophisticated understanding of human beings, both physically and psychologically. The system has gotten better acquainted with the common man more than he knows himself. This means that, in most cases, the system exerts greater control and great power over individuals, greater than that of individuals about themselves.

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Sounds somehow familiar? I think this list speaks pretty much for itself – and I feel that many of those strategies are applied widely by various media outlets – including the Huffington Post.

Therefore it is worth to reconsider time and again where our opinions really come from: are we convinced because of deeply thinking about an issue, or were we merely led to our conviction by allowing the media to flood our brain and senses constantly?