Wednesday, May 18, 2005

The Huffington Post Blows

Much has been made of Arianna Huffington's new website, the Huffington Post. I fail to see why. The writers on there are either a.) celebrities devoid of an original thought who merely regurgitate the same boiler-plate crapola in print that they piously ejaculate on shows like Bill Maher's OR b.) they're opinion editorial writers who already have ample opportunity to voice their opinions in other venues. Either way, it's a bust.

I fail to understand the concept behind this website. Is it to give a voice to the...uh....those that already have a voice? Really....does Norman Mailer really need to have yet another forum to spout his moon-bat theories about how, say, the Pentagon set Michael Isikoff up with a false story about the Qu'ran flushing incident so that they could slam the press yet again? Does Jim Lampley really need a forum to write about how spitting mad he is about the vote to remove filibusters? These people already have a forum. They're on television, in newspapers, and are the subject of glowing profile pieces in many a publication from here to California. The whole point of the internet, the blogosphere if you will, is to give a voice to people such as myself. I'm not a published writer (unless you count writing for my college newspaper), but I'd like to think I can write. If people come across this site and care to contribute some feedback, great. Maybe they'll walk away knowing something they didn't know before. On a macro scale, I can without a doubt say that I never would've come across writers like Glenn Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt, or even the sometimes insightful but normally hysterical Andrew Sullivan. The blogosphere has allowed writers, some of them not professional ones but merely citizen-journalists, to publish, to contribute to the macro-discourse. On occasion, they not only report otherwise unknown news, but actually to become the news. Consider that it was a blogger by the name of "Buckethead" that was the catalyst for taking Dan Rather and CBS News down for their character assassination attempt on President Bush. That's powerful....and the people now have it. (Much to the chagrin of the established media, who hate the blogosphere.)

When a media establishment personality su

No comments: