The Persona of Arianna Huffington

By KATE MALTBY

Feb­ru­ary 24, 2010

Accord­ing to Rupert Mur­doch, arbiter of our times, La Huff is a thief, a par­a­site, a con­tent klep­to­ma­niac.  But speak­ing at the Yale Law School on Mon­day, Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton appeared quite capa­ble of pro­pelling her­self entirely on her own momen­tum, ooz­ing self-confidence on the day she announced the launch of Huff­Post Col­lege. This lat­est sec­tion of Huffington’s epony­mous news web­site will col­late mate­r­ial writ­ten by stu­dents on “issues that mat­ter to stu­dents,” culling its finds from the web­sites of col­lege news­pa­pers across the US.

It is this very pur­suit of “aggre­ga­tion” that so angers Huffington’s rivals.  It was lit­tle sur­prise, then, that in Huffington’s talk on “net neu­tral­ity,” she argued that aggre­ga­tion plays a key role in open­ing up the inter­net, and encour­ag­ing cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists. Echo­ing Hilary Clinton’s sug­ges­tion last month that “free­dom to con­nect” be added to FDR’s basic four free­doms, Huff­in­g­ton defined “free­dom to con­nect” as “free­dom of assembly…in cyber­space.” Aggre­ga­tion, there­fore, facil­i­tates assem­bly. It was in the same vein that she praised the power of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists, argu­ing that it is eas­ier for gov­ern­ments to dupe or bribe a few reporters than it is for a whole nation of on-the-spot reporters to be so swayed. Appar­ently Ms. Huff­in­g­ton was not famil­iar with the phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Huffington’s cel­e­bra­tion of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists, how­ever, stems from a sound under­stand­ing of the weak­ness of the pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ist. Huff­in­g­ton is keen to cir­cu­late the term “jour­nal­is­tic cap­ture,” a new under­stand­ing of the ways in which jour­nal­ists can become sucked into the world of those on whom they report– and end up col­lud­ing in the prac­tice of cov­er­ing up for the estab­lish­ment. Huff­in­g­ton likens the process to “reg­u­la­tory cap­ture” on Wall Street, in which reg­u­la­tors develop vested inter­ests in main­tain­ing the finan­cial insti­tu­tions around which they oper­ate. Keen to advance the web as a tool for jour­nal­is­tic and polit­i­cal eman­ci­pa­tion, Huff­in­g­ton also called on the gov­ern­ment to pri­or­i­tize an increase in broad­band access–currently only 60% of Amer­i­cans have access to broad­band. At the same time, how­ever, she called for an end to the cul­ture of anonymity on the inter­net– again, in the inter­ests of trans­parency. Huff­in­g­ton also insisted that the age of pay-per-view con­tent is over. In a heavy accent, she reminded the audi­ence of her Greek her­itage, invok­ing “my favorite Greek philoso­pher, Her­a­cli­tus” in her asser­tion that “we can­not step into the same river twice.”

Such appeals to her Greek roots form a key ele­ment of Ari­anna Huffington’s glam­orous image, an image to which fem­i­nists have responded with mixed feel­ings. Cer­tainly Huff­in­g­ton cares about female enter­prise: two years ago she was stand­ing at the same plat­form to open the Women’s Lead­er­ship Ini­tia­tive con­fer­ence, when she talked with feel­ing about the need for female role mod­els and men­tor­ing. Yet she has been accused through­out her career of using highly tra­di­tional, invid­i­ous forms of female power. As a col­lege stu­dent, she invited British intel­lec­tual Bernard Levin to give a speech at Cam­bridge, seduced him, and spent her twen­ties being intro­duced to lit­er­ary Lon­don on his arm. When the rela­tion­ship ended, she left for Amer­ica and mar­ried a bil­lion­aire, pro­duced his chil­dren, and later divorced him, receiv­ing a set­tle­ment that has funded her polit­i­cal projects ever since. Accord­ing to the nar­ra­tive of her detrac­tors, even her con­stant ref­er­ences to her Greek alle­giances serve to con­firm her role as the exotic fem­i­nine. Three dif­fer­ent con­tem­po­raries of hers at Cam­bridge have told me that “she arrived at Cam­bridge speak­ing Eng­lish with a slight Greek accent– by the time she left, the accent had become over­whelm­ing, because she dis­cov­ered that men liked it.”

Huffington’s defend­ers argue that such carp­ing comes from those jeal­ous of her suc­cess– and she has indeed been suc­cess­ful. It is the fact of this suc­cess that most dis­cred­its those who would seek to dis­miss her as some­one who has charmed her way to the top: the extra­or­di­nary suc­cess story that is the Huff­in­g­ton Post was cre­ated when Huff­in­g­ton was a sin­gle mother, and is fueled entirely by her own cre­ativ­ity. The fact of her power in the world of the inter­net strikes a blow for women in the mas­cu­line cul­ture of the tech­no­log­i­cal indus­tries. One blast of her phe­nom­e­nal energy is enough to con­vince even the most skep­ti­cal observer that she is quite capa­ble of earn­ing her own suc­cess. The very accu­sa­tions against her entail such tra­di­tional misog­yny that it is hard to tell whether they are valid cri­tiques of Huff­in­g­ton for con­form­ing to misog­y­nist expec­ta­tions, or merely expres­sions of entrenched prejudices.

Kate Maltby is a senior in Yale Col­lege. She is a staff writer for Broad Recog­ni­tion.