Is it a coincidence that four days after Nancy Pelosi sat and gave an exclusive pep talk/schmooze session with AOL’s Arianna Huffington and an all-female editorial meeting in the offices of AOL/HuffPo, Arianna’s Washington Bureau Chief phoned-in a “nothing-to-see-here” apologia for the former-Speaker’s congressional insider trading scandal?
As liberal news outlets like CBS News, Daily Beast/Newsweek and even MSNBC saw fit to report the fact that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in a sweetheart IPO for VISA, while at the same time ensuring that tough regulations that would have stifled VISA’s profits stayed bottled up in the Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives, AOL/HuffPo opted to re-print Pelosi’s talking points and obfuscations in lieu of doing actual reporting.
With the awkward and ham-handed headline “Hit Job Falls Flat,” you can almost see Arianna herself hammering out bullet points on her blackberry, firing them off to reporter Ryan Grim in an effort to put her elegant fingers in the metaphorical dyke to stop the gushing in the most serious corruption story to hit Pelosi’s long career. The banner headline, full of wishful thinking, ran just hours after the “60 Minutes” story. First thing on a Monday morning at the beginning of a news cycle is a curious time to declare that a story “fell flat.”
In fact, the story was talked about on cable news and in the halls of congress all day. It inspired new legislation to finally make the corrupt practice of congressional insider trading illegal. Presidential candidate Rick Perry produced a 30-second ad featuring the story and calling for jail-time for any politician who profited from insider information. If this is “falling flat” I would like to see AOL/HuffPo’s idea of a successful investigative report.
Seriously, I’d really like to see one. Do they even do anything like that, or do they just sit back and let the rest of us do all of the real reporting?
In his defense of Pelosi, Grim cherry-picks facts from the CBS News story and then spends paragraphs allowing the former Speaker’s spokesperson to distract and deflect without ever providing his readers with the fundamental facts:
- Pelosi and her husband had a rare and exclusive (elite, one might say) opportunity to participate in a VISA IPO.
- Pelosi was deeply involved with legislation affecting the credit card industry at the time
- The original legislation included regulations allowing companies to negotiate the onerous transaction fees that make up a significant profit center for credit card companies
- The legislation languished in that form on the Speaker’s desk
- When the legislation finally became law, the rules pertaining to the transaction fees were stripped out
- The credit card companies’ stocks skyrocketed after the law was passed (how tough could it have been on them)
- Pelosi’s investment paid-ff over 200%
The story really is as simple as that, yet none of this made its way into AOL/HuffPo’s “Falls Flat” narrative.
So why would the publication that bears Arianna Huffington’s name run interference for the most significant corruption story coming out of Washington in decades? After all, the latest incarnation of Arianna Huffington’s world view (this is number six by my count, right after “Environmental Goddess” and well past “Newt Gingrich Disciple”) has a “Throw Them All Out” kind of ring to it. Huffington has made great pains in the past few years to place herself above the petty partisan attacks and be the multi-million dollar champion of the little guy who hasn’t a chance in our corrupt, bought and paid for system.
Isn’t this the woman who wrote Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America? Why would she not be embracing the incredibly thorough investigative research done by Peter Schweizer in exposing both Republicans and Democrats involved in the very legal, yet still corrupt practice of profiting from their positions as public servants?
To answer the question, look no further than this article from last Thursday written without a byline at AOL/HuffPo: Nancy Pelosi Visits The Huffington Post, Talks Motherhood, Breaking Barriers And Being Yourself.
We were so fortunate this morning to have Representative Nancy Pelosi stop by The Huffington Post office to speak to 30 or so female members of our editorial staff. Pelosi kicked off the round table discussion with the story of the first time she met Arianna Huffington (then Stassinopoulos), when Arianna stopped by Pelosi’s house in California over twenty years ago. While dazzled by her guest, Pelosi said, she couldn’t stop thinking about the bedraggled state of a white duck sofa in her kitchen that her five young children had all but destroyed.
With that very strange “we” in the first sentence, I’m shocked that the writer suppressed the urge to include a few “Dahling’s” in the narrative as well.
If AOL’s Arianna Huffington is to be taken seriously as a journalist, thinker and publisher (and she so desperately wants to be taken seriously), she can’t get a pass for hosting gadfly luncheons with people of power and influence all the while neglecting to seriously report on their obviously news-worthy antics. The cloyingly sweet aftertaste in one’s mouth after reading Pelosi’s advise “about getting into politics and just being better at life” given to the all-female editorial staff with Arianna perched next to her with an admiring gaze and an all-to obviously enthusiastic laugh at the Speaker’s quips, quickly turns to outrage when you read HuffPo’s ineffective and denial-ridden coverage of Pelosi’s growing scandal. The scandal that even Tina Brown green-lighted at Newsweek for an extensive expose’.
The quick assumption to make is Arianna remains a lefty and, therefore, AOL will continue to feed its readers (24 million at last count) love-letters from the political left and hefty criticisms — bordering on diatribes targeted at the political right. No doubt there is truth to that, and we see it played out on a daily basis. But, the sad rest of the story runs much shallower, unfortunately.
The fact is, Arianna Huffington’s history and track record proves that she is a lefty second and a desperate sycophant first. Her political writers will apologize for Pelosi because she’s on their side, but more importantly, because she came and giggled with Arianna and the staff for an afternoon. Her writers will attack Newt Gingrich not because they can come close to disputing his brilliant thoughts and ideas, but because he doesn’t come and pay homage to Arianna like he used to. Her site will continue to feature the destructive, hateful and bigoted Van Jones, not because he has any original or viable ideas, but because he looks so good on Arianna’s arm at black-tie events. That’s not just Arianna’s arm Van Jones is clinging to, it’s the collective arm of AOL and their stockholders.
It’s the politics of sycophancy, and it gets a hell of a lot of page views.