Bloggers threaten HuffPo strike as Guild chair says conservatives dealt 'death blow' to middle class

Unpaid bloggers threatening to strike at the Huffington Post got a boost this week when the Newspaper Guild joined the protest. HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington hasn’t blinked—yet—over the threats from bloggers who give away their content in hopes of either advancing a political cause or gaining some sort of left-sphere attention.

I can hear a few of my liberal friends doing some clucking over my categorization of HuffPo as left-sphere, but I would direct you to the entry page on any given day. Today for instance, there is an above-the-fold on the disaster in Japan. But the majority of content blurbed falls along these sample headlines:

Why the Republicans hate NPR
It’s time to vet the VAT as a solution to America’s staggering debt
Fighting cancer is a Defense Department obligation

Talk about propagandized headers. Yet Google returns HuffPo results in just about every search you do on political topics. A wise arbiter of news Google is not. It’s one thing to package and dispense commentary labeled as commentary. It’s another entirely to package commentary and dispense it as news.

At HuffPo, there’s also an abundance of posts bashing conservative pundits but that’s to be expected because it was only after Huffington’s post-(alleged)-conservative intellectual marriage to the left that she began to make a name for herself. Loving the left got her on Larry King—what more could a political diva want? [LOL]

Huffington has certainly benefited from those unpaid bloggers, and it pains me to agree with anything she says. She has responded to the strike threats with a who-cares approach—no one will notice. I think she’s right and furthermore, I don’t think she twisted those volunteer arms.

Meanwhile the Guild appears to be gliding gently into the HuffPo conflict by attacking conservatives. The Daily Caller quoted Rebecca Lum who chairs The Freelance Guild unit (whatever’s left of freelancers in today’s newspaper climate, anyway).

Lum, commenting on Guild advocacy for the strikers, said:

“[Huffington] has been a strong and articulate voice against conservative policies that have helped deal a death blow to the middle class. So what gives?”

Conservative policies have dealt a death blow to the middle class? This theory from a committee chair for a national newspaper guild? Let us marvel at objectivity in the newsroom. Let us also marvel at the idiocy in her ‘death blow’ claims as we prepare to tackle the mess progressives have created after gaining total  control of the US government.

Huffington’s ‘let them eat cake’ approach is logical, in the scheme of things. All those eager beaver bloggers (who assumed legal liability for every word as they handed over free content) got exactly what they were promised in whatever terms HuffPo presented them with.

Aside from that, it’s comical that unpaid volunteers are even threatening a strike. There’s nothing at stake except naiveté and millions of words of content that have likely never been fact-checked and stream rhetoric straight from the progressive socialist playbook.

Related Article at The US Report
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 (Commentary by Kay B. Day/March 18, 2011)

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