The Huffington Train Wreck...

Well, it hasn't been online for even 36 hours, but the Huffington Post is already being hailed as a complete disaster by Nikki Finke in LA Weekly:

This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it's the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it's the disastrous clone of Tina Brown's Talk, JFK Jr.'s George or Maer Roshan's Radar. No matter what happens to Huffington, it's clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences.

It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out.

The most glaring problem is the lack of "A-list" celebrity bloggers who showed up to christen the new venture. It seems all the talk by Arianna of bringing in the big names was a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

"The reality is that she is running around with a lot of names not only in terms of bloggers and so-called investors. And a lot of it is a little bit of a shell game," a source told me pre-launch. "You know the standard game. You call someone and say, ‘I've got X committed for X amount of money.' That's what she did with David. He was not aware that she's using his name as an investor." I'm told that, once Geffen was alerted, his people had to speak to Huffington and "straighten it out."

But not only is Geffen not an investor, he's not even a blogger. "I asked him, ‘Are you going to be doing a blog for Arianna's thing?' and he said no," a source informed me. At the time, Geffen didn't want to attract attention to himself by going public with his denial, I'm told. Besides, a source close to Geffen said to me, "He sends me two-word e-mails. He's not going to write a blog for her or anyone."

Full disclosure: I haven't visited the site. I don't really have to. Michelle Malkin links to Laurence Simon's Huffington Is Full Of Crap, which provides "cut and paste" versions of the most asinine posts as well as running commentary for each - Huffington apparently doesn't have the cojones to provide a "comments" function on the site.

Posted by: Gary at 08:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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