Arianna Huffington had an announcement (1/19/12) about a new section in her Huffington Post:

I'm delighted to announce the launch of Global Motherhood, a new section within HuffPost Impact dedicated to the health and well being of mothers and babies around the world, and sponsored by Johnson & Johnson.

It goes without saying that it's a bad idea in general to have a corporation in the health industry sponsoring health coverage; the potential for conflict of interest is obvious. But given that these kinds of special sections are typically created to meet an advertiser's need--an impression strengthened by the fact that the second paragraph of Huffington's announcement focuses on Johnson & Johnson's efforts to "use technology to improve the lives of mothers and babies"--one has to ask, why this section for this advertiser?

You don't have to dig very far back into the Huffington Post archives to get a clue. On November 1, HuffPost Parents posted this AP report:

The piece described a boycott launched against the Johnson & Johnson by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which "has unsuccessfully been urging the world's largest healthcare company for 2 1/2 years to remove the trace amounts of potentially cancer-causing chemicals--dioxane and a substance called quaternium-15 that releases formaldehyde--from Johnson's Baby Shampoo, one of its signature products."

After Johnson & Johnson reached an agreement with the campaign to phase out the chemicals in the U.S. market, HuffPost Healthy Living (12/28/11) ran this post by Samuel Epstein, an expert on cancer at the University of Illinois School of Public Health:

Epstein's post pointed out the geographically limited nature of the company's agreement and the fact that its shampoo contains a third chemical, nitrosamine, that is also a potential cancer risk.

To be sure, as Jezebel (1/20/12) pointed out, there are numerous health concerns with Johnson & Johnson products--from birth control patches to insulin pumps, from the anti-psychotic drug Risperdal to Tylenol and Motrin. But if your news outlet reveals that a product might be giving kids' cancer and then the makers of that product offer you a sponsorship deal, it's a good bet that they aren't doing so because they're grateful to you for keeping them on their toes.

I tuned into C-SPAN on Friday night and caught part of a panel discussion hosted by Arianna Huffington. One of the panelists was Weekly Standard reporter Stephen Hayes, who is perhaps best known for advancing the bogus theory that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were in cahoots.

And oddly enough, the discussion turned to misleading political advertising, and the efforts to factcheck such political lying--an effort that Hayes cheered:

HUFFINGTON: What else can the media do, Steve?

HAYES: I think one of the upsides to the proliferation of information sources is that you can go to places and find out whether an ad is truthful or not. I mean, you certainly--whether it's Politifact or whether it's local reporters who have teamed up with national media outlets that are fact checking these things almost on a real-time basis.

Ultimately as a believer in free markets, I think if you put out good information that follows bad, if you can identify blatantly misleading political ads, and call them on it, I think that  people will learn that it doesn't pay to run those kinds of ads.

Hayes went on to say:

But I do believe that if you provide people with good information, provide them with places to get that good information, they will ultimately use it.

I guess Hayes thinks some people should be factchecked.

PBS ombud Michael Getler, inspired at least in part by this post on FAIR Blog, addressed Dick Armey's recent appearance on the PBS NewsHour in his September 17 column. Getler wrote that the Armey segment, which was paired with a later interview with Arianna Huffington, "didn't work," since the guests seemed to have very different agendas. The pairing wound up as a "big public relations win for Armey as mostly a platform for his views, while Huffington's main point was that 'the solutions are beyond left and right' and spent as much or more time bashing the Obama administration, aside from noting that the problems grew from 'obviously a failure of the Bush years.'"

Getler goes on to make excellent points about the larger context:

One is that Huffington may be labeled as "a liberal Democrat," but she and her widely viewed website strike me, as a reader, as an equal-opportunity critic. Armey is not. There are plenty of sharp, critical assessments of the Democratic Party and administration on her site. For me, this fits into a purely anecdotal sense that I have that much of mainstream television coverage for some time now is more from a center-right starting point than left-center-right, where far more talking heads and pundits that are described as liberal or left-of-center, actually are closer to the center and just as likely to criticize the left as the right. That is usually not the case, at least as it seems to me, with conservative or right-of-center guests and pundits.

Another point goes to something I posted back in May in the aftermath of the shutting down of two major PBS public affairs programs--Bill Moyers Journal and Now on PBS. I said: "Both provided an outlet for people and subjects that are not in the safe, comfortable center of what passes for most public affairs programming on television. Rather, they often presented guests and topics that rarely get an airing, although what they have to say is of interest to many people who live and think outside that safe comfort-zone."

Both Armey and Huffington, even though controversial, are in what I'd consider that comfortable, or familiar face, zone. Both have many friendly TV and web platforms where their views and books can be, and are, promoted.

Liberal TV pundits are often actually just centrists? PBS should do more to feature views of those outside the Beltway and media elite? FAIR couldn't agree more.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (12/6/09) thinks there's something wrong with left-wing critics of Barack Obama. As his lead put it:

Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet.

 Milbank starts with Michael Moore, who wrote an open letter urging Obama not to escalate the Afghanistan war. This makes no sense to Milbank, since Obama never said he'd withdraw troops. Well, yes. I suspect many of Obama's critics--maybe even Michael Moore--are aware of that.  Moore also supports single-payer healthcare, and wishes Obama would too. Does that mean that continuing that advocacy with Obama in the White House is a waste of time? Or is the idea that no one should ever advocate for any political cause that upsets the power structure?

Maybe that'd be OK with Dana Milbank. As he put it,  Obama is an "incrementalist....  His Afghanistan policy, likewise, is above all a pragmatic, nonideological strategy." Opposing that policy, then, is ideological and anti-pragmatic.

Milbank closes with this:

You'd think his supporters might applaud this sort of thoughtful, methodical leadership as a repudiation of the Bush style of government by political theory. Instead, they're using words such as "O'Bomber" to describe the president. MoveOn.org launched a petition drive against the policy. Code Pink, the group that heckled Bush officials for years, heckled Obama advisers on Capitol Hill last week. The liberal Web publisher Arianna Huffington told Charlie Rose that the policy "puts into question his whole leadership."

Moveon's petition is not  "against the policy"--their petition, if anything, supports it, since it only calls on Congress "to push the Obama administration to outline firm benchmarks and a binding timeline."

Code Pink is against the war; the fact that they're still against is a sign of their consistency.  Milbank might see the process by which Obama decided to escalate the war "thoughtful," but if resulting policy is one you oppose, you continue to oppose it. 

Arianna Huffington, likewise, is saying she opposes Obama's decision, based on a variety of factors. Milbank's point, at face value, is that these people should have all been clear-eyed about Obama's position. That's obviously true--and some of them were. But one gets the sense that his real point is that those to the left of Obama should just leave him alone.

Arianna Huffington's latest column (Huffington Post, 7/13/09) presents a compelling portrayal of the power of new democratic media--versus the self-preserving corporate model of news gathering--in the Chinese government response to major riots last week: "It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest." But here's the rub: "At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area":

That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media--and offered traditional reporters a front-row seat.

China's leaders realized that it's one thing to try to spin the on-the-ground views of bussed-in reporters ("To help foreign media to do more objective, fair and friendly reports," in the words of the government's PR agency), but quite another to try to spin the accounts and uploaded images of tens of thousands of Twittering and cell-phone camera-wielding citizens.

The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran.

As Huffington reminds us, "the truth is, you don't have to 'be there' to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness."

Driving home the point that "the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing," Huffington then excerpts one of the most damaging journalistic examples of this in our time:

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, [a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade] pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.

So wrote an embedded Judith Miller, "bearing witness" to the "silver bullet" proof of Iraqi WMD in the New York Times in April 2003.

Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post, 5/25/09) is offering, as "a particularly egregious example" of corporate media as "enabler of the transformation of real reform into D.C. 'reform,'" a May 23 L.A. Times editorial she thinks "might as well have been written by industry lobbyists (the way many 'reform' bills are)." After her initial reaction to the subhead, "Stung by the excesses of the financial services industry, Congress is striking back"--"Actually, it wasn't Congress that was 'stung' by those 'excesses'--it was the entire world. And why is regulation of out-of-control markets 'striking back'?"--Huffington warns us that "it gets worse":

"Rather than trusting market forces, Democrats in Congress and the administration argue that unbridled capitalism has victimized consumers."

Who wrote this, the "tea party" organizers? Glenn Beck? Since when do things like setting ground rules and demanding transparency mean you no longer believe in "market forces"?

Apparently, according to the L.A. Times, the call for reform is now a "backlash" in which "Democratic majorities in Congress" are going to "clip the financial industry's wings." And this is bad because reform means "raising costs and limiting the freedom of savvy investors and borrowers."

Really? I wonder just how many of those "savvy investors" made money in, say, 2008, when they were blissfully free of all the wing-clipping regulations the L.A. Times is so afraid of? Not many--and that's because all investors, savvy and non-savvy alike, are victimized when the entire financial system is destabilized. In fact, I believe I've heard something about the crisis affecting the L.A. Times, too.

Noting that "the closer we get to actual reform, the more hysterical the debate surrounding it becomes," Huffington tells how "mainstream media's habit of internalizing bad faith arguments in the name of 'balance' becomes more pronounced; and the public interest loses out to the interests of the established financial/political class."