Huffington Post - Is the Internet revolutionizing political discourse in the United States?

The publisher of America's most-famous blog lashes out at the poll and political horse race-driven mainstream media, saying it'll be up to the bloggers to make coverage of the next presidential election interesting. Those same bloggers, she argues, could also spell trouble for Hillary Clinton.

Über-blogger Arianna Huffington: "Hillary Clinton has been so calculating that you can smell it."

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is the Internet revolutionizing political discourse in the United States?
Arianna Huffington: Definitely. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced their intentions to become presidential candidates online. Clinton is having a three-day question and answer period on the Internet. And we're working on the first online presidential debate -- first for the primaries, then for the general election. Bloggers and the whole online community are holding the mainstream media's feet to the fire. They focus too much on polling results and the latest horse race instead of the real issues. It's up to the online community to cover the presidential race 2008 in a more interesting way.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Are political blogs in the US so well developed because the mainstream media is failing to do its job?

Huffington: Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left. It's absurd to debate the Iraq war through the left-right prism -- yet the mainstream media continues to do exactly that. Sen. Sam Brownback, a respected Republican, is opposing the president's escalation plan. But most US journalists only talk about pressure "from the left." One role of the blogosphere is to shake up the mainstream media: Stop reporting in such a knee-jerk way! It's the same with issues like health care and the "war on drugs."
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Right now, Sen. Obama appears to be faring better in the blogosphere than Hillary Clinton -- he's getting more mentions in blogs. Why? And how much influence does that blogging have on the general public?

Huffington: Primary elections are always influenced by those who are the most politically engaged. Blogs are just another element of this. To most bloggers, authenticity is an important criterion. There is an allergic reaction to hyper-cautious politicians. Hillary Clinton's problem with the blogosphere is that she has been so calculating that you can smell it. Every thought has been processed through multiple channels in her and her consultants' brains. It's so fabricated!

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In 2004, you and many others did everything you could on the Internet to fiercely campaign against Bush's re-election. But in the end he won.

Huffington: This was partly a problem of our candidate. John Kerry was not authentic. Hillary Clinton has exactly the same problem.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In November 2006, the Democrats won the Congressional elections. Did blogs help to influence that outcome?

Huffington: Blogs made a big difference -- partly because of the emphasis on Iraq. The races were largely decided on this subject, and that was beyond the expectations of the Democratic leaders. The people and the bloggers were ahead of them. Jack Murtha was the first Democratic leader to make Iraq the central issue, and we at the Huffington Post supported him. He blogged for us, and we also linked to his blog from our news section. We helped him get his message out: that Iraq had turned into a civil war, and that America had no place there anymore. At that time, that wasn't the position of the Democratic Party leadership.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: That's a good example of how the Huffington Post works: You publish news and you feature a long list of guest writers. That sounds more like a professional publication to us -- can you really still call it a blog?

Huffington: It's a hybrid of 24-hour news and a collective blog. We have over 800 bloggers. And the Huffington Post is on its way to becoming an Internet newspaper. That's our goal.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You want to become a mainstream medium?

Huffington: No, we want to be an Internet newspaper: News 2.0. That's not mainstream media.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Won't that require the creation of an editing process like that of the traditional media?

Huffington: Not in the way of a classic paper. We will always have hundreds of bloggers writing whatever they want -- at least once we have given them a password to the site. Giving them the password is the editorial choice. But after that they're free to blog. I see their texts at the same point in time that you see them.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So you don't edit their posts?

Huffington: No. If an editor or a commenter spots factual inaccuracies, we point that out. We have a strict rule that it has to be corrected within 24 hours. If not, then we withdraw the blogger's password. That's our fact-checking process. But we don't edit.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: A few months ago, a videoblogger claimed that the White House removed the "Mission Accomplished" banner from the video of George W. Bushs famous speech on the aircraft carrier. That claim itself turned out to be a fraud. Nevertheless, it was picked up by the Huffington Post and is still online there -- even though commenters were pointing out that it was fake.

Huffington: ... I will check that. That shouldn't happen. It should have been removed, and if we didn't do it, we were wrong. The editor on duty should have fact-checked this once they saw a comment pointing that out.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How can someone become a blogger for the Huffington Post?

Huffington: There are different ways. Some are well-known voices or good writers. Some people are important political players -- like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Some are young and unknown, but we consider them interesting. We invite some, and some submit texts. It is used as an audition platform. We also take interesting posts from other sites -- people can cross-post. We would also like to have more European posts. That's why we hired an editor from the BBC who has a lot of connections in Europe.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Craig Newmark from craigslist has expressed his regret over the fact that the crisis in the classic media has led to a serious reduction in the amount of investigative reporting and research done today. What's your take?

Huffington: A lot of people on the Web are going to do more original reporting -- including the Huffington Post. We hired Melinda Henneberger, who has worked for The New York Times and Newsweek, as our political editor, to oversee our original reporting. We do that because the mainstream media are making cuts in the area of investigative reporting -- and because there's a lot of room for that kind of journalism anyway. There is tremendous need to provide real oversight -- especially when the administration is overreaching in so many areas.

Interview conducted by Christian Stöcker.