Is the Huffington Post Just This Year's Air America?

Sure sounds that way in Nikki Finke's smackdown in LA Weekly, "Arianna's Blog Blows". In fact, she wonders what the scam is and whether this Zsa Zsa impersonator is, in reality, a Republican mole.

Judging from today's horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington's bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn't accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. 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.

[cutting to the end]

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."

Yep. Certianly sounds like Hate Speech Radio for people who can read, doesn't it?