L'affarianna Huffington

Allow me, if I may, to offer my unsolicited input on what Jeff Jarvis has humorously dubbed “l’affarianna Huffington.” In case you haven't been following this story, you should go (in this order) here, here, here, here, and here. As it turns out, I think this whole thing is a non-controversy – or, rather, the wrong controversy.

Necessary to understanding what went wrong here is drawing a distinction between two different errors – often conflated, as in Jarvis’s critique – that people have claimed Huffington made. First, there is the issue of “repurposed” material – using statements or ideas that have already been made in public or published elsewhere (in Clooney’s case, as I understand it, the material for his post was cobbled together from prior interviews). Second, there is the issue of what I will call blog inauthenticity – presenting a blog post as conceived by and written by someone who in fact did not write it (in Clooney’s case, his publicist purportedly gave Huffington the okay to use the post her team had drafted). I distinguish this from pure fabrication because we shall assume that the purported author granted permission to a designated agent to approve the writing that later goes out under his name.

Now I want to present two stylized hypothetical scenarios meant to illustrate this distinction and to allow us to figure out what it is that people should find so objectionable about l’affarianna Huffington. Suppose, first, that Clooney himself had put together his own post based on material he pulled together from prior statements and interviews. This is the stylized, pure repurposing scenario. Is this a problem? I would argue that not only is it not a problem, it is routinely done without any question in the op-ed pages of the nation’s best newspapers everyday. Take Donald Rumsfeld’s op-ed published in Sunday’s Washington Post on the current state of affairs in Iraq. I would venture to say that, without much trouble, one could track down a version of every single statement that was used in that piece (many probably verbatim). Writers and politicians are constantly publishing things based on prior statements: Sometimes they just need time to write some idea down, other times they are publicly working through a problem or position that they later solidify into an op-ed piece. Repurposing, by itself, is not only acceptable but routine.

Here’s the second scenario I want to consider: Suppose that Clooney’s publicist had signed off on (or even drafted herself) a post that was not based on anything Clooney had said publicly before. Assume further that he had authorized his publicist to do this (incidentally, this latter condition, assuming Huffington’s account is accurate, appears to be what actually took place). This is the stylized, pure inauthenticity scenario. So, is this a problem? I think so. Readers should know who authored what they are reading – even if it involved multiple people, even if it involved a 25-year-old publicist. This is what transparency demands, and the Huffington Post, like other blogs, should aspire to this complete honesty with its readers.

But no so fast. Is this – the inauthenticity scenario – not, again, something that occurs routinely in op-ed pages in newspapers every single day? When Condi Rice publishes an op-ed in the Washington Post, do any of us really believe that she has been sitting at her computer some afternoon – with a cup of coffee, a chocolate chip scone, and her favorite CD on in the background – drafting it herself? Of course not. She has much more important things to do than mull over syntax, diction, and phraseology, and we should all want her doing those other important things. I’m no Washington insider, but I’m guessing that her speechwriters and press people draft her op-eds. Perhaps she signs off on them after reading them, but, more likely than not, some high-level staffer has the last say before it goes out.

I would submit that what Rice has done in my hypothetical (which is what I believe is close to what is actually done) is as wrong – if not, given the importance of her position and the things that she says publicly, much more wrong – than what Clooney would be doing if he had authorized his publicist to write something on his behalf. So, yes, Huffington was wrong to give some press flack the final say on Clooney's post, but no more wrong than the op-ed editors of newspapers who engage much more frequently in this sort of activity. Jarvis is correct that blogs are supposed to be uniquely personal, but so are op-ed pieces. Does he feel gamed, lied to, or insulted when he reads opinion pieces that could not have possibly been written by their supposed authors?

My question is this: Shouldn’t the criticism be spread around equally – to Huffington, as well as the mainstream media? Just as in my Clooney inauthenticity scenario we would want to know the true lineage of Clooney’s post, so we should want to know who is actually writing the op-eds that we read in papers everyday. If they involve speechwriters or other press people in, say, a government official’s office, we should know that. Instead, we are treated to the quaint but utterly improbable suggestion that high-level government officials (or heads of non-profit organizations, or leaders of thinktanks, etc.) are writing their pieces all by themselves.

The schadenfreude that many mainstream media folks are no doubt experiencing due to Huffington’s misstep is all wrong. Her mistake was not in acting as though she was exempt from the standard principles of opinion journalism but, rather, in acting in full accordance with those standard principles. What Huffington should have done was to make clear not only that there was repurposed material in Clooney’s post (though, as I’ve said, I think this is less of a problem than critics claim), but also to indicate who was actually involved in writing it and in what way.

Likewise, we should call for greater transparency on newspaper op-ed pages. To do otherwise is, bizarrely, to hold bloggers to a higher standard than newspapers and to silently acquiesce to an almost daily dose of minor intellectual fraud in press outlets where the stakes are presumably much higher.

Arianna, it's been very good of you to apologize. But you and Jeff Jarvis both have bigger fish to fry.