Newsbusters.org:
A freelance blogger on Tuesday filed a class action lawsuit against Arianna Huffington for $105 million. The suit alleges that the Huffington Post's legion of unpaid bloggers are entitled to one third of the revenue from the site's sale to AOL in February.
Jonathan Tasini, who filed the lawsuit, compared Huffington to a "robber baron" in a blog post on Tuesday, and called her site a "blogger plantation - where her slaves work to build her fortune."
Tasini's hard-left perspective came through in his complaint (students of Marx will no doubt recognize his labor theory of value):
We live in a time of unrelenting class warfare. We are the richest nation on earth—yet that wealth is flowing into the hands of the few. The greatest stage for that class warfare is in the workplace: CEOs and their top executives believe that they are the most important part of the company and that they should reap an obscene portion of the value created by WORKERS.
The Huffington Post was, is and will never be, anything without the thousands of people who create the content. Ms. Huffington is acting like every Robber Baron CEO—from Lloyd Blankfein to the Waltons—who believes that they, and only they, should pocket huge riches, while the rest of the peons struggle to survive. Ms. Huffington stance has been clear: only she deserves the fruits of the labor of the people who work for her.
Actually, Arianna Huffington is worse than the CEOs of the banks, the Walton family of Wal-mart. At least, they pay their workers something—even if those wages aren’t enough to make ends meet.
Huffington pays zero. Nothing. Nada.
Arianna Huffington is a hypocrite. While reaping money and building her "brand" based on books and speeches decrying the growing divide between rich and poor (I am not linking to those books in order to avoid giving her even more cash to pocket), Ms. Huffington is precisely acting to impoverish bloggers and create a blogger-plantation--where her slaves work to build her fortune.
The plantation line is absurd on its face. The Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney summed up everything wrong with the claim in a short headline: "Like slavery, only voluntary".
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I hope ya'll collect something but the truth is she is what she was. She's always been a camera hog, arrogant and greedy. Her insipid headlining of her own articles and interviews was clear foreshadowing.
ReplyDeleteShe's not blue collar, the only thing she's understood is the frustration felt by the sinking masses and how she might benefit from it, personally. All the blogger/writers should walk. There's another handful of reasonable decent objective websites like Raw Story that they could flee to. But the reality is they won't leave cause they like the byline.
The web for writers is just a vast sucking sound and many of the huffpost bloggers couldn't earn a dime if trying to work for conventional media either. That's not a knock, its the truth. As media transforms itself there's an incredible amount of folks who feel their opinion is relevant and needs be heard, true or not and compensation be damned.
My father and his father before him were teletype operators, one day they were posting columns and the next day in came the word processors. The teletype machines were literally in the lobby on antique stands a day later. Rapid change in the industry is the norm, not the exception.
I will say this, for years huffpost and its staff have been censoring our comments. For years Huffpost has been banning folks for flyspeck comments.
You knew that.
All the Bloggers know that cause its been the number one complaint online for years.
Yet - ya'll went along with it. Shame on that...