The Freebie Delusion

The LA Times has an amusing profile on Arianna Huffington, in which she said this howler:

Our site is not built around the freebie.

In the next breath, she also said this, apparently with a straight face:

Our site is built around very hard-working editors and reporters who do all the curating and aggregating and original content.

I don’t have a problem with the Huffington Post being a link farm for poached journalism. (I do have a problem with it being a prominent forum for anti-vaccine crusaders like Jim Carrey and Bill Maher. Sure, let them publish their views, just put something up there that balances out their nuttiness. That’s where those “hardworking editors” come in.) But for Huffington to claim that her site is not built on the “freebie” is sheer chutzpa.