Left Is Right: Arianna Huffington

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ARIANNA HUFFINGTON THRIVES at an intersection of punditry and celebrity, but her new book will not endear her to other members of the media elite.

In addition to the Bush administration and its standard-bearers, "Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution and Made Us All Less Safe" skewers folks like Tim Russert and Judith Miller and blasts away at fat targets such as the news media's obsession with Anna Nicole et al.

Huffington also takes on the media's practice of showing two sides of every issue. For instance, on an issue such as global warming, Huffington believes that the public's interest is not served by the addition of a quack skeptic to a panel discussion.

"There are such things as facts," the author writes. "There is such a thing as reality. And refusing to see those facts and report that reality — undiluted by an 'on the other hand' mixer — isn't a sign of objectivity, it's a sign of intellectual laziness and journalistic muddled thinking."

Huffington says the media has attention-deficit disorder and that one mission of her very popular Web site, HuffingtonPost.com, is to maintain a focus on important issues that the mainstream media has a tendency to flit away from.

"We have made sure that we cover stories in a very different way," Huffington said recently about her Web site. "The mainstream media breaks stories and then abandons them, like the big story The New York Times broke on the Pentagon delivering propaganda points to basically mislead the American people. That story has been abandoned by the mainstream media. The Huffington Post has been covering it on a daily basis, both in the news and in the blogs."

But much of the "Right Is Wrong" consists of the author damning "the lunatic fringe," with its own chronically inaccurate statements of the past seven years. One can see the influence of The Huffington Post on the author's writing: The book aggregates a torrent of facts, opinions and large blocks of text from other sources.

"Right Is Wrong," doesn't break much new ground, but it is a solid serving of red meat for Huffington's base.

Express spoke to Huffington, who reads at Politics & Prose on May 5.

» EXPRESS: Is it fair to say you went from a liberal Republican to a liberal Democrat?
» HUFFINGTON: Yes, I was a liberal Republican. I always was pro-gay rights, pro-gun control. The shift was not on these issues. The shift was on my understanding of the role of government. ... Newt Gingrich, after saying in his first speech as speaker that the moral imperative of fighting poverty is greater than the need to balance the budget, proceeded to try and balance the budget by cutting Medicare. That was a rude awakening.

There were many others. There was a constant argument that Washington could not win the war on poverty. It was a series of awakenings, about many of which I wrote — I had a syndicated column at the time — so it was not as if I kept my awakening secret.

» EXPRESS: When you talk about the political right's "lunatic fringe," I know you name names in the book, but can you do so again for our readers: Who exactly are you talking about?
» HUFFINGTON: I'll start with the toxic lunatic fringe: the Ann Coulters and the Rush Limbaughs and the Bill O'Reillys — the people the mainstream media has given a platform to. As a result, their power has increased. You have Ann Coulter on the "Today" show, for example. That's the kind of cover that the fringe has been given by the mainstream media.

Among our elected officials, I would put Dick Cheney at the top. The essence of the lunatic fringe is to be disconnected from reality. In the book, I have a series of Dick Cheney statements that indicate that he's completely delusional, time after time: from the lead-up to the war, when he went on "Meet the Press" and tried to scare the American people about aluminum tubes in Iraq — which turned out to be a story that his own office had fed to Judith Miller at the New York Times — on through the insurgency's being in its last throes [and that] we're going to be greeted as liberators. On and on and on, this man has lied to the American people and gotten away with it.

And many others in the administration, of course — the Don Rumsfelds and the secondary players like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. ... And there are others: Senator James Inhofe, who has insisted for years that global warming is a fraud, or Congressman Steve King, who said that al-Qaeda will be dancing in the streets if Barack Obama is elected.

[Laughs] It's really a very long list, but I hope I've given you enough examples.

» EXPRESS: Do you think that Bush has done anything good as president?
» HUFFINGTON: I hear that the Rose Garden is looking very pretty [laughs]. You know, I think Bush's legacy is so toxic. The pain he has inflicted on America — generations will pay the price for what he has done. So it's really hard to seriously think of good things he did. They would pale by comparison with what he has inflicted on this country and its standing in the world. Other than trivial things, I cannot think of any.

» EXPRESS: Do you see The Huffington Post's role as holding the mainstream media's feet to the fire and their attention to important stories?
» HUFFINGTON: That's one of the functions. Our other function is to provide 24/7 news and opinion, combined with our thriving community. We see ourselves as an Internet newspaper providing news and opinion — not just on politics, but on media, business, living, entertainment. A year ago we expanded into all these areas.

» EXPRESS: I'm sure you read that New Yorker piece on the health of the American newspaper and one of the interesting points it brought up is that you're looking to do more original reporting with The Huffington Post. Do you have a goal for a number of reporters to bring on board?
» HUFFINGTON: It's totally a function of our financing and how quickly our advertising expands. Basically, everything we raise or make, we plow back into our expansion. We're also expanding into other areas: "green," sports, international, books. [The "green" section] is being launched on June 4. So, there are a lot of plans in place. Hopefully we can move on all of them. It's a function of resources.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Mon., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness)

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Photo by Robert Rosenheck