Via my good friend Carolyn Kay of Make Them Accountable comes an article by Simon Dumenco about how Ken Lerer, one of the founding members of the Huffington Post, stated flat out that HuffPost has no intention of ever paying its bloggers anything:
- "That's not our financial model," he told the [USA Today]. "We offer them visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company."
Well, isn't that special.
But not surprising. Getting people to work for free has been the financial model of the left for over thirty years now. Instead of building organizations and paying people to do work, the financially secure leftists ask, no wait they demand that you give your time, your skill, and your money to the cause, and sniffle at the very idea that you should ever get your hands on some of that dirty money. Of course, those rules don't apply to Mr. Lerer and Ms. Huffington, who no doubt pull in more than enough to maintain their comfortable lifestyles.
Good journalism, which we unfortunately see too little of these days, is a combination of many things: chief among them being the dirty leg-work of research and investigation, and the informed opinions of people who can take complex issues and explain them in simple terms. No true reporter worth a damn would go through all that for "visibility, promotion and distribution with a great company", I somehow doubt that the landlord would accept this in lieu of rent.
The right, of course, has a slightly different financial model. They eschew the reporting and research part altogether and just pay people to lie, or to spout the party line (which is usually the same thing anyway). And it works for them because there's plenty of people who'd sell their souls for a buck, and when some of these slobs start earning the kind of money to put them in the same social circles as the hoi polloi of the so-called "professional" media, they tend to get the kind of "visibility, promotion and distribution" few of the 1,800 or so bloggers on HuffPost will ever see.
Now of course we don't have to lie like they do, and we don't have to pimp for the Democratic Party. But if you want to know why the country's been "'tarded" over the last thirty years or so, the left's "financial model" is a big reason. It's hard to be politically active when you have to do something else to earn money. And what's really sad is that people like Mr. Lerer, who I doubt will ever have to worry about where his next meal comes from, will probably never truly understand this.
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