Pharmaceutical Company Threatens Blogger

Boiron, a multinational pharmaceutical company, have threatened an Italian blogger with legal action, the BMJ reports.



Many people are concerned when big pharmaceutical companies do this kind of thing. So I don't think we should make any exception merely because Boiron's pharmaceuticals happen to be homeopathic ones.



Samuel Riva, who blogs (in Italian) at blogzero.it, put up some articles critical of homeopathy

which included pictures of Boiron’s blockbuster homoeopathic product Oscillococcinum, marketed as a remedy against flu symptoms. The pictures were accompanied by captions, which joked about the total absence of any active molecules in homoeopathic preparations

Boiron wrote to Riva's internet provider threatening legal action, if the offending references to Boiron weren't taken down. They also wanted them to lock Riva out of his blog, the BMJ says. In response Riva removed the references to Boiron, including the pictures and captions, but kept the posts on homeopathy in general.



Hmmm.



Above you can see a new picture I made of a Boiron product, with some captions you may find interesting. I've made sure to limit these to quotes from Wikipedia, and from Boiron USA's own website, and some simple mathematical calculations.



Beyond that, I make no comment whatsoever.



Turone F (2011). Homoeopathy multinational Boiron threatens amateur Italian blogger. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 343 PMID: 21840920

Pharmaceutical Company Threatens Blogger

Boiron, a multinational pharmaceutical company, have threatened an Italian blogger with legal action, the BMJ reports.



Many people are concerned when big pharmaceutical companies do this kind of thing. So I don't think we should make any exception merely because Boiron's pharmaceuticals happen to be homeopathic ones.



Samuel Riva, who blogs (in Italian) at blogzero.it, put up some articles critical of homeopathy

which included pictures of Boiron’s blockbuster homoeopathic product Oscillococcinum, marketed as a remedy against flu symptoms. The pictures were accompanied by captions, which joked about the total absence of any active molecules in homoeopathic preparations

Boiron wrote to Riva's internet provider threatening legal action, if the offending references to Boiron weren't taken down. They also wanted them to lock Riva out of his blog, the BMJ says. In response Riva removed the references to Boiron, including the pictures and captions, but kept the posts on homeopathy in general.



Hmmm.



Above you can see a new picture I made of a Boiron product, with some captions you may find interesting. I've made sure to limit these to quotes from Wikipedia, and from Boiron USA's own website, and some simple mathematical calculations.



Beyond that, I make no comment whatsoever.



Turone F (2011). Homoeopathy multinational Boiron threatens amateur Italian blogger. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 343 PMID: 21840920

A Ghostwriter Speaks

PLoS ONE offers the confessions of a former medical ghostwriter: Being the Ghost in the Machine.





The article (which is open access and short, so well worth a read) explains how Linda Logdberg became a medical writer; what excited her about the job; what she actually did; and what made her eventually give it up.



Ghostwriting of course has a bad press at the moment and it's recently been banned by some leading research centres. Ghostwriting certainly is concerning, because of what it implies about the process leading up the publication.



However, it doesn't create bad science. A bad paper is bad because of what it says, not because of who (ghost)wrote it. Real scientists can write bad papers without a ghostwriter's help.



When pharmaceutical companies pay a ghostwriter, they are not doing this to get access to special dark arts that real scientists are innocent of. As far as I can see, it's just more efficient to use a specialist writer to do your scientific sins, when you're doing it all the time.



Rather like every evil sorcerer has an apprentice to do the day-to-day work of sacrificing animals and mixing potions.



Logdberg says:

My career came to an end over a job involving revising a manuscript supporting the use of a drug for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), with a duration of action that fell between that of shorter- and longer-acting formulations.



However, I have two children with ADHD, and I failed to see the benefit of a drug that would wear off right at suppertime, rather than a few hours before or a few hours after. Suppertime is a time in ADHD households when tempers and homework arguments are often at their worst.



...Attempts to discuss my misgivings with the [medical] contact met with the curt admonition to ‘‘just write it.’’ But perhaps because this particular disorder was so close to home, I was unwilling to turn this ugly duckling of a ‘‘me-too’’ drug into a marketable swan.

Many scientists will recall being in that kind of situation, albeit in a different context.



When writing a grant application, for example, you are almost literally trying to sell your proposed research to the awarding committee, on several levels. You need to sell the importance of the scientific question; the likely practical benefits of the research; the chance of success using your methods; what makes you the right person to do this work, and so on.



Writing a paper is much the same, although in this case you're selling research you've already done, and the data you collected.



Turning ugly ducklings into fundable, or publishable, swans, is part and parcel of modern science. Of course, the ducklings are not always as ugly as in the case Logdberg describes, but they are rarely as beautiful as they eventually end up.



Logdberg, L. (2011). Being the Ghost in the Machine: A Medical Ghostwriter's Personal View PLoS Medicine, 8 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001071

A Ghostwriter Speaks

PLoS ONE offers the confessions of a former medical ghostwriter: Being the Ghost in the Machine.





The article (which is open access and short, so well worth a read) explains how Linda Logdberg became a medical writer; what excited her about the job; what she actually did; and what made her eventually give it up.



Ghostwriting of course has a bad press at the moment and it's recently been banned by some leading research centres. Ghostwriting certainly is concerning, because of what it implies about the process leading up the publication.



However, it doesn't create bad science. A bad paper is bad because of what it says, not because of who (ghost)wrote it. Real scientists can write bad papers without a ghostwriter's help.



When pharmaceutical companies pay a ghostwriter, they are not doing this to get access to special dark arts that real scientists are innocent of. As far as I can see, it's just more efficient to use a specialist writer to do your scientific sins, when you're doing it all the time.



Rather like every evil sorcerer has an apprentice to do the day-to-day work of sacrificing animals and mixing potions.



Logdberg says:

My career came to an end over a job involving revising a manuscript supporting the use of a drug for attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), with a duration of action that fell between that of shorter- and longer-acting formulations.



However, I have two children with ADHD, and I failed to see the benefit of a drug that would wear off right at suppertime, rather than a few hours before or a few hours after. Suppertime is a time in ADHD households when tempers and homework arguments are often at their worst.



...Attempts to discuss my misgivings with the [medical] contact met with the curt admonition to ‘‘just write it.’’ But perhaps because this particular disorder was so close to home, I was unwilling to turn this ugly duckling of a ‘‘me-too’’ drug into a marketable swan.

Many scientists will recall being in that kind of situation, albeit in a different context.



When writing a grant application, for example, you are almost literally trying to sell your proposed research to the awarding committee, on several levels. You need to sell the importance of the scientific question; the likely practical benefits of the research; the chance of success using your methods; what makes you the right person to do this work, and so on.



Writing a paper is much the same, although in this case you're selling research you've already done, and the data you collected.



Turning ugly ducklings into fundable, or publishable, swans, is part and parcel of modern science. Of course, the ducklings are not always as ugly as in the case Logdberg describes, but they are rarely as beautiful as they eventually end up.



Logdberg, L. (2011). Being the Ghost in the Machine: A Medical Ghostwriter's Personal View PLoS Medicine, 8 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001071

Debating Greenfield

British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield regrets the recent controversy over certain of her remarks, and calls for a serious debate over "mind change" -

"Mind change" is an appropriately neutral, umbrella concept encompassing the diverse issues of whether and how modern technologies may be changing the functional state of the human brain, both for good and bad.

Very well, here goes. I wonder if Greenfield will reply.



As Greenfield points out, the human brain is plastic and interacts with the environment. Indeed, this is how we are able to learn and adapt to anything. Were our brains entirely unresponsive to what happens to them we would have no memory and probably no behaviour at all.



The modern world is changing your brain, in other words.



However, the same is true of every other era. The Victorian era, the Roman Empire, the invention of agriculture - human brains were never the same after those came along.



Because the brain is where behaviour happens, any change in behaviour must be accompanied by a change in the brain. By talking about how behaviour changes, we will, implicitly, also be discussing the brain.



However it doesn't work in reverse. Changes in the brain can't be assumed to mean changes in behaviour. Greenfield cites, for example, this paper which purports to show reductions in the grey matter volume of certain areas of the brain cortex in Chinese students with internet addiction compared to those without.



The obvious comment here is that it doesn't prove causality, as it is only a correlation. Maybe the reason they got addicted was because they already had these brain changes.



However, there is a more subtle point. Even if these were a direct consequence of excessive internet use, it wouldn't mean that the internet use was changing behaviour.



We have no idea what a slight decrease in grey matter volume in the cerebellum, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and supplementary motor area would do to cognition and behaviour. It might not do anything.



My point here is that rather than worrying about the brain, we ought to focus on behaviour. Because that is also focussing on the brain, but it's focussing on the aspects of brain function that actually matter.



Greenfield then poses three questions.

1. Could sustained and often obsessive game-playing, in which actions have no consequences, enhance recklessness in real life?

It's possible that it could, although I don't think we do live in an especially reckless society, given that crime rates are lower now than they have been for 20 years.



However, the question assumes that game playing has no consequences. Yet in-game actions do have in-game consequences. To a non-gamer, these may seem like no consequences, because they're not real.



Yet in the game, they're perfectly real, and if you spend 12 hours a day playing that game, and all your friends do as well - you are going to care about that. Those consequences will matter, to you, and with luck, you'll learn not to be so impulsive in the future.



In World of Warcraft, for example, actions have all too many consequences. If you impulsively decide to attack an enemy in the middle of a raid, you could cause a wipe, which would, quite possibly, ruin everyone's evening and get you a reputation as an oaf.



Exactly as your reputation would suffer if you and your friends went for an evening at the opera, and you stood up in the middle and shouted a profanity. Ah, but that's real life, the response goes. Is it? Is a performance in which hundreds of people sit solemnly, while grown adults dress up and pretend to be singing gods and fairies on the instructions of a deceased anti-semite, any more real than this?

3. How can young people develop empathy if they conduct relationships via a medium which does not allow them the opportunity to gain full experience of eye contact, interpret voice tone or body language, and learn how and when to give and receive hugs?

I do not think that this accurately represents the experience of most children today. However, assuming that it were true, what would be the problem?



If everyone's relationships were conducted online, surely it would be more important to learn how to navigate the online world, than it would be to learn how to interpret body language, which (webcams aside), you would never see, or need to see.



If the brain is plastic and adapts to the environment, as Greenfield argues, then surely the fact that it is adapting to the information age is neither surprising nor concerning. If anything, we ought to be trying to help the process along, to make ourselves better adapted. It would be more worrying if it didn't adapt.



Some might be concerned by this. Surely, there is value in the old way of doing things, value that would be lost in the new era. Unless one can point to definite reasons why the new state of affairs is inherently worse than the old - not just different from it - it is hard to distinguish these concerns from the simple feeling of nostalgia over the past.



The same point could have equally well been made at any time in history. When our ancestors first settled down to farm crops, an early conservative might have lamented - "Young people today are growing up with no idea of how to stab a mammoth in the eye with a spear. All they know is how to plant, water and raise this new-fangled 'wheat'."

Debating Greenfield

British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield regrets the recent controversy over certain of her remarks, and calls for a serious debate over "mind change" -

"Mind change" is an appropriately neutral, umbrella concept encompassing the diverse issues of whether and how modern technologies may be changing the functional state of the human brain, both for good and bad.

Very well, here goes. I wonder if Greenfield will reply.



As Greenfield points out, the human brain is plastic and interacts with the environment. Indeed, this is how we are able to learn and adapt to anything. Were our brains entirely unresponsive to what happens to them we would have no memory and probably no behaviour at all.



The modern world is changing your brain, in other words.



However, the same is true of every other era. The Victorian era, the Roman Empire, the invention of agriculture - human brains were never the same after those came along.



Because the brain is where behaviour happens, any change in behaviour must be accompanied by a change in the brain. By talking about how behaviour changes, we will, implicitly, also be discussing the brain.



However it doesn't work in reverse. Changes in the brain can't be assumed to mean changes in behaviour. Greenfield cites, for example, this paper which purports to show reductions in the grey matter volume of certain areas of the brain cortex in Chinese students with internet addiction compared to those without.



The obvious comment here is that it doesn't prove causality, as it is only a correlation. Maybe the reason they got addicted was because they already had these brain changes.



However, there is a more subtle point. Even if these were a direct consequence of excessive internet use, it wouldn't mean that the internet use was changing behaviour.



We have no idea what a slight decrease in grey matter volume in the cerebellum, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and supplementary motor area would do to cognition and behaviour. It might not do anything.



My point here is that rather than worrying about the brain, we ought to focus on behaviour. Because that is also focussing on the brain, but it's focussing on the aspects of brain function that actually matter.



Greenfield then poses three questions.

1. Could sustained and often obsessive game-playing, in which actions have no consequences, enhance recklessness in real life?

It's possible that it could, although I don't think we do live in an especially reckless society, given that crime rates are lower now than they have been for 20 years.



However, the question assumes that game playing has no consequences. Yet in-game actions do have in-game consequences. To a non-gamer, these may seem like no consequences, because they're not real.



Yet in the game, they're perfectly real, and if you spend 12 hours a day playing that game, and all your friends do as well - you are going to care about that. Those consequences will matter, to you, and with luck, you'll learn not to be so impulsive in the future.



In World of Warcraft, for example, actions have all too many consequences. If you impulsively decide to attack an enemy in the middle of a raid, you could cause a wipe, which would, quite possibly, ruin everyone's evening and get you a reputation as an oaf.



Exactly as your reputation would suffer if you and your friends went for an evening at the opera, and you stood up in the middle and shouted a profanity. Ah, but that's real life, the response goes. Is it? Is a performance in which hundreds of people sit solemnly, while grown adults dress up and pretend to be singing gods and fairies on the instructions of a deceased anti-semite, any more real than this?

3. How can young people develop empathy if they conduct relationships via a medium which does not allow them the opportunity to gain full experience of eye contact, interpret voice tone or body language, and learn how and when to give and receive hugs?

I do not think that this accurately represents the experience of most children today. However, assuming that it were true, what would be the problem?



If everyone's relationships were conducted online, surely it would be more important to learn how to navigate the online world, than it would be to learn how to interpret body language, which (webcams aside), you would never see, or need to see.



If the brain is plastic and adapts to the environment, as Greenfield argues, then surely the fact that it is adapting to the information age is neither surprising nor concerning. If anything, we ought to be trying to help the process along, to make ourselves better adapted. It would be more worrying if it didn't adapt.



Some might be concerned by this. Surely, there is value in the old way of doing things, value that would be lost in the new era. Unless one can point to definite reasons why the new state of affairs is inherently worse than the old - not just different from it - it is hard to distinguish these concerns from the simple feeling of nostalgia over the past.



The same point could have equally well been made at any time in history. When our ancestors first settled down to farm crops, an early conservative might have lamented - "Young people today are growing up with no idea of how to stab a mammoth in the eye with a spear. All they know is how to plant, water and raise this new-fangled 'wheat'."

Arianna escalating her wage-less empire

By J. Thomas Duffy

Oh boy, I have to speculate the AOL purchase of The Huffington Post is going to be a bonanza of great fodder for weeks/months/years to come.

The World Wide Web is still buzzing with some great stuff from multiple angles.

First off, in the "Told-You-So" Department, Greg Sargent at The Plum Line has the scoop on Arianna's plans to continue not to pay her writers, and it's called "Citizen Journalism":

Arianna Huffington is planning to use AOL's infrastructure to launch a major expansion of citizen journalism in advance of the 2012 presidential campaign, she tells me in an interview, sharing new details about her vision of expanded political coverage in the wake of the merger with AOL.

Huffington described her plan as "Jeffersonian," and she says she plans to use AOL's Web site Patch.com, a network of sites that cover local news at the granular level, as a vehicle for expansion modeled on HuffingtonPost's 2008 "Off the Bus" coverage. "Off the Bus" made a splash when candidate Barack Obama was caught on tape suggesting that economically distressed voters are "bitter" and "cling to guns or religion," and if Huffington has her way, she will oversee a massive increase in such coverage next year.

"We are going to dramatically accelerate this in 2012," said Huffington, who discussed the idea on a conference call yesterday with Patch.com employees. "We will have thousands and thousands of people covering the election. Covering the Repulicans. Covering the Democrats. Just being transparent about it."

Huffington -- who said high-level editorial staffing decisions were still being worked out -- also provided the first clear glimpse of her plan to graft the HuffPo vision on to the AOL infrastructure. "Patch already has professional editors," she said, adding that freelancers across the country would work with those editors "the way that the Huffington Post pairs young reporters with established editors. It's something we can also do at the local level."

[snip]

The expansion of citizen journalism seems likely to expand the current model by which a massive amount of content is generated by unpaid freelancers who are looking to get their voices heard. If she gets her way, the site's current identity won't change, preserving the site's community feel but expanding it in new directions.

"The first thing I said about Huffington Post is that I don't want to talk to the choir," she said. "I wanted to use this platform to inform millions of people. Now that can be dramatically accelerated."

Cute, throwing in the "Jeffersonian" thing.

From Wikipedia:

The third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, acquired and sold hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime. Jefferson first acquired slaves through his father's inheritance and by his marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton. According to one historian, Jefferson remained silent and did nothing to challenge slavery after the Revolutionary War era, America's most urgent and pressing social problem. Jefferson's lavish spending left him in debt, and all but one of Jefferson's slaves that remained were sold after his death to pay his debts. Jefferson today remains a complicated American icon and his writings and behavior on slavery are full of contradictions. Jefferson, master of Monticello, relied heavily on slavery to support himself and his family's luxurious lifestyle.

Slaves ... freelancers ... and, coming, "Citizen Journalism."

Brilliant!

It certainly is "Jeffersonian."

"It’s like Friendster buying Facebook."

Meanwhile, it appears a majority of Huffpo-ers are despondent, feeling like Arianna sold them out.

From Howie Kurtz:

From this large sample, a whopping 81 percent (405) opposed the acquisition in terms that ranged from confused to pessimistic to, most frequently, downright livid. Only 19 percent (95) were optimistic, though many of those were far closer to neutral.

"We made HuffPost and we are being abandoned," one aggrieved reader wrote. "They will aim for the center. That's where the big money is." Another added: "Corporate greed and intelligent analysis don't merge." Others couldn't even bear to read the news: "I have no interest reading about yet another monopoly creation and the slow erosion of diversity in terms of news sources."

Within hours after the merger was announced, Huffington Post readers had even made a game of one-upping each other with metaphors that conveyed the depth of their despair about the sale. "This feels like walking into my credit union only to find out it was bought by Bank of America," one said. "[It's] like Carol Channing taking over for Fergie in the Black Eyed Peas. Legendary, but past the expiration date by about 10 years," another lamented. A user with the tech analogy might have been the closest to the broader sentiment: "It's like Friendster buying Facebook." 

Dana Milbank pulls back the curtain on the revolving door of Ariana's ideology:

"It's time for all of us in journalism to move beyond left and right," Huffington said Monday on PBS's "NewsHour." "Truly, it is an obsolete way of looking at the problems America is facing."

That is almost exactly what Huffington said in 2000 when she was making her last ideological transformation, from a conservative Republican into a liberal icon. "The old distinctions of right and left, Democrat, Republican, are pretty obsolete," she told Fox News then.

It's a stock line for Huffington, but if she and Armstrong are taken at their word, they are planning a radical reshaping of what had become an important voice for liberalism and a gleeful participant in the left-right game. "It can no longer be denied: the right-wing lunatics are running the Republican asylum and have infected the entire country and poisoned the world beyond," Huffington wrote in her 2008 book, "Right is Wrong ."

[snip]

I say this with admiration. Huffington deserves every one of those millions she'll be paid by AOL for creating this online sensation. She was once derided as "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus" because of her many well-connected friends, but Huffington has earned her place as one of the extraordinary personalities of our time: an entrepreneur and writer who is always chasing the next big idea, wherever it is on the ideological spectrum.

Yet this is also why Huffington and her Web site are unlikely to remain as they were. Anybody who expects her to continue as a reliable voice of the left is a poor student of Huffington history.

[snip]

But in the late 1990s, Huffington began to reinvent herself. She covered the '96 political conventions for Comedy Central with Al Franken. She broke with Gingrich. She disparaged Bob Dole. She promoted Warren Beatty for president. She published a book favoring campaign finance reform. In 2000, she hosted a "shadow convention" protesting both parties.

She later explained the "transformation" of her political views by saying the right had "seduced, fooled, blinded, bamboozled" her.

That's crazy talk. Nobody bamboozles Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. If anybody was fooled, it was those who believed she would be a more enduring progressive than she was a conservative.

Phew!

That's a whirlwind of changes.

But, as has been noted before, and what we offered up above, one change that won't occur is Arianna paying her writers.

Can't wait for all those "Citizen Journalist" posts in 2012 about all the funny signs and costumes at the Conventions, and tweets about "Where's the best place to eat?" and "I missed the Press Bus, can anyone give me a ride?"

Help Me, Mr. Wizard!

Bonus Riffs

Steve Benen: WEST'S UNIQUE TAKE ON THE AOL-HUFFPOST MERGER

Matt Lewis: My Farewell* Post to Politics Daily Readers

Jonathan Chait: Arianna Huffington's Latest Self

Farhad Manjoo: HuffPo's Achilles' Heel - Search engine optimization won't work forever.

Retro Garlic: Someone Teach Arianna Huffington How To Use Google

Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

HuffPo-AOL dealbreaker averted: "No mushrooms."

By J. Thomas Duffy

Logging on today, I expected to be hit, like a tsunami, with Super Bowl news.

Instead, the conflagration was all about this:

AOL Buys Huffington Post for $315 Million.

WTF!

I have always thought of AOL as the horse-and-buggy of the World Wide Web.

I mean, the bulk of its revenue comes from people still using dial-up services.

High-tech companies, Internet companies, and such have been booming, falling from the sky, like, say Google and Facebook, and many others, out there doing big, fast things, and then there was AOL, looking out the garage door, polishing the reins, and longing to ditch the horse and get out there in the growing Web.

They've seemingly constantly been doing the "My Sister/My Daughter" thing, dealing with their troubles.

But the deal was done at the Super Bowl, and Arianna Huffington is now a media mogul.

Holy Cow!

Me thinks that, while Dallas is where the "I's" were dotted and the "T's" were crossed, she sealed the deal some months earlier:

Around the same time, I got an email from Tim Armstrong (AOL Chairman and CEO), saying he had something he wanted to discuss with me, and asking when we could meet. We arranged to have lunch at my home in LA later that week. The day before the lunch, Tim emailed and asked if it would be okay if he brought Artie Minson, AOL's CFO, with him. I told him of course and asked if there was anything they didn't eat. "I'll eat anything but mushrooms," he said.

For the saving grace of not serving mushrooms, Hufffington gets to do this millennium's first updated Charles Foster Kane thing, albiet not in print but on the Web, with her new Xanadu being good ol' AOL.

And there's plenty of good snark going on.

Max Read at Gawker:

Somewhere, right now, Tina Brown is trying to sell The Daily Beast to Compuserve.

[snip] 

Swisher writes that Huffington and Armstrong's "motto" is "One plus one equals 11." Which, ha, Huffington better hope that's true if her writers are going to make AOL's insane pageview targets. To that effect, AOL content will be "integrated deeply" into the HuffPo site—alongside terrific HuffPo content like "What Time Does the Superbowl Start?" and "How to Date an Indian (Advice for the Non-Indian)." The new media landscape is going to rule.

Felix Salmon:

Now, by contrast, the constraints on Huffington are much fewer. Lyons frets that "all those bright young things with the glamorous job of writing for the Huffington Post are being sent down into the belly of the AOL galleyship and assigned to an oar" — but the fact is that Armstrong bought HuffPo, and TechCrunch before it, precisely because his galleyship model of managing writers was a signal failure. Arianna gets much more bang for her buck — and has happier and more loyal employees.

[snip]

Best of all, from Arianna's point of view, is that all the extra investment she wants to make in editorial, starting with HuffPost Brazil, is going to be paid for not by rapacious venture capitalists looking for monster returns on their investment, but rather by befuddled and elderly AOL subscribers with broadband connections who don’t understand that they can cancel their $20-a-month subscriptions and still keep their AOL email address. That stream of cash won't last forever, but it's never going to interfere with Arianna's editorial decision-making.

Mistermix at Balloon Juice:

I wonder who will quit first: the unpaid Post writers who aren't making a dime from this deal, Arianna's Hollywood buddies, or Arianna herself.

 

All you writers over at Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and others, prepare to lose your checks, and practice genuflecting, maybe even having to kiss Arianna's ring, mumbling gratefulness and gratitude for being able to write for such a great icon for nothing.

1 + 1 = 11?

Sounds like some of Tom Lehrer's new math

Bonus Riffs

Erick Schonfeld: The Arianna And Tim Show: It’s About Women, Power, And Local

Jill: Mrs. Arianna Huffington, YOU'VE SOLD OUT!!

Kevin Drum: Arianna Huffington: The $315 Million Woman

Bonus Bonus Riffs

Barry Crimmins: Financial Modeling for Fun and Profiteers

Breaking News! GM Cancels UAW In Favor of Adopting Huffington Post Business Model ...Celebrities, Auto Enthusiasts and Bloggers To Build Cars For Free; Huge Spike In Profits Forecast

Retro Garlic: HuffPo Still Impacting Auto Industry

Retro Garlic: Someone Teach Arianna Huffington How To Use Google

(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

AOL buys HuffPost

By Michael J.W. Stickings

For a whopping $315 million.

As a (fairly frequent) HuffPost blogger, my cut will be... zero.

Good times.

**********

I really don't know whether this is a good thing or bad thing, but my inclination is to be optimistic.

Kevin Drum writes that it "sounds completely crazy" and that "[t]he odds of this being a good deal for AOL stockholders seem astronomical."

But, honestly, what is AOL these days? I can't remember the last time I visited an AOL website (except for MapQuest) and I can't remember the last time AOL mattered in any meaningful way as a major media outlet. To me, AOL is essentially the Internet for dummies, as unsophisticated as it is useless.

So AOL desperately needed to do something, anything to regain its lost significance. In particular, it needed content, which is what it gets a whole lot of in acquiring HuffPost.

Will the synergy work? Maybe, maybe not, but it's worth a shot, and certainly Arianna is positive about it.

And, what's more, Arianna will have editorial control over all AOL content as head of the new Huffington Post Media Group. Why is this a good thing? Well, because she's on the left, and because the content that appears on HuffPost -- including, of course, my posts -- are for the most part liberal/progressive.

In an age, then, of generally right-wing corporate control of the media, this AOL-HuffPost merger (which is what it is, even if the former is buying the latter) could create a huge liberal/progressive media outlet, much bigger than HuffPo is now. And that, if managed properly, is just the sort of thing we need.

As Steve Benen writes, "this seems like a pretty good deal. The Huffington Post gets an expanded reach, while AOL gets the eyeballs that follow one of the most powerful online news behemoths." And as Arianna herself explains:

By combining HuffPost with AOL's network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we'll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform.

Yes, let's hope so. In my own small way, I'm just happy to be a part of it. 

********** 

In related news, we're going to learn more about Keith Olbermann's future tomorrow.

The pattern takes hold

By Mustang Bobby

The pattern is sadly the same. A horrible incident occurs with people being killed by a single person. The media coverage saturates everything, spreading out like rising flood waters. In the initial minutes and hours no one really knows any answers so they grab the slightest bit of speculation and put it on the air to fill the space between the re-running of the initial reports and endless video loops of flashing lights at the scene to cautious -- and often wrong -- rumors, including false reports of deaths of the victims.

As the situation begins to solidify and the facts become known, the hastily-called press conferences begin with updates from the hospital and the police and new names are added to the American lexicon. The cable news networks have come up with a concise title for the incident and even put up somber music and graphics to go with it. Special broadcasts are scheduled for later that evening, giving the producers time to call in their analysts so the first round of speculation, navel-gazing, and finger-pointing can begin.

Meanwhile, the news media is trying hard to fill the time, so they are interviewing everybody, even themselves. If the suspect has been caught, the police are leaking information about the person, apparently in the hopes of shaking something loose, such as background or motive; the public can always be counted on to come forward and tell what they know if it gets them on TV. The friends and neighbors invariably report that the suspect was a kind of quiet person, always kept to themselves, never gave much of a hint of trouble, but they always knew there was something a little "off" about him. Thanks to the social networks, the suspect will have posted subtle warning signs about his plans; it is hard to resist the need to let the world know, however cryptically, that they were planning this for some time. And the sketchy and incoherent image of a tortured soul comes forward. But for now, he is as quiet as the dead; it won't be until a trial that we hear anything from him again... assuming he did not turn the gun on himself.

The political framing is already taking shape. Each side has pronounced their horror and outrage -- on that they are equally firm -- but already the posturing is being framed for the inevitable contest of soundbites that blame one side or the other, or, most maddeningly of all, both sides equally. The political parties will instantly search their databases to determine if there was any connection between themselves and the suspect, and the one that comes closest will immediately gulp and then issue a defiant statement condemning the action and, at the same time, disavow any connection, knowing full well their opponents are focusing on them. (Meanwhile the conspiracy theorists are seeing a vast connection between both sides and the CIA.) Within 24 hours all the resources have been mustered to air a special round-table broadcast of all the best pundits, including the fringe types just to keep in interesting, and the inevitable spokesperson for the gun lobby will confidently report that guns don't kill people; people kill people. With guns.

Everyone will scratch their chins, shake their jowls, nod their heads at the profound prepared off-the-cuff remarks, and then, after they have all decided what the incident portends for everyone involved -- the president, the political parties, and anyone that happens to be there, including the heroic people who got their moments in the spotlight -- the networks and the blogs, including this one, will return to the status quo, and the regularly scheduled programming already in progress will be rejoined.

Within a surprisingly short time, most of the details of the incident will be forgotten. By the time the seasons change, the names of the dead will have faded from our short-term memory; the only reminders will be the trial of the suspect, but that will be the fourth or fifth story on the news, just ahead of the update on a celebrity in rehab. And the only people who will remember this with the clarity and pain are the victims; the families of the dead and the survivors who, even if they recover from the physical trauma, will never be truly healed.

Worst of all, we will immediately seek to absolve ourselves of any culpability. One person did this; one "lone wolf," with serious mental problems, we're told, as if that is a way of comforting ourselves that we are not to blame. It wasn't anything we did; maybe it was the other guys, and when the other guys are confronted, they turn back and say, well, you had something to do with it. And then everyone agrees that if we all had something to do with it, then nothing can be done about it.

As I said, the pattern is always the same; Dallas 1963, Memphis and Los Angeles 1968, and, more recently, Oklahoma City, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and on and on. It devolves to a single name to cue the recollection; this past weekend will be known as "Tucson." We follow the script because that's the way we process the information, and we try to put it behind us and move on because to dwell on it would not make it any better; the healing -- such as it is -- could not happen. But it rarely changes us. No profound shift will come to our national psyche; no deep assessment and re-evaluation of our social make-up will occur; it didn't after the murder of a president or the countless number of other rampages since then. It is both the blessing and the curse of our collective mind that we have the ability to move on; it is a sign of optimism, but it also means we give up much of a chance of learning anything. The pattern takes hold.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)