Arianna

As the sidebar indicates, I'm a daily reader of the Huffington Post. I would say it's a guilty pleasure, but it's not really a pleasure. I find myself wincing repeatedly at all the celebrity worship that goes on there. I understand that Arianna Huffington is above all else a celebrity, and this is a world she thinks is important, but it makes it harder to find things worth reading there (and there often are).


Arianna is an intelligent woman, but I wonder if she doesn't value her celebrity more than her intelligence. Case in point is this interview with John Stossel on ABC's 20/20.

Stossel is a well-established jerk who has been a libertarian water boy for years. She should have known she could not go on his show as a "celebrity" and come off looking intelligent. True to form, Stossel pulls out two charts -- one on the earnings of "poor people" and one on employee accidents before and after OSHA, which are supposed to prove that "ending welfare as we know it" was good and OSHA is bad, and Arianna is supposed to respond to them. This is tailor-made for television, because there's no chance to actually study the charts and see what the definitions and assumptions are. Stossel has a chart, so it must be true. And Arianna responds to them as though she accepts the definitions and assumptions, even though she doesn't know what they are.

So, of course, Arianna comes off looking bad.

Now, this was predictable. This is Stossel's mode of operation.

Which leads me to wonder what she was thinking when she agreed to go on that show. And what means more to her: intelligence or celebrity?

Update: The fact that the Huffington Post is pumping the video of the appearance so heavily suggests there's nobody there with the courage to tell her how bad she looks.