Beyond left and right? The Huffington Post’s delicate balancing act

Arianna Huffington has a knack for navigating competing social worlds, deftly handling decision-makers and activists with divergent views on politics and business. She's done so in public for decades.

But with AOL acquiring her eponymous news and commentary site, Huffington may have to do her most difficult balancing act yet. In taking control of AOL's content strategy, several constituencies, in pursuit of varying agendas, are watching her every move. Huffington has to convince long-time bloggers and readers—especially progressives who flocked to the site when it launched in May 2005 as a liberal antidote to The Drudge Report—that The Huffington Post remains passionate about the issues that galvanize the online progressive community. At the same time, however, she'll have to take care to maintain AOL's mass readership—which is likely to be turned off if any of the properties she manages lurch too far in one ideological direction or another. (To state the obvious, Yahoo! is a competitor of AOL's.) Meanwhile as she does all this ideological balancing, Huffington must also soothe some on Wall Street and Madison Avenue who are anxious she'll pull the Internet giant to the left.

Huffington has spoken many times in recent years about approaching issues outside of the standard left-and-right prism. Since news of the AOL deal broke, she's repeated that argument like mantra in the face of constant questions about her site's politics.

On Monday, Huffington told Politico that she doesn't view her site as being on the left, while getting into the "beyond left and right" discussion with Kathleen Parker that night on CNN. She made similar comments to The Wrap on Tuesday, which summed things up with the juicy headline: "Exclusive: Arianna Huffington will not make AOL a leftie blog." Huffington has also downplayed politics on the site by telling reporters that political content accounts for just 15 percent of the site's traffic, now more than 25 million unique visitors a month.

That may be true, but it doesn't mean that several of The Huffington Post's 26 verticals—such as "College" or "Green"—don't include political elements simply because the coverage might not come from Washington D.C. That's the argument executive editor Nico Pitney made this week on Townhouse, an influential private email listserv for liberal writers and activists.

Pitney is well known in progressive circles. Before joining The Huffington Post, he worked on Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign and for the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund, which includes the site ThinkProgress. So Pitney's words should carry some weight among liberals concerned that The Huffington Post will become watered down under its new corporate parent.

Pitney, in one exchange obtained by The Cutline, took issue with Politico summing up Huffington's remarks by suggesting that "the transition away from progressive politics has been underway for some time." Pitney said that's "not correct."

"What is correct is that the site has expanded to include a variety of other sections like Green, Health, Tech, Impact, College, Arts, etc. Of course, virtually all of these sections have political elements," Pitney wrote. "College launched with a big project on student debt, and the lede story this morning is 'States Facing The Biggest Higher Ed Cutbacks in 2011.' Green obviously focuses on the politics around energy and the environment. And so on and so on. At this point, 15% of the traffic goes to pages that are specifically marked, 'Politics,' but that doesn't mean just 15% of the traffic is to political content."

Pitney did not respond to emails from The Cutline seeking comment on his observations, but an official referred us to Huffington herself. In an interview with The Cutline on Thursday, she explained that she's in agreement with her executive editor. She also asked whether a specific Huffington Post project—such as the one on the crisis of college debt—is necessarily partisan simply because it has political elements. "It's a story that has huge political implications," Huffington said. "It's not a story that can be described as a left versus right story."

She also said that The Huffington Post won't stop focusing on issues she considers also "beyond left and right," such as "the decline of the middle class" once the new AOL ownership is in place. "Is anybody suggesting that The Huffington Post will be any less passionate about the downward mobility that we are facing or the corruption or hypocrisy wherever we find it?" Huffington asked.

Huffington talks a lot about passion, which for some conditioned to journalists keeping politics at arms length, might come across as advocacy. The Huffington Post's editorial strategy however could also be compared to old-fashioned muckraking of the early 20th century in an early 21st century format. Either way, Huffington is bringing point-of-view journalism, and a commitment to some political issues, to a relatively apolitical corporation. It makes investors and advertising executives nervous.

Still, some progressives have doubts about what The Huffington Post's priorities will be under the AOL umbrella.

Pitney, in one exchange, told Townhouse members "the best evidence of the site's priorities is in where we're devoting our editorial resources," which he noted was "overwhelmingly" in reporting on politics and business. Indeed, The Huffington Post hasn't been hiring top entertainment writers in recent months, but rather big names in business (Peter Goodman) and political journalism (Howard Fineman).

In another email, Pitney pointed out that The Huffington Post now has full-time staffers covering beats focused on "average middle class/working class people suffering from the economic crisis—exposing industries that, post-crisis, thrive off of screwing over desperate people" along with "black unemployment in America—the injustices of our immigration system and, more generally, socioeconomics in the Latino community—the war in Afghanistan from the perspective that it is a huge national security liability for the United States."

Pitney doesn't argue that The Huffington Post covers these issues from any doctrinaire, left-wing position or from the perspective of Obama administration officials. But by calling attention to such priorities, Pitney implicitly makes the argument that The Huffington Post remains committed to and is passionate about some progressive concerns. Like his boss, Pitney stresses that Huffington Post coverage doesn't proceed from an avowedly political—namely, Democratic—point of view.

NYU professor Jay Rosen, looking at recent coverage of The Huffington Post's politics, asked Wednesday night if "ideological innovation" is "possible in online journalism." He suggested that Huffington shouldn't bind editors to an "artificial neutrality" while also not enforcing a strict "party line."

Huffington would likely agree with Rosen's views on avoiding "artificial neutrality," while balking at any suggestion that The Huffington Post has an ideological point of view.

Huffington is certain to continue fielding questions about how her liberal site will change AOL--or else be changed by AOL. And she'll just as clearly continue to bat down suggestions that her site has moved beyond left and right.

Huffington doesn't have much tolerance for journalists trying to pigeonhole the site politically, noting that journalists only looking left and right are bound "to think that they have painted all reality with two phone calls."

"You can sit at your desk and dial a D and dial an R and get a couple of quotes and think you've covered the whole spectrum of the American experience," she continued.

Huffington seems convinced that her own online news juggernaut is the best at covering the full spectrum of the American experience. So perhaps there's no better place for Huffington to prove it than by shaping the editorial future of America Online.