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From its founding in May 2005, Arianna Huffington, HuffPost’s editor, has consistently maintained that the website that bears her name is not partisan in any way:
“[T]he news is not right-wing news orleft-wing news, it’s the news. And that will be the sensibility, that will basically permeate our news coverage.”
Arianna Huffington, May 3, 2005
“What we’re doing is two things. We do news. I don’t believe news is left wing or right wing. And then we do the group blog, which is going to be a dialogue from all viewpoints.”
Arianna Huffington, May 6, 2005
“The editorial stance of the Huffington Post is to debunk the right-left way of thinking, which has become completely obsolete.”
Arianna Huffington, Conde Naste Portfolio, November 14, 2007
“[T]oo many reporters have forgotten that the highest calling of journalists is to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned.”
Arianna Huffington, July 29, 2008
“[Arianna Huffington] is offended and bewildered by the suggestion that other news outlets think she’s getting a free ride. She sees herself as the future of journalism, not the end of it.”
Time magazine, March 19, 2009
“[W]e are increasingly seen … as an Internet newspaper, not positioned ideologically in terms of how we cover the news.”
Arianna Huffington, May 22, 2009
On Feb. 6, 2010 AOL purchased HuffPost, and hired Huffington to act as President and Editor In Chief of all its content. She denied all insinuations that HuffPost is partisan in any way:
“We don’t see ourselves as left.”
Arianna Huffington, to Politico, Feb. 8, 2010
“It’s time for all of us in journalism to move beyond left and right… [A]ll voices have been welcome at the Huffington Post”
Arianna Huffington, to Hollywood Reporter, Feb. 7, 2010
“It’s time for all of us in journalism to move beyond left and right.”
Arianna Huffington, to The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Feb. 7, 2010
Huffington even admonished Fox News’s CEO Roger Ailes should adopt HuffPost’s nonpartisan, professional editorial policy:
“[At HuffPost] there are guidelines that have to be followed — and they include a prohibition on conspiracy theories or inflammatory claims. These are actually very good ground rules for Fox News to adopt. I’ll send you a copy and cc Roger. For context, it’s good to remember that Glenn Beck didn’t come out of nowhere. He’s the latest example of what the great historian Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ which he defined as angry minds that traffic in ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,’ and that see ‘the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms… always manning the barricades of civilization’.”
– Arianna Huffington, April 3, 2010
However, a 2011 lawsuit filed by against Huffington by two of her former associates, who asserted that they conceived of what would become HuffPost, but received neither credit nor a share of its profits, revealed in part the apparent partisan deception that was built into the concept they pitched to her:
The site would be, they say: “[A] Democratic-leaning site with enough non-partisan news as to appear more mainstream than it truly is; this is critical for credibility and advertising revenue.”
Daou’s alleged ‘Huffpo’ proposal: ‘Appear more mainstream’, by Ben Smith, January 5, 2011, Politico.com.
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