Judging from today's horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington's bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn't accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it's the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it's the disastrous clone of Tina Brown's Talk, JFK Jr.'s George or Maer Roshan's Radar. No matter what happens to Huffington, it's clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences.Finke goes on to document (at length) Arianna's allegedly dodgy practices while raising funds for her new blogging venture. Read the whole thing.
It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out.
While my own assessment isn't quite so harsh, my impression, on taking a quick scan of Arianna's new blog, was that most of the Hollywood types who currently blog there simply aren't very interesting without a script (or a script doctor.)
I was particularly disappointed in John Cusack's entry about Hunter Thompson. Cusack is a smart, funny man whose writing credits include the wonderful High Fidelity and Grosse Point Blank; nonetheless, his piece was listless and boring (and how one can be listless and boring when writing about HST, I'll never know.)
(Related: The Huffington Post.)
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