Who's Afraid of Arianna Huffington?

The New York Times has been gunning for The Huffington Post* lately, which makes me wonder what exactly Arianna Huffington has done to scare or anger them so. Or perhaps that's the wrong question. Given that our enemies are often those we don't understand, I wonder what The Times fails to grasp about HuffPo. That then leads to the question of what The Times can learn from this Post.

Felix Salmon has done a skillful job covering this one-way war, this schoolyard taunting in two posts. Times Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote two columns and a blog post going after Huffington -- once directly; once without (as Salmon puts it) the intellectual honesty to link to and allow his readers to judge those he criticizes; and once defensively, after Huffington called his bluff. Times staff loyally picked up Keller's spitballs to lob their own. Media critic David Carr wrote and then killed a tweet sniping about Arianna that he later conceded was "tasteless." Andrew Goldman didn't so much interview Huffington for The Times Magazine as he acted like a parody of a TV prosecutor trying to bait a cagey witness--or perhaps it is better described as a comic homage to Joe McCarthy trying to elicit confessions of leftness. Then Salmon points out that The Times snagged a HuffPo scoop without credit. Just now Carr delivers a glancing blow to Aol/HuffPo, reading into a defection a defeat.

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