Arianna Huffington’s AOL deal sparks accusations of a political sell-out

Arianna Huffington has long reigned as the queen of America’s chattering classes, using her Huffington Post website as a platform to transform herself into a darling of the United States’ left-leaning media elite.

But no longer. Since she announced that the HuffPo was being sold to web giant AOL for $315m, Huffington has been accused of being a political sellout and someone who made a personal fortune from the labour of thousands of bloggers who write for no pay.

America’s Newspaper Guild, the journalists’ union, has started a campaign to target the Huffington Post as having a business model that has done great damage by not paying contributors. It has demanded that Huffington donate some of her AOL deal profits to investing in paid journalism. “After building a media empire based on unpaid writers and republishing the works of others… we are calling on Arianna Huffington to invest in quality journalism by sharing a portion of this fortune,” said the guild’s president, Bernie Lunzer.