Via America’s Lawyer: It’s a buyer’s market for the HuffPost publication, which Verizon owns and has dubbed a money pit for the telecommunications giant. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Verizon is looking to dump their ownership of the Huffington Post as readers abandon that liberal outlet. We’ve been talking about this so long haven’t we? Okay. Verizon is forced, they literally are forced to buy this thing called HuffPost that never made any money. It had such a narrow niche that it never will make any money. And they, they, they were forced to buy it in that $4 billion acquisition. But now they’re trying to get rid of it and they can’t even get rid of it. I mean, it sounds like a fire sale.
Farron Cousins: It really does. And it’s, it is sad almost to a degree. You know, a lot of us Huffington Post has been around and they’ve been doing this just as long as you and I have, but Huffington Post evolved in the wrong way. In the early days, Huffington Post was where you went. It’s where the intellectuals would post their articles. You didn’t have to wait for it to come out in a major newspaper. They could just do it whenever they had these thoughts and ideas. And that’s what it was. It was instantaneous. And then after it got sold to AOL, they got rid of the good named writers. They got rid of the investigative journalists from Huffington Post and instead they moved it into more of the infotainment, you know, 20 top pieces of clothing that you need to wear this summer. Things like that instead of saying, here’s where the opioid crisis is hitting the hardest, we were on the ground.
Mike Papantonio: That’s what they used to do.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. So now you have this, you have this organization, it is going to be a fire sale. I mean, if you’re working for, if you’re working for HuffPost right now, get out, because Verizon’s going to do whatever they can to get rid of it. The first thing they’re going to do is they’re going to start cutting so dramatically. So A, there used to be a couple of investigative writers, they’re gone. They’ve moved on to a really good organizations.
Farron Cousins: Right, they have.
Mike Papantonio: They’ve moved on to the intercept, right? Buzzfeed, some of those places.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So, so what ends up happening is they have this shell that they used to have these kids coming out of college and they would get paid $30,000 a year, $40,000 a year to almost slave, slave labor wages to keep things turning up. They used to have celebrities that would write stories, for free. You know, me and my vacation in Pango Pango. They used to have these things that you said, oh, well, you know, it sounds like fluff. I’ll read it anyway. Just to see what, what, see, see how bad this, this organization has fallen. But now it’s even worse. I mean, have you seen the pub, the public where you, you write your own story and they print it for you?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. That is absolutely a joke. And then on their political side, which again, they used to have really good, hard hitting political information. And that’s the difference. There’s no more information. They’ll, they’ll take a bunch of tweets that they found, oh, Trump tweeted something stupid. Here’s all the crazy responses to it. Look at these people. They’re really going after him. That’s not journalism, that’s filler.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And anybody can dunk on Trump or dunk on Biden all day, but they don’t have any substance behind it.
Mike Papantonio: Right. We won’t be making any offers to HuffPost or their writers.
Farron Cousins: Definitely not.
Mike Papantonio: Thank you for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
