Huffington in Time’s 100 most influential

The
top blogger in the US?
Depends who you ask. According to Time magazine it could be Arianna Huffington.
The Greek-born, former British journalist was included last week among the news
magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. Does that make her the No 1 American
blogger?

Certainly
her website – huffingtonpost.com – which just celebrated its first anniversary,
is one of the most quoted. An example: her criticism of the recent White House
Correspondents’ Dinner at which George Bush look-alike, comedian Stephen
Colbert, provided the entertainment. She was very critical. Her website claims more
than two million visitors a month.

Since
she arrived in America25 years ago, Arianna , who was for a time married to a Texas politician (they
were divorced after it was revealed he was gay) has made the switch from
conservative to liberal. Back in Britain,
when she started out in journalism after graduating from Cambridge, her journalistic mentor was
Bernard Levin. Her philosophy as a blogger: “We are living in a 500 channel
universe” she told USA Today. “There is so much happening and it’s so easy for
even front page stories to die. What we provide is staying on a story,
developing it until its does break through the static”

She
gives as an example her coverage of Judith Miller, the NY Times reporter who
went to jail rather than disclose her source in last year's CIA leak scandal. At
the start Miller was regarded as a Joan of Arc, a journalistic heroine. But
after Arianna and other bloggers questioned Miller’s motives, by the time the
Miller was released from jail she was a.discredited figure. A plus mark for the
blogging community? Perhaps, suggests Arianna.