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Opinion: Feb. 9, 2011 buzz: Killing journalism, killing foreign languages

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The buzz for Feb. 9, 2011:

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In Wednesday’s Opinion pages, Op-Ed columnist Tim Rutten skewers today’s media-saturated environment. In ‘AOL ♥ HuffPo. The loser? Journalism,’ which is most viewed, most Tweeted and most shared on Facebook, he writes, ‘To grasp [the Huffington Post’s] business model , you need to picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates. Given the fact that its founder, [Arianna] Huffington, reportedly will walk away from this acquisition with a personal profit of as much as $100 million, it makes all the Post’s raging against Wall Street plutocrats, crony capitalism and the Bush and Obama administrations’ insensitivities to the middle class and the unemployed a bit much.”

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He continues: “The fact is that AOL and the Huffington Post simply recapitulate in the new media many of the worst abuses of the old economy’s industrial capitalism — the sweatshop, the speedup and piecework; huge profits for the owners; desperation, drudgery and exploitation for the workers. No child labor, yet, but if there were more page views in it…’

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Elsewhere in our pages, the editorial board writes that ‘there’s simply no need for a bill that would make English the official language of the U.S.’ in ‘English-only? Press ‘no’.’ Just as any topic that hovers around the topic of immigration, this editorial has brought readers to our comments board like bees to a hive. We love it when they call us ‘La Raza Times.’

-- Alexandra Le Tellier

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