The co-founder of one of America’s most liberal news sites just took a position on Uber’s board of directors.
In an April 27, 2016, article, co-founder of the Huffington Post Arianna Huffington explained her decision to join close friend and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on the company’s board of directors.
Huffington explained the decision just after Kalanick announced her membership and touted her success. Some, however, greeted the new partnership with skepticism, and pointed out that Huffington joining the board might create conflicts of interest for the HuffPost head.
Huffington and Kalanick appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box the same day as their announcements, and complimented each other’s abilities. “We have a simpatico thing on building companies,” Kalanick remarked of his and Huffington’s relationship.
In a statement released on Uber’s website, Kalanick said Huffington’s “ability to tell stories is invaluable for an engineer like me, whose natural tendency is to rely on data.”
The two entrepreneurs partnered with Toyota to raise awareness about drowsy driving, and wrote a joint article about the issue on Huffington’s site on April 5, 2016. Washington Post writer Erik Wemple brought this up in a critical article he wrote about Huffington’s decision to join the company.
Wemple suggested that Huffington, who is also the Editor-in-Chief of HuffPost, put her journalists in an awkward situation and compromised the integrity of her site’s reporting. As reported by Wemple, Huffington even used Uber to promote her book “Sleep Revolution.”
Another point raised by Wemple was the fact that Huffington Post may have unjustifiably promoted an article about Kalanick on the site’s front page. Gawker made a similar complaint on April 3, 2014, when it reported that Huffington removed a portion of an article that was critical of her friend Seth Godin’s organization.
Dustin Jones, founder of United for Equal Access New York, also suggested Huffington’s new position might interfere with Huffington Post’s reporting.
“Arianna Huffington’s appointment to Uber’s board raises questions about whether the Huffington Post will provide objective coverage of Uber’s discrimination against wheelchair users in New York,” Jones said.
In addition to Uber, Huffington sits on the board of directors for The Center for Public Integrity, a George Soros-backed journalism site. Once a prominent conservative in the 1990s, Huffington later became a liberal. Her website has regularly featured far-left viewpoints, and on March 8, 2016, the site’s executive business editor claimed, “Free tampons should be a human right.”
