The announcement Sunday that the company calling itself AT&T has reached a deal to buy T-Mobile’s US arm was a no-brainer. Rather than building out its own network, it covets the network — and more — of a competitor that offers lower prices and better customer service. It’s a great deal for AT&T, and barring a sudden awakening of the Obama administration to the benefits of competition in telecommunications, this buyout will go forward — to the huge benefit of two telecom giants and the detriment of everyone else.

Let’s be clear. If the Obama administration fails to block this deal, it will be setting the lowest possible bar in approving mergers and buyouts. This buyout could not be more obviously bad for competition — and therefore bad for customers — and antitrust enforcement is designed precisely for protecting competition.

When I said there would be two major winners in this deal, I was referring to Verizon, the largest mobile carrier in the nation, as the other one. AT&T is currently second largest, with Sprint and T-Mobile trailing among what we might call the Big 4 carriers. A combined AT&T and T-Mobile would be a bit larger than Verizon, with Sprint in a very distant third place.

We’re talking about creating an effective duopoly, or something not too short of that. Business history shows no case in which a duopoly proved beneficial to competition, or to customers.

AT&T wants us to believe there’s plenty of competition. This is sophistry. A few regional and tertiary players do exist, but they have none of the reach, and not nearly the same level of capabilities and service, that you can get from today’s Big 4. They would be utterly dwarfed by the Big 2 plus Sprint in the new world.

Consider the airline business. Today, we have three major carriers left: Delta, American and United-plus-Continental (the latter two are in a merger). A host of smaller carriers, including the increasingly beefy Southwest, keep the big ones mostly in line on price on most routes. But does anyone believe we’d be better off with just two mega-airlines, other than some industry executives and shareholders? This is plainly not a perfect analogy, but it gives you a sense of what’s at stake.

More important, T-Mobile has offered competitive service plans including my ability to bring my own phone and get a discounted monthly rate. All of the other carriers force customers to pay the same rate whether they buy a supposedly subsidized phone or bring their own — an outrageous policy that, if we had actual regulation to ensure consumer fairness, would not be permitted. (We have no serious regulation in America, of course.)

T-Mobile’s customer service people are unfailingly polite and knowledgable. That’s unique among US carriers. It has by far the best privacy protection of any mobile data provider.

T-Mobile puts as much crapware — unwanted applications that are difficult to remove — on the phones it subsidizes as anyone else. But unlike AT&T (and the rest), it cheerfully unlocks its phones after a reasonable period. This is important mainly for people who travel abroad; we can buy local SIM cards (only works for GSM phones, and AT&T blocks this anyway by refusing to unlock the phones its customers have paid for) for lower-cost service in other countries.

AT&T is widely loathed by its customers. It’s lagged in deploying 3G bandwidth on its wireless network and has a history of collaborating with illegal government spying on its customers.

Om Malik makes a persuasive case that Google is a major loser in this deal. He writes:

In T-Mobile, it has a great partner for its Android OS-based devices. Now the company will be beholden to two massive phone companies — Verizon and AT&T — who are going to try to hijack Android to serve their own ends.

Don’t be surprised if you see AT&T impose its own will on what apps and service are put on its Android smartphones. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the worst phone company in the U.S. (according to Consumer Reports) tries to create its own app store and force everyone to buy apps through it.

The biggest losers, of course, are all of us who want to see actual competition in an increasingly restrictive marketplace. This is not a good deal for anyone but AT&T and its shareholders, and it should be stopped in its tracks.

Give the Washington Post editorial page some credit for labeling its columnists as “left-leaning” and “right-leaning” — it’s an attempt to offer a little truth in labeling. The exercise makes the paper look more silly than transparent, though it nicely illuminates the way Washington insiders work and think.

Let’s start with the idea that Richard Cohen — a reliable supporter of torture, among other non-liberal stances — can be remotely considered left of anything but the far right. He’s a statist, a militarist and a member in good standing of the inside-the-Beltway crowd that insists rules and laws are for little people, not the ones in power.

The larger issue, of course, is the assumption that these labels hold any meaning whatever at this point. They certainly don’t in Washington policy circles, where what once was called the near-radical right controls the Supreme Court and one legislative chamber; where the Democratic president has embraced and extended the civil liberties abuses of his predecessor and refused to serious investigate, much less prosecute, not just torturers but also the Wall Street barons who looted the nation and nearly wrecked the economy. Washington’s main fealty today is to the corporate interests that have bought the government.

As Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan points out today, the Post’s new policy, which extends even to Twitter feeds, pushes further the an anachronistic notion about journalism:

This, at last, is the full realization of the simplistic and rotten Washington journalistic ethos: as long as we have an equal amount of “left” and “right,” we are completely and totally balanced, and insulated from any legitimate criticism. True journalistic perfection. Anyone whose beliefs fall anywhere outside of these boxes is simply not to be taken seriously.

The most unfortunate element of the Post’s policy, however, is that it ignores the real elephant in the newsroom: the human biases and world views that are never acknowledged. The Post’s news pages, during the run-up to the Iraq war, pounded the war drums more loudly than almost any other major newspaper, pushing the Bush administration’s fear-mongering on page one while relegating serious questions to deep inside the paper. The paper’s world view was obvious, yet it was never stated.

Tell us the world views of the top news section editors — which are reflected in the journalism at every major news organization — and then the Post will be doing something novel, at least in America.

If the Post editorial page pursued real transparency, meanwhile, it would consider being a little more forthcoming about the editorials it writes, not just what the op-ed writers say. For example, the Post might consider correcting its mistakes, such as the embarrassment of October 2009, when it published an editorial based on an entirely false premise — a flagrant error it has never even acknowledged, much less corrected. Transparency? When?

My friend and occasional colleague Scott Rosenberg warns in a CNN column that we all need to be careful of the “gotcha” stunts of people like James O’Keefe, a protege of the infamous Andrew Breitbart. In this case Scott is discussing O’Keefe’s successful efforts to get NPR to panic in the face of some off-putting remarks a fundraising executive (who has resigned) made about Tea Party supporters. (Scott also makes kind mention of Mediactive in the column.)

Meanwhile, the best analysis so far of the O’Keefe stunt comes not from NPR supporters or traditional media. Rather, it’s in this detailed examination of the video on Glenn Beck’s site, The Blaze — and the bottom line is that the NPR exec’s statements look much more benign and O’Keefe’s tactics look (if this is possible) even worse. Who’d have thought this might happen? Not me, I confess — and I’m going to start paying more attention to the site as a result.

UPDATED

Twenty years ago, on March 3 1991, a media shock wave hit Los Angeles and the nation: the Rodney King video. As a bystander captured the incident with his home video camera, several LA police officers beat King repeatedly while other officers stood by and watched.

The video, or more accurately its broadcast across America, set in motion consequences that have reverberated through the years since the beating. Among them: the Los Angeles riots, after the acquittal of police charged with assault, and the poisonous relations between LA police and many of the city’s citizens.

Another impact, of course, was the recognition — which grows more and more prevalent — that anyone with a video camera could become more than a witness to the events of our times. The camera-bearing citizen, in this case a man named George Holliday, was becoming an integral part of how we remember these events.

Holliday’s act was one of citizen journalism. It wasn’t the first, however, even though it was a milestone.

Indeed, people have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. Consider the picture at the right. It shows a man being rescued from a truck that dangled over the side of a bridge. It was taken by Virginia Schau, an amateur photographer who happened on the scene after the accident. She won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography.

Less than a decade later, an old-fashioned movie camera captured the most famous pictures in the citizen-media genre: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Abraham Zapruder, the man pointing the camera that day in Dealey Plaza, sold the film to Life Magazine for $150,000— over a million dollars in today’s currency.

In Dealey Plaza that day, one man happened to capture a motion picture—somewhat blurred but utterly gruesome nonetheless—of those terrible events. Zapruder’s work, by any standard we can imagine, was an act of citizen journalism.

But the Rodney King video was a turning point. By 1991, home video gear was becoming common, heading toward today’s near-ubiquity. When people saw that video, they realized a number of things, not least of which was the possibility that average citizens could hold powerful people — the police in this instance — somewhat more accountable for wrongdoing they committed in public places. Witnessing was being transformed into action, we all understood.

Today, many of us carry around still and video cameras that are part of our phones. In the U.S. and around the world, people are capturing events, routine and horrific, that mark our times. The mobile-phone video of Neda Soltani’s death by gunshot in the aftermath of Iran’s rigged 2009 election became a rallying point for opposition to the regime.

In recent days, the grim videos and photos coming out of Libya have been testament to people’s desire to bear witness to cruelty and oppression. Around the world, dictators have learned that even if they kill their people they can’t ultimately stop the world from seeing what crimes they commit. Yes, they can use technology to stifle freedom, and they do. But media from average people can make a real difference, too, and it does again and again.

Imagine where we will be a decade from now in a technological sense, and then let’s return briefly to November 22, 1963. Dozens or hundreds of people in Dealey Plaza would have been capturing high-definition videos of the Kennedy assassination, most likely via their camera-equipped mobile phones as well as single-purpose digital cameras and video recorders. They’d have been capturing those images from multiple perspectives. And—this is key—all of those devices would have been attached to digital networks.

If the soon-to-be-ubiquitous technology had been in use back in 1963, several things are clear. One is that videos of this event would have been posted online almost instantly. Professional news organizations, which would also have had their own videos, would have been competing with a blizzard of other material almost from the start—and given traditional media’s usually appropriate reluctance to broadcast the most gruesome images (e.g., the beheading of the American businessman Nick Berg in Iraq), the online accounts might well have been a primary source.

And think about this: We’d also soon have a three-dimensional hologram of the event, given the number of cameras capturing it from various angles. Which means we’d probably know for sure whether someone was shooting at the president from that famous grassy knoll. In the future, government commissions will still issue official reports, but the documents will be created with much more input from citizens, who, because of digital media tools, are playing increasingly direct roles in governance as well as elections. The prospect of actually making policy, or at least having an impact on it, can offer a serious incentive to be a citizen journalist.

Another famous picture of our times is the single image that we will most remember from the July 2005 bombings in London. It was taken by Adam Stacey inside the Underground (London’s subway), as he and others escaped from a smoky train immediately after one of the bombs exploded. The production values of the image were hardly professional, but that didn’t matter. What did matter was the utter authenticity of the image, made so by the fact that the man was there at the right time with the right media-creation gear.

Stacey’s picture, like the other material I’ve highlighted here, made its way to wide viewership largely because traditional media organizations gave it a push. That will be less and less necessary as social media become the news-access tools of choice for a new generation that consumes, produces and shares news in varying ways. Big media will always have a role, an important one for some time to come, but it’s no longer clear that they’ll be as overwhelmingly essential even in the “distribution” arena.

The era of ubiquitous media creation tools has been dawning for some time. It is almost here now. It will bring some alarming consequences, notably a further erosion of personal privacy; for example, even if you don’t want the world to know that you were falling-down drunk at that party, there’s a growing chance that someone else who was there will post a picture of you in that condition on Facebook.

We will be better off, in the end, as more and more journalistic media creation of this sort becomes part of the mainstream. This isn’t good news for professional spot news photo and video journalists, who are much less likely to be at the scenes of newsworthy events than their “amateur” fellow citizens. But we will have more genuine media than before, as in the authenticity of the London image, and that is a good thing for us all.

UPDATE: In conversations with the Poynter Institute’s Steve Myers, who’s working on written a terrific piece of his own about the King video and its long-range impact, the subject of speed of publication/broadcast and compensation came up. I’ll point to his piece as soon as I see it, but meanwhile hHere are two Mediactive excerpts I sent him relating to these issues.

I also question the ethics of news organizations that assume, as many do, that the work of the citizen journalist is something the company should get for free. I’m highly skeptical of business models, typically conceived by Big Media companies, that tell the rest of us: “You do all the work, and we’ll take all the money we make by exploiting it.” This is not just unethical, it’s also unsustainable in the long run, because the people who give freely of their time won’t be satisfied to see mega-corporations rake in the financial value of what others have created.

Not every person who captures a newsworthy image or video necessarily wants to be paid. But many do, and right now, for the most part, their compensation is a pat on the back. Eventually, someone will come up with a robust business model that puts a welcome dent into this modern version of sharecropping.

Stacey’s picture in the London Underground was widely distributed—it was published on the front pages of many newspapers—in part because he put it out under a Creative Commons license allowing anyone the right to use it in any way provided that they attributed the picture to its creator. There were misunderstandings (including at least one use by a photo agency that apparently claimed at least partial credit for itself), but the copyright terms—I’ll explain Creative Commons more fully in the Epilogue—almost certainly helped spread it far and wide in a very short time.

Beyond licensing, we need new market systems to reward citizen photographers. Some startups are positioning themselves as brokers, including a service calledDemotix. As I’ll also discuss later, we need to take the next step to a real-time auction system.

A few news organizations have adapted, and are finding ways to reward citizen creators in tangible ways. Bild, the German tabloid, asks people to send in their own pictures, and pays for the ones it publishes. This is an important part of our future.

…

Just as some people gladly take the New York Times’s absurdly low pay when their freelance articles make it into the paper’s news and op-ed pages, some photographers gladly sell their work for peanuts to Time. They have their own reasons, which can range from getting valuable exposure—so they can (try to) charge more for subsequent work—to not needing the higher rates that staffers and more famous people can demand.

This gets trickier, it seems to me, when it comes to breaking news, where news organizations derive enormous benefits from having the right image or video at the right time, and too frequently get it for less than peanuts. Indeed, practically every news organization now invites its audience to submit pictures and videos, in return for which the submitters typically get zip.

Which is why we need a more robust marketplace than any I’ve seen so far—namely, a real-time auction system.

How would a real-time auction system work? The flow, I’d imagine, would go like this: Photographer captures breaking news event on video or audio, and posts the work to the auction site. Potential buyers, especially media companies, get to see watermarked thumbnails and then start bidding. A time limit is enforced in each case. The winning bid goes to the photographer, minus a cut to the auction service.

The premium, then, would be on timeliness and authenticity. One or two images/videos would be likely to command relatively high prices, and everything else would be worth considerably less.

Eventually, someone will do this kind of business—which could also be useful for eyewitness text accounts of events. For the sake of the citizen journalists who are not getting what they deserve for their work, I hope it’s sooner rather than later.

For print, an auction system is also needed, but the timeliness is less critical. A British startup is planning, as I write this, to launch a service called “Newsrupt,” aimed more at editors than reporters. I hope it’s the first of many such ventures.

(I initially wrote this piece, which is adapted in part from the Mediactive book, at the request of CNN.com. However, CNN declined my request to run it with a Creative Commons license, and since I’m not being paid for the effort I declined to let CNN use it in the first place. Note: I normally don’t care for anniversary journalism, but this felt like a worthwhile exception.)

The public editor (ombudsman) of the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, has looked into the newspaper’s extremely questionable actions in a recent situation — withholding key facts from articles at the request of the Obama administration and then actively misleading readers — and concluded that the paper did the right thing. I could not disagree more.

Let me note here that I’ve known Brisbane for many years. We’ve been colleagues at several news companies, and he’s a friend. But I believe he got this one very wrong.

The case at hand: Raymond Davis, who either works for the CIA or has extremely close ties, shot and killed two people in Pakistan recently. (The Times says he’s a “private contractor” — read: mercenary — who provided security for CIA agents; the Guardian says he’s a CIA spy.)  The U.S. government persuaded the Times and several other news organizations to hold back on his affiliation/employment after the shootings, which have caused a huge uproar in Pakistan, a nation that has increasingly tense relations with America.

But the Times didn’t just withhold that information. It actively dissembled. As Brisbane writes:

For nearly two weeks, The Times tried to report on the Davis affair while sealing off the C.I.A connection. In practice, this meant its stories contained material that, in the cold light of retrospect, seems very misleading. Here’s an example from an article on Feb. 11 that referred to a statement issued by the American government:

“The statement on Friday night said that Mr. Davis was assigned as an ‘administrative and technical’ member of the staff at the American Embassy in Islamabad. But his exact duties have not been explained, and the reason he was driving alone with a Glock handgun, a pocket telescope and GPS equipment has fueled speculation in the Pakistani news media.”

How can a news outlet stay credible when readers learn later that it has concealed what it knows?

The answer is it cannot. And, as Brisbane himself notes, what the Times did was more than simply conceal. When it reported that “Davis’ exact duties have not been explained,” it was, quite simply, being deceitful to its audience.

I appreciate that the newspaper was trying to do the right thing here. It wanted to help protect the life of someone who might be in serious jeopardy if it told the truth it knew. The editors believed they had two options only: Tell the full story (or as much as they actually knew), or deceive the readers by telling only part of it truthfully and using deliberately misleading language in places. I’d have some discomfort picking either option, though if those were genuinely the only two choices I’d have picked the first.

But there was a third option: Say nothing at all — pretend the situation doesn’t exist and write nothing about it. The Times makes daily decisions about what it considers newsworthy, not to mention what stories it feels it’s gathered enough information to tell in the first place.

The say-nothing option wouldn’t have been a lot more palatable; indeed, it would have made the paper look as if it didn’t have a clue about a major story, or, as people would have speculated, that it was not publishing anything for its own (probably political) reasons. But it would have been less dishonorable than the route the paper chose to travel.

Printing nothing would have been journalistic nonfeasance, what Webster describes as the “failure to do what ought to be done.” What the newspaper printed was, in my view, malfeasance — outright journalistic wrongdoing.

At MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, Jack Driscoll sees Mediactive as a common-sense follow-up to We the Media. The book, he writes, assumes “we no longer are receptacles of information but active participants in the process, who are called on to break out of our ‘comfort zone’ like a chick cracking open its shell.”

Is it finally dawning on the news business that Apple is not a friend, nor an ally, nor even a partner in any true sense of the world?There are some signs of sanity emerging in the week since Apple announced its terms of engagement for offering subscriptions via mobile apps, rules that were arrogant even by that company’s standard.

To recap: The company’s new in-app subscription rules, issued a week ago in a press release purporting to quote Supreme Leader Steve Jobs, reinforced Apple’s determination to be publications’ gatekeeper in every sense of that word. What took publishers aback was the financial part of the rules: To publish via Apple’s iOS ecosystem — currently the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) – news organizations must agree to give Apple a 30 percent cut of every transaction with audiences. Apple had already made it clear that it would take a cut of in-app advertising sales. Moreover, publishers were not allowed to charge a higher price for the app subscription than they do in any other format — and they couldn’t even put a link into the app showing potential customers how to buy subscriptions elsewhere.

This was too much even for some of Apple’s many media-business acolytes. Even so, the most serious protests have come not for news organizations but rather from companies like Rhapsody, which sells music subscriptions and realized that Apple’s plan was either to kill or own their businesses. News organizations, whether out of fear or caution or both, have been largely silent. A few have already acceded to Apple’s demands.

Meanwhile, after having adapted Readability software as part of its Safari browser, Apple refused to allow this tiny startup to offer the same functionality as an app — because that would interfere with Apple’s insistence that it alone will control how anyone makes money.

All of this goes to the bigger picture in the new publishing environment: the need for content creators to recognize that they need to actively seek options. One of the most interesting is Google’s One Pass system, which is more in the category of announcement-ware than reality at this point. The much lower cost to publishers — 10 percent instead of 30 percent — is the most obvious lure. Another, for publishers, is sharing key subscriber information, but if Google is smart it will offer users an opt-out in at least some circumstances.

An interesting experiment is Time’s Sports Illustrated mega-approach, called “All Access,” or a subscription to print plus online versions (other than iPad). The mistake here, I believe, is charging more for a digital-only subscription than a print one. The economics of that approach are good only for Time, not its customers who are not as stupid as the company thinks they are.

The All Access system also gives Time editorial control over what it produces. What remains the most publisher-antagonistic element of the Apple ecosystem is the one thing that most media companies still hate to discuss: To even exist in that ecosystem, they must give Apple — not their own editors — final say over whether the content they produce is acceptable under Apple’s “we’ll disallow or remove it if we don’t like it” rules.

You find not a hint of this, for example, in this week’s “Media Equation” column by the New York Times’ normally sensible David Carr. This isn’t the first time he’s neglected that particular elephant in the room (and the New York Times Co.’s dealings with Apple remain a mystery that gets no comment from the company), but I wish he’d address the issue one of these days, as it’s not trivial and goes to the heart of free speech in an online world.

I’m grateful to folks who’ve found and reported mistakes in the book. Not only do I plan to name you on a special page, but I’ll be offering you a copy of the next print edition of the book (later this year, I hope). I haven’t worked out the details, but consider this a promise.

Fine print: As you might guess, this applies only to the first person to report each specific mistake.

UPDATED

Apple has finally clarified what it will demand of publishers that want to sell subscriptions through its iPhone and iPad app ecosystem. The demands are extortionate, and traditional publishers agreeing to them are crazy if not suicidal.

Here’s Apple’s official pronouncement. Key items:

Apple will permit publications to sell subscriptions from inside their apps. But look at what Apple then demands:

Publishers who use Apple’s subscription service in their app can also leverage other methods for acquiring digital subscribers outside of the app. For example, publishers can sell digital subscriptions on their web sites, or can choose to provide free access to existing subscribers. Since Apple is not involved in these transactions, there is no revenue sharing or exchange of customer information with Apple. Publishers must provide their own authentication process inside the app for subscribers that have signed up outside of the app. However, Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app. In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

The arrogance of this is stunning. Consider, first, that publishers are not allowed to sell their content at a higher price inside the App Store even though Apple takes 30 percent of the money. And then consider that publishers are not allowed even to show their audiences, from inside the apps, how they can bypass Apple and get the subscription directly from the publishers themselves.

The second demand is in line with Apple’s current insistence that it can decide what content is allowed within news organizations’ apps. The cowardice they’ve shown in this arena has surely emboldened Apple to extend it in this anti-customer way.

None of this should surprise anyone who’s been watching Apple take firmer and firmer control of the iOS ecosystem, or who’s watched media companies compete for the right to be Apple’s pets. But it’s discouraging nonetheless.

The Apple deal will make more sense to startup publishers that want to avoid billing issues by leaving the back-end finances to Apple. Even they, however, should realize that they’re turning over their futures to a company that is not working in their interest in the long run.

What this should do is lead publishers, especially traditional ones, to speed up their development of HTML5 applications and apps for other operating systems like Android. But as the lemmings head for the cliff, I’m not holding my breath waiting for them to change course.

UPDATE: Ryan Carson pleads with people to “fight Apple’s subscription extortion.”

We already know that Arianna Huffington is smart. She and her small team have built a media company from nothing in just a few years, and now they’re flipping it to AOL, where she’ll be content editor in chief. The price sounds bizarrely high to me at $315 million, but so do lots of prices these days in what looks like a new Internet bubble.

Others have commented at length on the synergy of the deal. If AOL is going after a link-driven community, the blend could work in the long run. The Huffington Post has been evolving from its origins, as the left-wing op-ed page of the Internet, into a blend of aggregation, curation, pandering — all of which have been done with some genuinely intriguing if not innovative technology initiatives — and some home-grown content. The first three of those are likely to be, in the end, much more important for the business than the original content.

AOL has been rolling the dice at an ever-more-frantic rate lately on digital content. The reported $25 million it paid for TechCrunch made sense to me, and I think it’s way too early to say, as many are doing, that the Patch local-news service is failing. But there’s a common thread in many of the content initiatives: paying low (or no) money to the people providing the content, and having lots and lots of it.

Indeed, the Huffington Post’s home-grown content, for the most part, has been especially notable for its low cost to Huffington: low as in free. Although some actual paid journalists work for the organization, her blogger network is an amazing achievement; she’s persuaded untold numbers of people to write for nothing, to have their names on the page as compensation for their labor. Exploitive? Sure, in a way, but let’s also recognize the fact that people want to put their stuff on the site. No one writes for the New York Times op-ed page for the money; it’s for the platform to spread ideas.

And, based on the email Huffington sent to her bloggers, that’s the model she plans to continue. Here’s part of that email:

Together, our companies will have a combined base of 117 million unique U.S. visitors a month — and 250 million around the world — so your posts will have an even bigger impact on the national and global conversation. That’s the only real change you’ll notice — more people reading what you wrote.

It’s hard to imagine something that sends a more dismissive message. Which is why I’m hoping that Huffington will recognize how this looks and then do the right thing: namely, cut a bunch of checks to a bunch of the most productive contributors on whose work she’s built a significant part of her new fortune. They’ve earned some of the spoils. I think Huffington is smart enough to know not just the PR value of doing this. And, and feel free to call me naive for saying this, I also think she’s wise enough to know why she should do it on more ethical grounds, too.