[Smells Like News] What Does Arianna Huffington Really Look Like?

The Huffington Post has brought back its old trick of posting embarrassingly high-resolution photos of celebrities, Portfolio.com notes, to much controversy. HuffPo defends its pics as "playful spin on our... fascination with celebrity images." OK, let's "play." With your founder.

Arianna Huffington has allowed her editors to run ultra-close ups of the aging body of Vogue's Anna Wintour ("what does she really look like?") and now actresses Lindsay Lohan ("unedited" and splotchy) and Elizabeth Hurley (a bit sweaty). It's a case of her unprofitable company's need for monetizable, non-! political Web traffic (read: cheap celebrity clicks) running headlong into Huffington's need to suck up to celebs, who write for her site and come to her parties and help her seem very glamorous.

We won't lecture Huffington on how her company's shoddy and schlocky attempts to make money in the online publishing racket. At least, not in this post. But we will keep her honest: If Huffington is going to run unedited pictures of others, it's only fair there should be some unedited pictures of her out there.

Click any of the images below to pop-up large, hi-res versions. (Warning, this may slow down your web browser and ruin your lunch.) We've played by HuffPo rules: Posed, red carpet pictures with no editing. We've also excerpted a highlight, as Huffington did with Wintour.

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Posted By sysop to Smells Like News at 10/29/2009 11:37:00 A
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