AOL buys Huffington Post

The NY Times reported today that AOL is buying the Huffington Post. What I think is interesting about this is not so much that a big, struggling company is eating a smaller, more successful one, but that AOL will actually be giving Ariana Huffington "oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone."
Arianna Huffington is a left-wing icon and the Huffington Post is an unabashedly liberal news-aggregator and blog site. AOL, meanwhile, has been moving away from being an Internet-provider company and more towards being a content provider. They have been buying up successful blogs on all kinds of topics, like culture, food, and technology, to form a massive advertising-generating content network, like a giant Internet-based newspaper. So it makes sense, on one level, for AOL to want the Huffington Post as their liberal editorial page, just like they wanted Engadget as their technology page.
The problem, I think, is this: If the Huffington Post editorial staff has oversight of much more of AOL's content besides for just itself, they will be in a position to shape and influence much or all of AOL's huge content farm in acordance with their political views. Obviously, that's not a problem on a political opinion blog. But on Mapquest? I'm not suggesting that Ariana Huffington is going to use her new authority to start ruling the Internet, but I do think that the lines between editorial content and just plain information on the Internet are fuzzy enough--and they're just going to get fuzzier.