The Faces of 1994 : From the Twentysomething Mayor Who Stayed Home to the Eightysomething Photographer Who Returned There, We Catch Up With some of These Pages’ Most Interesting Personalities : ARIANNA HUFFINGTON : ‘Everything Happens for a Purpose’

Michael Huffington’s failed Senate campaign turned out to be a long, strange journey back to Santa Barbara for him and his wife, Arianna (“Eyes on a Cosmic Prize,” Feb. 20, View). Along the way, Arianna may have been accused of courting the public eye, but the press attention wasn’t that much fun, not with all those pesky critics.

“It was unprecedented, the level of viciousness,” she said. “But it’s not a personal thing. It’s not about Michael and me. It’s about what we stood for. Because you see the same exact people attacking Newt Gingrich.”

So Huffington is fighting media fire with fire. She’s finishing a pilot for “Beat the Press,” a TV show that would focus on “the media’s sacrificial lamb of the moment”--a new one each week--and then “do an investigative package on who the reporters are and what are their motivations,” noting any “left-wing alliances,” according to her written treatment. First up is GOP chum Gingrich, the House Speaker-designate who’s closely linked to the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a think tank that has enlisted Arianna as a senior fellow.

Arianna is also writing a book based on a journal she kept during the campaign, in which the couple spent $28 million of their own money. She’s toying with possible titles: “California on $25,000 a Day” or “Where Was Mary Poppins When I Needed Her?,” a wry reference to the controversy over the Huffingtons’ hiring of an illegal immigrant. She doesn’t believe, however, that that issue did in her husband’s stab at the Senate.

“I don’t think it’s ever any one thing, and I don’t think it’s accidental either. Everything happens for a purpose,” said Arianna, whose spiritual experiments and alliances also aroused controversy.

As for Michael, he’s in Santa Barbara, mulling career moves that he’ll announce in the new year.

Yes, Santa Barbara . “Contrary to 3,000 stories, we’re not selling our house in Santa Barbara,” she said. “That’s one of those undocumented, unsubstantiated things.”