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thornhappy -> RE: Shirley Sherrod To Sue Cocksucker Over Edited Video (7/30/2010 7:44:49 PM)
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Slate ran a few articles on Breitbart recently. One of them's a 4-pager, and gives some insights into his background and approaches.
"For Breitbart, bringing down the mainstream media isn't just a crusade. It's practically a civil rights issue—only more fun. He considers himself a journalist-slash-entertainer, an Edward R. Murrow by way of the Merry Pranksters. What makes him different is that he's offensive in every sense of the word. "My entire business model is to go on offense," he said. "They don't like our aggressiveness." He knows how he's seen by the liberal establishment. "They want to portray me as crazy, unhinged, unbalanced. OK, good, fine. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you."
As media criticism, it's not subtle. But then, neither is Andrew Breitbart. As a six-word corporate motto, however—a kind of elevator pitch for the whole Breitbart enterprise—it is genius. As long as his message is getting through, Breitbart doesn't care if you think he's an asshole. Assholes get attention.
...The advantage of coming from the left, however, is that Breitbart knows the left, which enables him to use the left's language and tropes against it. Rachel Maddow isn't just wrong. "She believes in a poststructural model in which she's a lesbian progressive activist first and an American fifth, sixth." Maureen Dowd doesn't just make fun of Dick Cheney. She creates a "Republican other." Eric Boehlert doesn't just falsely misrepresent Breitbart's views. "He takes text and deconstructs it and then makes false accusations based upon the most ridiculous readings." I asked Breitbart whether the appropriation is intentional. "I'm saying that with a grain of irony," he said. "You gave me these tools, I'm going to use them back against you."
Meanwhile, he and O'Keefe explicitly acknowledge their debt to Chicago activist and community organizer Saul Alinsky. O'Keefe told the New York Post in September that he had been inspired by Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, particularly the lesson that "ridicule is man's most potent weapon." He said he wanted to expose the "absurdities of the enemy by employing their own rules and language." That could mean testing the limits of ACORN's willingness to help unsavory characters get loans. Or it could be as simple as pointing out that Max Blumenthal has a booger hanging from his nose.
The willingness to be ridiculous is something Breitbart has on his critics. When Media Matters finds a discrepancy in one of Breitbart's stories, it calls him out for breach of journalistic ethics. "He's a pathological liar," Boehlert says. "These people are almost incapable of telling the truth." When Breitbart finds an error, he trots out Retracto, the Correction Alpaca.
Another advantage is Breitbart's readiness to go to the mat over minutiae. Most public figures, when facing an attack on their integrity, make a mental calculation. Do I respond and dignify the attacker? Or do I let it go? Breitbart always fires back—sometimes unnecessarily. "Just because you can retweet everything about yourself and every inch of your scorched earth crusade doesn't mean you should," said Breitbart acquaintance and Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn."
I saw an interview of him where he look a bit flustered and seemed to retreat to one line about "all media is in context". And later read of him telling a reporter that when he gets stuck, he just brings everything back to that line. An interviewer who lets that go on for long (that goes for anyone who repeats themselves, not answering a question) should just keep leaning on them or at least do some kind of followup questioning. (At least the BBC gets a bit pointed with people, whereas NPR frequently lets really stupid remarks go uncontested.)
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