Andrew Breitbart Is Dead

This was a Breitbart victory. He made the president look bad. Shirley Sherrod was merely collateral damage.

I was half asleep this morning with the TV on low. The news still jumped across the room. Andrew Breitbart died last night in Los Angeles. Natural causes said the family, though dying in your 40s isn’t the way nature usually works.

Breitbart was a right wing lightning rod. He was the guy behind the Shirley Sherrod video.

If you’ve forgotten, it was a video that made Ms. Sherrod seem racist until it was shown to have been edited entirely out-of-context. The Obama Administration which had done damage control at warp speed was left with egg on its face.

This was a Breitbart victory. He made the president look bad. Shirley Sherrod was merely collateral damage.

Andrew Breitbart first came on my radar in August 2005. I wrote a blog entry about him after I noticed a huge number of links to his site from Drudgereport.

Over the past few years he’s become a much larger media presence.

Breitbart was made for TV. Inviting him on a talk show was like carrying a lit cigarette lighter through a refinery.

I feel bad when people die. Andrew Breitbart leaves behind a wife and children. Tragic.

I will not miss his take no prisoners style of political discourse. Breitbart was the poster child for what’s wrong with our political system today.

Alas, other poster children are probably already waiting in the wings.

ABC And Andrew Breitbart — Let The Games Begin!

“This blindsided a good portion of the team here,” the source emails. “And not in a good way.”

(updated November 2 5:00 pm)

Back in July when the Shirley Sherrod video rush-to-judgment exploded I predicted we’d be seeing a lot less of Andrew Breitbart. It was Breitbart whose website brought the edited Sherrod tape to light. I was wrong!

Here’s what I wrote in July.

Undoubtedly this is the end of Andrew Breitbart as an on-camera interview and source. Thank God for small favors. He’ll still have influence behind the scenes, but that’s just not the same and he knows it.

Now ABC News has invited Breitbart to be part of their election coverage.

Surprised? Yeah, I was too.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent said the emotion was even stronger at ABC News.

People in ABC’s newsroom were also caught completely off guard by the news, a newsroom source tells me.

“This blindsided a good portion of the team here,” the source emails. “And not in a good way.”

That was followed by an ABC press release clarifying not all was as it seemed. Breitbart had been invited, but not to appear on TV, just online. I’m not sure in this day-and-age that distinction means as much as it once did.

Mr. Breitbart’s role has always been as one of our guests at our digital town hall event:

Mr. Breitbart is not an ABC News analyst.

He is not an ABC News consultant.

He is not, in any way, affiliated with ABC News.

He is not being paid by ABC News.

Mr. Breitbart will not be a part of the ABC News broadcast coverage, anchored by Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. For the broadcast coverage, David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg will contribute reaction and response gathered from the students and faculty of Arizona State University at an ABC News/Facebook town hall.

If you thought that would be the end of the story think again! Last night Breitbart published some emails from ABC which certainly gives the impression he would be on-the-air.

This program will broadcast on the ABC Television Network, abcnews.com, ABC News Now, and ABC News Radio.

Breitbart says his diminished role is courtesy of a “calculated “astroturf“ intimidation campaign by the well-funded and frightened-for-their-political-lives institutional left to quash dissenting voices.” Maybe so. There is no shortage of Breitbart haters on the left.

Though this story might not have ‘legs’ it will have an impact on coverage and commentators going forward. My July prediction might not have been wrong, it was just issued too soon.

(update) On Tuesday Breitbart was uninvited! Here’s the email from ABC.

Dear Mr. Breitbart,

We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABCNews.com and Facebook. The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News. We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall. Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage. As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.

Sincerely,

Andrew Morse

Sherrod/Breitbart–Each Others’ Worst Nightmare

Breitbart picked a fight with someone racists don’t think exists. And, of course, that is the weakness of racism. It’s a philosophy built without benefit of truth.

I want to talk briefly about Shirley Sherrod. Her mistreatment by the press and government has been despicable. That being said, if I had been in a decision making position I’m not sure I would have acted differently. That troubles me.

Most of us are willing to rush to judgement when we see documentary proof of a believable event (and sometimes even a non-believable event like Breitbart’s doctored ACORN video where characters straight out of Super Fly ask how to break the law without getting caught). It’s sad.

Here’s the weakness in the system. When Andrew Breitbart presented the Sherrod video everyone assumed he had vetted it. Breitbart was already a lightning rod for left wing criticism. He wouldn’t dare lie on a controversial matter.

Underestimation! As it turns out he hadn’t vetted the video and as subsequent reporting has shown he’s not above lying&#185.

Luckily for all of us Shirley Sherrod wasn’t the person Breitbart said she was. She was the opposite! In the interviews I’ve seen she comes off as level headed, sincere and well spoken. She is a racist’s worst nightmare!

Breitbart picked a fight with someone racists don’t think exists. And, of course, that is the weakness of racism. It’s a philosophy built without benefit of truth.

In the end Breitbat was the one blindsided. Good.

Will this episode start a new dialog about race? Maybe. That part is tough to predict.

Undoubtedly this is the end of Andrew Breitbart as an on-camera interview and source. Thank God for small favors. He’ll still have influence behind the scenes, but that’s just not the same and he knows it.

It is that realization and not guilt over what he did that’s made him look so bitter the past few days.

&#185 – Even if you allow Breitbart might not have originally known about the video’s editing he did later say, “the audience was laughing and applauding as she described how she maltreated the white farmer,” which of course is totally untrue.

Who Is Andrew Breitbart And Why Is Matt Drudge Throwing Him All Those Links?

I’m a habitue of Drudge. Though Matt Drudge has a political and sometimes social agenda, the site links to news I find interesting and does it on a fast and constant basis. Drudge is mostly a collector of news rather than a reporter. Just about all his headlines point to stories on other sites.

Until recently, most of Drudge’s stories came from traditional sources. If a story was actually from the Associated Press, he’d find a website carrying it and link there. You’d be directed to a newspaper, TV station, magazine or Yahoo, which carries wire service reports.

Now, he’s started linking to lots of stories on breitbart.com. Breitbart.com looks like an automated aggregator of AP and Reuters wire stories.

Quite honestly, I’d never heard of it or of Andrew Breitbart, the person whose telephone number is listed as the contact for the web address.

I’m not in Los Angeles, but I used Google’s mapping facility to look at breitbart.com’s physical address. It looks like a residential area just off the San Diego Freeway and near UCLA.

Then I started checking his name. Here’s a quote from Andrew Breitbart on author Roger Simon’s site.

The New York Times got it right — I am amicably leaving the Drudge Report after a long and close working relationship with Matt Drudge, a man who will rightfully take his place in the history books as an Internet news pioneer. I am also excited to be a partner in an inspired new endeavor, the Huffington Post. The last time I worked with Arianna she got a guy who didn’t deserve to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery disinterred. That was cool. I admit: I like to go where the action is.

And, if you go to the Internet Archives and look at some older breitbart.com pages, they actually show Drudge’s site. Well, they all do except this one. Oops.

So, it looks like Breitbart is now somehow connected with Arianna Huffington – liberal and, once again, Matt Drudge – conservative.

Is Drudge is sending all this traffic Breitbart’s way out of the goodness of his heart?

There’s nothing nefarious here (well nothing I can see). If there’s a financial relationship between Breitbart and Drudge, traditional journalists might question the ethical connotations of linking for profit. There’s nothing I’ve looked at that says that’s what’s happening and far be it from me to judge ethics. I just don’t know.

I’m writing what I found because I saw unusual online behavior and put 2+2 together. It’s all out in the open.

For me, it was interesting to see this new website spring up and get much of Drudge’s business. That’s where my curiosity kicked in. If you can aggregate tens or hundreds of thousands of hits… or more, Google ads (or similar ads, sold by others and placed on your site) alone could make a small, automated website very profitable with little investment or ongoing effort.

Blogger’s note: While looking through more websites, trying to read up on Andrew Breitbart, I stumbled on the fact that his father-in-law is Orson Bean. If the name means nothing to you, don’t worry. If you’re my age, Orson Bean was a very witty New Englander who worked the TV game show circuit in the 60s and 70s. I was a big fan. I wondered where he went.