Responding to Andrew Breitbart
In a letter published on Andrew Sullivan’s site (and posted at Big Hollywood), Andrew Breitbart complains about recent pieces I’ve written that include criticism of his approach to political discourse. I want to direct readers who’ve read my work to his objections, and to respond. Before I begin, I want to note that I’ve repeatedly complimented Mr. Breitbart for publishing the ACORN pieces on Big Government, and dubbed him a savvy media critic who lands some punches against his targets.
Of course, I’ve also got major objections to his punditry, hence the criticism that I’ve offered.
It is my understanding that The Daily Beast, where we’ve both written, is up for hosting a debate where we can air our disagreements, and engage in what I think would be a productive conversation about journalism on the right, the left, and otherwise.
I’d certainly be up for that, or a Bloggingheads episode (assuming that they’re willing to host) or both.
Meanwhile I’ll address Mr. Breitbart’s letter.
He writes:
In the piece you link to and affirm in the Daily Beast, “The Right’s Lesser Press,” Conor Friedersdorf refuses to interview me as he continues to be my unofficial biographer. (I’m VERY reachable, Conor.) He writes opinion pieces on me purporting to be journalism. He doesn’t quote or cite me, he simply assumes and pushes the point of view he thinks I have and makes an argument based on these alleged positions. It’s sloppy and you, of all people, should know better.
This gets a couple of things wrong.
Prior to the first piece I wrote about Mr. Breitbart, “At the Gates of the Fourth Estate,” I wrote him a lengthy e-mail requesting an interview. It is dated May 1, 2009, if he’d care to check his records (subject line: “We Met at the GenNext Panel”). He did not respond to my request.
Even so, I didn’t write a piece that failed to quote him — I quoted him twice, and argued against a position that he articulated on national television! If there is some position in that piece that I’ve imputed to Mr. Breitbart, but that he doesn’t actually hold, I wish he would tell me what it is. I am happy to append a correction to the piece if that is the case, but I do not believe that anything in it is inaccurate.
If memory serves, the next piece I wrote that mentions Mr. Breitbart appeared in The Daily Beast. Titled “The Right’s Bob Woodward,” it lauds the ACORN expose published on Mr. Breitbart’s Web site Big Government, and offers a lengthy quote that he offered on the site. Around the same time, I wrote a blog post at The American Scene titled, “Credit Where It’s Due: Andrew Breitbart 1, ACORN 0.” On September 11, 2009, I e-mailed the full text of that post to Mr. Breitbart, with “Kudos on the Big Government Piece on ACORN” in the subject line.
As many of you know, the NEA conference call where artists were asked to support the Obama Administration is another topic Mr. Breitbart’s sites have covered at length. I also criticized the NEA for its behavior here, citing Mr. Breitbart’s site as inspiration, and here, where I argue that yes there is so something wrong with what the NEA did.
So what am I supposed to make of it when Andrew Breitbart writes this to Andrew Sullivan:
I believe that you and Conor would like to paint me into a corner, the one you are currently trying to paint Glenn Beck into. You are trying to marginalize me because of the net effect, pun intended, of the White House/NEA “propaganda” series on Big Hollywood, and the explosive ACORN expose´ on Big Government. Protecting President Obama and the left at all costs is your prerogative.
If my objections to Mr. Breitbart are his ACORN and NEA stories I’ve sure got a funny way of showing it! Seriously, how can he possibly attribute that motivation to me when I’ve written at length in defense of the ACORN stories, and against the NEA’s behavior?
Mr. Breitbart writes:
As you well know, I was the person who came up with the idea behind the Huffington Post, and even helped Arianna and Ken Lerer launch the sucker. At the time I did not abdicate my point of view as a right leaning voice. I stated what I believe today: Let’s put it all out there, and may the best ideas win.
Is it insignificant that I was behind the left’s most prominent blog/media site?
It isn’t insignificant — it’s telling. I submit that The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report, two projects with which Mr. Breitbart are associated, share many of the same flaws — that is to say, visit those sites on any given day and you’re likely to see a misleading/sensationalistic headline that spins the news to attract an audience that prefers to exist inside an ideological cocoon. That isn’t to say that those sites are all bad. They’re both impressive in their own ways, and Mr. Breitbart is without question an Internet genius who is uncannily able to create successful Web properties that offer benefits to their audience (and revenue for their creator).
What Mr. Brietbart misunderstands is what I’m up to. I am trying to paint him into a corner! It’s just that what I am after is for him to do better journalism, as he rails against the Obama Administration, or the Hollywood establishment, or when he creates the next Huffington Post. I’ll cheer-lead for any quality journalism done on his sites — as I’ve done already — no matter their political fallout.
He and I agree on a surprising number of things, among them that we should “put it all out there, and may the best ideas win.” But that model of public discourse requires a commitment to accuracy, arguing in good faith, exposing people to ideas with which they disagree rather than contributing to the cocooning of American media, challenging one’s audience as much as one panders to them, avoiding bombastic hyperbole, etc. I’d like to provoke Mr. Breitbart to do those things, whether by persuading him that it’s best for the country, or that it’s best for his purposes, or shaming him into living up to the standards to which the right holds other enterprises.
My position is that at present, his punditry and the Web properties that he is associated with fall short of one or another of those standards. I am happy to provide a long list of examples if this is a matter in dispute.
Mr. Breitbart writes:
The New York Times is a daily read. It always has been. I loved its recent profile of my college pal, hotelier Jeff Klein.
No daily publication can capture the essence of the cultural elite — good, bad and ugly — like the New York Times. The paper has its merits, no doubt. But when it comes to the political scene, its ascent into monolithic partisan hackery in its news pages — never mind the op-ed experience — is worthy of exploration granted its self-identified motto “all the news that’s fit to print” is disproved day after day when the news that hurts the political left is either ignored or distorted to sate its diminishing readership’s need for political conformity.
Here is what I wrote in my piece:
As a hegemonic newspaper, the Gray Lady has accomplished journalistic goods unprecedented in history—a long-running global network of first-rate reporters, a record-setting 101 Pulitzer Prizes, and powerful advocacy for First Amendment causes, for starters. These feats don’t obviate the need for vigilant critics, especially given the newspaper’s history of significant screw-ups: false apologia published for Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, fictional dispatches filed by Jayson Blair, and insufficient due regularly paid to conservative insights are notable examples.
Its most recent journalistic sin concerns the ACORN story broken by activist reporters with hidden cameras. Thoughtful critics, including the Times’ own ombudsman, rightly castigated the newspaper for being slow to cover news that was obviously fit to print.
Again, it appears that Mr. Brietbart and I agree on some things, though you wouldn’t know it from reading his rebuttal. What we disagree on, apparently, is whether the right’s press outlets should adopt some of the core journalistic values that the mainstream media claims as their own, though they often fall short of them.
I regard that as a question that Mr. Breitbart and I could profitably debate, if he is game.
Conor, I’m having trouble figuring out what you’re getting at when you write of Drudge and HuffPo:
To help get things on firmer ground, can you go to Drudge right now and choose a headline that you object to and post it here in comments? Your position is clear. I’d like to see how your eye works.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 6, 11:22 PM · #
I’d much rather read the debate than these lengthy defenses that show how right you are.
— mike farmer · Oct 6, 11:50 PM · #
And another thing. Surely you know that all upstarts start with a niche, otherwise known as a mission or a slant. The New York Times began as a Republican propaganda machine and gained its popularity waging war against Boss Tweed and the NYC dems. Only after my man and fellow Tennessean Adolph Ochs got a hold of the Times did it become a newspaper of record.
The only reason it was super-successful at that was because by the end of the 1800s yellow journalism predominated, opening up a huge and untapped opportunity in the market for a newspaper to sell speed, accuracy, objectivity and comprehensive coverage.
That’s why it is ironic when you write:
It’s the other way around. Partisan journalism isn’t the enemy of good reporting. It is a precondition: it’s victory in the market opens up the opportunity for a responsible venture; the violence it commits on popular norms of politeness and fairplay, and the frustration that follows prolonged exposure, is precisely what leads to a demand for objective and disinterested reporting.
What you are doing is noble, no doubt. It’s just not terribly useful.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 6, 11:53 PM · #
You response is disappointing. So according to you, the whole point of your recent article was as follows: AB(or other right wingers) should finance even better journalism or hire more fact checkers. If that’s the case, then you need a new beat. And less smugness, please. As I posted in the comments to the original article down below, you need to try to accomplish something yourself before becoming the right’s self-styled public editor. Lead by example. Show your depth. Why are you better than the competition? Pointing out their obvious flaws doesn’t get you there. Your Ode to the NYT ain’t the proof. Your view of NYT and the New Yorker, etc… is funny and out of touch.
— JC38 · Oct 7, 12:48 AM · #
To help get things on firmer ground, can you go to Drudge right now and choose a headline that you object to and post it here in comments? Your position is clear. I’d like to see how your eye works.
Are you serious? Drudge’s biggest supporters admit he is rampantly sensationalistic.
How about “Olympic Spirit: Video Shows Brutal Gang Murder in Chicago,” conflating two stories that have nothing to do with each other. How about “Caught by Surprise: Iran is Building a Second Nuclear Plant,” when the story linked to goes at length to say that the US wasn’t caught by surprise and had been tracking that plant for years? How about the headline that says “Obama: ‘World Order’!” when in fact the quote was “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed,” not some appeal to a new world order? How about “White Student Beaten on School Bus; Crowd Cheers,” when in fact the video shows many students most certainly not cheering? How about always placing global warming in scare quotes? How about a headline saying “The Emergence of Obama’s Muslim Roots”? How about “Fox TV Chicago Ordered Not to Run Anti-Olympic Story”… which ran after the television story had already come out! How about Drudge claiming, about an ABC News piece, “The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate”— when in fact the program devoted almost half its time to criticism of health care reform? That’s from the last couple months!
Jesus.
— Freddie · Oct 7, 12:55 AM · #
No doubt Breitbart could improve his game be following some of Conor’s advice. But, on the other hand, while I’m always interested to see what Breitbart is up to, I find myself increasingly bored and shying away from reading Conor. Why is that? I think it is because Breitbart is frequently breaking really interesting news stories about that big old interesting world out there, while Conor’s is essentially a second or third-order operation, devoted mostly to commenting on news stories that others have uncovered, or on the people doing the uncovering. Of course this is no special flaw of Conor’s. He is in this respect no different from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck,O’Reilly, Hannity or Mark Levine (none of whom do I ever bother with these days), or, indeed, 95% of output on the blogosphere, all of which is second order commentary on news stories generated by others. Breitbart is different from the other gaseous Limbaugh type windbags on the right, and worth more attention, since here, perhaps, is the beginnings of a new effective news structure on the right.
— nb · Oct 7, 01:09 AM · #
Conor,
Andrew Breitbart is far from the only new media juggernaut who does not answer emails from lowly denizens of the same medium which provided an incubation chamber for his star web properties.
why, i remember a certain admiring comment-on-a-comment made on an Alex Massie article at culture11, and an emailed response which received nothing but the disregard of no response at all (whether simply to inform the commenter that flying a kite was worthwhile pastime or not)
As to your argument with Andrew Breitbart, it could continue into eternity if our bodies were to last that long. He breathes ideological pap and instinctively conceptualizes ways to package it with celebutainment—an idiot savant of the most profitable kind. When a man sees liberal oppression in every passerby, whether under the influence of a few cocktails or not, he is simply constitutionally incapable of seeing the jarring disjunction between professing information-sharing egalitarianism and using the most reductive, ideologically-bound language to describe “the other side.” How could AB exist were it not for the presence of his mortal frenemies, the liberal elite?
— Nayagan · Oct 7, 01:48 AM · #
Can we just change the name to “Uptight Schoolmarm to the Right” already?
Or, alternatively, and, yeah, this is a crazy suggestion, we could take all this meta stuff outside and strangle it and y’all could write about something real.
— Adam Greenwood · Oct 7, 01:55 AM · #
You’re giving concern trolling a bad name.
— Adam Greenwood · Oct 7, 01:57 AM · #
Criminy, this is a terribly wordy way to say that your vagina hurts.
Man up, Friedersdorf. This level of obsessive whining in unseemly.
— Cinco Jotas · Oct 7, 05:27 AM · #
Freddie, that’s what I’m saying. It’s like complaining that WWE is fake, or whining that The View isn’t as rigorous as Meet The Press, or getting all huffy because Lynch’s movies don’t make sense.
Drudge is hype. I just wanted to see what kind of hype got Conor all hot and bothered.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 7, 01:27 PM · #
But isn’t the point that not hyping bullshit, like the NYT doesn’t do, is better, and that the conservative media should adopt it?
— Freddie · Oct 7, 01:52 PM · #
Why is it better for everyone to be staid?
I think Conor is afraid that the progression is linear, that Drudge and FoxNews are the first step toward an Idiocracy. But it’s not like that at all, if for no other reason that the vulgar and the elite continue to define themselves as each other’s opposites.
Right now America is in a drift, and vulgar is on the ascent. Pettiness, passion and partisanship predominate, not because of supply, but because of demand. Rush and Beck didn’t create these people, they tapped into them. Remove the rabble-rousers and you’d still have the problem of the lowly public getting involved in politics, which means they would be organized under common tropes, which means a man would step forward to articulate the tropes into a battle cry, and connect the tropes together into an affecting worldview, which means . . .
That’s why I keep coming back to, hey, it’s a 300 million person democracy. This is what it looks like, this is what you get — especially in Vocal America. The problem is not the trope-mongers but the people who believe they make good sense. And you aren’t going to educate those people; they’ve seen what they’ve seen and they are who they are. They’re like a mecha love unit from the movie AI: once they’re imprinted, they can’t be reprogramed (of course, in our case we may still lure away their kids).
So what then? Throw up our hands, retire to a mountain, start playing the flute around elementary schools? I don’t really know. What I do know is that Nemesis emerges from the shell of Victory, and that seriousness will win again, but only when it’s called for.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 7, 02:32 PM · #
“But isn’t the point that not hyping bullshit, like the NYT doesn’t do, is better, and that the conservative media should adopt it?”
One person’s bullshit is another person’s story-the-NYT-missed. Thank goodness for the alternative media — they keep the dinosaurs and progressive hacks honest — well, not honest, but appropriately shamed.
— mike farmer · Oct 7, 02:46 PM · #
Defending the washed up Gray Lady is hilarious. They have been bad for so long. Their ‘news’ and political reporting has been a joke for years.
— JB · Oct 7, 03:32 PM · #
Brietbart is as thin-skinned as ever, again playing the victim. “We’d be winning if only Hollywood made movies that agree with me!” “We’d be winning if only the media moguls agreed with me!” “No one would criticize me if only they interviewed me!” These conservatives who claim to believe in the free market until the free market rewards ideas they dislike always crack me up.
— tgb1000 · Oct 7, 04:20 PM · #
“Remove the rabble-rousers and you’d still have the problem of the lowly public getting involved in politics”
Yes, but without the rabble rousers there’s a greater chance of that “lowly public” rallying behind a leader who, you know, actually recognizes reality and offers a legitimate agenda for dealing with problems.
Mike
— MBunge · Oct 7, 05:13 PM · #
Clearly Conor is ineffectual. One long e-mail to AB constitutes his efforts to get an interview with the man? Weak. Whiny. Back when I was young journalist, I had to do much much more to score an interview with people much less busy than AB. That Conor would offer up his one email as a defense shows how little he understands journalism in the real world.
— JC38 · Oct 7, 06:14 PM · #
Since when is “staid” the only alternative to dishonest? News can be interesting and relevant without being misleading. Of course it’s usually easier, and more profitable, to be sensationalistic than honest, but if that’s your game don’t try to pretend you’re a martyr to your ideals.
— Sunny · Oct 7, 06:23 PM · #
One long e-mail to AB constitutes his efforts to get an interview with the man? Weak. Whiny.
So Conor writes an op-ed that is, in part, about Andrew Breitbart but contains no direct quotes from him. Breitbart responds, saying that Conor “refuses” to interview him and makes a big deal out of his availability. Conor responds saying that he did email Breitbart to request an interview, but received no response. And somehow, this makes Conor the whiny one…
I don’t fault Breitbart for a single missed email, but I’m amazed-not-surprised that someone would defend him in such a stupid, bullish way.
— Tom_Meyer · Oct 7, 08:09 PM · #
BTW, if a debate happens, I’d be very interested in watching it. And special Kudos to Breitbart if it does, who hardly needs the attention right now.
— Tom_Meyer · Oct 7, 08:18 PM · #
Drudge’s main headline right now is about gold hitting a record high. A quick review of the other major news outlets (FOX, CNN, MSNBC) shows no such story on their main pages. Seems like an effort by Drudge to panic people into thinking the dollar is collapsing.
— Mike · Oct 7, 09:42 PM · #
“What we disagree on, apparently, is whether the right’s press outlets should adopt some of the core journalistic values that the mainstream media claims as their own, though they often fall short of them.”
Mr. Friedersdorf, I don’t accept your premise.
Mainstream media falling short of core journalistic values is the rule not the exception. The irony is that the abuse of “core journalistic values” is exactly what created the vacuum that has allowed the right’s alternative media to thrive. Drudge might be sensationalistic, but did in fact make his reputation in large part by breaking the Clinton/Lewinsky saga ~ all made possible by Newsweek, which demonstrated its journalistic integrity by spiking the story.
Likewise, it is unfathomable that ACORN, with scores of reports of voter fraud and dozens of indictments across the nation would not provoke a scintilla of investigative journalism in the mainstream media. Enter Brietbart, and two kids with a camera. Instant fame gratis the intellectuals who find Sarah Palin’s garbage and John McCain’s fake mistress more interesting than rampant fraud and abuse of taxpayer money in a republic pretty much evenly divided politically.
What our mainstream media braintrusts fail to comprehend is that the only way to diffuse their nemesis is to report the news – all of it.
— Reilly · Oct 7, 10:04 PM · #
The mainstream media ran reports on Sarah Palin’s garbage and McCain’s fake mistress? Links, please. I’d love to read those.
— tgb1000 · Oct 7, 10:10 PM · #
Well, but Conor’s point seems to anticipate yours. If I can restate him – if ideologically-driven coverage, with its commensurate selection and promotion bias for some stories and against others is the problem, then how can the solution be more ideology, more bias, more selection of some stories over others?
If the conservative criticism of the media is that it is too ideological, why did they turn around and create “media” that exists for the sole and open purpose of being as ideological as possible? Why didn’t they create objective media, instead?
— Chet · Oct 7, 10:13 PM · #
Freddie wrote:
The NY Times doesn’t do? You really are from a galaxy far, far away. May the force be with you.
— jd · Oct 7, 10:35 PM · #
Conor, I think your only mistake, in both your original piece and in your defense, is in conflating Fox News with the broader partisan right media. HuffPo and Drudge don’t claim to be “fair and balanced” while Fox News does, and there’s your difference.
I have no problem with partisan media supplementing traditional media. And sometimes they even outreport traditional media. But when partisan media masquerades as traditional media, as Fox News does, that’s where they lose me.
— Troy · Oct 8, 05:14 PM · #
Conor just wishes everyone was as boring as he is
— Ace · Oct 8, 06:32 PM · #