Michael Maiello's picture

    He Wasn't Afraid To Make Enemies

    We don't need an Andrew Breitbart eulogy here, and I wouldn't be qualified to write one.  I've been reading them all day though.  Elizabeth Spiers, the young editor trying her best to save The New York Observer from extinction, writes one here that, I think, captures the tone.  Josh Marshall has a short and interesting piece as well.  The two dovetail nicely.

    At the core of these short remembrances is the tale of a public figure who relished in a good fight and didn't much care about making enemies or hurting feelings.  Other writers are especially attracted to such types.  In journalism, my chosen profession until it degraded itself both economically and morally, we have always lionized the unapologetic commentator like Mark Twain or H.L. Mencken.  We have tried, so much as it's possible, to prefer the provocateurs who punch upwards by picking on people with more power, status or notoriety than the journalist or their publication has.  If it wanted to, The New York Times could probably dig up some dirt to write, say, an unflattering portrait of me.  They don't because it serves no purpose.  Why take me down from a height below their kneecaps?

    Twain and Mencken were not perfect at punching upwards.  Really, nobody is.  But there can't be any doubt that Breitbart, and his disciple James O'Keefe, picked some serious fights with people who were completely ill-equipped to defend themselves.  Shirley Sherrod?  Local employees at Acorn?  Really?

    Enjoying the fight is, says Marshall, "a big, punchy, vivid and outrageously honorable tradition in the American public square."  Granted.  This is a country born out of a revolution.  Without public square pugilists we'd all be British.  We'd still be an apartheid culture for both ethnic minorities and women.  Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey liked a good fight too, but they had none of Breitbart's advantages and they picked on the powerful far more often than they went after the weak.

    The guy in the pub who can knock anyone on his ass, or get up after getting his own ass kicked, might win for himself a certain affection from his fellow drinkers.  Unless his only targets people he outweighs by 50 pounds or more.

    I know, I know, people are writing with his friends and family in mind.  Many of them considered him a friend of sorts, or a friendly and fun rival.  He was probably a charismatic guy.  Given that he successfully launched two media companies during an industry-wide depression, he'd pretty much have had to be.

    But it must be easier to praise him if you were never on the receiving end of his malice.  You can't say somebody is a great fighter without looking at the person's opponents, specifically if they were the ones who tended to pick the fights and choose the targets.  When a boxer spends his career fighting in Panama and Mexico and then comes to the U.S. with a 46-0 record, they don't just give the guy a title shot without asking about the quality and abilities of the 46 vanquished foes.

    Breitbart, enabled by a media that gave him far more attention than anyone similarly situated would have received, picked small, defenseless targets.  That's not a fighter, that's a bully. 

    UPDATE

    I just read this piece of excrement from Time's Michael Scherer:

    "He was not just speaking truth to power. He was trying to obliterate entire power structures."

     
    Please, show me how Shirley Sherrod, a government employee and, by all accounts average American, counts as an "entire power structure."
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    Comments

    I get this!

    But that takes me to some people like Hitchens.

    I mentioned in some fantasy at Creative that the problem with Hitchens is that he would disrobe great people (great in the sense of power) without ever holding the sacrament of power.

    And he felt like that author who always dresses in white after Labor Day who endorsed w bush!

    Oh we are in it for the fight.

    But Breitbart cheated and lied and did more than Nixon or w bush would ever think of doing.

    Was it for the greater good?

    F*&k no!

    It was for the greater good of Andrew.

    And Andrew had not one tenth of the drunken abilities of Hitchens.

    THE END


    When Hitchens went off the security deep end and started to advocate for democratizing the Middle East by force, he didn't lose his essential Hitchensness.  His targets were terrorists and dictators.  His sources on the ground were largely the people being oppressed by the same.

    Hitchens went into the war zone, was deeply sourced and advocated for real people who he described in great detail.  He didn't, say, pick on inner city mosques in Detroit.


    Holy cow! this is the quickest blog I have ever commented on. hahahah

    Yes, yes , yes!

    Hitchens would get there.

    I went nuts when he talked about being in some North African Kingdom and he could not get a drink!

    It was hilarious. hahahaha

    The Muslim law applied to him. hahahahaha

    He swears it was the only time he had been without a drink for more than 24 hours.

    See, I can absorb that, I can understand that, I can empathize with that.

    But damn, what had Andrew ever risked!

    Very Good Destor. Very good indeed!

    Not just intellectual abilities but experience.

    Well done!


    I believe Josh Marshall is coming at it from his belief in "activist journalism," something I always disagreed with him about. Actually, I more than disagreed, I was puzzled and perplexed. I found it disturbing that a PHD in American history believed that Fleet Street traditions of non-objective, political journalism, that were carried over to the American colonies, were a necessary and natural part of American politics. I have always looked at it as the "American experiment" finally inventing journalism as a profession in the 20th century, as a natural development of our system, one that took too long but made much sense, throwing away those old UK traditions.

    I think Breitbarts are what you reap when you sow preference for "activist journalism." You can easily find more Breitbarts in history books.


    Holy Cripe, I am back to the red sled. hahahahaah



    hahahahah

    Jesus Lord, people are quick around here!

    This is fun.

    Where in the hell did you find this cartoon?


    Obviously AA remembers the Maine.


    Ahhhhhhh she could not be more than 75 or 80 at most. hahahahahaha


    I do believe in analytic journalism with a point of view.  I think you can be "biased" but still fair in your reporting and in your analysis of the facts and context.  But it takes a lot of restraint to do right.  TPM does get a little silly at times, too, especially in its story selection.


    Every human brain is biased, it's impossible to be totally objective. But actually promoting journalism as a political too, and believing that the idea of separation of news pages and opinion pages was folly, is something quite different. The way I see it is that if you believe journalists can't do it, then you believe the practice of historians and other scholarship is folly, too.


    Well, most history and scholarship that I've read does come from a point of view.  Everything needs a thesis, right?  The reporter must, ultimately, separate fact from fiction and build the proper context.  But I agree with you that this kind of thing shouldn't be about advancing political goals.  There's analysis and there's propaganda.  Analysis follows the facts, as the writer honestly understands them.


    Are the two breeds mutually exclusively?

    Sure, history is rife with outrageous examples of shameless political disinformation under the guise of journalism. But some of the greatest journalists in American history have practiced politically-charged journalism, and it's hard to imagine them writing without that ideological fire. Moreover, I think that the common charges against MSM--the false veneer of objectivity and the mind-numbing pursuit of even-handedness--are well-earned.

    That's not to say that we should return to the days when every news publication was a mouthpiece for one party or the other. The idea of objective journalism was a tremendous advance, and it would be a tragedy to let it slip away. But I think that we also recovered something valuable when political voices joined the chorus, notwithstanding those discordant notes from Breitbart and company.


    I would say it's about more than punching upwards or down.

    It has more to do with the content and value of the fight: What's at stake? Is the cause good or evil or nothing much at all?

    The civil rights fight inspires and awes. Breitbart's shadow boxing wasn't about much other than sensationalism, as far as I can tell--and, to be fair to someone who wasn't, I haven't read him much.

    In the process, as you point, a number of innocent people and even good causes (ACORN) got hurt as did the people they championed. So you can add "slimy" to his list of traits.

    Once you have a megaphone--and it's not THAT hard to get one these days--it isn't that hard to provoke, get people talking about you, get folks riled up. Just look at the comments here, and the food fights that ensue sometimes.

    I do believe we are all God's children each possessing infinite worth and possibility for doing good (and evil). So call it a failing, but I can't raise an eyebrow to mark Breitbart's passing.

    (I did learn, however, that he's Orson Bean's SIL, and Orson became quite a right winger in his dottage.)


    The civil rights fight inspires and awes. Breitbart's shadow boxing wasn't about much other than sensationalism, as far as I can tell--and, to be fair to someone who wasn't, I haven't read him much.

     

    YES YES YES.

    This is THE issue of the day in MSM!

    I could not have said it better nor have I once seen it put so well!

    To be fair I wish no one had read him that much!


    By the by it was Tom Wolfe I was referring to in the whites.

    That SOB was at some aristocratic American dinner and gave his pretend Twain impression and someone asked him:

    Well who are you endorsing as President of these United States of America.

    And the bastard replied:

    Well, George W. Bush of course.

    Now the audience was stunned and did not know how to reply. It was 2004.

    I knew exactly how I would have replied.

    YOU GODDAMNABLE HYPOCRITICAL SON OF A BITCH.

    That is how I would have replied.'

    The prick.


    I haven't followed him much, but maybe it goes back to his Mau Mau days when he concluded that all liberals were dupes, shallow and, ultimately, hypocrites.

    For a good long while--though this fable has faded under the bright light of conservative lunacy--conservatives thought of themselves as people of the world, realists, keepers of the truth that life isn't fair (though we all wish it were).

    Evil exists, they would assert, and there is a difference, god damnit, between good and evil. They thought of themselves as tough thinkers and strong decision-makers capable of making the hard choices adults must make.

    At the same time, they tended to look down on liberals as though they were children who still believed in fairytales. Wolfe may still be stuck in this way of thinking.


    I can't recall ever having read anything by Breitbart, but I gather he was a gigantic asshole.


    I've never read anything by him that was longer than a rabid tweet.  I've otherwise only seen him on the TV, getting the kind of attention that very serious journalists did not.  And, I guess I'm guilty, too.  Maybe I should have taken the time to blog about the late Mr. Shadid when we lost him, instead of Breitbart now.


    Andrew Breitbart, Force of Nature, Dead at 43 | Kevin Drum | Mother Jones describes him as a gadfly which is very accurate.

    Gadfly = One who upsets the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, or attempts to stimulate innovation by proving an irritant.


    Gadfly? I really think this gives him WAY too much credit.

    I think Breitbart is more in the realm of the shithouse fly who keeps flying back into that hole. I chose to never follow him, but there are many who did.


    Definitions more to your liking? 

    gadfly [ˈgædˌflaɪ]

    n pl -flies
    1. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Animals) any of various large dipterous flies, esp the horsefly, that annoy livestock by sucking their blood
    2. a constantly irritating or harassing person
    [from gad2 (sting) + fly2]

    Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

    http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gadfly

    Honestly, I was only dimly aware of Breittbart before he died.  Never even saw nor heard the man but I have enjoyed reading his website, Big Hollywood,  on occasion.  


    Nor is Rush, obviously.


    Hallo Destor. 

    Josh had a 'higher than thou' take on Brietbutt, and I understand why. It's kind of interesting, folks who think he deserves no better than the level of decorum that he himself practiced have been getting banned from the commenting section of TPM 2012. With prejudice even.

    Seems eerily familiar.

    For you election central junkies, the new chat at Mibbit is:

    http://cbe005.chat.mibbit.com/

    channel: #tpmregulars

    Nick: wotevah you wish

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    GoBama 2012!

    xoxoxox


    My obituary/eulogy of Breitbart would be very short (two sentences) and would read as follows:

    I have heard it said that if I can say nothing good about a person I should say nothing at all. Andrew Breitbart is dead.


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