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Andrew Breitbart

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Andrew Breitbart
Born (1969-02-01) February 1, 1969 (age 55)
California, USA
Alma materTulane University
Occupation(s)Journalist, Columnist

"[Left-leaning Hollywood personalities] are uninteresting, they’re vicious, they’re vitriolic, they’re really, really not good people. I’m willing to say that on the record. You could probe them scientifically and anthropologically and prove that they’re not good people....[The Hollywood left] is a stale group of people who are recycling the same old bad ideas that don’t work. Why else would those people go to the stinky side?"

Meet Andrew Breitbart, self-proclaimed rebel-king of L.A.'s underground conservative movement (interview), 2008[1]

Andrew J. Breitbart (pronounced /ˈbraɪtbɑrt/; born February 1, 1969) is an American publisher,[2] commentator for the Washington Times, author,[3] and an occasional guest commentator on various news programs. He may be best-known for serving as an editor for the Drudge Report website. He was a researcher for Arianna Huffington, and was employed by her as "the primary developer" of her website, the Huffington Post.[4][5] He currently runs his own news aggregation site, Breitbart.com, and four other sites: breitbart.tv, Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism.

Origins and personal life

Breitbart grew up in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. His father was a restaurateur, his mother a banker.[6] He worked as a pizza deliveryperson and car washer.[7] He graduated from Tulane University in 1991.[8] He says he "grew up in Brentwood a secular liberal Jew" who celebrated his bar mitzvah and "has the tape to prove it," but had "an interesting epiphany" during the Clarence Thomas hearings. He now describes himself as "a Reagan conservative" who has "sympathies towards the libertarian side of issues."[2] He "runs [his] business from [his] basement."[2]

His early jobs included a stint at cable channel E! Entertainment Television, working for the company's online magazine, and some time in film production.[6]

In 1995 he saw the Drudge Report and was so impressed that he emailed Matt Drudge. "I thought what he was doing was by far the coolest thing on the Internet. And I still do."[5] Matt Drudge introduced him to Arianna Huffington, when she was still a Republican,[6] and Breitbart subsequently assisted Huffington, after she became a progressive, in creating her website.

He is married to the daughter of actor Orson Bean, Susannah (Susie) Bean, with whom he has four children.[5][9]

Contributor

Before the launching of Big Government, Breitbart's highest profile venue was the Drudge Report. Breitbart, who once described himself as "Matt Drudge’s bitch,"[10] selected and posted links to other news wire sources. Mr. Breitbart has guest-hosted the Savage Nation talk radio program on several occasions. He also regularly fills in for Dennis Miller as host of Miller's nationally-syndicated radio show.

Author

Breitbart co-wrote Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon with Mark Ebner, a book that is highly critical of U.S. celebrity culture. The publisher's description says, "celebrities somehow believe that it's their God-given right to inflict their pathology on the rest of us. Hollywood, Interrupted illustrates how these dysfunctional dilettantes are mad as hell.... And we're not going to take it any more."[11]

Breitbart's work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, National Review Online and the Weekly Standard Online, among others. He writes a weekly column for The Washington Times, which also appears at Real Clear Politics.

Commentator

Breitbart has appeared as a commentator on Real Time with Bill Maher and Dennis Miller. In 2004 he was a guest commentator on Fox News Channel's morning show and frequently appears as a guest panelist on Fox News's late night program, Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld. Breitbart also appeared as a commentator in the 2004 documentary Michael Moore Hates America.[12]

On October 22, 2009 Breitbart appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. He gave his opinions on the mainstream media, Hollywood, the Obama Administration and his personal political views, having heated debates with several callers.[2]

In the hours immediately following Senator Ted Kennedy's death, Breitbart called Kennedy a “villain,” a “duplicitous bastard,” a “prick”[13] and "a special pile of human excrement."[14][15]

In February 2010, Breitbart received the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award during the CPAC conference in Washington, D.C. During his acceptance speech, he responded directly to accusations by NY Times reporter Kate Zernike that Jason Mattera, a young conservative activist, had been using "racial tones" in his allusions to President Obamaa, and had spoken in a "Chris Rock voice." (Because Mattera is from Brooklyn, he was actually speaking in his own dialect.) From the podium, Breitbart called Zernike "a despicable human being" for having made such allegations about Mattera's New York accent.[16]

Breitbart.com

Breitbart currently runs his own news site at Breitbart.com; it is frequently linked to by the Drudge Report and other websites. It features wire stories from the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Fox News, PR Newswire, U.S. Newswire, as well as direct links to a number of major international newspapers. Its Blog & "Network" links tend run to the right within the U.S. political spectrum (e.g., National Review, Instapundit, and Townhall.com). The site also features a search engine powered by Lingospot and a finance channel powered by FinancialContent. In 2007, Breitbart launched a video blog, Breitbart.tv.[17] According to the The Standard, a Hong Kong-based news site, when Breitbart is at the controls of the Drudge Report, he regularly links to Breitbart.com in order, the site suggests, "to cash in on Drudge's legions."[18]

Big Hollywood

In 2008 Breitbart launched the website "Big Hollywood," a "group blog" driven by Tinseltown, with contributions from a variety of writers, including entertainment-industry professionals who politically lean right.[19] John Nolte is the editor-in-chief of Big Hollywood. Other contributors include Greg Gutfeld, Gary Graham, and Iowahawk (Dave Burge).

The site, an outgrowth of the column "Big Hollywood" that Breitbart wrote for the Washington Times, addresses issues facing conservatives who work in Hollywood.[1]

Big Government

Andrew Breitbart gave notice that he would produce a new blog, entitled "Big Government," to premiere on September 10, 2009.[20] He hired Mike Flynn, a former government affairs specialist at Reason Foundation,[21] as Editor-in-Chief of Big Government.[22]

Further information: [[:ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy]]

The site started by airing footage of ACORN staffers in Baltimore who gave unethical advice concerning underage prostitution and tax-evasion on-tape to Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe. Within 24 hours of the video's release, the two women featured on the hidden camera were fired by ACORN over the incident. After the release of the second in the tape series, which targeted the Washington D.C. ACORN office, the U.S. Census Bureau severed its connection with ACORN, which had been scheduled to assist in the 2010 census. Five "sting tapes," with Hannah Giles portraying the "prostitute" Kenya, and O'Keefe acting as her boyfriend/pimp, have been released; these feature the ACORN offices in Baltimore, Maryland, Washington, DC, Brooklyn, New York, and both San Bernardino and San Diego, California.

Breitbart has vowed to "continue exposing"[citation needed] the ACORN organization; on November 22, 2009 he broke a story on Burbank's KFI AM radio about a "document dump" by the National City, California ACORN office. His story claimed that thousands of allegedly incriminating documents were thrown in a public dumpster in the wake of California Attorney General Jerry Brown's investigation of ACORN, only to be recovered by local private investigator Derrick Roach.[23] Breitbart said that he intended to "drip" the documents out in a serialized story, in a fashion similar to the O'Keefe videos.

Controversy

In a January 26, 2010 interview with Hugh Hewitt, Breitbart stated that he pays James O'Keefe a "fair salary", but denied that the James O'Keefe 2010 arrest at Federal Building was associated with Big Government or Breitbart.com. [24]

Big Journalism

In December 2009, Breitbart launched Big Journalism. He told Mediaite:[25]

Our goal at Big Journalism is to hold the mainstream media’s feet to the fire. There are a lot of stories that they simply don’t cover, either because it doesn’t fit their world view, or because they’re literally innocent of any knowledge that the story even exists, or because they are a dying organization, short-staffed, and thus can’t cover stuff like they did before.

Big Journalism is edited by Michael Walsh, a former journalism professor and Time magazine staffer.[25] One of Breitbart's aims for the site is to shame "traditional media outlets ... into telling the truth." [25] In 2010 some of this has been conducted through posts by a supposed alpaca, "Retracto, the Correction Alpaca," whose bio claims it is "a Senior Fellow at Breitbart.com".[26] The alpaca's true identity remains unknown, but it does have its own theme song. It specializes, of course, in demanding corrections from mainstream news media sources.

References

  1. ^ a b "Hollywood Infidel". The New York Observer. March 16, 2007. Retrieved 2008-10-01.
  2. ^ a b c d Andrew Breitbart, Breitbart.com Publisher C-SPAN, October 22, 2009. Breitbart referred to the "Democrat-Media complex" several times (from 14:45); demanded the host disconnect one caller, calling him a "creep" because he claimed that he witnessed Clarence Thomas renting pornography (from 16:00); defended the ACORN videos he published (from 18:15); stated conspiracy theories can be used to convince the poor that "the white man is out to get you" (23:15-24:30); said he is a limited government, low-tax conservative, sympathetic toward libertarian views, with a "libertine soft-spot" on issues of consensual behavior among adults (from 24.45).
  3. ^ Chideya, Farai. "Semper Fi Media", National Public radio, September 14, 2007. Accessed January 18, 2009. "The other person on the panel was Andrew Breitbart, who runs Breitbart.com, a news aggregator. That basically means that he culls what he considers the best of the news and puts it on one site. As it turns out, it's a profitable business. He's also an author, a blogger,"
  4. ^ "Big Hollywood.com >> Andrew Breitbart". Big Hollywood. Retrieved 2009-11-23.
  5. ^ a b c "Breitbart.com has Drudge to thank for its success". Cnet news. 2005. Retrieved 2009-07-29. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  6. ^ a b c "The Weekend Interview With Andrew Breitbart: Taking On the 'Democrat-Media Complex' - WSJ.com". online.wsj.com. Retrieved 2009-10-18.
  7. ^ Rice, Ned (2009-06-01). "Can Andrew Breitbart Save Hollywood?". Townhall. Retrieved 2009-07-27.
  8. ^ McCain, Robert Stacy (2007-05-29). "'News addict' gets his fix". The Washington Times. Retrieved 2009-07-27.
  9. ^ Orson Bean (2005). "Sgt. Curtis Massey Was 41". Cnet news. Retrieved 2009-07-29. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  10. ^ "Lists: What's Your Source for That? Where Andrew Breitbart gets his information". ReasonOnline.com. Retrieved 2008-10-01.
  11. ^ Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon—The Case Against Celebrity, John Wiley & Sons
  12. ^ "National Review Online (http://www.nationalreview.com)". www.nationalreview.com. Retrieved 2009-11-02.
  13. ^ "Not all Kennedy critics hold fire". Retrieved August 26, 2009.
  14. ^ "Compromise: what Pennsylvania lawmakers could learn from Ted Kennedy" (editorial), The Patriot-News (Pennsylvania), 28 August 2009. Accessed 24 September 2009.
  15. ^ "Opinion: Ted Kennedy, the liberal adversary to the conservative movement". www.digitaljournal.com. Retrieved 2009-09-24.
  16. ^ Benson, Guy. The New York Times Owes Jason Mattera an Apology], Big Journalism, February 19, 2010.
  17. ^ Owen, Rob. The next wave: Ex-WTAE anchor Scott Baker changes channel to run Web news site, Post-Gazette
  18. ^ "Drudge and jury". The Standard. August 11, 2007. Retrieved 2009-09-09.
  19. ^ "Breitbart's Conservative Alternative to Left-y Celebrity Blogs". Retrieved 2008-11-04.
  20. ^ "New Political Blog 'Big Government' Launches Tomorrow". http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/. Retrieved 2009-06-14. {{cite web}}: External link in |publisher= (help)
  21. ^ "Introducing Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, Edited by Mike Flynn", Nick Gillespie, reason.com, September 10, 2009
  22. ^ Author page for Mike Flynn Editor-in-Chief of Big Government
  23. ^ "BREAKING: San Diego ACORN Document Dump Scandal (November 23, 2009)". Retrieved 2009-11-23.
  24. ^ http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/g/3c0f68ec-ee51-42ae-b9ce-a170d352c202 An Interview With Andrew Breitbart About The O'Keefe Arrest
  25. ^ a b c Exclusive Interview: Andrew Breitbart Announces Launch of New “Big” Sites Colby Hall, Mediaite, December 10th, 2009
  26. ^ Author page for "Retracto, the Correction Alpaca" at Big Journalism

Breitbart's websites:

Other links:

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