Townhall: Can Breitbart Save Hollywood?

[hokie4redskins]

This is a very impressive and interesting read on the rise of Andrew Breitbart (AKA The Next Drudge) and conservative thought in Lala land.

http://townhall.com/columnists/NedRice/2009/06/01/can_andrew_breitbart_save_hollywood?page=1

..........Yes, the rumors are true. After decades of cowering in the deep-blue (as in Blue State) shadows, Hollywood conservatives are beginning to openly express their political beliefs despite the price they’ve paid—both socially and professionally—for doing so in the past. Some are calling this newfound courage the Breitbart Effect, named for the affable New Media titan who exposed the amoral Superfund toxic waste site of Tinsel Town by subjecting it to the standards of traditional, conservative (read: normal) American values.

Through his pioneering work on news aggregation Web sites such as the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, Breitbart led the charge away from the take-it-or-leave-it company store of monolithic network news and toward the consumer-driven free market of the New Media. How important was it to break up this monopoly? Before there was a New Media, Dan Rather’s “CBS Evening News” “exposé” about George W. Bush’s National Guard service (complete with forged documents) would have gone unchallenged—and Dan Rather would still have a career. Because of New Media and outlets such as Drudge, Rather’s inept hoax was discovered—and shared with the world—within a matter of hours.

Recently asked if Angie Harmon’s remarks were an example of the Breitbart Effect, the man in question’s response was as characteristically modest as it was uncharacteristically brief: “Never heard of it.”

Call it what you like—the Breitbart Effect, the Having-Just-Grown-A-Pair Effect, the Other Great Enlightenment—a little candor on the part of show business conservatives would be a refreshing change from the days when being “outed” in Hollywood had more to do with what one did in the privacy of the voting booth than in the bedroom (or, this being Hollywood, in the hot tub).

WHAT’S A ‘BREITBART’?

So who is this man who, by some accounts, may have helped jump-start this right-wing Renaissance?

Andrew Breitbart grew up in the part of Los Angeles known as Brentwood (“O.J. country,” he calls it), surrounded by entertainment industry families and regular working folks like his father, a restaurateur, and his mother, who worked in the trust department at Bank of America. Andrew’s Wonder Bread years were spent playing baseball, watching his beloved Dodgers and absorbing the pop culture references that would help form the foundation of his life’s work.

Unlike many of his trust-funded peers, Andrew also worked during these early days, first lying about his age at 15 to get a job at All-American Burger, later graduating to delivering pizzas and washing cars. But young Mr. Breitbart wasn’t just putting video gaming coin in pocket; he was also internalizing the value system that defined his parents’ lives: hard work plus common sense as a formula for success. “I trusted my parents’ methodology and approach to life more than I did that of any college professor I ever encountered,” he now admits...........

Breitbart’s nascent conservatism blossomed as he watched gavel-to- gavel coverage of the Clarence Thomas hearings on C-Span in 1991. “Going in, I wanted us to take down this serial sexual harasser,” he says now of that experience. “By the end of the hearings, I was screaming at my TV, ‘How can you do this to this man?’ What made Ted Kennedy feel confident enough to grill Clarence Thomas about his private videotape collection and insinuate that this man was a sexual predator? How ironic that it was Ted Kennedy at the forefront. Throw in Joe Biden, and suddenly I saw the matrix that would define my perspective from there on in.”

In a flash of insight, Breitbart realized that the media were the Democratic Party, that the NAACP was the Democratic Party, that NOW was the Democratic Party and that the false notion that the media and the various rights groups were acting in the best interests of America independent of ideological bias seemed less laughable than criminal to him. That lesson learned, Andrew Breitbart had the work ethic, the political convictions and the knowledge base he needed to fulfill his destiny. All he needed now was to somehow randomly stumble upon that which he was born to do, which is about when the Internet happened.

A PROVIDENTIAL CONFLUENCE

From the first time he logged on to Al Gore’s magical new Information Superhighway, Andrew knew that his interests in politics, popular culture and the media could constitute a powerful vehicle for change—and that he might get to do some of the steering. “This is my absolute passion,” Breitbart says today of his media presence. “When I didn’t have [a passion], I wished for one—and I got it. Now I have no choice in the matter. I would be doing this whether they paid me to or not.”

His mission now clear, Breitbart began by establishing an editorial relationship with the Drudge Report, which began in 1996 as an on-line gossip site run out of Matt Drudge’s tiny Hollywood apartment and grew into a $10-a-year, subscriber-supported e-mail newsletter before finally assuming its present form: a virtual town square of news and commentary specializing in posting the story online before the Old Media has a chance to print or broadcast it. The Drudge Report put itself on the map in 1996 by being the first to report that Bob Dole had selected Jack Kemp as his running mate. Two years later, Drudge revealed that Newsweek magazine was sitting on a story about an inappropriate relationship between President Bill Clinton and a White House intern—the rest is history..............

.........Getting into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is relatively simple: You have to either hit 600 home runs or win 300 games as a pitcher.

Admission to the as-yet imaginary Conservative Hall of Fame will be somewhat more selective: You have to have been mocked on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” a feat Breitbart achieved just recently. During a segment on “anti-Obama hysteria,” Stewart showed a clip of Breitbart saying that at his son’s school in Brentwood the kids were required to call St. Patrick’s Day “Potato Day.” This elicited the usual guffaws from Stewart’s audience of trained seals only after their beloved host suggested (falsely) that Breitbart believed the school had done so at Obama’s behest. Andrew explains, “I was talking about all the p.c. euphemisms Obama has introduced, like ‘man-made disasters’ instead of ‘terrorist attack,’ and how that this was creating an atmosphere in which misleading euphemisms are damaging the language, and the last example I gave was Potato Day.” Which, naturally, was the only example the “Daily Show” audience saw.

Breitbart, who was also not warmly received by Bill Maher’s audience on HBO’s “Real Time,” adds, “When you walk on stage for ‘Real Time’ or the ‘Daily Show’ or even a debate and the booing starts before you speak—and people are shouting out ‘Racist!’—something is obviously, drastically wrong. The United States was founded on the free exchange of ideas. Democracy can’t survive where people can’t express ideas openly. Perhaps that’s the point. Until the Right realizes that we’re in a propaganda war and we’re losing, we’ll be on the losing end of this debate."

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