IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Be Andrew Breitbart (These Days)
An update of “merry prankster” (as Time magazine characterized him a year ago) Andrew Breitbart has been up to lately, in this profile published by The New York Times:
Part performance artist, part polemicist, Mr. Breitbart, 42, has used his network of Web sites and their legions of followers to bring conservative media red meat. Some of his reader-generated scoops have reverberated all the way to the halls of the United States Capitol, like the Weiner photos and undercover video he released of Acorn workers offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. After the videos went viral Congress ended grants to Acorn, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.
The stories and videos Mr. Breitbart plays up on his Web sites - which include Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood - tend to act as political Rorschach tests. If you agree with him, you think what he does is citizen journalism. If you don’t, his work is little more than crowd-sourced political sabotage that freely distorts the facts. …
When Mr. Breitbart is not checking his BlackBerry, which pings continually with the hundreds of e-mails and text messages he receives each day, he is talking on the phone. When he was exiting the lobby of his hotel one night, a woman approached him to pitch a story. He listened patiently for a minute and then said, “I’ll forget all this. So e-mail me at andrew@breitbart.com.”
Mr. Breitbart is always looking for new ways to channel his seemingly bottomless well of playful outrage. In Minneapolis, he decided to crash the mostly liberal Netroots Nation blogger conference that was taking place just down the street. …
A crowd of bloggers quickly gathered around him, Flip cameras in hand. One of them repeatedly shrieked questions about whether Mr. Breitbart had ever patronized a prostitute, used cocaine or looked at gay pornography. Mr. Brietbart said little in response and mostly grinned.
Another onlooker called him a racist and condemned him to hell. The growing crowd - chanting “Coward! Coward!” - became so hostile that the guard protecting Mr. Breitbart eventually had to whisk him out a back door.
“Tee-hee, tee-hee! Bedlam ensued!” he laughed, reading coverage of his stunt later. “Isn’t it funny that wherever I go, crazy stuff happens?”
Comments