Let's do this right.
Some people who knew him:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/breitbart/
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/opinio...art/index.htmlQuote:
In the years before he died on Wednesday night, Andrew Breitbart, the conservative media provocateur, had turned himself into something of a public caricature. On cable TV and at tea party rallies, he became loathed and loved as the perpetually and righteously pissed-off right-winger, hurling insults and three-quarter truths at the “Democrat-media complex” as fast as he could chuck them out.
But I knew a different Andrew Breitbart, the one before he started his eponymous series of conservative websites, before he co-founded the left-wing Huffington Post, and before he became a best-selling author. In the middle of the 2000s, Breitbart was still the (largely) hidden hand behind the uber-popular Drudge Report. He was a partisan back then, a deep one. But he was more interested in shooting the shit with friends than in picking political fights.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1314639.htmlQuote:
Anyone who tries to reduce his importance to that of a fire-breathing, ax-wielding right-wing hatchet man -- a sort of Sean Hannity Jr. - is going to miss entirely his enduring legacy to the current and future mediascape.
...
His legacy has nothing to do with whether the Republican party picked up Anthony Weiner's congressional seat or whether ACORN has been able to renew its funding. It has to do with the ways in which he created new places and spaces to talk about whatever any of us want to talk about. He told Reason in 2004 that after feeling ignored by existing outlets, "We decided to go out and create our media."
It doesn't matter who we is, kemo sabe. It's the conservatives at Drudge, the liberals at HuffPo, the leftists at DailyKos, the libertarians at Reason. It's all of us and Breitbart helped create and grow a series of do-it-yourself demonstration projects through which we can all speak more loudly and more fully.
Breitbart is dead, but the conversation pits he built will live on for a long, long time. A lot of people theorize about democratizing the public square and bringing new voices and sources into conversations about politics and culture. Breitbart actually did it. It wasn't always perfect and it wasn't always pretty (ask Shirley Sherrod, the former Department of Agriculture official who sued him for defamation), but he blazed a path that surely leads to a far richer and more interesting mediascape than the one we all grew up with.
http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/0...w-breitbart-19Quote:
In 1997, Matt Drudge introduced Breitbart to Arianna Huffington, who recalled in an interview her two experiences working with him -- first on a personal site, Arianna Online, and later with The Huffington Post.
"From the beginning, the thing about Andrew was just his exuberance," Huffington said. "When he started working for me, soon after that, it was hard to get him to leave the office." Huffington said she had to conspire with Susie, his "amazing wife," in order to get him to leave the office.
Breitbart played a key role in getting Arianna Online -- which included newspaper columns, a chat room and even an advice column featuring Huffington's mom called "Ask Ya-Ya" -- online. "[My mother] would write her answers longhand or give them to Andrew and he would transcribe them and post them," Huffington recalled. "And throughout that whole time, she would feed him."
But the working relationship wasn't all about online advice and Greek food at the kitchen table in Huffington's Brentwood home. Breitbart was obsessed with scoops, could dig for information online and later worked with Huffington on a series of columns revealing that Larry Lawrence, a top Clinton donor, had fabricated his war record and shouldn't have been buried in Arlington Cemetery -- an honor given at the president's request. Lawrence's remains were later dug up and moved to another site.
Breitbart next went to work with Drudge, recalling in his book a period when all three were intent on shaking up the legacy media back East.
"I had my buddies Arianna and Matt, and we were all hanging out together, we were all doing more from Los Angeles with minimal resources than the mainstream media were doing from Washington D.C. with hundreds of reporters," Breitbart wrote. "It was great fun."
Drudge, in a statement to readers Thursday, described Breitbart as "a constant source of energy, passion and commitment" through the site's first decade.
Breitbart would return to work for Huffington in late 2004 on what became The Huffington Post, staying on until shortly after the site's May 2005 launch.
He was also a fighter for gay rights:Quote:
It was always funny to many of his friends that Andrew Breitbart, after he became famous, was probably most famous for being a 100 percent polarizing political lightning rod. The reason that was funny was two-fold: He didn't actually have strong philosophical/policy beliefs - at all - and he was always perfectly comfortable and perfectly welcome in ideologically and culturally diverse settings. Like my L.A. backyard (pictured), dozens of times.
That doesn't mean the guy stumbled accidentally into politcal conflict. He lived for it. He was genuinely, convincingly, overwhelmingly outraged at the workaday biases of liberal media, academia, and entertainment, and always positioned himself smack dab in the center of it. He'd be in the middle of some hilarious story about trying to do unspeakable things at some Irvine Meadows concert in the 1980s, and then if the conversation got steered toward the media, his eyes would narrow and redden, his face would go purplish, and Breitbart-Hulk would take over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi952nAd8PA
CR
