Breitbart is a stalwart presence on Fox News programming.
In 1991, Breitbart was a bored twentysomething from Brentwood, a ritzy entertainment-industry enclave in west LA. A hyperactive news junkie, he read several newspapers and watched several newscasts a day. A low-level movie production job had left him disgusted by what he saw as Hollywood’s culture of limousine liberalism. He was miserable. “Kurt Cobain without the record deal,” he says. “Just give me the gun.”
While waiting tables at a Venice bar and grill, he got to know one of the regulars, veteran TV actor Orson Bean. Bean had a wild reputation in Hollywood. He had written a book extolling the spiritual power of orgasm and, even more shocking, was a die-hard Nixon man. Breitbart admired him as an unpredictable rebel, a raconteur, an independent thinker — the kind of guy Breitbart wanted to be. He started dating Bean’s daughter Susie and eventually married her. Bean served as Breitbart’s first mentor, encouraging him to cut against what both men saw as LA’s leftie grain.
Breitbart found his second mentor on a lark. He had become a fan of Matt Drudge’s online newsletter, a weird, irresistible mix of right-wing politics, conspiracy theories, extreme weather, and pop culture. In 1995, Breitbart emailed Drudge to see if he could help out. Pretty soon, his bylines were appearing on the report alongside Drudge’s. Breitbart had found his niche.
A link from the Drudge Report could bring hundreds of thousands of readers to a newspaper story — even if an editor had buried it on page C23. So reporters who wanted exposure for their work reached out to Drudge and Breitbart as soon as their pieces were published (or even before). Those tips gave the pair a back door into virtually every newsroom on the planet. In early 1998, the site was able to break not only the news that President Clinton had sex with an intern but also the fact that Newsweek spiked a story on the affair.
But scoops alone weren’t what made the Drudge Report a must-read. The site had a new feeling of urgency, of velocity. Together, Drudge and Breitbart set the vicious, unceasing pace that is now the norm for Twitter-era journalism.
No one really knows how they did it. Neither Breitbart nor Drudge will discuss their partnership. “I’ve honored Drudge’s wishes, spoken and unspoken” is all Breitbart will say. “He’s a private guy.”
At the turn of the century, Drudge receded from the spotlight, and journalists and politicos learned that the key to getting link-love from the Drudge Report was to IM Andrew Breitbart. Among those members of the Democrat-media complex: me, an ex-Clinton-Gore campaign staffer contributing to The New York Times. In 2008, I took Breitbart to Wired’s 15th anniversary party in Manhattan. He took me to gatherings of pols and pundits at Yamashiro, a restaurant in the Hollywood Hills designed to look like a shogun palace. Yet Breitbart’s relationship with the press is generally adversarial, and even though he has millions of readers, he describes himself as being part of the “undermedia.” Breitbart believes in the conservative cause, but he also knows that casting himself as the Resistance in an information war gets him an audience. “We know the undermedia has power,” Breitbart says. “And it comes from positioning it against the mainstream media.”
One thing Breitbart will say about Drudge, though, is that his mentor introduced him to Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing pundit and Drudge confidant. Breitbart became her researcher and Web guru. By her side, he learned that the media could be more than scooped — it could be hacked. The first exploit was almost an accident: In September 1998, he suggested that Drudge and Huffington go to the embezzlement trial of former Clinton business associate Susan McDougal. The Los Angeles Times took note of their attendance the next day in a headline and a few sentences in the Metro section. Publicists have been pulling similar tricks since silent-movie days, sending celebrity clients to public events. But to Breitbart, the move was a revelation. “You can play the media. You can force them to cover things,” he says. “This is not just stenography. There’s a performance art to it.”
Breitbart started looking for ways to attract the spotlight to himself. In 2004, he and journalist Mark Ebner wrote the book Hollywood, Interrupted, which excoriated the drug habits and vapid liberalism of many stars. Breitbart emerged as a conservative spokesperson with a passion for the culture wars not seen since the Lewinsky years. “They’re an elitist pestilence,” he says of his celebrity targets. “They tell us we can’t have SUVs. They try to impose a one-child-per-family policy. But they can do whatever the hell they want because they’re gallivanting around in the name of the greater good.” He pauses while I try to figure out the “one-child” comment. “God, I fucking hate them.”
Shortly after Hollywood, Interrupted came out, Huffington — by then a left-wing pundit — invited Breitbart to help her and Democratic fund-raiser Ken Lerer assemble what would become liberal Hollywood’s favorite Web site, the Huffington Post. It was political apostasy, of course. But the paycheck was substantial for Breitbart, then a father of three. Also, he says, building something from scratch was a chance “to show that I was a presence and a player.” Breitbart liked the idea of a new forum for ideological combat, separate from the traditional media’s slanted playing field. “He was extremely interested in how to have a conversation online — how to bring together all these interesting voices,” Huffington says. “Now it’s, like, so obvious. But at the time, it had never been done.”