‘You can play the media. You can force them to cover things. This is not just stenography. There’s a performance art to it,’ says Breitbart.
The Huffington Post was consciously designed as the Left’s answer to (and upgrade of) the Drudge Report. But instead of aggregating news and opinion, the HuffPo would host it. Newswires would appear right on the site; bloggers could battle it out in a giant group forum. The site launched in May 2005.
By June, Breitbart was out. Today, five years later, even his role in building the site is a matter of dispute. “I created the Huffington Post,” he says simply. “I drafted the plan. They followed the plan.” Huffington disagrees, saying that while he helped with strategy, the idea for the site was cooked up at a meeting in her living room after the 2004 elections. Breitbart, she says, “wasn’t present.”
Breitbart went back to Drudge, but he was still looking for ways to prove he was more than a behind-the-scenes guy. He wanted to make a name for himself, earn some money, and advance his cause. He realized he could build his own Web presence using all the lessons he’d learned. Even stories that seemed inconsequential could be framed to poke the mainstream media. Any reaction — or lack of reaction — could be bent to Breitbart’s purpose. It’s another media hack: Heads I win, tails you lose. One 2009 post featured a two-year-old video of Oscar the Grouch joking about “Pox News” on Sesame Street. When the PBS ombudsman apologized for the pun, Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog wrote up the apology as an admission of systemic bias. Another post lambasted the White House for displaying a painting it said was a Matisse rip-off. When a critic at The Washington Post defended the work, it proved — said Big Hollywood — the desire of the press corps to “shield” Obama.
The stories don’t even have to be true to be useful. In December, Big Government’s Michael Walsh put together a list of the top stories the mainstream media missed in 2009. Number four: Sarah Palin’s claim that the health care bill included a “death panel” that would decide the fate of the infirm and disabled. Of course, Palin’s claim — thoroughly discredited — was one of the most widely covered stories of the year. But for Walsh, none of that mattered. Death panels were “a marker for the entire Sarah Palin story,” he says. “Sarah Palin makes the Left’s heads explode. If only for that, it belongs on the list.”
Today, the adversarial media world that Breitbart helped create is fodder for both sides of the political spectrum. The debate itself is the news. Every time Breitbart goes after Oscar the Grouch, the Left goes after Breitbart. Liberals get to feel superior to someone thuggish enough to attack Sesame Street, and Breitbart’s message gets an extra push. Even the Obama administration plays the game, elevating opponents like Rush Limbaugh because they rally the Democratic base. “This stuff is gold for the White House. It’s gold for the Right,” says Republican consultant Goldfarb. “Everybody profits.”
To build an alternative media empire, Breitbart had to find alternative sources of money and talent. That has led to ties with some pretty sketchy characters. His first solo Web site, Breitbart.com, got 2.6 million readers in its first month thanks in large part to links from the Drudge Report. But Breitbart needed to turn that traffic into ad revenue, and he wasn’t much of a businessperson. A pair of conservative entrepreneurs volunteered to act as his sales agents. Brian Cartmell, a quiet programmer with money from his own antispam company, offered his coding expertise. Brad Hillstrom, the bearded, garrulous co-owner of a chain of medical clinics, brought contacts. Hillstrom flew Breitbart out to his lavish home on Lake Minnetonka for a weekend with Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Sandy Froman, president of the National Rifle Association. Breitbart was suitably impressed. He figured that his audience, combined with Cartmell’s geekery and Hillstrom’s Rolodex, would make millions.
On November 3, 2005, the three launched Gen Ads, a business that secured the exclusive rights to serve up banner ads on Breitbart.com. By the end of January, they were suing one another. Reuters was paying Breitbart a referral fee for every clickthrough from his site to Reuters.com, which Hillstrom and Cartmell said violated their exclusivity agreement. Breitbart countersued, pointing out that the pair had failed to run any site-specific ads on Breitbart.com and had concealed their own rather lurid pasts. Hillstrom’s company had been investigated by the Department of Labor for paying physical therapists brought in from Poland as little as $500 a month and was forced to pay $460,000 in back wages. Cartmell had been sued by Hasbro in 1996 for turning candy-land.com into a porn site. The legal wrangling dragged into the summer and cost Breitbart “more money than I had,” he says.
With the lawsuits behind him, Breitbart next became a champion of Pat Dollard, a former Hollywood agent turned gonzo war documentarian. Then it came to light that Dollard had doled out liquid Valium to marines in Iraq and robbed a pharmacy there while dressed in US military fatigues. A long Vanity Fair article detailing Dollard’s excesses made him toxic to all but the most extreme of conservative activists.
For Breitbart, though, Dollard fit right in with his self-image. Despite his conservative views, Breitbart sees himself in some ways as an heir to 1960s radicals like the Yippies and Merry Pranksters, turning the absurd into political points. In the end, that’s what he saw in O’Keefe, his star provocateur.
Now O’Keefe might become a liability as well. The FBI says that in January of this year, Joe Basel — O’Keefe’s partner in the HUD stings — and another man put on fluorescent green vests and tool belts and walked into the New Orleans offices of Democratic senator Mary Landrieu, saying they were there to fix the phones. O’Keefe was in the lobby, recording the encounter on a cell phone. When Basel couldn’t produce identification, US marshals arrested them all for entering federal property under false pretenses “with the purpose of committing a felony” — a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The cable networks, wire services, and political blogs called it a wiretapping plot. The head of the Democratic Party in Louisiana condemned the “Watergate-like break-in.” Breitbart says he had no idea that O’Keefe was in Louisiana, let alone in the senator’s office. But he knew that actions this criminal and clownish had the potential to hurt him. “I saw my life passing in front of my eyes,” he says.
O’Keefe and Breitbart traded instant messages even before O’Keefe called his attorney. Then Breitbart went on the offensive, bashing the press on Big Government for overreaching. Despite the hysterical headlines, O’Keefe hadn’t actually been charged with wiretapping. MSNBC reprimanded correspondent David Shuster for his attacks on O’Keefe, and The Washington Post issued a correction to its story about his “bugging.” Those are the kind of things that count as “wins” on Breitbart’s scorecard.
Then, Breitbart and his bloggers tried to swap the break-in narrative for a Byzantine conspiracy tale. O’Keefe may have used poor judgment, they said, but his arrest and subsequent treatment proved that the Democrat-media complex was working to ruin Breitbart and O’Keefe as payback for the Acorn sting.
After the story’s first couple of waves come and go, I call Breitbart in Los Angeles. “I believe the Justice Department is doing to me what we did to them,” he says. “They kept him in jail for 28 hours. During that period of time they were able to use the media to cast a false narrative of Watergate II, illegal wiretapping, breaking and entering, blah blah blah. It’s a joke. It shows the complicity between this administration and the press to destroy political enemies.”
He takes a breath. “They call us tea-baggers. They call us racist, sexist, homophobic, and we are finally punching back. It’s over, dude. It’s over. You think you’re gonna be able to put the genie back in the bottle? It’s over. And if you don’t like my aggression, there are going to be millions more of me,” Breitbart says, the cell phone connection skipping in and out. “Because the new media provides the tools and there are millions out there who are outraged. Now they realize, ‘Wow, anybody can do that. We can hold these people accountable. We have the means. We have the technology.’” Then Breitbart hangs up. He has more interviews to conduct, a speech at the National Tea Party Convention to prep, and bloggers to talk to. The O’Keefe story might still turn out very bad for Breitbart. But there is no way he’s going to let someone else tell it.
Contributing editor Noah Shachtman (www.wired.com/dangerroom)