Few media personalities have had as big an impact on how news is consumed and distributed as Andrew Breitbart, the controversial founder of the conservative news site Breitbart. Breitbart News NetworkIn a new collection of essays, “Against the Corporate Media,” author Larry O'Connor explains how Breitbart transformed a once-in-a-lifetime news scoop into a media company in 2011 whose outsized influence still resonates more than a decade later.
At Andrew Breitbart's funeral in 2012, I purposefully looked at the people sitting around me and imprinted their faces into my memory. I wanted to remember who was there, the men and women Andrew had chosen to help develop and build his new media empire, realizing his vision of a revolutionary new media paradigm.
There was Greg Gutfeld. There was Ben Shapiro. Andrew Klavan, Dana Loesch, Michael Flynn (not a three-star general), Michael Walsh, Matt Drudge, Dennis Miller. There were a few Congressmen, maybe even a Senator. There were a few actors who were well-known in film and television, plus a few media people from the traditional corporate “mainstream media” – the very mainstream media that Andrew was singlehandedly trying to destroy.
Andrew was undoubtedly a visionary. He foresaw a new media world in which the gatekeepers would become irrelevant or disappear. He saw this new media world emerge the moment Matt Drudge exposed the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the pristine, one-page, black-and-white Drudge Report. “With that one story, billion-dollar networks and The New York Times had become bystanders to the biggest political scandal since Watergate. If it had happened with Lewinsky, he wondered, why couldn't it happen again? Why could it never happen again?”
As managing editor at Drudge, Andrew learned the rhythms of the news cycle, and then in 2011, something amazing happened: Andrew not only broke news stories and original reporting in the waves of the news cycle, but he also found himself at the center of a chain of events that would either destroy him (and lead to his arrest on federal criminal charges) or be singlehandedly responsible for the downfall of a powerful congressman with ties to the Clinton dynasty: the Anthony Weiner scandal.
On the evening of May 27, 2011, Andrew called an emergency conference call with all editors. I joined the call and Andrew informed me that a tweet had been sent an hour earlier from the account of Congressman Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, containing a photo of an erect penis barely contained in a pair of skin-tight canvas pants. There was no doubt that the photo had been sent from the Congressman's account. By the time we were on the call discussing the matter, the tweet had been deleted. Andrew had taken a screenshot, and several of us (including me) were able to view the tweet and confirm that it had not been tampered with. The tweet definitely had come from Weiner's verified account.
But how do we treat this as news? What on earth happened? No one can claim that this photo was sent by Weiner, because someone in his office has access to his account. Or maybe he was hacked. Was this newsworthy? If so, what was the actual story?
During the call, we witnessed Weiner's tweet disappear before our eyes, as did the Twitter and Facebook pages of the recipients of the vulgar images. Weiner then claimed he had been hacked into his account. “We are watching for a cover-up,” Andrew told us all. As always, he was right.
“Of course this is news,” he said. “Big news: A sitting congressman's Twitter account has been hacked and lewd images have been released. It's quite possible this is an attempt to frame him.” Either that, or Weiner's been up to some pretty sleazy stuff and is trying to cover it up. Andrew wrote the headline himself: “Weinergate: Congressman Claims 'Facebook Hacked', Lewd Photos Released on Twitter.” Yes, Andrew himself coined the phrase “Weinergate.”
The original post was published late at night on May 27th, Pacific time. Every story on the site was time-stamped from Los Angeles, where Andrew is based and is from. Social media erupted, and by the time the East Coast woke up the next morning, it was already a sensation.
It was Memorial Day weekend, and a normally dormant news cycle was the perfect time for a story like this to break. We were tracking how the mainstream media was covering this, and it quickly became clear that the primary focus would be on Breitbart, not Weiner.
Weiner stuck to his guns and denied being hacked. Suddenly, reporters were blaming Andrews. The story unfolded, and before Memorial Day, Andrews was getting multiple calls denying that he had hacked the social media accounts of sitting members of Congress.
Who should we believe? The left-wing Democrats who married Hillary Clinton's personal assistant Huma Abedin, or “right-wing bloggers” like Andrew Breitbart? Weiner was a darling of the liberal media in Manhattan and Washington and a protégé of New York Senator Chuck Schumer. Former President Bill Clinton even officiated at Weiner and Abedin's wedding. Breitbart, on the other hand, was an outcast and was treated as such by the mainstream media.
Cable news fell in love with the story and thought they could destroy Breitbart, their way of finally eliminating a right-wing upstart who had made a name for himself by ignoring their rules.
CNN invited Andrew to discuss our article, while Breitbart said, based on the facts, that the media should scrutinize Weiner and dig into his apparent interest in sharing lewd and lascivious material with very young women. House legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin then appeared on air to analyze whether Weiner or Breitbart were in legal trouble (depending on which side you believe).
“Look, this is a light-hearted story. This was just a silly little thing that happened. It's no big deal,” Toobin said. (Toobin's “it's no big deal” is actually pretty funny considering it led to the downfall of his career a decade later.)
On MSNBC, Salon's Joan Walsh attacked Breitbart and made him (and those of us who worked at the site) the villains of the story. Joan came to the conclusion that Weinergate was the product of a “right-wing smear machine” and that Andrew Breitbart was the creator and operator of that machine. Instead of pursuing the truth, corporate journalists from major establishment outlets were spending their energy and effort blaming Breitbart as the messenger. Their liberal hero, Anthony Weiner, was actually the one who committed this terrible act of self-destruction.
The pressure on Andrew was intense as Weiner stuck to his guns. But cracks were beginning to show. By midweek, some reporters were pointing out that Weiner hadn't contacted the FBI, or even the Capitol Police, about the alleged cyber intrusion. But he had hired a lawyer. When CNN's Dana Bash confronted Weiner on the Capitol steps, he played “confusing perpetrator” rather than “noble victim.” It was clear he was hiding something. Weiner's initial clear denial gave way to a bald admission that he couldn't “with any certainty” that he wasn't the culprit.
We got him. We knew from an anonymous tip that Weiner had done this before, and we knew he was lying. By the time our tip published on June 6, 2011, when Andrew infamously took to the podium in midtown Manhattan and hijacked Weiner's own press conference, Andrew's innocence had been thoroughly vindicated, even if Toobin, Joan Walsh and other his detractors would never admit it.
Weinergate best illustrates the revolution that Andrew fought for and won in the short three years he was in the public eye. Like the Lewinsky scandal 15 years earlier, the Weiner affair spread online, unseen by the self-appointed gatekeepers of news. If they had still been in charge, the case would have been shelved. It would have disappeared. But Andrew's new media revolution created an environment in which the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the broadcast networks became irrelevant bystanders.
Ultimately, Weinergate was a media story: how the media missed the story, how media insiders ignored it because they didn't like what they saw, how they skewed it to fit their own preconceived ideas, and finally, how they shoved it into the back of their minds, as evidenced by the fact that in 2013, when a “reformed” Weiner came close to becoming mayor of New York City, they gleefully celebrated his spectacular return to office, an election he would have easily won had it not been for yet another sexting scandal.
The old media landscape has changed dramatically since Weinergate. The media revolution that Andrew started came full circle in 2016 when a man who was rejected by the editorial boards of 98 of the 100 largest newspapers in America won the presidential election. Andrew would have loved to see the media so thoroughly humiliated, ignored and dismissed by the American people on election night 2016, and would undoubtedly have enjoyed Trump's relentless battle with the media throughout his presidency.
From “Go Against Corporate Media: 40 Ways the Press Hates You.” Copyright 2024. Posthill Press
