Hating Breitbart | American-Rattlesnake

It’s been over a year since we lost Andrew Breitbart, although it seems much longer, and his departure is just as piercing today, as we confront an administration unencumbered by the rule of law, overseen by a politically neutered Congress, and whose actions are facilitated by a press whose slavish devotion to the left’s ideological agenda is something you would expect to find in the former Soviet Union.

I don’t think we can exaggerate the importance of the space he occupied within the counterrevolutionary movement against the domestic left, and particularly, its allies among the mainstream media. Sitting through a screening of Hating Breitbart, a remarkable film directed by Andrew Marcus which examines why his enemies hated him-and went to such great lengths to misrepresent, vilify or simply ignore his message-reminded me yet again of what a groundbreaking figure he was in disseminating news and information that had been suppressed by what Jim Lehrer nostalgically calls America’s “gatekeepers.”
The beauty of this documentary is that it captures the essence of Andrew Breitbart both as the pubic face of an online samizdat as well as the individual whose unique personality and character shaped the movement which arrived at an historical moment when-as Andrew Klaven observes-quantum leaps of technology had made the stranglehold the fourth estate exercised over the distribution of information increasingly obsolescent.

This is one of the recurring themes of Hating Breitbart, whose interview subjects accurately diagnose the dilemma facing a mainstream media which has consistently failed to adapt to the challenges imposed by progress. In this regard, the campaign to destroy Andrew Breitbart’s reputation made practical sense not only because he offered an alternative form of news gathering and media consumption, but a wholly different business model.
Nothing illustrates the threat this new form of investigative reporting posed to the existing model of journalism more vividly than the mainstream media’s reaction to the 2009 sting conducted by Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe, which uncovered ACORN employees colluding with putative criminals in order to exploit the American taxpayer...