Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge’s former No. 2 and the founder of the right-leaning websites Big Government and Big Journalism, has always used journalism to paint a world that reflects his own offbeat interior worldview. From a great profile of Breitbart on Slate today:
His first piece for the Tulane Hullaballoo was a field analysis of Tulane’s most notoriously debauched hookup bar, complete with annotated floor diagrams and submitted on 19 cocktail napkins. “Then I started to descend into pure weirdness,” Breitbart said. His articles were stream-of-consciousness brain dumps written on deadline. One recounted a bowling date with the fictional Ambassador Johnny Autrod DeBumperspoons. “He was ambassador to Chile,” Breitbart said, “but he was also ambassador to Chili’s the restaurant chain, and the ambassador to the sensation of being chilly.”
As a high-school reporter, he went even further in stretching the truth to get across what he was trying to say:
One of the first articles Breitbart ever published appeared in his high-school newspaper, the Brentwood Eagle, in 1986. It was an anthropological dissection of the school’s senior and junior parking lots. One had Mercedes and BMWs, the other Sciroccos and GTIs. Breitbart needed a quote to support his thesis. So he made one up — and attributed it to the new kid from South Korea, Henry Sohn. Breitbart recalls it verbatim: “Seniors are having too much of nice car than juniors.” “He loved it,” Breitbart says. It was an epiphany. Not only did Breitbart enjoy writing — he found he could do it in a quirky, funny, politically incorrect way.
No judgment here — your Intel editors wrote a lot of horse crap when we were younger. This story actually makes the almost-always-angry-seeming Breitbart seem likable. Good-humored, at the very least. Luckily, Slate also posted a video mash-up of Breitbart abusing fellow journalists. Full picture, people!
Big Breitbart [Slate]
