Andrew Breitbart
Andrew Breitbart was a prominent figure in the alternative media movement, recognized for leveraging the Internet to influence political discourse in the United States. Born in Los Angeles in 1969, he was adopted into a Jewish family and grew up in a household that emphasized secular values. He attended Tulane University, where he became involved in conservative politics after discovering talk radio. Breitbart initially collaborated with Matt Drudge to enhance The Drudge Report, a key political news aggregation site. He later co-founded The Huffington Post but departed when it took a more liberal direction. In 2005, he launched Breitbart.com, which became a platform for conservative commentary and investigative journalism, featuring several spin-off sites like Big Government and Big Hollywood.
Throughout his career, Breitbart's work often aimed at exposing what he perceived as liberal bias in mainstream media. His controversial tactics included undercover videos that led to significant political fallout, such as the defunding of ACORN and the resignation of Congressman Anthony Weiner. Despite his passing in 2012 from heart failure, Breitbart's media legacy endures through the continued publication and influence of Breitbart.com and its associated platforms, perpetuating his vision of targeted political journalism.
Subject Terms
Andrew Breitbart
Founder of Breitbart.com
- Born: February 1, 1969
- Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California
- Died: March 1, 2012
- Place of Death: Los Angeles, California
Primary Company/Organization:Breitbart.com
Introduction
Andrew Breitbart was a driving force behind the alternative media movement, which recognized and harnessed the power of the Internet to engage the masses and drive political change. He spent his early career working with Matt Drudge to create one of the world's most influential political news aggregation sites, The Drudge Report, which provides ready and direct access to content from all types of news channels all over the world. Breitbart went on to cofound the equally influential Huffington Post but left almost immediately when it became a forum for the liberal left. In 2005, Breitbart created his own online community for the political right under the umbrella of Breitbart.com. His sites—Breitbart.tv, Big Hollywood, Big Government, Big Journalism, and Big Peace—went beyond directing or hosting media traffic. They also served as channels to present breaking news that challenged what Breitbart believed to be the liberal establishment and leftist popular culture. Individuals and organizations have been toppled by the Breitbart.com franchise, which continues to pursue its controversial agenda even after the death of its founder in March 2012.
Early Life
Andrew Breitbart was born to a Jewish mother and an Irish father on February 1, 1969, in Los Angeles, California. His birth parents gave him up, and he was adopted as an infant by successful restaurateur Gerald Breitbart and his bank executive wife, Arlene. Andrew grew up in the Breitbart home in Brentwood, California, and was raised as a secular Jew along with his adopted younger sister, Tracy.
Breitbart attended the prestigious Carlthorp School in Santa Monica, California, for his elementary education before enrolling in the private Brentwood School in Los Angeles, California, to complete his secondary education. He was not a typical straight-A Brentwood student bent on an Ivy League future. He got average grades and spent his time pulling pranks aimed at entertaining his fellow students and subverting the school's upper-crust establishment.
Upon graduation from Brentwood School, he left his home state and moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, to attend Tulane University. He relished the freedom and became immersed in the college party scene. He joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. By his own account, Breitbart spent much of his time at Tulane engaged in excessive consumption of alcohol, experimentation with drugs, and gambling. Despite his focus on extracurricular activities, Breitbart graduated from Tulane University in 1991 with a bachelor of arts degree in American studies.
After receiving his degree, Breitbart moved back to Los Angeles and floated in and out of menial jobs. He worked as a waiter, a delivery man, and a low-level movie production worker. A lack of direction had him searching for focus. His search took him briefly to Austin, Texas. However, it was not until he began listening to Rush Limbaugh and like-minded conservatives on the radio that he finally found his motivation. He embraced a philosophy of resolute conservatism and set his sights on ridding the country of what he considered to be a debilitating liberalism that was spreading throughout the United States. He felt that rampant liberalism was being driven by the mindsets and messages of the country's powerful media companies, so he targeted his efforts on that industry. He recognized that the Internet would be the most potent weapon in his conservative campaign.
Life's Work
In 1995, Breitbart contacted Matt Drudge, the founder and force behind the conservative Drudge Report, and asked if he could be of assistance. Breitbart began working for Drudge both in creating content and behind the scenes. For the next decade, Breitbart helped Drudge transform the once gossip-based electronic newsletter into one of the most prominent and powerful web-based aggregation sites for the world's political news. Breitbart believed that by using the Internet to deliver news directly to the public, The Drudge Report could circumvent what he considered to be liberally biased reporting by established media channels. A single link from The Drudge Report could expose any story from any newsroom around the globe in an instant to hundreds of thousands of readers anywhere.
Drudge introduced Breitbart to Arianna Huffington, at the time a right-wing author and analyst. Breitbart began working with Huffington as a researcher and web expert. When the mainstream media published the presence of Drudge and Huffington at the embezzlement trial of Susan McDougal (significant because she was a former business associate of President Bill Clinton), Breitbart had an epiphany about the power he and his colleagues held over the media.
Breitbart decided he wanted to have a bigger voice. In 2004, he coauthored a book along with journalist Mark Ebner titled Hollywood, Interrupted. It was a scathing commentary on the state of Hollywood celebrity. Around the same time, Huffington contacted Breitbart to help create The Huffington Post. Breitbart envisioned the site as a bipartisan blog that would complement The Drudge Report. By then, however, Huffington's ideology had swung to the left. She and the other site cofounders—Internet entrepreneur Jonah Peretti and media businessman Ken Lerer—decided that they wanted to give the site a more liberal bent. The site launched in May 2005 as a hosted forum for liberal discussion. Breitbart quickly became dissatisfied and left the project. However, his experiences at The Huffington Post had given him the opportunity to build a site from the ground up and had helped him realize that if The Huffington Post could create an online gathering place for the liberal left, he could do the same for the conservative right.
Later that year, Breitbart launched Breitbart.com. He used the conservative news and commentary site to break high-impact stories, especially those that exposed or riled his liberal foes. The site attracted more than 2.5 million readers in its first month, helped largely by links to the site from the by-then-well-established Drudge Report. By November, Breitbart had partnered with two business owners—Brian Cartmell and Brad Hillstrom—to form Gen Ads. The venture had the exclusive rights to display banner ads on Breitbart.com, but distrust and dissatisfaction led to the dissolution of the partnership within three months.
In the years that followed, Breitbart launched several other sites under the Breitbart brand's umbrella. Political video blog Breitbart.tv debuted in 2007. The next year, Breitbart launched the first site in his “Big” franchise. It started with Big Hollywood.com in 2008 as a tool to showcase what Breitbart believed was the liberal hold Hollywood has on popular culture. Big Government.com followed in 2009 to put the spotlight on the government's liberal leanings, as perceived by Breitbart. In 2010, Big Journalism.com was born to bring attention to what Breitbart emphatically believed was the left-leaning bias of the popular press. Later that year, Breitbart launched Big Peace.com to address international news, foreign policy, and national security from a conservative perspective.
When it launched in 2009, the fledgling Big Government site featured an undercover video revealing alleged improprieties that led to the defunding and downfall of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN. The next year, another video on Breitbart's sites forced the temporary dismissal of US Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. The video had been edited to suggest Sherrod had discriminated against White farmers, which was the opposite of what Sherrod said. Breitbart's estate later settled a lawsuit. In 2011, Breitbart's Big Journalism site posted an explicit photograph and broke the story of sexual indiscretions by Congressman Anthony Weiner, Democrat from New York. The story forced Weiner's resignation from office one month later, in June. Only two months earlier, Breitbart's second book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World, was published. It was ranked on The New York Times best-seller list. A political documentary about him, Hating Breitbart, was released in 2012.
Breitbart's sites have been listed among the top hundred most influential new-media sites as ranked by Technorati. Even after Breitbart's death, his alternative media empire continued his legacy of targeted-assault journalism. In May 2012, Breitbart.com posted a 1991 booklet from President Barack Obama's former literary agency, incorrectly indicating that the president was born overseas in Kenya rather than in the US Hawaiian Islands, as has been publicly stated and verified.
Personal Life
Breitbart met his wife, Susannah, through a mutual friend during a night out at a karaoke bar when he was a college student in 1988. However, the couple did not begin dating until they met again in 1992. The Breitbarts wed in 1997 in a backyard ceremony at the Venice Canals home of the bride's father, actor Orson Bean. They welcomed their first son, Samson, two years later. Their daughter, Mia, arrived two years after that. Their son Charlie was born after a four-year interval, and William followed two years later. The family of six lived in Westwood, California.
Shortly after midnight on March 1, 2012, Breitbart collapsed on a sidewalk not far from his house during a late-night walk. A witness called paramedics, who attempted to revive Breitbart at the scene. He was rushed to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, located nearby, but all attempts to save him failed, and he was pronounced dead at the age of forty-three. An autopsy revealed that Breitbart had died of natural causes as a result of heart failure. The stress on his heart stemmed from coronary disease and an enlarged heart that had begun causing symptoms a year earlier.
Bibliography
Breitbart, Andrew. Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! New York: Grand Central, 2011. Print.
Breitbart, Andrew, and Mark Ebner. Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon; The Case Against Celebrity. New York: Wiley, 2005. Print.
“Breitbart Tells Tea Partiers: ‘We Are The Majority in This Country.'” Human Events 66.8 (2010): 3. Web. 12 Aug. 2012.
Dobuzinskis, Alex. “Conservative Activist Andrew Breitbart Dead at 43.” Reuters, 1 Mar. 2012, www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/conservative-activist-andrew-breitbart-dead-at-43-idUSTRE8201AV/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024
Friedersdorf, Conor. “Andrew Breitbart's Legacy: Credit and Blame Where It's Due.” The Atlantic, 8 Mar. 2012, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/03/andrew-breitbarts-legacy-credit-and-blame-where-its-due/253953/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.
Jonsson, Patrik. “Andrew Breitbart, a ‘Happy Warrior,' Rallied the Right and Vexed the Left.” Christian Science Monitor, Mar. 2012, www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/0301/Andrew-Breitbart-a-happy-warrior-rallied-the-right-and-vexed-the-left. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.
Oney, Steve. “Citizen Breitbart.” Time 175.13 (2010): 34–37. Web. 12 Aug. 2012.
Rosen, Rebecca. “What Andrew Breitbart Got About the Internet.” The Atlantic, 1 Mar. 2012, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/what-andrew-breitbart-got-about-the-internet/253836/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.
"'Walk Toward the Fire': Remembering Andrew Breitbart." Breitbart, 1 Mar. 2024, www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/03/01/walk-toward-the-fire-remembering-andrew-breitbart/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.