Great Moments In Cognitive Dissonance

I’ve been a big fan of Jack Shafer’s media columns at Slate, but the title of this piece, “Two Cheers for Andrew Breitbart — Sometimes it takes an outsider to show the press corps the way” is curious. So what makes Breitbart an “outsider”? This is the media where former New York Times editor Howell Raines famously said, that his paper’s diversity efforts have made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse.” Are its politics that monolithic that any apostasy means you’ve “blacklisted yourself?” That’s Roger L. Simon’s phrase for how Hollywood works, but thanks to the Internet, journalism is now much more decentralized a product. And in no small part, thanks to Breitbart. In other words, journalism is something you do — it’s not a title given to you by a guild. Since the mid-to-late-1990s Breibart has: Worked behind the scenes at the Drudge Report since its early days. Co-authored Hollywood Interrupted. Helped launch the Huffington Post. Distributes online news feeds of all the main wire services. Partnered with an online TV service. Pens a weekly column for the Washington Times. Launched two of his own Internet salons, Big Hollywood and Big Government. In contrast, during that same period, much of traditional journalism went backwards. They attacked newcomers such as Drudge and the Blogosphere. They used forged documents to bring down one president and were so badly in the tank for one candidate in 2008 that 90 percent of the public can see it. The rest here.

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