Few media personalities had as much impact on how news is consumed and delivered than Andrew Breitbart, the controversial founder of the conservative news-site Breitbart News Network. In the new collection of essays Against the Corporate Media, author Larry O’Connor explains how Breitbart translated a once-in-a-lifetime news scoop in 2011 into a media enterprise whose outsized influence still resonates more than a decade later.
There was a moment during Andrew Breitbart’s funeral in 2012 when I purposefully scanned those sitting around me and soaked their faces into my memory banks. I wanted to remember who was there.
I wanted to remember the faces of the men and women Andrew had chosen to help to develop and build his new media empire all while fulfilling his vision of a revolutionary new media paradigm.
Greg Gutfeld was there. So was Ben Shapiro. Andrew Klavan, Dana Loesch, Michael Flynn (not the three-star general), Michael Walsh, Matt Drudge and Dennis Miller. I also saw a couple of congressmen and possibly a senator. I saw a few recognizable actors from film and television plus a good handful of media types from the traditional, corporate “mainstream media.” The very mainstream media Andrew wanted to single-handedly destroy.
Andrew was a visionary, no doubt. He saw a new media world where the gatekeepers would become irrelevant, if not extinct. He saw this new media world emerge firsthand, at the moment when Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal on his rudimentary, single-page, monochromatic Drudge Report website.
With that one story, he saw the networks and The New York Times with their billion-dollar combined budgets reduced to mere spectators to the biggest political scandal since Watergate. If it happened with Lewinsky, he thought, why can’t it happen again? Why can’t it happen in perpetuity?
As Drudge’s primary editor, Andrew learned the rhythmic nature of the news cycle. And then, in 2011, something extraordinary happened. Andrew didn’t just deliver news items and original reporting into the news cycle waves — he personally got caught in the center of a whirlpool of events that would either end with his destruction (and perhaps even his arrest on federal criminal charges), or he would be single-handedly instrumental in the downfall of a powerful member of Congress with connections to the Clinton dynasty. This was the Anthony Weiner scandal.
It was the evening of May 27, 2011, when Andrew called an emergency conference call of all his editors. I jumped on and Andrew informed us that in the past hour a tweet had been sent from the account of Rep. Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, that included a picture of an erection barely contained within the confines of a pair of snug, cloth underpants.
There was no doubt the picture was sent from the congressman’s account. By the time we were on the phone discussing it, the tweet had been deleted. Andrew had taken a screenshot of it and several of us (me included) had seen the tweet and could verify that the screenshot was not doctored, the tweet had definitely originated from Weiner’s verified account.
But how to handle this as a news story? What, exactly, had happened? We couldn’t claim the picture was sent by Weiner because it could have been someone in his office with access to his account. Or, he could have been hacked. Was this newsworthy, and if it was, what was the actual story here?
During the conference call, we observed Weiner’s tweets disappearing before our eyes as well as the Twitter and Facebook page of the intended recipient of the tawdry image. Weiner than claimed on his account that he had been hacked. “We’re watching the cover-up,” Andrew said to all of us. As usual, he was right.
“Of course, we have a story here,” he said. “We have a huge story. A sitting congressman’s Twitter account has been hacked with a pornographic image. It may very well be an attempt to frame him.” It was either that, or that Weiner was guilty of some pretty tawdry stuff, and now he was engaged in covering it up. Andrew personally wrote the headline: “Weinergate: Congressman Claims ‘Facebook Hacked’ as Lewd Photo Hits Twitter.” Yes, Andrew himself coined the phrase: “Weinergate.”
The original post was published late in the evening of May 27, Pacific time, as all articles on the sites were time-stamped from Los Angeles since this was Andrew’s home and base. Social media exploded. By the time the East Coast woke up the next morning, it was already a sensation.
It was Memorial Day weekend, and the usually dormant news cycle was perfectly poised for a story like this. We were tracking how mainstream outlets would cover it, and before long it was clear that the main focus was not on Weiner but on Breitbart.
Weiner continued to stick with his denial and his claim that he had been hacked. Suddenly, reporters started pointing the finger at Andrew. The narrative evolved and before Memorial Day rolled around Andrew found himself on phone call after phone call denying that he had hacked the social media accounts of a sitting congressman.
After all, who are you going to believe—a leftwing Democratic politician married to Hillary Clinton’s personal assistant, Huma Abedin, or a “rightwing blogger” like Andrew Breitbart? Weiner was a darling of the liberal press in Manhattan and Washington, a protégé of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. Former President Bill Clinton, of all people, had officiated at Weiner and Abedin’s wedding. Whereas Breitbart was a pariah, and the mainstream media treated him as such.
Cable news became obsessed with the story; they thought they could destroy Breitbart. This was their way of finally being rid of the rightwing upstart who made his name defying their rules.
CNN had Andrew on to discuss our story, where Breitbart factually noted that the media should be scrutinizing Weiner and digging into his apparent interest in sharing lewd, lascivious material with very young women. House legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin was then brought on the air to analyze the legal trouble that Weiner or Breitbart might be in, depending on whom one believed.
“Look, this is a light-hearted story. This is a silly little thing that happened; it’s not a big deal,” Toobin said (Toobin’s “not a big deal” is just delicious in light of what led to his career downfall a decade later.)
Over on MSNBC, it was Salon’s Joan Walsh who piled on Breitbart and turned him (and those of us who worked on the sites) into the villains of the story. Joan had come to the conclusion that Weinergate was the product of a “rightwing smear machine,” and Andrew Breitbart was the creator and operator of the machine. Corporate journalists at the major, established institutions were spending their energy and effort blaming the messenger, Breitbart, instead of pursuing the truth: that their liberal hero, Anthony Weiner, actually did this awful, self-destructive thing.
The pressure on Andrew was tremendous as Weiner stuck to his story. But cracks were starting to show. By mid-week, some reporters noted that Weiner had not contacted the FBI or even the Capitol Hill Police about the alleged cyber-intrusion. He had lawyered up, however.
CNN’s Dana Bash confronted Weiner on the steps of the Capitol and his performance was less “noble victim” and more “obfuscating perp.” It was clear that he was hiding something. Weiner’s original, unequivocal denial had morphed into a weasel-y admission that he could not say “with certitude” that it wasn’t him.
We had him. From an anonymous tip, we knew that Weiner had done this before, and we knew he was lying. By the time Andrew infamously took the podium and hijacked Weiner’s own press conference in Midtown Manhattan on June 6, 2011, the day our tipster’s story was published, Andrew had been fully vindicated, even if Toobin, Joan Walsh, and the rest of his detractors refused to acknowledge it.
The Weinergate affair best exemplifies the revolution that Andrew fought and won in his three short years in the public eye. Like the Lewinsky scandal 15 years before, the Weiner story broke online and outside of the self-appointed news gatekeepers. If they had been in charge still, they would have shelved the story.
It would have died. But Andrew’s new-media revolution created the environment where The New York Times, The Washington Post and the broadcast networks were irrelevant bystanders.
Ultimately, the Weinergate story was a media story. About how the media missed the news. Ignored the news because its members didn’t like what they saw.
Distorted the news so it could fit their preconceived narrative. And finally, how the members of the media memory-holed the news, evidenced by their willingness to celebrate Weiner’s triumphant return to public life in 2013 when a “rehabilitated” Weiner came a whisker away from becoming mayor of New York City. He would have easily won the election if it weren’t for yet another sexting scandal.
Since the Weinergate affair, things have never been the same for the legacy media. The media revolution Andrew began reached full circle when in 2016 a man who was rejected by the editorial boards of 98 of the one hundred largest newspapers in America won the presidential election.
Andrew would have loved how thoroughly the media was humiliated, ignored and dismissed by the American people on election night, 2016. And without a doubt he would have relished Trump’s no-holds-barred war with the media throughout his presidency.
From “Against the Corporate Media: Forty Ways the Press Hates You”; Copyright 2024; Posthill Press
