My two-cents on the Andrew Breitbart controversy: I don't think this is about ethics, or conservatism or liberalism or race or even Breitbart. Rather, it's about New Media vs. Old Media, how Old Media is getting clobbered by guys with laptops sitting in coffee shops and why guys like Breitbart are a threat to multimedia corporations run by elitists in suits who work out of tall buildings and manage vast staffs but who can't pivot as quickly as guys like Breitbart can.
Old Media can't quite figure out what to do with the Breitbarts and the Moulitsases and jumping on Breitbart for posting what somebody sent him is a convenient way to attack them all and the very notion that citizens like them should be able to communicate directly with viewers and readers.
The aforementioned are in the best tradition of our Founding Fathers: rabble-rousers and pamphleteers with passion who were out to convince fellow citizens that they were right and their opponents wrong and I much prefer hearing what these guys have to say and then making up my own mind rather than watching the Evening News presented by "journalists" desperately (and mostly unsuccessfully) trying to hide their biases and pretending to be objective.
The great thing about New Media is that the very nature of the give-and-take allows misunderstandings to be quickly corrected, which in this case meant that within 24 hours of Breitbart posting what he received, the NAACP was able to give viewers the full context. That seems to me a much more open and honest process than what we have experienced over the last half century with Old Media and its unchecked power.
I interviewed Andrew awhile back for the Bully! Pulpit show and have posted it here.
What we need are not fewer Breitbarts and Moulitsases but more of them to sharpen our public debate and keep each other honest and accurate.
Follow Mark Joseph on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markmjm
So you actually accept Breitbart’s plausible deniability angle.
I think you might be missing a key component of this story.