Conor Friedersdorf has a good take down of America’s most worthless piece of shitsleaziest blogmeister:
There is some truth in Breitbart’s assessment: liberals do excel in the realm of culture, and conservatives too often convey their ideas less adeptly. But he hasn’t a clue how to remedy the situation — in fact, he exacerbates it. On his own Web sites, where he is free to reign as he likes, he doesn’t publish journalism of exceptional quality, like some feature stories you see in The Weekly Standard, or arguments of great sophistication, like the best of the essays in the Claremont Review of Books. He publishes aggrieved blog posts, many of them poorly reasoned, and the person he has most elevated is James O’Keefe, purveyor of low-budget ideological sting videos.
The temptation is to tell Breitbart, “Quit whining and produce something of quality, rather than incentivizing a whole generation of young conservatives to jet around the country trying to win news cycles, or convincing them that if they go into any cultural industry they’ll be persecuted.” [Italics mine]I’ve tried to tell him before. But he still doesn’t get it, and his remarks in the clip above illuminate his error. It’s telling, for example, that what he wants isn’t for conservative directors to produce their own It’s a Wonderful Life, or Cool Hand Luke, or The Graduate. What he wants is Avatar, a film that succeeded almost entirely due to its achievements in the technical realm, and whose plot was widely regarded as a hackneyed piece of simplistic borderline propaganda.
Friedersdorf understands what Breitbart doesn’t seem to-the problem, with the evil Mr. Brietbart, is not with the other media-its with Breitbart himself. He’s too fucking lazy to do any real work.
What Breitbart wants is more conservative creative professionals. But what’s needed to even the playing field in the arts is something different: creative professionals who happen to be conservative. Folks for whom excellence in their chosen field comes first and is their desired end. That is why Jon Stewart succeeds. He is a comedian first. Through his comedy, we get a window into his worldview, including his ideological preconceptions. They shape what he satirizes. Sometimes his comedy gives insufficient due to conservative insights. It would be nice for the right if there were a TV comedian as talented who bought into some right-leaning ideas. But if Andrew Breitbart launched a site called Big Comedy, he’d recruit based on ideology, house the comics in a business model where ideological agreement with the audience was vital, and pronounce it a success if it showed a profit, even if the jokes were awful.
That is what he’s done in the realm of journalism, seemingly blind to the fact that NPR is excellent largely because it employs folks who care a lot about producing exceptional work. Listen to the best public radio generally – This American Life, Planet Money, Radio Lab – and what you hear isn’t merely an impressive technical adeptness. The substantive quality is evident too, whatever one’s ideological predispositions. Sure, its mostly liberals producing these shows, but they’re mostly doing their utmost to follow their stories and ideas where they lead.
Connor also very distinctly tells us why this is so. Breitbart doesn’t care about the quality of what he does:
That is because in practice, Breitbart isn’t motivated by producing work of high quality in any field. He is an ideological warrior, someone who cares more about destroying ACORN, embarrassing the NAACP, and exploiting the sex scandals of Democratic politicians – all political projects – much more than building any journalistic or artistic institution of exceptional merit.
Which is his privlege, I guess-if were not for the fact that he is taking other people over the cliff with him.