Opinion

Breitbart: Media Rebel With a Cause

Andrew Breitbart — my dear wild friend, who died yesterday at the heartbreakingly young age of 43 — could have become a mainstream media mogul, perhaps the first true mogul of the Internet era.

There was a moment, a few years ago, when the size of his role in the Great Media Disruption that was the Internet suddenly came clear to the world, and every magazine of note and every newspaper of importance was chronicling him.

If he’d been a man of conventional ambitions, he would’ve taken up the offers to introduce him to hedge-fund guys, raise a pile of money, go conservative-newsy on the Web, as Fox News did on cable, and, in effect, go straight — speak at TED conferences, hobnob with other honchos at the Aspen Ideas Festival and live a very high life.

But he was too much of a gadfly, too countercultural, too much of a battler — too committed to setting himself against convention, rather than seeking validation from it.

In his 20s, lost and lolling about his native Los Angeles in the 1990s, Andrew came upon Matt Drudge, a fellow LA gadabout who was contributing bits of startlingly accurate media gossip to Internet newsgroups and an opt-in email list in amusing, rat-a-tat-tat, Walter Winchell prose.

Andrew helped Drudge fashion his wares into the Drudge Report, and saw the necessity of setting up shop on a Web page. In 1998, the Drudge Report broke the news of Newsweek spiking the Monica Lewinsky story, and it would be fair to say that the world was never quite the same after that.

That wouldn’t have happened without Andrew’s early sense of the importance of Web sites. Nor would Drudge’s astonishing rise to a billion page views a month — which was built on the spectacular news sense he and Andrew shared, which put almost all page-one editors who preceded them to shame.

I met Andrew in the mid ’90s; he was working as a research assistant to Arianna Huffington, then on the Right. (Later, he’d talk her into launching what became the Huffington Post — which, like the Drudge Report, became a phenomenon.) And he immediately got into a fight with me, which was par for the course with him.

It was over some changes I insisted on making to an Arianna column I was editing. I told him he was out of line, that I’d been at this longer than he had and he shouldn’t teach his grandmother how to suck eggs — and he laughed and said his father used to say that to him, and we became friends in that moment.

Of course I was wrong; that I was older and with a longer career in the news biz meant nothing to him, and it shouldn’t have. He understood something I didn’t — that the guildlike nature of media was about to shatter into a million pieces; gatekeepers like me (I was then editing these pages) would have to reconcile ourselves to the entry of amateurs who had something new and powerful to contribute, or we’d be crushed by the shattered glass.

He knew more about how to make the Web work, and all the possible uses of it — from how to break a story to how to integrate video with text to how to run a site frugally and sensibly — than anyone. That was why he could’ve built a media dynasty. But he was made of different stuff.

And of course, what made Andrew different and special and new was his politics. There’d been counterculture figures, disrupters, before him, but they’d all been on the Left. Andrew brought all the qualities of counterculture journalism — sophomoric humor, ribald energy and a sense that the Establishment needed to be destroyed — in the service of core conservative values, like honor and patriotism and equality of opportunity.

As with all counterculture types, he went too far. He didn’t believe in the boundaries drawn by the Establishment he reviled, and so he transgressed them — but we all need boundaries, and Andrew never found the right ones for himself.

He was one of the very few people I’ve ever known who loved being hated, because he knew the hatred he inspired was due to him getting under the skin of his antagonists in ways they couldn’t bear. And that quality co-existed with a gregarious and garrulous sweetness that marked him as a true original.

Andrew leaves behind four beloved children between the ages of 12 and 4, and Susie, a beautiful woman of surpassing gentility.

His cruel death at far too young an age doesn’t alter the fact that Andrew Breitbart changed the world.