Word: breitbart
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...game he plays extraordinarily well. Breitbart has become the Web's most combative conservative impresario - part new-media mogul, part Barnumesque scamp. Last fall, he launched Big Government, the flagship of his wickedly right-of-center sites, which also include Big Hollywood, Big Journalism - which described the House's March 21 passage of the health care reform bill as a "socialist putsch" - and the news aggregators Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv. On its first day of business, Big Government produced a scoop: undercover filmmakers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles - the would-be Borats of the right - had shot videos that appeared...
...stunt gave Breitbart - who like many online scribes had spent much of his professional life toiling in anonymity - a public persona. In January, O'Keefe was arrested in New Orleans on charges of entering the offices of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu under false pretenses while preparing another undercover video. That only boosted Breitbart's profile. At the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville in February, Breitbart introduced the star speaker, Sarah Palin, and delivered a rousing jeremiad of his own. Assailing national reporters for portraying the movement as "racist and homophobic," he used the dais at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel...
...Breitbart perceives himself as a new-media David out to slay old-media Goliaths. As he sees it, the left exercises its power not via mastery of the issues but through control of the entertainment industry, print and television journalism and government agencies that set social policy. "Politics," he often says, "is downstream from culture. I want to change the cultural narrative." Thus the Big sites devote their energy less to trying to influence the legislative process in Washington than to attacking the institutions and people Breitbart believes dictate the American conversation. Recently, Big Hollywood has gone after Sesame Street...
Such cultural crusades might seem to appeal mostly to the far-right fringe, but Breitbart is tapping a deep reservoir of conservative dismay. Former Bush Administration official (and TIME contributor) David Frum says, "What matters to [conservatives] is not why the government is spending $15 million on this or that. What matters is a perception that hostile forces are invading your home, school and family. Those forces come in on TV and in newspapers. An enormous amount of what conservatism now does is media criticism...
...Merry Prankster Breitbart was raised in Brentwood, on Los Angeles' privileged west side. The area is home to studio executives and producers, and the politics are Democratic. Breitbart was never fully comfortable in L.A.'s '80s social milieu. His parents are Midwestern Jews. (His father ran a Santa Monica steak house.) They saw life differently than the other kids' sophisticated dads and moms did. "My folks are from an older and very silent generation," Breitbart says. "My dad is as conservative as William F. Buckley was, but without the same presentation. He expressed his conservatism by working 16-hour days...