TAMPA, Florida — The time elapsed between the exposure of David
Chalian’s hateful remarks and his firing as the D.C. bureau chief
of Yahoo News was astonishingly brief. At 10:22 a.m. Wednesday,
Matthew Sheffield posted video showing Chalian, accidentally caught
in an open-microphone moment during an ABC News online broadcast,
making a sick “joke” that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign was
indifferent to suffering caused by Hurricane Isaac: “They’re not
concerned at all. They are happy to have a party with black people
drowning.” Within three hours, Chalian was fired — “terminated
effective immediately,” Yahoo said in a press statement that
included an apology to Romney, to the GOP nominee’s campaign staff,
and to “anyone who was offended.”
About a half hour after Chalian was fired, in a theater near the
Tampa Bay Times Forum where the Republican National Convention is
meeting this week, a new documentary film made its world premiere.
Hating Breitbart
chronicles the career of a man who dedicated his life to fighting
the dishonesty and prejudices of what he called the Democrat-Media
Complex. Among the “stars” of the movie, appearing as an expert
commentator on liberal bias and Andrew Breitbart’s war against it,
is a young man named Matthew Sheffield — the founding editor of
the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters site, and the same
Matthew Sheffield who exposed Chalian’s career-destroying
gaffe.
Breitbart died of a heart attack in March, but his crusade
against media bias lives on, so that it is possible to name what
happened to the former D.C. bureau chief of Yahoo News: David
Chalian got Breitbarted.
A lot of other journalists here in Tampa — where an estimated
15,000 members of the press have converged to cover the GOP
convention — share the same partisan prejudice that resulted in
Chalian becoming a sudden addition to the unemployment statistic.
Consider, for example, MSNBC’s coverage of the Tuesday night’s
proceedings: Every time a black or Hispanic speaker appeared on
stage, the cable-news division of the NBC network
cut away from live coverage. No one watching MSNBC saw the
speeches by Texas GOP Senate candidate Ted Cruz, former Alabama
Democrat Artur Davis, or Utah GOP congressional candidate Mia Love.
It seemed as if the network’s coverage was orchestrated to protect
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who has relentlessly accused the Republican
Party of racism. This is not a new accusation, nor one made
exclusively by Matthews, but it was one that particularly enraged
Breitbart.
Hating Breitbart examines several examples of
Breitbart’s battles against the Republicans-as-racists meme,
including an incident in 2010 when Democrats claimed — and major
news organizations reported as fact — that Tea Party protesters
had shouted racial epithets at members of the Congressional Black
Caucus, including Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis. After
examining multiple videos of the confrontation, which occurred
during a “Kill the Bill” rally against the Democrats’ health-care
legislation, Breitbart concluded that no such incident had
happened: Democrats were lying, and the liberal media were merely
repeating those lies. So he publicly offered a $10,000 reward to
anyone who could provide proof of the alleged epithets. Then
Breitbart upped the ante, first to $20,000 and a few days later to
$100,000. In a moment captured in the new film by director Andrew
Marcus, Breitbart joked to a friend that he might as well increase
the reward to a trillion dollars.
No one ever collected the reward, rather conclusive proof that
Breitbart was right: Democrats had manufactured a false accusation
of Tea Party racism out of whole cloth, and the media had purveyed
it as true, without even bothering to examine the evidence.
That kind of injustice — not mere “bias,” but outright
dishonesty by major news organization — inspired Breitbart’s rage.
The movie shows Breitbart saying, “I’ve got two modes: jocularity
and righteous indignation.” His impish sense of humor gets ample
play in Hating Breitbart, which shows him in New Orleans
on the campus of his alma mater, Tulane University, where he was a
decidedly indifferent student. He partied his way through school
and, because he was more interested in drinking than in taking
notes, escaped much of the left-wing indoctrination that has become
so deeply ingrained in American higher education. Still, he was a
man of the Left until he read a book by Rush Limbaugh given to him
by his father-in-law, the actor Orson Bean. The film doesn’t touch
on the deep irony of Breitbart’s political conversion. Bean was
blacklisted in the 1950s because of his alleged Communist
sympathies, but had become conservative by the time his daughter
started dating Breitbart, whom he helped convert from Left to Right
— a conversion that ultimately had revolutionary consequences.
Breitbart spent more than a decade as a top assistant to Internet
news pioneer Matt Drudge, then helped Arianna Huffington create the
Huffington Post and eventually launched his own news site,
Breitbart.com.
In 2009, Breitbart emerged as an outspoken defender of the Tea
Party movement, and much of the footage in Hating
Breitbart comes from his speeches at rallies around the
country. Since its founder’s death, Breitbart.com has continued to
pursue his vision. The site has a team in Tampa covering the GOP
convention, and it was Breitbart.com’s John Sexton who on Wednesday
pointed out certain interesting details of Chalian’s résumé,
including his role at ABC News as the producer of Charlie Gibson’s
2008 interview with Sarah Palin. Breitbart’s example helped inspire
a surge of interest in citizen-journalism, as he often explained in
speeches that he relied on ordinary people with video cameras to
expose the news that the liberal press refused to report.
Many of those in attendance at Wednesday’s movie premiere were
Breitbart’s friends and colleagues, who afterwards expressed how
much they miss him. Breitbart the man is gone, but Breitbart the
verb is still very much with us.
