Not So Bright, Bart

Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker has an interesting profile of an acquaintance of mine, internet media baron Andrew Breitbart. I recommend it.

Alas, it's a profile written from the outside. This wasn't necessary. Mead's need to keep Breitbart and his politics at arm's length--to signal the reader she doesn't buy what he's saying--gets in the way of the narrative without illuminating its central figure. (The piece is entitled "Rage Machine: Andrew Breitbart’s empire of bluster"--I think that would fit a lot of New Yorker profiles, actually.)

For example, look at how Mead describes the work of two undercover people who exposed practices at ACORN and which Breitbart helped publicize:

The hidden-camera footage, which Breitbart has called “the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society,” did not expose endemic corruption at Acorn: though O’Keefe and Giles induced employees to coöperate with an appalling scenario, they did not dig up evidence of any actual wrongdoing by those employees.

What O'Keefe and Giles essentially did was go to various ACORN offices posing as a pimp and prostitute, and ask for help in what amounted to opening up brothels and bringing underage sex workers into the country. Many of the ACORN employees didn't bat an eye, and went about helping them, some even explaining how you'd get around the authorities.

Mead could have simply described the events and left them at that--they're pretty compelling. Or, if she'd had the reaction most people have, could be dumbfounded at this huge and surprisingly easy to pull off expose. But not Mead, and not The New Yorker. In what is one of Breitbart's big moments, she, for some reason, insists on going out of her way to defend ACORN.