ABC News is reaching out to Andrew Breitbart.
For anyone unfamiliar with who that is, he’s the right-wing blogger that got Shirley Sherrod fired with misleading, edited video. He made her appear to be a racist, so she lost her job.
Once upon a time he was a researcher for Arianna Huffington. For sometime now, however, he’s been less a journalist than a sort of impresario. He promotes and manages staged acts of journalistic theater that are gauged to generate distrust and nihilism about the media and politics.
According a statement by Andrew Morse, an ABC executive producer, “He (Breitbart) has been invited as one of several guests, from a variety of political persuasions to engage with a live studio audience that will be closely following the election results.”
In the same statement, which Mr. Morse released in order to placate his own outraged staff, he pointed out that Breitbart “is not being paid by ABC news. He has not been asked to analyze the results of the election.”
I’m sorry Mr. Morse, but that is just, not, good enough.
Decisions like this are apt to make observers wonder if ABC News has been taken-over, in secret, by skeptical philosophers for whom the possibility of truth is ultimately a false proposition.
I say this, because Andrew Breitbart is an unapologetic, serial fabricator. By his own admission, he holds conventional journalism and journalistic standards in utter contempt.
An example: On September 21st of 2009, out of perverse curiosity, I read one of his habitual rants against the credibility of “mainstream media.” I was amazed. In the blog, he bragged about a sort of collaboration with Glenn Beck. Together they used the Acorn under-cover, fake-hooker video scandal to undermine the credibility of major news outlets like ABC that refused, at first, to report the deceptively edited video “sting” as hard news.
“Thus was born the multimedia, multi-platform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post,” he crowed.
In the blog, Breitbart admitted that he had coached, the “activist” who made the video, put it on YouTube, told Beck and Fox about the “viral” clip, and come up with the plan to have Fox start reporting “a mainstream media cover-up” within 24 hours of the video appearing on the web. Then he bragged about his strategic sagacity on his blog.
Given this open antipathy towards the “mainstream media,” one has to wonder why he’s been given an opportunity to gain a wider audience by a news organization that has been the target of his manipulation and ridicule?
Is ABC News foolhardy, sleazy or clueless? Is the editorial staff unable to recognize the difference between passionate conservative advocacy and the calculated, strategic deception of Andrew Breitbart?
The unfortunate probability is that they have come to a decision that Breitbart’s likely contribution to conflict, drama and ratings is all that matters. There are just too many experienced editors in that newsroom for Breitbart’s inclusion to have been an oversight.
So now...If that is the way ABC intends to roll, I've got a pitch for Andrew Morse, Andrew Breitbart and any ABC executives that might be reading.
Why not double-down on spicy and innovative, political content?
My idea is for ABC to import a group of unemployed pot smoking teens to camp-out in a camera-ready Washington squat... The teens would have sex, fight, make-up and go on road trips to political rallies to rumble with Tea Partiers. I would call it “Real World: Liberal Activists.”
Think about it Andrew and Andrew, it’s genius… Political coverage might finally make money, and a new, lucrative, reality TV genre would come into being! It could even freshen up ABC’s stale weekday line-up!
Don't worry if a few wholly-invented, negative stereotypes get smuggled into the national discourse...that's actually the best part, because it would probably help ABC sell space for tons of secretly funded political ads!
It's time to get paid ABC, after all, it's only entertainment.
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