AUDASE

The Right’s Blogger Provocateur

By JEREMY W. PETERS NEW YORK TIMES

MINNEAPOLIS — Andrew Breitbart wasn’t supposed to be sitting here in a television studio makeup chair. But when he heard that Anthony Weiner was about to announce his resignation, he dropped everything.

Mr. Breitbart, the conservative author and blogger who first published Mr. Weiner’s suggestive self-portraits, had ditched his book-signing in central Illinois and hopped on a flight earlier than planned to the Twin Cities, where he was booked as a marquee attraction at RightOnline, a conservative bloggers conference.

“To put myself in Decatur, Ill., without a satellite connection would have put me in a bad situation,” he explained as a woman applied a layer of foundation to his jowly face in preparation for his appearance on CNN. (He had just finished a phone interview with Fox News; Sean Hannity’s radio show would follow; then a quick break before sitting down with a documentary film crew.)

Part performance artist, part polemicist, Mr. Breitbart, 42, has used his network of Web sites and their legions of followers to bring conservative media red meat. Some of his reader-generated scoops have reverberated all the way to the halls of the United States Capitol, like the Weiner photos and undercover video he released of Acorn workers offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. After the videos went viral Congress ended grants to Acorn, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.

The stories and videos Mr. Breitbart plays up on his Web sites — which include Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood — tend to act as political Rorschach tests. If you agree with him, you think what he does is citizen journalism. If you don’t, his work is little more than crowd-sourced political sabotage that freely distorts the facts.

“On the right, he is seen as an investigative journalist along the lines of Woodward and Bernstein,” said James B. McPherson, author of “The Conservative Resurgence and the Press.”

The damage Mr. Breitbart suffered to his credibility after he posted a tipster’s edited video that showed an Agriculture Department official, Shirley Sherrod, making what appeared to be prejudiced remarks seems not to matter as far as his fans are concerned. Also, the Acorn videos appeared to show a man walking into Acorn offices dressed as a pimp, when in fact he was not.

“I think his actions show that if he’s not willing to distort, he is at least careless with the facts,” Mr. McPherson added. “But there are no standards of fact anymore for a lot of people. We have gone from selecting sources of opinion that we agree with to selecting facts we agree with.”

In person, Mr. Breitbart attracts a similar split between blistering condemnation or fawning adulation.

A sampling from his in-box recently: “You are nothing but a malicious moron and a filthy looking bum.”

“I hope you rot in hell.”

“I’d like to have 15 minutes alone with you.”

But as Mr. Breitbart barreled his husky, 6-foot-1 frame through the halls of the Hilton here for the RightOnline conference, he could barely move 10 feet without being stopped and exalted.

“You’re an inspiration to me,” gushed one young woman.

“You’re my hero,” a middle-aged female admirer declared.

“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” said one man, grinning spectacularly as Mr. Breitbart posed for a picture with him.

Conservative media does not lack for big personalities (see: Limbaugh, Rush; Beck, Glenn; or Coulter, Ann). But where Mr. Breitbart stands out is through his accessibility. He gives out his cellphone number in speeches and passes along his personal e-mail address to almost anyone who asks. If you write him, chances are you will hear back.

“If you’re a citizen journalist,” said James O’Keefe, the conservative activist who filmed the Acorn sting videos and passed them along to Mr. Breitbart, “you have to be responsive to people, you have to listen to the people around you. And you can’t do that if you’re sitting behind a golden microphone making $40 million a year.”

When Mr. Breitbart is not checking his BlackBerry, which pings continually with the hundreds of e-mails and text messages he receives each day, he is talking on the phone. When he was exiting the lobby of his hotel one night, a woman approached him to pitch a story. He listened patiently for a minute and then said, “I’ll forget all this. So e-mail me at andrew@breitbart.com.”

He grew up in West Los Angeles among many of the liberal types he now pillories. That gives him a certain credibility among fans who see his as a redemption case. “I admit it, I’m from L.A. I still am shallow. Don’t anyone think otherwise. It’s part of the experience out there,” he said in a speech at RightOnline, bringing the audience to its feet.

After graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, he drifted around Los Angeles looking for a career. Arianna Huffington gave him his first big break in media when she hired him as her researcher in 1997. Matt Drudge, a mutual friend who ran an online newsletter and Web site about politics and Hollywood gossip, had introduced them.

He would later go to work for Mr. Drudge, helping him manage The Drudge Report. He gained a Web following of his own by routing articles featured on The Drudge Report through his own Web site, Breitbart.com. Then in 2004, Ms. Huffington called. “Do you have any ideas for a Web site?” he recalls her asking. He helped her introduce the site but left after a few months.

He may not have liked the politics, but he embraced the model of assembling a nationwide network of mostly unpaid contributors. “I was going to have to develop a public persona that caused people to be willing to write for me often and in most cases for free,” he said.

In the summer of 2009, Mr. O’Keefe approached him with videos he had secretly recorded in Acorn offices on the East Coast. Mr. Breitbart borrowed $25,000 from his father and started a site, Big Government, where the videos would be posted. They quickly went viral, consuming official Washington.

The most notorious video he put up — one that almost ruined his career — was a two-minute clip of Ms. Sherrod, a black Agriculture Department official, telling an N.A.A.C.P. gathering that she did not help a white man as much as she could have with his failing farm. The headline said “NAACP Awards Racism.”

But when the N.A.A.C.P. released a longer version of the video, it showed clearly that Ms. Sherrod’s story was about overcoming racial prejudice, and that she did indeed go to great lengths to help the farmer. Defending himself, Mr. Breitbart said that the video came to him already edited, and that the crowd applauded when Ms. Sherrod said she did not help the man.

Critics seized on it as evidence that Mr. Breitbart selectively chooses content that reflects poorly on political opponents. But the episode only seemed to help bolster his status as a rising star on the political right.

“I just like the work he’s done,” said Andrew Madsen, a 21-year-old college student from Watertown, Minn., who waited in line at the Hilton to have Mr. Breitbart autograph a copy of his new book, “Righteous Indignation.” “Everybody has their biases. But there’s a big bias toward liberalism and big government. At least he’s attempting to provide an outlet that provides an alternative perspective.”

Mr. Breitbart is always looking for new ways to channel his seemingly bottomless well of playful outrage. In Minneapolis, he decided to crash the mostly liberal Netroots Nation blogger conference that was taking place just down the street. His plans to rent a dunk tank and charge people $50 each to throw a baseball didn’t pan out.

He bounded in uninvited, accompanied by a 12-person entourage that included a documentary film crew, a security guard, several reporters and some fans.

A crowd of bloggers quickly gathered around him, Flip cameras in hand. One of them repeatedly shrieked questions about whether Mr. Breitbart had ever patronized a prostitute, used cocaine or looked at gay pornography. Mr. Brietbart said little in response and mostly grinned.

Another onlooker called him a racist and condemned him to hell. The growing crowd — chanting “Coward! Coward!” — became so hostile that the guard protecting Mr. Breitbart eventually had to whisk him out a back door.

“Tee-hee, tee-hee! Bedlam ensued!” he laughed, reading coverage of his stunt later. “Isn’t it funny that wherever I go, crazy stuff happens?”

When a reporter pointed out that the pandemonium was probably not coincidental, he paused for a moment.

“Are you saying it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy?” he asked, seemingly sincere. “I’ll have to think about that.”