I met Andrew Breitbart in person for the first time last Friday evening in Troy, Mich., at a Americans for Prosperity event that he headlined with Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. But he had been a brother-in-arms and friend to the website of which I am editor, TheMichiganView.com, for a long time before that.
We collaborated on a story not long ago about “99 Percenter” Michael Moore’s summer palace in Michigan, which was reported through both MIView and Big Hollywood. On Friday, we rehashed the Moore story and spoke of mutual friends.
We all owe a bow to Breitbart and his visionary colleague Matt Drudge for pioneering Internet journalism that has broken the left-wing, MSM’s media monopoly.
They have seeded a revolution.Thanks to the Drudge Report, Breitbart’s Big Government.com, National Review Online, The Daily Caller, MIView, Capital Confidential, and so on, Americans today can find all the information they need to be informed citizens, rather then being force-fed politically correct news through the MSM filter. Combined with Fox News and cable news, we are living through a media information Golden Age.
While the MSM talks about citizen journalism, Breitbart actually lived it. His network of contacts exposed the lives and lies of those in power. One of MIView’s most-read scoops, citizen-shot video of Detroit congressman John Conyers reading a Playboy in open view on a D.C.-bound airplane, came to us via a Breitbart source.
He was the P. T. Barnum of the new media — a fearless showman who reveled in taking on the elites, both in media and in public office. A media entrepreneur, his business model relied on giving public speeches and so he was always on the road, spreading the gospel of fair journalism and making new friends — and enemies — wherever he went.
The Michigan View will miss him. We will all miss him. He was a pioneer.