Kyle Smith (Twitter: @rkylesmith) is a film critic for The New York Post and the author of the novels Love Monkey and A Christmas Caroline. Type a title in the box above to locate a review. Find an alphabetical listing of The New York Post's recent film reviews here.
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By Kyle | January 6, 2010
Now the one-man media whirlwind has launched Big Journalism to nestle beside Big Government and Big Hollywood. All hail Breitbart. Everyone who taps a keyboard for a living will be working for him pretty soon.
Topics: Blogs |
January 6th, 2010 at 10:24 pm
It’s not like there’s an opening for good journalism these days …
oh, wait.
Go get ‘em, Andrew.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Ah. Nothing like some good old elitist, left-wing media bashery. The ingenuity is overwhelming. To what Mr. Breitbart is criminally ignorant is the obvious reality that conservative journalism is at the forefront of American media culture as he sobs over his keyboard. The Wall Street Journal has the highest circulation in the nation, with well over 2 million subscribers. Fox News just finished 2009 with its highest ratings in 13 years. There is no longer a fashionable minority of rightist news advocates alienated by their more mainstream counterparts. It stings, doesn’t it?
“But something changed,” Breitbart squeals in his introductory entry. Yes, something did change — the politics of the newsroom suddenly reversed in opposition to the warm and fuzzy climate to which you had become so accustomed. Rationally dissecting the ethical implications of both conservative and liberal bias on newspaper staffs is mildly commendable. But parading as an objectively sound traditionalist does not rectify whatever media crisis he believes is blanketing the countryside. Even the comments left on his posts reek of naive endorsement of a quasi-revolution:
“WOW!!! Simply amazing. Hopefully this is a fight we win!”
“We Are All Spartacus Now - So say we all!”
“The launch of your site here, the work that Andrew Breitbart has done; Big Government and Mike Flynn have given people something to rally around. A ray of hope, in a vast desert wasteland of MSM controlled propaganda.”
David Plouffe could propagate a more reasoned batch of fist-wavers — and it wouldn’t take a nose-to-the-air blog to accomplish.
January 7th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Patrick
If you think that Fox News+Talk Radio+WSJ = every single other outlet out there (major broadcast news media, 95 percent of newspapers, academia, pop culture, etc), than your math skills need some fine tuning, flowery rhetoric aside.
January 7th, 2010 at 5:23 pm
I said those outlets were at the “forefront of media culture,” which is obviously an arguable statement, but nonetheless a credible statement.
The Wall Street Journal was the only Top 25 newspaper to increase its circulation this year. They accelerated their web traffic by 160 percent in a year. And Rupert Murdoch is currently the most visible figure — and aggressive advocate — in the news industry’s otherwise sluggish attempt to charge for online content.
I shouldn’t have to elaborate on the ubiquity of Fox News.
January 7th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
Oh. I almost forgot to address your last sentence. I’ll remind myself next time to tone it down for you. I guess “flowery rhetoric” is the knee-jerk impulse for freelancers who can’t distinguish between “than” and “then.” My apologies.
January 7th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Well then Patrick let me be the one to ask; what exactly was the point of your little verbal temper tantrum up there?
Breitbart’s goal is not to overwhelm the liberal media with the size of his media empire. He, especially with Big Journalism, is trying to expose the media’s irresponsibility. You hear that? Not left-wing bias, IRRESPONSIBILITY. I couldn’t care less if Keith Olbermann begins everyone of his shows with a reading a Das Kapital and a pagan sacrifice to some nonspecific matriarchal deity because I already know he’s a frothing-at-the-mouth leftist. This is about holding the media responsible for not doing their jobs. So the fact that the WSJ and Fox News are doing well in the numbers is completely irrelevant.
Your attempt to sound rational and above the fray of petty newsroom bias just makes you sound clueless.
January 7th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
You and I both wish Big Journalism was solely devoted to increased responsibility among the mainstream media. It may very well be.
But Breitbart is a blatant conservative who is poorly masking his political leanings with this laughable call to action. Honestly, who else totes a resume that boasts credits from The Drudge Report, the Washington Times, and RealClearPolitics? Don’t kid yourself. As I stated earlier in my verbal temper tantrum, I would have no problem if Breitbart created the blog to examine the state of journalism from a rightist perspective. Instead, he’s touting the entire effort as a revitalized insurgency to combat the MSM, an acronym that might as well represent People I Don’t Like in his case.
My second comment about the ample successes of Fox News and Wall Street Journal this year was directed at Christian’s remark.
January 8th, 2010 at 1:17 am
Then … than … tomatoes, tomah-toes … let’s avoid the truth, shall we?
Again, do the math. Fox News plus WSJ vs. … every other outlet. Fair fight???
January 8th, 2010 at 1:57 am
I never claimed that the perceived clout of the WSJ and Fox News equates to that of every other outlet. I simply said that they are at the forefront of American media culture, which I then supported with statistics hinting at the Journal’s viability. Fox News has become equally omnipresent, whether its unavoidable presence in the mainstream media be personified by its weepy pundits, invasive tactics, or even Obama’s foolish singling out this past fall. The bottom line is that the rise of decidedly conservative outlets to universal recognition — ideally symbolized by the Wall Street Journal and Fox News — contradicts Breitbart’s impulse to demonize the “MSM” as driven almost wholly by smirking liberals.
In one of Breitbart’s latest posts on his fiasco with a conniving Gawker snooper, he even concedes that Big Journalism is intended to wage the “war against pure hackery and media bias.” My dear friend, blackhawk12151, your lofty dreams that this blog will inspire ramped-up accountability among journalists leaning both left and right are just as delusional as they are ill-conceived. Big Journalism may feel inclined to demand increased responsibility from notoriously liberal primetimenites, such as Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, but I guarantee that sentiment will seldom apply to the other end of the ideological spectrum. Breitbart later admits that his “Big sites are certainly right of center.”