With a de rigueur dose of unimpeachable fair-mindedness, the NY Times' media correspondent Jeremy Peters reveals this, via us, about the guttersnipe Andrew Breitbart:
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.
Well, well, what a conundrum. Breitbart could be either. It's all a subjective matter of how one sees him. And who's a media correspondent for the world's most distinguished newspaper to venture an opinion? That would be unprofessional. But, tell you what, he'll allow another professional, James McPherson, author of The Conservative Resurgence and the Press, to report the objectively unpleasant:
[T]here 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.
To offer this troublesome shift as a recent phenomenon, one would first have to define "recent." In 2009, for instance, 200 years after Darwin's birth, only one of every four Americans said they believed in the blithering obviousness of evolution. Roughly a couple of hundred years before Darwin's arrival on Earth, the Church insisted, in its ecclesiastically infallible wisdom, that Galileo's telescopic findings in the heavens were factually mistaken; and for hundreds of years before that, Western man knew not the correct number of teeth in a horse's head, since Aristotle had got it wrong but no one bothered to actually peak into a horse's mouth to learn otherwise.
OK, that last one slipped into personal reverence over the scientific method, nevertheless it still adds to the astonishing sum of human gullibility.
So it seems to me that what really troubles is not so much that human beings remain ignorant slates to be written on, but that virtually any jackass can do the writing these days.
I mean, Andrew Breitbart? Who the hell is Andrew Breitbart? Is he a thinker of uncommon depths? a magical political organizer of Van Buren-like talents? a visionary of Spinozan splendor? Again, one asks: Who the hell is Andrew Breitbart, except a bundle of ferociously ignorant biases with a Web site ...
... who gets profiled by the New York Times. Thus the artificial eminence of Breitbart, and Beck, and Limbaugh, and all the other right-wing pissants mutated by the modern media into real political players.