Why we should thank Andrew Breitbart...despite his buffoonery

Andrew Breitbart, that conspiracy theorist who believes everyone has a political agenda and that the media is a liberal whore, recently stepped in another pile of bullshit by publishing a video clip of a USDA employee supposedly making a racist remark to the NAACP.

Being ever-ready to jump the gun on any sort of "gotcha moment," Breitbart proceeded to advance the notion that the NAACP is full of racists.  He did this all within the context of trying to prove that NAACP is racist and since they are racist it gives the Right cover to be racist also...despite the ludicrous reasoning behind such a proposition.



Such a position is logically and rationally untenable yet, Breitbart subscribes to the faulty assumption at the foundation of Fox News and MSNC, viz., since everyone has an agenda, then it's perfectly acceptable to double-down on a particular worldview as a filter for facts and call it "news".

My position on Fox News (who incidentally took Breitbart at his word and ran with the story without doing appropriate background...probably because it fed into their right-wing slant) and MSNBC, is that such assumptions about an inherent slant in every news source is faulty; it does nothing but undermine journalistic ethics and professionalism.  

We have a name for that type of journalism and it rhymes with "mellow".

For example: If you had a choice of information between a source that felt entitled to color the reporting according to their own agenda 

OR 

you had a source that freely admitted innate, human, biases, but made a concerted effort to reduce those biases and report the facts---which would you choose?


I, for one, choose the latter.  Going even one step further, I tap multiple sources for the same information, pitting bias against bias so I can get a better picture of the facts.  

Some, Breitbart being one, prefers the arrogance of their own self-important worldview--even when it lays bare the laziness of the media and their own willful ignorance.


This, my friends, is why we should thank Andrew Breitbart:

Not only did he show himself to be the ideological and attention-seeking whore that he is---again.


He shined a light on the laziness and lack of professionalism in the media--more particularly of Fox News.  

Thank you Andrew Breitbart!