The Breitbarters launch their first barrage in their war against the American Leftist media

One of the weaknesses in my abilities as a blogger is that I have very little patience for television, especially the talking heads on MSM television.  To me, they’re all Max Headroom:

My philosophy is that life is too short to spend time in Max Headroom’s company. My mistake, though, is in believing that mine is a common philosophy. Those Americans who think of themselves as informed believe that the path to being informed is to watch the talking heads.  Rather than viewing original source material, or reading in-depth analyses, they turn to the chattering classes.

For decades, therefore, the MSM had a lock on the information Americans heard.  Conservatives talked among themselves, but they couldn’t break through the MSM’s lock on middle-class sensibilities.  In the early years of MSM dominance, middle-class sensibilities still hewed conservative, so the MSM’s effect was blunted.  With the passing of decades, however, the combination of the Leftist lock on media and education meant that the new middle class — and especially the educated middle class, bought entirely into the MSM worldview.

Conservatives responded by throwing up their hands and saying “what can we do?”  In the place of argument and emotionalism, they kept trying to come back with facts.  B-O-R-I-N-G.  In a media age, without a hook for those facts, no one pays attention to some thoughtful, scholarly dissertation, especially when its some guy with a bad comb-over or, worse, a Southern accent, taking on a pretty, hyper-verbal bimbette who is trained in the party line.  The first crack in this monolithic wall of information was Fox TV, but Fox still plays by MSM rules.  It substitutes conservative talking heads for liberal ones — and Americans love it — but it’s still playing the same game.

Andrew Breitbart’s genius (a word that I do not use loosely) was that he understood that, with new media, he had in his hand the atomic bomb that completely overthrows the traditional media dynamic.  Add to that his ADHD understanding of the average audience attention span, and you’ve got a whole new paradigm.  Thankfully, although Andrew is gone, those who worked with whom are keeping those lessons alive.

Yesterday, as you all know, Breitbart.com rolled out the first Obama tape.  To be honest, it’s a nothing.  Really.  At an affirmative action rally back in the early 1990s, Obama gives a fond welcome to Prof. Derrick Bell.

What’s fascinating isn’t the boring video, but the media’s response to the boring video.  Derrick Bell may have had disgusting racial attitudes, but he was a crazy, pompous fart, and you need to connect a lot of dots to explain to Americans that this crazy, pompous, racist fart had an outsized effect on academia, including budding academics like Barack and Michelle, and all their friends.  Given those facts, the media could just kind of ignore the video to death.  But media people aren’t doing that.

Instead, the MSM’s talking heads are doing what Soledad O’Brien is doing, which is to announce shrilly an obvious point — that the video is boring — and then to try to obfuscate the issue as much and as loudly as possible:

What Soledad and the others don’t realize (and what I’m assuming) is that they’re being played. And boy does this feel good, because the Dems certainly played us with the Sandra Fluke testimony. In the above video, the pretty Soledad is shrill and argumentative. Joel Pollak, who does not have a bad comb-over, but is a perfectly nice looking and sounding man, is calm.  He’s neither boring nor condescending.  Instead, he’s starting the education process. Without ever losing his cool, he lets Soledad, whose voice becomes dog whistle-shrill as the segment progresses, to dig an intellectual hole, and then he bombards her with peacefully stated facts.

I love this Pollak versus O’Brien video.  I really do.  And it’s still a nothing.  It’s a silly fight between a shrill sorority girl and a charming intellectual about a boring video from two decades ago.  But that’s not the point.  This is ground work.

If there’s one thing we learned when Andrew brought down ACORN, it’s that he understood narrative. You don’t give away the movie in the first five minutes. You have a story line. You have plot twists and turns. You have more and more information. And then you have a stunning denouement. The Breitbart crowd is letting the Leftists show themselves here. We’re seeing their bias, their condescension, their ignorance, and their spin. In the elegant tradition of true story-telling, the Breitbarters are allowing the movie’s bad guys to show themselves.

Having established character, the plot will begin.  Right now, the bad guys (i.e., the MSM cadre) are using up their ordnance to kill what they openly characterize as a mere mosquito. Meanwhile, the Breitbarters are educating the public about the dangers of mosquitoes. Not one measly mosquito, but swarms of mosquitoes. And I know what that means: the Breitbarters are going to be swarming us with more and more and more information about Obama’s unpleasant friendships and, more importantly, about the media’s cover-up.  This is a horror movie, and the victims and the bad guys are one and the same — the MSM people swatting at a single mosquito while a swarm of killer mosquitoes floats ominously just over the horizon.

At the end of the day, the current video isn’t about Obama at all. The subsequent videos won’t be either.  He’s already president. We’ve had three and a half years to see him in action, and we know who and what he is. We know about the petulance, the racism, the antisemitism, the incompetence, the passivity, and the intellectual dishonesty.

This battle is about something much more important than one petty man.  It’s about the mainstream media. The media won the election for Obama in 2008.  They did so using chicanery, deceit through omission, obfuscation, and a variety of other tricks that flim-flammed a credulous public that has relied upon a self-styled “objective” media for more than forty years.  What we’re seeing now is the Breitbarters working hard to make sure that the media’s credibility is so thoroughly destroyed that it can no longer throw elections to its favored candidates.