Three and a half years after he inherited Andrew Breitbart’s right-wing media fiefdom, Steve Bannon finally proved himself a worthy heir: he bet against
Bloomberg Businessweek’s ability to read and won.
“Steve Bannon runs the new vast right-wing conspiracy,”
ran the subhead to that week’s cover story, “and he wants to take down both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.”
Bannon, now months deep into his
new role as chief executive of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, had, at the time, been nurturing an ostensibly nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), into a perverse mirror image of ProPublica.
Clinton Cash, written by GAI’s lead investigator and president Peter Schweizer and published by HarperCollins, had already been subject to a
New York Times front-page exposé. The nonprofit had even partnered with
Newsweek,
ABC News, and
60 Minutes on research-intensive scoops. That October, with the impending publication of Schweizer’s
Bush Bucks, the team at
Bloomberg had been somehow induced to believe that GAI was “as eager to go after establishment Republicans such as Boehner or Jeb Bush as Democrats like Clinton.”
But it wasn’t true. At twenty pages of actual text and about 120 footnotes — less than ten of which were primary source documents remotely indicative of original reporting — Schweizer’s
Bush Buckswas more term paper than tome. By page count, it was one full order of magnitude less labor-intensive than the 256-page
Clinton Cash.
Worse still:
Bloomberg’s Joshua Green knew this, or should have — he reports that he had “obtained” an advance copy. (Green did not reply to requests for comment.)
Just as his predecessor — the late outrage hustler Andrew Breitbart — had infamously “
hacked the media,” a quintessentially amoral framing courtesy of
Wired, Bannon had gotten the exact coverage he wanted simply by daring professional reporters to do their jobs.
Back in 2009, Breitbart
launched his libertarian title
Big Governmenton the back of an explosive, but thoroughly dishonest, hidden-camera sting. He had simultaneously released full, unedited transcripts of those undercover videos. These publicly available transcripts so completely contradicted the claims professed by
Big Government that its story, and the site itself, ought to have been dead within a week. And yet for months, no one — not CNN, not the
New York Times, not MSNBC, not even the
Daily Show — had the time or the resources to bother.
The elevation of
Breitbart’s unique brand of lightweight, gossamer junk to the status of national news tells — in part — the story of what gets dredged up by the low-friction vacuum of journalism’s protracted financial collapse. By tapping Bannon, Trump not only acquired a reliable conduit to
Breitbart’s unruly community of libertarians, paleoconservatives, and alt-right brown shirts. He also acquired access to the GAI’s well-financed lawyers, data scientists, and forensic investigators — an opposition machine that the cash-strapped majors in the news media have already proven desperate to cut deals with.
But just as importantly, the rise of Breitbart’s media network also tells the story of petit-bourgeois ideological entrepreneurship, fueled by white-hot, fame-hungry, and not especially consonant feelings of class angst, and the haute-bourgeois venture capital that it so easily located.
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