BigJournalism.com Makes Its Debut…
…and the inaugural article on the new Andrew Breitbart venture is a recounting of a conversation between the site’s proprietor and ACORN’s Bertha Lewis:
“Did you go to the White House last year?” I asked.
Bertha Laughed heartily. ”No,” she said.
“Really?” I pushed.
“No. One hundred per cent not. Not this year. Not last year. Not ever,” she stated firmly, all the while maintaining an awkward and ironic joviality that was likely born of the weirdness of our impromptu exchange.
“Are you aware that the White House is claiming that the proof you are not the Bertha Lewis who was given a personal tour of the White House residence in early September is that you are Bertha M. Lewis? I asked. “And the one on the visitors log is Bertha E. Lewis. In an online database I see you once had ‘Evans’ in your name.”
“That was a former husband, who is now dead,” she said.
“I’m sorry about that,” I responded sincerely, as we defied the odds that the awkwardness couldn’t get any greater.
I respected her for staying on the phone when she had no reason not to hang up. I even believed her when she claimed she wasn’t Obama’s personal guest in their White House residence even though in the last four months Bertha Lewis rarely uttered a statement in public that wasn’t a provable lie.
And her friends in the press did everything they could to pretend they didn’t notice her lies – and repeated them often to ensure the group didn’t completely implode.
ACORN was the underdog for the media from the word “ho” – and African-American ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis was chosen over Caucasian ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson because Bertha Lewis, a former theater gal, played the perfect victim…
My call with Bertha M. Lewis ended as abruptly as it started. A happy ending it wasn’t as our conversation turned hostile.
“Well then, “ I continued. “Will you issue a correction for the lie that you peddled at the National Press Club where you repeated a lie that the Washington Post had already retracted that James O’Keefe was motivated by racism when he investigated ACORN?”
“No,” she said. “Why would I do that when I believe it in the bottom of my heart?”
“Because you pushed a lie that the Washington Post created from whole cloth, and you hold yourself to account for propagating it,” I responded.
“You are a bad, bad, bad journalist,” Bertha Lewis exclaimed.
Did she hang up? I looked at my cell phone. She had.
The site advertises through Breitbart’s opening piece that it’s going to treat the legacy media with the scathing derision it deserves, and as such we can expect BigJournalism to be an uproariously funny publication.
And potentially a quite important one as well. Perhaps a game-changer, along with scores of other properties growing in audience and commercial viability at the expense of the established elites. As Breitbart says:
Big Journalism is staking the claim that media is now at war with one another: Big Media versus Small Media; Old Media versus New Media; Left Media Vs Right Media. You get the picture. The practice of journalism will never be the same, and not the New York Times’s Pinch Sulzberger nor all the sniping children at Gawker and Media Matters can un-ring this bell – which, after all, tolls for them.
It seems for the first time in my life people who agree with my broad point of view are using the media to tell their truths, to go on the offensive, to act as checks and balances against entrenched media power. And to have a major effect.
I sleep well being part of this process of stratification. If the media isn’t going to take the large clues of losing subscribers, dwindling viewers, thriving alternatives – perhaps something more aggressive will instigate a change for the better.
Even if you’re one of those awful, biased old-media types we seek to destroy, welcome to Big Journalism, where the spirit of free inquiry lives on.
Indeed. Let the games begin.
