jammerbirdi
Joined: 23 Sep 2004
Posts: 21046
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 Posted: 08/21/17 8:47 pm ::: Breitbart Explained Here |
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I'm not suggesting at all that this New York Times Magazine long read on the editor in chief of the controversial website IS the explanation of Breitbart in the title of this thread. What I'm doing is asking for help from people who actually know a lot about Breitbart, not just those who have an opinion, to share what they know in this thread and help to flesh out the picture a little.
Something in the piece struck a chord with me.
"Maybe it’s hard to remember anymore what you thought of Breitbart two years ago, but if you were like most people, you didn’t think about Breitbart at all. The average voter had no idea the site existed, and by the time its stories slipped into the mainline arteries of public discourse, most people were already hearing more about Breitbart than they would ever hear from Breitbart. Take a quick survey of your friends and see how many visited Breitbart last week or can name two articles that appeared on the site in the past three months. Then ask the same people what they think of Breitbart’s influence on the election, and watch how loud the room becomes. It’s startling the way the word ‘‘Breitbart’’ has become iconographic, referring not really to the website or the company but to an amorphous mass of revanchist opinions for which Breitbart receives credit or blame. We’re all so certain that Breitbart is spewing a fountain of bigotry every day — denigrating women and riling up anti-Semitism, wailing about ‘‘black crime’’ and ‘‘trannies’’ — that few of us devote much time to observing it for ourselves. As a result, we haven’t done a great job of figuring out what exactly Breitbart is or what Steve Bannon meant when he described it as a ‘‘platform for the alt-right.’’
So I have to admit that I fall into the category of having an opinion about Breitbart without having been a consumer of the product. Which, I will also admit, is a little perplexing to explain considering I happen to agree with a certain amount of America first nationalism, and have some less than pristine opinions of open borders, sanctuary cities, even legal immigration, BLM as a movement, and the Democratic Party of which I belong.
I know I visited the Breitbart website once or twice last year, but it certainly didn't grab me. After reading this article this weekend I revisited the place, and it looked familiar, and I understand why it didn't grab me. Which is summed up by a comment to the Magazine article.
"What strikes me most is that most of the content on Breitbart is simply of very low quality. Many articles are just quotes from other news sources, often The Times. I guess their purpose is to throw some incendiary scraps (in the view of Breitbart readers) on the floor so that the readers can work themselves into a righteous rage in the comments section, which they then reliably do."
This. And this. I don't know about low-quality, how about there's no there there? I didn't get it when I visited there or I would have been caught up in the storm of incendiary articles countering the mainstream media and the political parties on behalf of the little guy. And after taking another look, I still don't get it. I do understand, of course, that a place can thrive and be a bee hive based solely on the fact that it is an online gathering place for like-minded end-users to form a community to voice their opinions. Duh. I get that. And that that is the thing that Breitbart is most known for and what brings it the most mainstream scorn.
But I'm just flummoxed by the fact that this place isn't an online salon of great long reads on the subject of nationalism and immigration and trade deals, etc. That it doesn't seem to have produced any of those in the fashion that Slate, Deadspin, Politico, Grantland, Gawker, etc. has and had done over the years. When it would SEEM that it was churning that stuff out on a regular basis if the reputation and notoriety it has was to be believed. The Alex Marlowe guy seems a fairly button-down erudite and eloquent Stanford grad who should have a murderer's row of brilliant incisive writers. And that's what I expected when I visited Breitbart. I'm so disappointed.
Anyway. So when Steve Bannon says he's built this machinery that he now will have at his disposal, his weapons are back in his hands, etc. I'm like, this is a content aggregation website that doesn't come near some of the more important examples of those, most notably the Huffington Post. I've seen some Wordpress blogs by serial re-bloggers (like re-tweeters, sharing other people's posts) that remind me a little of the Breitbart front page. What's the weapon here? The comments section? lol.
So, I'm just wondering what people here might know that I don't know. The article names a couple of current, somewhat straight journalism writers and a couple of flamethrowers who are no long associated with the publication. And I see a LOT of simply linking to content from other publications. If I'm not mistaken, even the headline article today. IDK. I feel like I'm missing something. I've MADE better arguments for nationalism and a reassessing of immigration right here than I see on Breitbart. If the commenters on the site are the draw, why aren't the better commenters being tapped for pieces?
One last thing for Luuuc and Queenie, and all the old timers really. The full quote from Bannon.
“I feel jacked up,” he says. “Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons. Someone said, ‘it’s Bannon the Barbarian.’ I am definitely going to crush the opposition. There’s no doubt. I built a f***ing machine at Breitbart. And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.”
lol. He sounds like someone we would need to ban! The mentality is that of a teenager. Scary. But funny, too.
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