Sponsors rush from Limbaugh program over ‘slut’ comments controversy

By Sam Baker and Alicia M. Cohn

Rush Limbaugh is facing the most significant controversy of his decades-long career after losing roughly 30 advertisers in the days since he called a Georgetown University law student a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

Media experts say Limbaugh won’t lose his show over the controversy, but the exodus of ad money — and Limbaugh’s nearly unprecedented decision to apologize for something he said — show that the uproar is taking a toll.

Limbaugh’s career has been defined by fights with the media and the political left, but incendiary comments have gotten radio and television hosts fired in the past.

Don Imus lost his show after making a derogatory remark about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, and liberal TV host Bill Maher saw his ABC show get canceled after he said the Sept. 11 hijackers were brave.

Limbaugh has managed to avoid such consequences, despite a long history of controversial comments about women. But his critics say he finally crossed the line with his personal insults against Sandra Fluke, the law student who testified before House Democrats in support of the White House’s recent contraception mandate.

“What makes this different, like Imus, is the attacks were not on a politician. They were just on a young woman who was asked to testify,” said Karl Frisch, a partner at the liberal consulting firm Bullfight Strategies. “I have never seen this kind of intensity on Limbaugh before.”

Over a three-day span last week, Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” and said she should record sex tapes in exchange for her insurance plan providing contraception without charging a co-pay. He issued an apology over the weekend.

Democrats and their allies have seized on Limbaugh’s comments, pressing GOP leaders to renounce the insults. Democratic Reps. George Miller (Calif.) and Steve Cohen (Tenn.) encouraged Limbaugh’s advertisers to drop his show, and Cohen said he wouldn’t buy airtime on stations owned by Clear Channel, which owns Limbaugh’s show.

The controversy has swept social networking sites like Twitter, where users have bombarded Limbaugh’s advertisers.

Some of his biggest sponsors, including Carbonite, disavowed Limbaugh’s statements and said they would not advertise on his show anymore. Other companies, including major advertisers such as Sears and Netflix, buy bulk advertising on local radio affiliates and have directed those stations not to run their ads during Limbaugh’s show.

That will hurt Limbaugh’s bottom line in the short term, but advertisers will either return or be replaced, Boston University Professor John Verret said.

“I think Rush Limbaugh is going to ultimately ride this out,” Verret said. “His following is much more fanatical than the Imus following.”

He said pressuring advertisers has worked “incredibly well” in the past, but can only succeed with hosts who are also losing their audience.

Limbaugh’s fans will only grow more devoted because of the Fluke controversy, Verret said, and advertisers will have a hard time passing up the chance to reach millions of listeners.

“Ultimately, business is business,” he said.

Limbaugh’s critics are making a similar counterargument.

Angelo Carusone, director of online strategy at Media Matters for America, said affiliates will second-guess the value of Limbaugh’s show as they lose advertising revenue and have to spend their own resources making sure certain ads don’t run.

“He did this. He told them he was bad for business,” said Carusone, who has pressured Limbaugh’s advertisers from his @StopRush Twitter account.

The uproar over Limbaugh’s attacks on Fluke has sparked pushback from the right. Pundits have pointed to a slew of derogatory comments from liberal men, accusing the media of a double standard. Current or former MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz have all drawn sharp criticism for comments about women, particularly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) said on Facebook on Tuesday that if President Obama is going to condemn Limbaugh, he also ought to return a $1 million campaign contribution from Maher, who insulted Palin during the presidential campaign with off-color anatomical references.

Verret said he doesn’t expect Limbaugh to lose his show the way Maher, who now hosts a talk show on HBO, lost the late-night “Politically Incorrect” on ABC.

The difference between Maher and Limbaugh, according to Verret, is power. Maher is nowhere near as influential on the left as Limbaugh is on the right.

Carusone was also instrumental in the campaign against former Fox News host Glenn Beck, who lost his show on Fox News amid declining ratings and wary advertisers. Carusone said companies can be persuaded that advertising with a potentially inflammatory host isn’t worth the risk, and questioned whether advertisers would come back. Of the roughly 400 sponsors that left Beck, he said, only two returned.

Carusone said Media Matters and other Limbaugh critics are targeting markets where Limbaugh doesn’t perform especially well. Although his show is syndicated in hundreds of cities, it’s not a huge draw in all of them, Carusone said.

Fluke, in an appearance on ABC’s “The View,” said listeners will decide whether advertisers support Limbaugh.

“Americans have a long tradition of supporting companies who share the values that they have,” she said, adding that she would allow Limbaugh’s sponsors to decide whether he should remain on the air.

Fox News Haters to Host Joint B-Day Party

By Betsy Rothstein

Don’t expect FNC Prez Roger Ailes to be on the guest list, or anyone from The Daily Caller for that matter. But this weekend, former MMFAers Eric Burns and Karl Frisch, now of Bullfight Strategies, are coming together to host a joint birthday party. Frisch is also a syndicated columnist.

Will the birthday cake say “F–k Fox?”

The invitation is as follows:

“They attacked Tom DeLay and the culture of corruption in Congress together on the House Rules Committee. They battled Fox News and the right-wing noise machine together at Media Matters. Now they duke it out for their clients at Bullfight Strategies. The only fight Eric Burns and Karl Frisch seem to be losing is the one with age. Please join us for a party celebrating their respective birthdays at BLANK on Saturday, March 3, 2012 upstairs at BLANK.”

Disbelief, Backlash After Vote Against Marriage

By Kevin Naff

Maryland Del. Sam Arora’s decision to vote against the same-sex marriage bill last week proved unpopular with many in his progressive Montgomery County district, but no one was more disappointed than Arora’s own state senator, Roger Manno.

Sen. Manno (D-District 19), in a lengthy interview with the Blade, recalled his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to persuade Arora to support the bill, stretching back to last year.

“It’s a very tough situation,” Manno said. “I’m extremely concerned and disappointed and have spoken to constituents who are confused and concerned. I’m so … deeply disappointed and sad that Sam could not get there for whatever reason.”

Manno said he began meeting regularly with Arora shortly after he was elected in 2010 and heard that the freshman delegate was struggling with the marriage issue. Arora had campaigned on a pledge of support for the bill and even co-sponsored it initially before changing his mind last year.

“I could sense there could be a problem,” Manno said. “And I tried to mentor him. Freshmen make mistakes here and it’s easy to do things that are damaging to your career and that hurt people.”

So Manno and several other members of the Montgomery County delegation to Annapolis tried “to get him to see the issue as we saw it.”

“In my heart, marriage equality is an important and timely issue of emancipation for loving families who happen to be of the same sex,” Manno said.

After the marriage bill died in the House last year and the session ended, Manno said Arora took time off to study for the bar exam. Then last summer the two colleagues met again to discuss marriage.

“We sat for several hours and talked about his thoughts on marriage equality and where he was on the bill and he represented it was a crisis of faith,” Manno said.

At that point, Arora expressed a range of concerns about the bill, Manno said, including religious, moral and constitutional objections. Still, Manno urged Arora to keep an open mind because he knew that Gov. Martin O’Malley was planning to introduce the marriage bill in 2012. In late summer, Manno asked Arora to join him at a press conference where O’Malley announced his plans for the marriage bill, but Arora failed to show up.

When the 2012 session started last month, Manno said he continued to reach out to Arora, culminating with an hour-long meeting last week before a joint committee vote on the marriage bill; Arora serves on the Judiciary Committee, which was considering the measure.

“I didn’t know where he was going to go that week,” Manno said. Arora ultimately abstained from voting in committee at which point, “I put my head in my hands and said, ‘oh no,’” Manno said. After the committee sent the bill to the House floor, Arora received multiple calls from senior Democrats seeking his support, including O’Malley and former President Bill Clinton.

“When he went to the floor, I was there in the House chamber to give him a hug and let him know he had my support to vote for equality,” Manno said. “The vote came Friday, I was on the floor, I sent him a text a minute before the vote. I believed at the end of the day he would put a green vote on the board and he didn’t. The chamber erupted in jubilation, rightfully so, but I was standing on the floor with my head hung because Sam had disappointed a lot of people.”

Arora has yet to publicly disclose his reasons for opposing the bill after once sponsoring it. He has refused repeated interview requests from the Blade and other media outlets since last year.

Joshua Lapidus, Arora’s legislative director, quit in protest Friday night just after the marriage vote in a scathing resignation letter obtained by the Blade.

“I respect you and your beliefs, however I cannot respect your decision to place personal religious belief over the roles and responsibilities of the stewardship the people of District 19 entrusted unto you,” Lapidus wrote. He added, “It saddens me that you are standing against the tide of history and ending your career over an issue that will no doubt be decided in the affirmative, with or without your vote, over the next couple years. So, I write this letter to inform you that if you vote don’t vote for HB 438 l can no longer work under your employ.”

Arora issued a brief statement to the Blade in response to Lapidus’s resignation.

“I don’t comment on personnel issues,” Arora wrote. “That said: Josh continues to be a friend, and I wish him well.”

Another one-time friend of Arora’s, columnist and Democratic strategist Karl Frisch, praised Lapidus for stepping down.

“I think it’s gutsy,” Frisch said. “It’s the right move and shows that we had allies working on our behalf in his office.”

Frisch, a D.C. resident, donated $100 to Arora’s campaign in 2010 and said he knew Arora socially for several years. But after rumors emerged that Arora’s marriage position was changing, Frisch said his calls and emails went unreturned.

“I feel personally betrayed,” Frisch said. “I don’t take candidates’ word for it — he was listed as a co-sponsor of the bill and filled out an Equality Maryland questionnaire [on marriage]. … I’m used to politicians lying, I’m not used to being lied to by a friend.”

After Friday’s vote, Frisch said he took part in a conference call with a group of “national and Maryland-based political operatives to discuss every tool we can deploy to send Sam packing in 2014.” Manno said he wasn’t on that call but noted that politicians have to answer to their constituents.

“A former boss of mine once said that politics is about loyalty — to people, ideas, communities. At the end of the day, that’s really what we do,” Manno said. “Politicians have to answer for what we do in the next election and we all have to answer for what we do in the next life and I try to keep that in the forefront of my thoughts everyday.”

Manno, 45, is straight and married but credits his upbringing in the diverse and gay-friendly neighborhoods of Chelsea and Greenwich Village in New York for influencing his views on marriage. He once interned in the Clinton White House for Richard Socarides, who advised Clinton on gay-related issues.

“Marriage is a terribly uncomplicated issue,” he said. “If you love people and want to see that spark ignite, you have to love everyone.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg staying put, won’t give Obama SCOTUS opening this year

By Myles Miller

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has donned a black robe for 32 years, including 18 on the Supreme Court, and she has no plans to hang it up anytime soon.

Senate halls have been buzzing for about a year about the prospect of the Supreme Court justice retiring during this election year, a move that would clear the way for President Barack Obama to appoint another liberal justice before the court determines the fate of his 2010 health care law.

Ginsburg, the eldest member of the court at 78 and a consistent voice of its liberal wing, has told friends in Washington and back home in Midwood, Brooklyn, where she was raised, that she isn’t ready to go.

“Justice Ginsburg has not expressed any interest in retiring,” a close Ginsburg friend from the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., told The Daily Caller. The jurist was raised and attended high school in Midwood.

Democrats fear if a Republican wins the 2012 race and she were to retire in 2013 or later, her successor could be a conservative — giving the high court a long-term rightward tilt.
During the last term, she served for the first time with two other women, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. She also has the power to delegate dissenting opinions when she is on the losing end of rulings split on ideological lines.

Observers of the nation’s highest court point to the justice’s recent activity as a clear sign that she has no intention of retiring.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled by a 7–2 margin that an Alabama man on death row who missed an important court-filing deadline due to a mailroom mix up at a New York law firm must be given a second chance at clemency. Justice Ginsburg wrote for the majority, saying “no just system” would allow the missed deadline to be held against the inmate, Cory R. Maples.

In just the past week, the court has published six decisions written by Ginsburg.

Democratic strategist Karl Frisch told TheDC that while Supreme Court justices are political individuals, they pride themselves in defying political expectations.

“You would expect that [Supreme Court justices] would line up their retirements with what works for the political calendar but it never works out that way,” Frisch said.

Appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg’s health has been a constant concern for Supreme Court observers. She survived colon cancer in 1999 and then underwent pancreatic cancer surgery ten years later. Doctors found a tumor in her pancreas at an early stage.

According to the Hirschberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research, only four percent of patients with the disease live five years after their diagnoses. But the five-year survival rate “can rise as high as 20% to 25%,” the foundation adds, “if the tumor is removed completely and when cancer has not spread to lymph nodes.”

Ginsburg’s 2009 cancer surgery produced three strokes of good luck. First, the one-centimeter tumor doctors identified in a CT scan turned out to be benign. And second, surgeons stumbled upon another, much smaller lesion — the cancerous one — far earlier than they would have been able to with ordinary noninvasive tools.

The third miracle was that her lymph nodes showed no sign of cancer. Doctors also said it had not spread to other parts of her body.

It would be a major disruption, both for the court and the Senate, if Ginsburg were to step down mid-term, according to Laura K. Ray, a Widener University law professor.

“As a rule that doesn’t happen unless a health emergency,” Ray said. “This is a woman who has had two varieties of cancer. She lost her husband and she’s come back on the bench. Her work on the bench is tremendously important to her.”

If Ginsburg’s were to retire in the next few months, President Obama would likely pick someone aligned with her political ideology, Frisch added.

A spokesperson at the Democratic National Committee did not respond to The Daily Caller’s request for comment.

Television is the defining medium for the way people consume their news and make decisions,” progressive strategist Karl Frisch says about being able to share his vision with millions through his television appearances. “[Television] gives me the opportunity to show what a serious gay man has to say about politics.”

Frisch says since he left Media Matters last year to form Bullfight Strategies with former Media Matters president Eric Burns, he’s been tapped by shows like “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” “The Big Picture with Thom Hartman” on RT America and several CNN and MSNBC shows to not only discuss LGBT issues, but all progressive values.

“People embrace the fact it’s important to have LGBT people appearing in news programs,” says Frisch, a Los Angeles native and now D.C.-based syndicated columnist and radio/TV guest. “I hope people see the need for having more LGBT voices in the news.

Inside the Beltway

By Jennifer Harper

Quake-a-Mageddon

Yes, why not use the Great Capital Earthquake of 2011, the proverbial Quake-a-mageddon to exercise vigorous political humor? Bars in the nation’s capital were offering discounts on “shaken” drinks. And after the White House rattled from the Earth’s shifting tectonic plates rather than the undulating sound bites of Congress, folks took to social media. Among the aftershocks and after-tweets that surfaced, almost instantly, on Twitter:

“Shaking buildings full of people yelling and screaming, Tweeting up a storm and freaking out. Just your run-of-the-mill Rick Perry rally.” (From RickPerryFacts.)

“Capitol evacuated. Nation experiences brief economic recovery.” (commentator Ann Coulter)

“Okay, I’m done talking about the Earthquake. So far as I know, it didn’t hurt anyone. The Republicans on the other hand…” (Karl Frisch, former spokesman, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee).

“Has Michael Bloomberg called in grief counselors yet?” (Columnist Michelle Malkin)

Queery: Karl Frisch

By Joey DiGuglielmo

Karl Frisch started his career as a Republican. He now makes a living pointing out what he calls the party’s hypocrisies and biases masquerading as journalism.

“It’s been an advantage in some ways,” the 33-year-old Westchester, Calif., native says. “I came to this fight having seen what the other side is capable of. I started very young … working on the campaign of a local Republican. My parents were Republicans … my politics were not motivated by ideology but more by my own trajectory and career. I was thinking about what would raise my profile and make me more successful.”

He was also closeted at the time. Frisch, today a syndicated columnist and founding partner of Bullfight Strategies (a communications partnership that helps progressive leaders), has joined the Democratic Party and discusses his views on radio and TV. The college dropout is a regular on CurrentTV’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and morning radio’s “Stephanie Miller Show” where his “Right Wing World” segment airs Thursdays at 9. Listen for him Monday and Tuesday when he guest hosts the nationally syndicated “Leslie Marshall Show,” which can be streamed through her eponymous website.

So what led to his political turnabout? Frisch says it was mostly a matter of age and maturity, some of which was tied up in his decisions to come out about the same time. He eventually felt “ludicrous,” he says, and realized early in his career a “wasted life in the closet, miserable” wasn’t for him. His campaign staff work, which included a stint with Sen. John McCain in 2000, led him to Iowa, South Carolina, Vermont, Ohio and more. He landed in Washington in 2004 after working on the Howard Dean campaign. Frisch initially did some new media consulting work here, then worked with U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter on the House Rules Committee.

Frisch enjoys traveling, skiing, camping, politics, espressos, live music, theater, gadgets and “Glee” in his free time. “Sweet Transvestite” from “Rocky Horror” is his signature karaoke song. He de-stresses by doing cardio at Vida and walking his dog, Dexter Von Frisch, who has his own Twitter account. Frisch is single and lives in Dupont Circle.

How long have you been out and who was the hardest person to tell?

The first person I told was my closest high school/college friend Portia in 1999. I sent her a letter and was so upset when I didn’t hear back from her after a few days. It turned out that I’d simply put the wrong zip code on the envelope — she ended up being great and very supportive. So supportive in fact that her college roommate came out within a few days! It wasn’t long until I was out to everyone in my life with the exception of my parents. They were the hardest to tell though I finally did in 2002.

Who’s your LGBT hero?

That’s going to be a four-way tie between my sister for the personal inspiration, Harvey Milk and Dan Savage for their civic inspiration, and members of the LGBT community who continue to reside in states that deny their equality and fail to value their simple human dignity. They should inspire us all, especially those of us in D.C. who have it far easier in comparison.

What’s Washington’s best nightspot, past or present?

Feeling divey? Townhouse Tavern. Want to sing? Karaoke at Playbill Café with Jill on Thursdays. Nellie’s and D.C. Bëar Crüe happy hour are always fun too.

Describe your dream wedding.

First and foremost, there would have to be another groom. Oh, and it would also be a union recognized in every U.S. state, district and territory. I’d even give up the cake, tuxedo and reception for that (though I really shouldn’t need to).

What non-LGBT issue are you most passionate about?

Climate change. I have no doubt that we are on the precipice of full equality as a community. I’d like to be able to enjoy it here on planet Earth for decades to come. With the same anti-science crazies that stand in the way of our equality denying the truth of global climate change, that isn’t a guarantee.

What historical outcome would you change?

The 2000 election. If Gore had been declared the winner, perhaps we would be further along in the march for equality.

What’s been the most memorable pop culture moment of your lifetime?

Four words: Marky Mark Calvin Klein.

On what do you insist?

Voting. If you don’t, STFU. Seriously.

What was your last Facebook post or Tweet?

“Amazing. My youngest sister is in the new GLEE Live 3D movie. She’s the redhead makeup artist: http://t.co/s6i3A4y”

If your life were a book, what would the title be?

“Second Chances: The Story of How a Closeted Conservative Became a Gay Progressive and Changed the World for the Better”

If science discovered a way to change sexual orientation, what would you do?

Start casting aspersions on science like a Republican.

What do you believe in beyond the physical world?

Literally? Other planets, our universe, some stars, various gasses, space junk etc.

What’s your advice for LGBT movement leaders?

Keep calm and fight on!

What would you walk across hot coals for?

I’d settle for $5,000 cash and the world’s best pedicure.

What LGBT stereotype annoys you most?

The notion that being gay is a choice. It isn’t. Religiosity and being Republican on the other hand …

What’s your favorite LGBT movie?

That’s really tough because so many are so very bad. For major releases, I’d go with “Milk,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “Top Gun” (it’s about volleyball right?). “Get Real,” “Spork,” “Sordid Lives” and “Edge of Seventeen” for some indie flare.

What’s the most overrated social custom?

The subordination of women.

What trophy or prize do you most covet?

Who wouldn’t dream of completing the EGOT during their lifetime? Google it.

What do you wish you’d known at 18?

That “it gets better.” If I’d known that, perhaps I would have come out at 18 or even earlier.

Why Washington?

History. Happens. Here. (and Crabcakes.)

Good Morning FishbowlDC Readers

By Betsy Rothstein

…

Ahh…the memories

“It’s worth noting that in @DexterVonFrisch’s first year of life he was named the cutest dog in DC by @FishbowlDC. #happybdaydexter” — Syndicated Columnist and Bullfight Strategies Partner Karl Frisch in a Monday tweet. This photograph was taken when we met up with Dexter at Starbucks in Dupont Circle. We presume he was reading FishbowlDC. Happy Birthday Dexter!

Karl Frisch, a Breitbart critic with the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, says the only difference between the ACORN incident and the Sherrod affair was that “he was proven a fraud in a few hours vs. several months,” referring to the fact that initial reports about the ACORN story (such as the fact that the undercover “reporters” were dressed as a pimp and a prostitute) were later found to be untrue. After a four-month investigation, a Brooklyn D.A.’s investigation found no illegal activity by the organization.

“He’s like everyone in conservative journalism,” Frisch says. “Which is to come up with a story and go get one side of the evidence to prove that story.”

[…]

But does he have a future after the Sherrod embarrassment? When asked if he considers Andrew Breitbart dangerous, Karl Frisch says simply, “He’s as dangerous as the media allows him to be.”

Read the entire story after the break.

Thursday, September 9, 2010
Creative Loafing

No apologies: A visit from right-wing flame-thrower Andrew Breitbart

By Mitch Perry

“I’ve had an interesting month,” conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart said at the beginning of his 45-minute address in Tampa late last month, before slightly correcting himself. “I’ve had an interesting year.”

For once, the media provocateur was being a bit understated.

He began the year the subject of bemused admiration, profiled by the likes of Time, The New Yorker and Wired after masterminding the 2009 ruse that brought down the community activist organization ACORN. “Breitbart is, in short, expert in making the journalism industry his bitch,” said Wired. A few months later, though, he made headlines for a major misstep: He posted a deceptively edited snippet of videotape on his site that ended up on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor and unjustly led to Shirley Sherrod losing her job at the Department of Agriculture.

When it was made clear after her resignation that Breitbart had presented the excerpt wildly out of context, the White House and the NAACP apologized to Sherrod for calling for her to step down.

But Breitbart never apologized. He’d accomplished his mission: embarrassing the White House and the NAACP. Besides, his supporters believe he always speaks truth, even when he doesn’t.

Introducing Breitbart at the “Florida Transparency Summit” sponsored by the conservative James Madison Institute at the Sheraton Riverwalk Hotel in downtown Tampa on August 28, Institute CEO J. Robert McClure made reference to the Sherrod controversy, then added, “But we know that truth is on our side and not on the side of the Left.”

As the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans is waged daily in our media, Breitbart, 41, has become a key cultural warrior for the conservative cause.

A former Matt Drudge assistant, he now hosts five different websites; his latest, the pro-military bigpeace.com, went live on the 4th of July. Based in Los Angeles, he peppered his Tampa speech with various references to living in “the worst place ever,” but with four kids, added that he’s not moving anywhere.

Breitbart barely mentioned the Sherrod incident during the speech, dismissing it at one point as a “non-story.” It was, in fact, one of 2010′s hottest media scandals.

The tape he provided to O’Reilly Factor seemed to show Sherrod, in a speech to the NAACP, boasting about having given short shrift to a white farmer once. By the time the video aired, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had already asked for Sherrod’s resignation. But a day later, that same white farmer told CNN that Sherrod had actually gone out of her way to help him keep his farm. Other segments of her speech surfaced, in which she explains that if she had ignored him, she would have been giving in to the racism that she and her family had encountered much of her life.

In the Q&A session after his Tampa speech, Breitbart returned to the mantra that his intention in distributing the video was to hit back at the NAACP for accusing the Tea Party of being racist. Perhaps the fact that Sherrod has said she will sue Breitbart deterred him from commenting further.

Breitbart talked much more extensively about videos screened on his Big Government website that led to what is now known as “the ACORN scandal.” That is, the series of videos starring two young conservative activists named James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, who went into ACORN offices and videotaped discussions that showed staffers encouraging prostitution and tax evasion.

Although liberals cried foul (and O’Keefe, in an unrelated incident, later pled guilty to entering federal property under false pretenses), the Census Bureau ended up dropping the group as an unpaid “partner” for the 2010 census, and Congress voted to strip the community activist group of millions of dollars in funding, leading many of its funders and allies to withdraw their support.

Jack Shafer, the media critic for Slate.com, praised Breitbart when the Acorn story broke: “…as a work of undercover journalism, the stunt is a mess, but an interesting one — like something William Randolph Hearst might have conjured up for his sensationalistic New York Journal in the 1890s.”

But after Sherrod, Shafer told CL in an e-mail that “the Sherrod business seriously dinged [Breitbart's] reputation.” He added that “one of the marks of a good journalist is acknowledging error.”

Karl Frisch, a Breitbart critic with the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, says the only difference between the ACORN incident and the Sherrod affair was that “he was proven a fraud in a few hours vs. several months,” referring to the fact that initial reports about the ACORN story (such as the fact that the undercover “reporters” were dressed as a pimp and a prostitute) were later found to be untrue. After a four-month investigation, a Brooklyn D.A.’s investigation found no illegal activity by the organization.

“He’s like everyone in conservative journalism,” Frisch says. “Which is to come up with a story and go get one side of the evidence to prove that story.”

The Sherrod incident enraged the left, but Breitbart appears to relish the atttention. In Tampa he said that ex-liberals like himself who go conservative are “really, really obnoxious. I’m David Horowitz on Ritalin. I’m really, really, really pissed off.” In fact, Breitbart’s disdain for all things liberal is epitomized by his opinion of ACORN, who he calls “an immoral, amoral group that is not out there trying to help people… it’s trying to keep the poor people on the plantation that is liberalism.”

Breitbart views his work as an extension of the rise of conservative media, beginning with Rush Limbaugh’s dominance in the late 1980s on AM radio, followed by Drudge on the Internet, Fox News and Glenn Beck.

But Media Matters’ Frisch says Breitbart is merely a master of self-promotion. Groups like the Media Research Center have been doing the same work over the past 25 years.

But what Breitbart has done is flood the blogosphere. He says that the invention of blog software has allowed all sorts of access to the media that simply wasn’t possible even when the Drudge Report began some 15 years ago, and he says it was liberals who are now paving the way for conservatives like himself to prosper.

By “understanding basic HTML and how to use File Transfer Protocol,” he said in Tampa, “these software gurus on the left opened the floodgates, and the left ultimately sowed the seeds of their own demise, because every person could start a blog from their cell phone if you could go to WordPress.”

Breitbart helped Arianna Huffington create the Huffington Post back in 2005 (Huffington was a noted conservative before changing her political course — that’s when Breitbart originally met her). He says that HuffPo’s decidedly liberal bent is actually “expediting the demise of the New York Times,” saying that it’s a false premise among the “academic elite” that what they’re doing is objective journalism.

Breitbart admits he’s biased on the right, and says everybody else, including the New York Times and other bastions of “old media,” should admit their biases too.

Kathleen Hall Jamison is a professor of communications and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-author of the book, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. Upon reading a text of Breitbart’s Tampa speech, she called it a “very standard critique from the right of the mainstream media,” and says much of it can be heard daily on Rush Limbaugh.

One of the 50 or so people cheering Breitbart on in Tampa was Tim Condon, a South Tampa self-described conservative/libertarian who used to edit the Alligator, the student newspaper at the University of Florida.

“The mainstream media has always said they’re objective, therefore anybody who used to challenge that was called a nutcase,” Condon told CL a few days after Breitbart’s speech. “But what Breitbart says is that they were lying, they were never objective and the Internet has empowered the truth coming out.”

Another fan is Hillsborough County Republican David Hurley, who said afterward that the speech Breitbart gave shows that “he is aware of the dangers of crossing people in high places but goes ahead and takes the plunge. No matter how one feels about his perspective, you have to admire his courage.”

But does he have a future after the Sherrod embarrassment? When asked if he considers Andrew Breitbart dangerous, Karl Frisch says simply, “He’s as dangerous as the media allows him to be.”

During his remarks to those assembled, Press said:

And then I’ve got to say a word about Media Matters. Right? And that’s where we are.  This book would not exist without Media Matters. Truly, It was born — or conceived I guess is the word — in the office of Karl Frisch… where Kevin and I came in a year or so ago and sat down with Karl and said, “you know what? We’re thinking about writing a book about right-wing talk radio, what do you think we ought to do?”

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