Breitbart: Media Rebel With a Cause

New York Post ^ | March 2, 2012 | John Podhoretz

[presidio9]

Andrew Breitbart — my dear wild friend, who died yesterday at the heartbreakingly young age of 43 — could have become a mainstream media mogul, perhaps the first true mogul of the Internet era.

There was a moment, a few years ago, when the size of his role in the Great Media Disruption that was the Internet suddenly came clear to the world, and every magazine of note and every newspaper of importance was chronicling him.

If he’d been a man of conventional ambitions, he would’ve taken up the offers to introduce him to hedge-fund guys, raise a pile of money, go conservative-newsy on the Web, as Fox News did on cable, and, in effect, go straight — speak at TED conferences, hobnob with other honchos at the Aspen Ideas Festival and live a very high life.

But he was too much of a gadfly, too countercultural, too much of a battler — too committed to setting himself against convention, rather than seeking validation from it.

In his 20s, lost and lolling about his native Los Angeles in the 1990s, Andrew came upon Matt Drudge, a fellow LA gadabout who was contributing bits of startlingly accurate media gossip to Internet newsgroups and an opt-in email list in amusing, rat-a-tat-tat, Walter Winchell prose.

Andrew helped Drudge fashion his wares into the Drudge Report, and saw the necessity of setting up shop on a Web page. In 1998, the Drudge Report broke the news of Newsweek spiking the Monica Lewinsky story, and it would be fair to say that the world was never quite

[expat1000]

This is a beautifully written tribute.

[newzjunkey]

He was also a freeper, class of 1998. Freeper Kristinn remembers him here.

[presidio9]

Podhoretz crawled out Romney’s ass just long enough to remind us why people around here used to respect what he had to say.

[McGavin999]

Andrew will be missed but he will never be forgotten. One of a kind. God does good work.