“[Breitbart] is a very powerful person, in a lot of ways he might be more powerful than ACORN.”
Columbia Journalism Review Q and A with Liberal Historian Rick Perlstein on ACORN:
As the recent scandals surrounding the green-jobs advocate Van Jones and the community organizing group ACORN have shown, even under a Democratic White House and Congress, the conservative media have an ability to place a story on the national agenda. Those episodes have also prompted some mainstream media outlets to examine their own practices. A recent column by Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander reported that the paper’s executive editor, Marcus Brauchli, pressed his staff for more ACORN coverage; Brauchli was also quoted expressing the concern “that we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It’s particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view.”
This relationship between “conservative issues” and national issues more broadly is one that’s been of interest for some time to Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland and Before the Storm. A leading liberal historian of the conservative movement, Perlstein’s work has won respect from some leading conservatives; writing for CJR, he once praised the late journalist Paul Cowan for his sensitivity to the “dignity and value” of conservative subcultures. But Perlstein has also chastised the media, in the pages of the Post, for being too sensitive to conservative criticisms….
…The Post‘s irresponsibility when it comes to ACORN is symbolized by the fact that the word “Drudge” doesn’t show up in that article. The idea that this guy Andrew Breitbart [a protégé of Matt Drudge, and the founder of Big Government, the Web site that presented the ACORN videos] is just floating out there in the ether as some kind of independent conservative activist–he’s a very powerful person, in a lot of ways he might be more powerful than ACORN.
Read the full interview here.