Andrew Breitbart death skepticism: A legacy no journalist wants

Andrew Breitbart in November.

Conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart died early this morning at the age of 43, and the immediate reaction on Twitter was disbelief.

But it wasn’t disbelief as in “I can’t believe he died so suddenly and so young!” It was disbelief as in “This is probably a hoax.”

It was not a hoax. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s office confirmed the death and said it would conduct an autopsy.

Breitbart was most famous for media stunts that were based—there is no other way to say it—on lies. In two of the three most famous controversies he played a role in, videos were edited to make it look like something was happening that was not. Breitbart then attacked the people in those videos for doing things that they appeared to have done, but had not.

This led to political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow to tweet, incisively, “So if Breitbart is really dead, his legacy is such that no one entirely believes reports of his death.”

That’s not the best legacy for a journalist, though I couldn’t tell you whether Breitbart would accept that job description.

Breitbart was the founder of BigJournalism.com and other sites, and was most famous for his involvement in controversies surrounding the non-governmental organization ACORN, U.S. Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod and Rep. Anthony Weiner.

Breitbart rose to fame after a video on his site showed ACORN workers apparently helping a pimp make arrangements for his underage prostitutes. The organization was eventually forced to close. Sherrod, who is black, was forced to resign after Breitbart posted a video of a speech she gave to the NAACP in which she appeared to say she refused to do her best to help a white farmer who needed help when she worked for a nonprofit organization.

Both videos were edited in such a way to create those illusions, neither of which were accurate. Sherrod, who had really been telling the story of when she learned to move past race—she ended up helping the white family save its farm, and the farmer defended her during the controversy—later sued Breitbart for defamation.

Breitbart’s role in the Weiner controversy, which came after the other two, was more straightforward. He got hold of sexually explicit photos the congressman had texted to women not his wife, and Weiner eventually resigned from Congress.

Whatever you think of Breitbart’s politics, take a lesson from the reaction to the news of his sudden death. Though his most recent “journalistic” coup checked out as true, the initial reaction to reports of his demise was to assume it was another Breitbart falsehood. I’d wager that that would have been the case even if Breitbart had lived long enough to break 20 more big stories, all of them accurate.

Credibility is something you earn one story at a time. But once you give people a reason not to believe what you say, just one time, they’ll hang on to it forever. Once you lose your credibility, you’ll go to your grave without it.

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Photo by Mark Taylor / Flickr Creative Commons