[Orson] Bean was a genuine American original: a wit, a storyteller, and a conservative who had appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson more often than almost any other guest. He was married to the actress Alley Mills, and his daughter Susannah would become Andrew’s wife. When Andrew noticed Limbaugh’s book, The Way Things Ought to Be, on Orson’s shelf and demanded to know why it was there, Orson simply suggested he listen to the man before judging him. Andrew tuned in to KFI AM 640, expecting to confirm his worst suspicions. What he found instead was a happy warrior—a man of uncommon humor, courage, and clarity who took on the American left three hours a day, 52 weeks a year, without breaking a sweat. Andrew was transfixed. He had gone looking for evil personified and instead found a great teacher. He later called him “Professor Limbaugh,” so powerful was the encounter. He swallowed hard and told Orson Bean that he was right.
But it was an earlier moment that had truly cracked Breitbart’s liberal worldview. Watching the United States Senate’s treatment of Clarence Thomas during his 1991 confirmation hearings, led by Senators Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, Breitbart understood that he was not witnessing principled liberal truth-telling. It was a coordinated smear. The charges against Thomas were false, and the men leveling them knew it. The liberal framework he had inherited collapsed. In its place arose something more honest and more durable: a determination to call things by their right names. Breitbart also saw that the American media was complicit in the attempted takedown of Thomas. Not only were lies being told, but they were amplified by supposedly objective journalists.
Throughout most of American history, there was no question that newspapers were partisan. There was no illusion that they were objective observers. This changed in the early 20th century with the founding of the first journalism schools, most notably the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism and later the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. As more Americans attended university, the impression arose that, because journalists were attending journalism schools, they would emerge as objective arbiters of the truth. A new standard of professionalism had been created, and questioning a journalist’s objectivity was simply unnecessary. Whether that was ever true or not, by the time he graduated from Tulane in 1991, Breitbart knew from his college experience that journalism courses, like those in the American Studies department and other social sciences, were rotten to the core.
Around this time, Breitbart met Matt Drudge, whose Drudge Report had already demonstrated that a single person with an internet connection and a willingness to publish what the mainstream press refused to touch could change the entire media landscape. Drudge’s revelations on President Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal demonstrated the power of the new media in spades. Breitbart worked closely with Drudge for years and absorbed everything he could from the experience. Drudge was the proof of concept that one did not have to be part of the mainstream media to have an impact.
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