07 Oct 2009 Andrew Breitbart is Wondering…

Andrew Breitbart is wondering why a guy named Conor Friedersdorf, who writes for the Atlantic and the Daily Beast, keeps writing about Breitbart but refuses to interview him.

C’mon! Friedersdorf works for the Atlantic, which this month is running a very long cover story complaining about U.S. interrogation techniques without giving roughly equal consideration to the question of how many lives may have been saved by these techniques.

This is the logical equivalent of complaining about the U.S. dropping atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without examining the possibility that these horrific attacks may have saved more lives than they cost. Did no one from the Atlantic even notice that the other side of the question was entirely missing from its cover story?

(Lest readers think it unfair of me to drag Andrew Sullivan — who wrote the cover story — into this, be aware that he injected himself by putting an approving piece on his own Atlantic magazine blog about what Conor Friedersdorf has written about Breitbart.)

MSM writers often fail to fact-check. Just ask Slate’s Timothy Noah, or better, the White House staffers who relied on Noah’s research when crafting President Obama’s recent health care speech to a joint session of Congress.

(Not that the White House speechwriters have the slightest excuse for not checking the original sources themselves.)

When Conor Friedersdorf writes about Andrew Breitbart without giving Breitbart the courtesy of a phone call to give his side of the story, it’s really just business as usual for the MSM.

And that, ironically, is in part why so many people choose get their news from Breitbart.

(As a very off-the-subject side note, the Atlantic cover story on torture contains this sentence, intended as part of its condemnation of U.S. interrogation techniques: “But 48 days and nights with no more than four hours’ sleep every 24, combined with stress positions, hypothermia, and forced nudity, push these nuances over a line any decent person would acknowledge.” Aside from the hypothermia, this is a precise description of the two-month period during which I gave birth to twins.)

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Labels: Defense, Health Care, Media, Retirement, White House