Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Social media Miscellaneous Other Andrew James Breitbart (/ˈbraɪtbɑːrt/; February 1, 1969 – March 1, 2012) was an American conservative journalist[1] and political commentator who was the founder of Breitbart News and a co-founder of HuffPost.

[5] Breitbart played central journalistic roles in the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, the firing of Shirley Sherrod, and the ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy.

[6] Commenters such as Nick Gillespie and Conor Friedersdorf have credited Breitbart with changing how people wrote about politics by "show[ing] how the Internet could be used to route around information bottlenecks imposed by official spokesmen and legacy news outlets".

[11] Breitbart remembers his upbringing as apolitical, except in one instance: when the family's rabbi tried to defend Jesse Jackson against charges of antisemitism after his "Hymietown" comment, his parents left the synagogue in protest.

[18][19] Previously left-leaning in his politics, Breitbart changed his political views after experiencing "an epiphany" while watching the late 1991 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, due to what he considered unfounded attacks on the part of liberals based on former employee Anita Hill's sexual harassment accusations.

[1] Listening to radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh helped Breitbart refine his political and philosophical positions, igniting an interest in learning that he had suppressed as a result of his distaste for the "nihilistic musings of dead critical theorists"[21] that had dominated his studies at Tulane.

In this era, Breitbart also read Camille Paglia's book Sexual Personae (1990), a massive survey of Western art, literature and culture from ancient Egypt to the 20th century, which, he wrote, "made me realize how little I really had learned in college.

Described as "a series of do-it-yourself demonstration projects" and "conversation pits", the Breitbart websites have been both criticized and praised for their role in various political issues.

[26] In April 2011, Grand Central Publishing released Breitbart's book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World, in which he discussed his own political evolution and the part he took in the rise of new media, most notably at the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post.

[29][30] Breitbart himself maintained that he stated this in his article about it, and that the purpose of the video was to show the crowd's positive reaction to Sherrod's statements about discriminating against the white farmer.

[32] In June 2011, Breitbart's websites broke the story that congressman Anthony Weiner was sending underage females revealing photographs of himself.

He gave his opinions on the mainstream media, Hollywood, the Obama administration and his personal political views, having heated debates with several callers.

[37][38] In February 2010, Breitbart received the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. During his acceptance speech, he responded directly to accusations by The New York Times reporter Kate Zernike that Jason Mattera, a young conservative activist, had been using "racial tones" in his allusions to President Barack Obama, and had spoken in a "Chris Rock voice".

[40] Blumenthal was referring to James O'Keefe over his having attended a Georgetown Law Center discussion on race featuring Kevin Martin, John Derbyshire, and Jared Taylor, the last of whom founded American Renaissance, a white supremacist online magazine.

[41] These comments resurfaced after the controversy of Donald Trump hiring Breitbart News' executive chairman Steve Bannon to be his White House Chief Strategist.

Breitbart offered to donate $100,000 to the United Negro College Fund "for any audio/video footage of the N-word being hurled," claiming that the several Congressmen made it up.

"[43][44] In February 2012, a YouTube video showed Breitbart yelling at Occupy D.C. protesters outside a Washington hotel hosting a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

An autopsy by the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office showed that he had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with focal coronary atherosclerosis and died from congestive heart failure, which had been diagnosed the year before.

[59][61] Rick Santorum, Reince Priebus, Mitt Romney, Jonah Goldberg, Joel Pollak, Sarah Palin, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, Michael Steele, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich paid tribute to Breitbart.