Thursday, August 30, 2012

‘Breitbart’ as a Verb

The time elapsed between the exposure of David Chalian's hateful remarks and his firing as the D.C. bureau chief of Yahoo News was astonishingly brief. At 10:22 a.m. Wednesday, Matthew Sheffield posted video showing Chalian, accidentally caught in an open-microphone moment during an ABC News online broadcast, making a sick "joke" that Mitt Romney's presidential campaign was indifferent to suffering caused by Hurricane Isaac: "They're not concerned at all. They are happy to have a party with black people drowning." Within three hours, Chalian was fired -- "terminated effective immediately," Yahoo said in a press statement that included an apology to Romney, to the GOP nominee's campaign staff, and to "anyone who was offended."
About a half hour after Chalian was fired, in a theater near the Tampa Bay Times Forum where the Republican National Convention is meeting this week, a new documentary film made its world premiere. Hating Breitbart chronicles the career of a man who dedicated his life to fighting the dishonesty and prejudices of what he called the Democrat-Media Complex. Among the "stars" of the movie, appearing as an expert commentator on liberal bias and Andrew Breitbart's war against it, is a young man named Matthew Sheffield -- the founding editor of the Media Research Center's Newsbusters site, and the same Matthew Sheffield who exposed Chalian's career-destroying gaffe.
Breitbart died of a heart attack in March, but his crusade against media bias lives on, so that it is possible to name what happened to the former D.C. bureau chief of Yahoo News: David Chalian got Breitbarted.

Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/08/30/breitbart-as-a-verb

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