Biased about bias: the hunt for ideology becomes an ideology.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Columns

ANDREW BREITBART IS a paid assistant to the excitable editor of The Drudge Report; he cheerfully describes himself as "Matt Drudge's bitch." "Twelve years into this adult nightmare," he tells me and two dozen other reporters, "I woke up, after having grown up in Brentwood as this liberal Jewish kid, and sensed that something was wrong--I started to realize that I was a conservative."

We're at the Los Angeles Press Club, and Breitbart, co-author of the breezy Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon--The Case Against Celebrity, is on a panel discussing campaign coverage and media bias, in that narrow window of time between the Swift Boat controversy and Rathergate.

"Every day I wake up in the battle about media bias," he says. "The best analogy I can give to you is this: Have you ever gone to like the Santa Monica Pier, and seen one of those holograms on the wall, and you're supposed to stare at it for awhile, and there's supposed to be, like, a magical castle in it? Well you look and you look and you can't see that castle and you can't see that castle, but eventually your eyes focus in such a way that the castle comes up. And then you can't not see the castle. That's how media bias comes to you from the conservative angle."

As the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach argued, if you stare at anything long enough, it will look more like what you're obsessed with than what it actually is. Or, if you're a scoop-hungry reporter like Dan Rather, it can immediately resemble something you were desperately seeking.

Rather already had a serviceable 60 Minutes II segment, another contribution to the already stuffed journalistic dossier showing that George W. Bush received preferential treatment while leaving a strangely incomplete paper trail in the Texas Air National Guard. But CBS'S Seven Million Dollar Man wanted to boost the story several notches by documenting a sensational, thus-far-unproven allegation: that Bush disobeyed a direct order.

When a package of memos meeting these requirements was produced, Rather and his team notoriously brushed off skepticism from their own hired forensic consultants, failed to adequately press the memos' source--a known Bush-hating Democrat--as to where he got them, and rushed the documents to broadcast. As Barbara Mikkelson, proprietor of the urban legend-debunking site Snopes.com, once told me, "Mom always said if something appears too good to be true, it generally is."

And so it was for Rather, who...