Loving Hating Breitbart: a powerful post-partisan message from a documentary about an infamous right-winger.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Andrew Breitbart - Movie review

THE LATE ONLINE impresario Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012) was firmly on the right side of the political spectrum. But a new documentary about his life, Hating Breitbart, transcends his politics and instead captures the tectonic shift he helped bring about from the legacy media to newer forms of distributed newsgathering and opinion-making.

This move from conventional gatekeepers and authorities (think The New York Times, official spokespeople, and established broadcast and cable news channels) to endlessly proliferating tastemakers and outlets (think Instapundit, Gawker, and Breitbart's own suite of "Big" sites) doesn't break along conventional ideological lines. It's more attitudinal, more punk in the best sense of the word. When faced with a world that didn't cater to them and their aesthetics, the punks of the late 1970s and early 1980s famously made their own clothes, hairdos, and music. If they learned how to play their instruments at all, they did it on the job. Disaffected and unsatisfied people stopped simply choking down mass culture. Instead, they seasoned off-the-shelf meals to their own tastes, tossed in whatever other ingredients they wanted (or could steal), and stirred the pot until the dish was OK by them.

Breitbart pulled off something similar during his truncated life. The guy who once worked as Matt Drudge's "bitch" (his term!) and who helped create The Huffington Post came into his own by striking out on his own, first with the aggregator sites Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv and then with Big Hollywood (born in 2008), Big Government (2009), and all the rest. Like many on the right, he burned with resentment that the mainstream media disdained not just his perspective but his preferred ways of expressing it. As he notes in Hating Breitbart, he had only two modes: jocularity and righteous indignation. But Breitbart didn't just stew in his anger. He realized that it keeps getting easier for individuals and groups at every level of society and at every spot on the ideological spectrum to enter into conversations about everything under the sun.

Reputation still matters, arguably more than ever. But there's no question that it has never been so easy to make a name for yourself by bringing something new to the table. Ask Hot Aires conservative commentator Ed Morrissey, who not so long ago was managing a Minnesota-based call center, or New York Times stats maven Nate Silver, who made his bones as a baseball stats nerd and whose...