The following is excerpted from Robert Stacy McCain's recent interview with Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com:
Q: You're just constantly checking your e-mails for something new. ...
A: This is my secret URL that I created. Most people like to read news by category. And so the URLs are coded to go into the proper topic, the proper channel. That's not how I read news. I just like this free flow of news coming in, where I see every single headline from every single news wire. ...
Q: And they're coming in at the rate of three to four every minute. ...
A: Yeah, that's about right. I'd say a little more sometimes. ...
Q: You're getting Reuters, AP, UPI ...
A: AFP, Press Association -- the British newswire. You can look and see, AP sends out their top headlines. ... AP sends out to their editors their top stories.
The Associated Press is, to a huge degree, the conventional wisdom, because if you're watching CNN or Fox News, many people assume that there are people in those buildings who are making those determinations, but they're subscribing to AP and Reuters and filling in the spaces with their own original content. For the most part, this is a reliable place for an editor, at a cable news network, to say, "These are the top stories, so let's cover them, let's take their content, let's take their quotes and let's incorporate that into a package."
The good thing about the Internet is, you don't have to follow that conventional wisdom.
Q: You create your own news wire.
A: There are people who can go out there and become a creme brulee blog and obsess on creme brulee and have strong opinions on creme brulee, and which is the best type of creme brulee. They can fight against the creme caramelle people who don't have the hardened sugar top. And eventually, people who like creme brulee will migrate to this place and that person will become the creme brulee spokesperson. And then maybe a dessert company finds this person, says, "You know more about this than our president does," and hire them for $75,000 a year.
It seems that there's been, across the board, a democratizing of everything. It seems that the American spirit of freedom is being exported. In a MacLuhanesque way, the medium is the message. The freedoms that we see online in this country -- there's no taxation of it -- all these things have all benefitted from the growth of the Internet.
It's very difficult to sell to totalitarianism in the Internet age. Do you want a free Internet? Do you want absolute control of your Internet life, or do you want to put that in the control of others? And I think that if people were to start taking away your freedoms online, you'd see a bloody revolution.
Q: People would fight for their online freedom.
A: Right. To many people, it's everything. I think people take it for granted. I think people should be jumping up on top of their beds, thanking God every single day that this thing was invented.
I went from having a television Jones to the point where, I don't have it in me to be able to turn on television to watch regular programming. It's like, "Why would I go there? If I can be on the Internet?" And I can be a participant in this, and read and see what I want, and not let some executives tell me what to laugh at, and then lead me there with a laugh track. It just seems like the Internet is inherently smarter.
Q: It's a smart medium. It requires interactivity.
A: Right. And I think that, a lot of times, before the Internet, people ended their education when they graduated college. They stopped reading, that's when their assumptions would stop, and people would close their minds, and just go along with the rest of their lives.
Part of the Generation X thesis back in the '90s was political apathy. OK, well, that's a crazy notion now, to me, because the Internet has created an environment where you've got your DailyKos and your FreeRepublic and your Lucianne.com and your HuffingtonPost. Now, everyone seems to have an opinion, and a strong one, at that.
So we went from a period of raw apathy to hyperawareness of the political realm, without the mainstream media … covering that radical transformation. And the reason why is because, in the past, the old media wasn't doing its job. It bored people to tears. It was conventional wisdom for the sake of conventional wisdom, and because they were in control, they were happy with it, it was a profitable business for them. Well, the Internet has created a wonderful environment of competition for the powers that be. And now they're going to have to figure out how to give the people what they want. And the people want new information, they want fresh information, they want accurate information, they want unbiased information.
I think that in 10 to 15 years of the Internet, one thing that's for certain and absolutely, the New York, left-of-center tilt of the media had not been completely -- it was always the talk of the right wing -- but that notion is now self-evident. The Internet exposed who the reporters are. Before, people didn't know who the bylines were, now we know who they are. We know their histories. When they write something on Tuesday, we know what they said last Wednesday.
There's such a high level of accountability out there, that the very people who were criticizing the online world because there's not accountability, because there's no gatekeepers, because there's no editors, were in fact wrong. Errors were allowed to live an exceptional life in the Old Media without debunking. In the New Media, a lie cannot get out of the door before it's waylaid.
Q: You were talking about your ADD --
A: If it is in fact what I have -- and I don't have a strong medical background to be able to determine whether ADD is a legitimate disease. But am I like a lot of men and boys in the world, where my focus ... is a difficult thing to maintain?
I don't think every boy was meant to sit at a desk. I think that men were supposed to go out there and hunt and gather and be men, and not be emasculated, in front of a desk. ... I feel like, in an electronic sense, I am hunting and gathering. I'm out there on my own free range, doing what I want to do, how I want to do it, without somebody [supervising me]. ... That, for me, works well. I want to work. I want to be productive. The idea that I could do for a living that which I would do in my free time, for free, is the single greatest thing on the planet.
ADD, or whatever it is, was only a problem for me in that I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to be a productive citizen, working in a 50-story office building, working for the man. But it's not a problem when I'm able to be a functioning member of society, so it's an afterthought, it's not a problem. And I think that there are a lot of people like that.
Q: Let's talk about the history of how you became involved with Drudge. ...
A: I e-mailed him after reading his posting of what was a newsletter, basically, that he posted on the alt.news newsgroups. And I was just very interest in the subjects he was covering -- politics, box office, extreme weather. It just seemed like a more interesting take on the world than what I was seeing on the networks, and on the front pages, which was a predictable representation of a mundane truth. It was the first thing that I found online that I recall that I was passionate about seeing.
I thought that he was perhaps an operation of about 20 people. And when I found out that it was just one person, that we lived in the same town as one another, we became quick friends. And I became a strong supporter and ally of his vision.
Q: What year was that?
A: '95-ish, I think. ...
Q: Let's talk a little about politics. We recently had a panel where we brought in a lot of bloggers and other online people, and we talked about the perception that the Left has gotten more mileage out of the blogosphere, especially in the 2006 cycle. You got any take on that?
A: I think that's kind of conventional wisdom-y. The Left has recently figured out its place on the Internet. And it's less in reporting facts the mainstream media is ignoring -- because there is a simpatico sensibility between the left-wing blogosphere and the mainstream media, in terms of political hopes and aspirations. ...
The Right on the Internet is about an alternative stream of content and an alternative stream of ideas that comes to different situations and different stories from a completely different philosophical point of view. So there's a lot of original content that has opened up a lot of people's eyes who wouldn't see these ideas, but for the Internet and the freedom that exists out there to circumvent the traditional media and the traditional media biases.
The Left is not succeeding because it's creating more Left-friendly material, it is succeeding because it's mimicking the real-world traits that served the Left well in the '60s, and that's activism. It's not saying, "Here's an article and this is going to tell you new information, and give you a different vantage." No, this is, how to get a hundred people to vote who otherwise wouldn't be voting -- how to get people motivated. It's more of a tool to apply to rules of activism to the Internet.
It's sort of the [Joe] Trippi model. How to get people to donate money, and how to feel like they're involved. ... When you hear about the successes online of the Left, it's usually how one person was able to motivate [the 2006 Democratic primary campaign] to get Joe Lieberman out of office. It's isolating the act, and getting people to act on that. It's activism.
The Right, to me, online has been more about having a venue in which these ideas that you'd never find in the New York Times or The Washington Post can find their way online. How conservatives consume that is their own private thing.
Q: So it's not telling people, "Here, let's go to this meeting, let's sign this petition." It's more about, "Look, here's something you don't know."
A: It's about the constant stream. It's about connecting people out there who've not felt served by the traditional media's organization and ideological constraints. That's not to say that the Right doesn't have its activist tendencies on the Internet, but that's not the primary value of the Internet to the Right. The primary value of the Internet to the center-right is, here are ideas that, 10 or 15 years ago, you had to either subscribe to National Review or the Weekly Standard or to Commentary or to The Washington Times, to get an alternative. But you really had to actively pursue that stuff. Now, there are so many right-of-center venues. ...
Q: Last time we talked, we'd talked about you and Arianna Huffington. You're still friends, you and Arianna?
A: Yes, very good friends.
Q: And she went from Right to Left and has become sort of the diva, or the hostess --
A: The hostess of a very popular online salon that caters to the Left.
Q: Her original idea -- tell me how you helped her develop her site?
A: I think that she had the vision that the Internet was where the real action was going to be, and that running around getting your column in another dozen papers is a valuable way to spend your life, but that the real action is jumping online and seeing if you can swim -- and she did. I knew that she would be able to, because when I worked with her, I will credit her with this: She was the first person that convinced me that I could work. She put me to work and she taught me a lot. She's one of the most committed, determined people. ...
She's the most diligent, committed worker that I have ever been around. She, in a strange way, didn't allow for these tendencies of mine. ...
Arianna, for sure, offered absolute credibility and authority to her friends in Los Angeles, to her political allies in Washington who wanted to be involved in something on the Internet that would have an impact. She was the natural person to bring together some of the more prominent voices on the Left, who may have had power in the traditional media, but wanted a foray into the New Media.
Arianna has her political ideas, but she also has a strong sense of fun. She's part journalistic pitbull and she's part party-thrower. And that's a fun combination, especially for people of an activist bent. She's the type of person, you talk to her for 10 minutes and you say, "OK, let's go to war." ...
Q: The social networking -- you were talking about her throwing parties, knowing everyone in town.
A: Yeah, Arianna knows everyone. ... She's risen through the social and intellectual ranks everywhere she's gone. There's no one I know who's lived in London, New York, D.C. and L.A. and accumulated that level -- her Rolodex is made of titanium. It's unbelievable.
Q: You went to work for her in what year?
A: In '97. I worked for her from 1997 to '99 as her researcher -- ostensibly, to create Web sites for her, but I ended up becoming her researcher, which for me, was about gaining access to Lexis-Nexis, which was the greatest thing ever.
Q: Lexis-Nexis is a research tool that is far superior to just mere Googling.
A: Yes, though not as much as it was 10 years ago. In 1997, it felt like she handed me the keys to the kingdom, for an information addict. Now, if you do a search on Google, you'll find an archive of something within the last 10 to 15 years that you want. So Lexis-Nexis is grand, but it's not quite what it was at the point that she handed it to me as my primary work tool. To say that I fell in love with Lexis-Nexis is an understatement, and I think I wielded it fairly well. I started to figure out this thing, and I felt like I'm Mario Andretti and I've got the fastest car at the speedway. ...
