Breitbart Texas: All Thunder, No Rain

When Breitbart Texas, the Lone Star “vertical” of the right-wing news and commentary site Breitbart.com, launched in February, I was privileged to be one of its first targets. The site ran what I believe it was trying to pass as a smear piece about my abortion politics.

“Ms. Grimes doesn’t just want abortion,” wrote then-columnist and self-described “Breitbart protégé” Lee Stranahan, about my work for the site RH Reality Check. “She wants it freely available and she wants the state to pay for it.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Except when I say it, there tends to be quite a bit more cussing. Perhaps that’s why Breitbart printed the piece—plucked from my extremely public Twitter feed—with this pearl-clutching advisory: “LANGUAGE WARNING: ANDREA GRIMES UNCENSORED.”

Stranahan kindly warned me on Twitter that a storm would soon be brewing about me. He implored his readers to “please treat [me] civilly.” But I heard nary a peep from any of them. I didn’t even get any nice church ladies threatening to pray for me.

Whither the Breitbart Texas storm?

When Breitbart Texas launched last winter, Managing Editor Brandon Darby claimed the site was poised to “bring a voice to grassroots Texans,” and to “arm Texans … with the information they need to stand up against the institutional Left.”

Ten months later, I’m still wondering: Where’s the storm? As yet, the site hasn’t exposed the dark-blue underbelly of mainstream Texas journalism. Rather, Breitbart Texas has imported an inside-the-Beltway model of smear “journalism” that’s blatantly partisan, enthusiastically flakkish and of a type not commonly seen here in Texas. Breitbart Texas has positioned itself as a sympathetic ear and attendant mouthpiece for right-wing communications cronies tasked with grinding their bosses’ axes.

I asked Breitbart Texas’ Darby whether Rumpf has an knack for reading the hivemind of the P. Bush operation, or if this was an engineered smear from the campaign. He didn’t reply.

Case in point: This summer, The Texas Tribune quoted George P. Bush—currently running for Texas land commissioner—talking about coastal erosion in the same sentence as climate change, as if he believed the two might be related. It was a horrifying instance of a Texas Republican saying something that vaguely recognized the existence of climate change.

Within 72 hours, a Breitbart Texas writer fresh off a gig at the right-wing think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation stumbled upon an “exclusive” with the P. Bush campaign, running a convoluted attempt to reconstruct what P. Bush had really meant in his Tribune interview. That proved awkward given that the Trib had posted a transcript online.

But Breitbart’s Sarah Rumpf plunged ahead with her scoop anyway, writing,  “Bush’s comments and positions have been seriously misrepresented.” The headline? Rendered in CAPS LOCK, as are all Breitbart headlines: “REPORTER MISREPRESENTED GEORGE P. BUSH CLIMATE CHANGE INTERVIEW.”

Typically, a serious misrepresentation is the kind of thing that merits a conversation with the reporter and/or the editor. It’s something news outlets might consider addressing with a correction or a follow-up.

But Tribune Editor Emily Ramshaw told me via email that they “haven’t heard from George P. Bush or his campaign staff about the story or the transcript, and generally [they] would immediately if someone took issue with the story.”

Generally, that is, if right-wing campaigns were playing by old Texas media rules, rather than crying foul to a more malleable partisan site. As the Observer’s Chris Hooks noted in September, Bush didn’t need to try to “undo” his statements with a Trib correction: “Breitbart will do it for him.”

I asked Breitbart Texas’ Darby whether Rumpf has an knack for reading the hivemind of the P. Bush operation, or if this was an engineered smear from the campaign. He didn’t reply.

In the absence of a definitive explanation, Breitbart Texas appears itself to be guilty of the right-wing version of the very crimes it accuses the “institutional Left’s” Obummer-worshiping media lapdogs of committing. And at the same time, the site proved itself not loyal to the unruly right-wing grassroots, but rather to the Bush family.

Breitbart Texas: a little thunder and lightning but no rain. Didn’t anyone tell ’em we’re in a drought?

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