Breitbart.com was launched as a news aggregation site in 2005. Later, a series of topical subsites was added -- Big Hollywood, Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Peace, all designed to counter what Breitbart describes as the "bully media cabal" that ignores stories at odds with prevailing liberal orthodoxy. His goal, he says often, is to "destroy the institutional left."
Last fall, Breitbart made his first big splash. He posted an undercover video in which a pair of conservative activists posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend asked employees of the community group ACORN for help with a brothel that would house underage Salvadorans. ACORN was embarrassed when some of its workers seemed too helpful; Congress responded by defunding the organization.
For the last few weeks, Breitbart has been researching a story that came to his attention in the wake of the Sherrod misadventure: the government's massive civil rights settlement with black farmers that the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against between 1981 and 1996. (Sherrod was a plaintiff in the case, Pigford vs. Glickman.)
For Breitbart, Pigford has become the subject of another epiphany.
"The more I look into this, the more sympathetic I am to the original case by the black farmers," Breitbart said. "They got the short end of the stick in a major way.... There is a huge scandal here that is going to upset the status quo in America."
Breitbart said he was even toying with reaching out to the Huffington Post or to the even more liberal Daily Kos for a joint investigation.
"I promise them," Breitbart said, "there will be Republican carcasses too."
robin.abcarian@latimes.com
