WashPost Film Critic: Breitbart Was Wrong That 'Mainstream Journalism' Tilts to the Left

The funniest part of The Washington Post’s review Friday of the new movie “Hating Breitbart” is their conceit that “mainstream journalism” – like the Post – is so "mainstream" that it's just as reviled on the left, since it’s so staid and conventional. The Post isn't part of the "institutional left," oh no.

Mark Jenkins claimed "Breitbart's conceit was that he and his cohorts were 'citizen-journalists,' providing a counterweight to 'the institutional left' and its media allies. But mainstream American journalism, with its devotion to official sources and conventional wisdom, is no more popular on the left than on the right."

Jenkins then added: "And Breitbart's Web sites specialized in showing people behaving stupidly, which is (or should be) a relatively small part of what professional journalists do." The Post's movie reviewers prefer radical-left rabble-rousers -- like Daniel Ellsberg. Forty years after his heyday, Ellsberg was still "astonishingly germane." But the Post review of the Breitbart movie is headlined "Film overstates Breitbart's impact."

The Post also celebrated leftist TV actor Richard Belzer and his new book on conspiracy theories, and they brought Breitbart's death into the conversation:

Any theory on the sudden death of conservative rabble-rouser Andrew Breitbart?

Belzer couldn’t see any reason why anyone would want to rub Breitbart out. “It was one of the few times I don’t believe in a conspiracy.”