Before Breitbart mainstreamed conservative obsessions, he got a graduate-level course in how the MSM worked. Mickey Kaus, in his idealized obituary of Breitbart, tells the story that illuminates the power Breitbart had as the co-editor of the Drudge Report: Breitbart, working on a tip from Kaus, told the Smoking Gun to track down an old interview in which then-gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger bragged about participating in orgies. He publicized the result at Drudge, and it instantly became national news. Work at the Drudge Report was rarely quite so entrepreneurial — usually news outlets would do the work on their own and beg for a link.

The end result of a media environment so fixated on the predilections of this one oddball and his hyperactive aide-de-camp was the rise of Drudge-baiting — the pursuit and promotion of stories designed solely to attract the interest of the Drudge Report. This often involved freak weather and news about Madonna, but it mostly meant things that made Democrats look bad. (The Schwarzanegger story, chosen in part to illustrate Breitbart’s essential fairness, qualified because it had just enough celebrity and sex to make up for the fact that it was damaging to a Republican.)

The sensibility was Drudge’s, but Breitbart was the guy people in the press desperately befriended at parties. The new gold standard of long-form campaign reporting is Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s “Game Change,” a book that tackles a presidential campaign as a series of hopefully Drudge-worthy nuggets of inane gossip. (Halperin’s previous book was essentially an ode to Drudge’s influence and import.)

The apotheosis of Drudge-bait is Politico, a site that aimed to take the national politics section of a newspaper and strip it of everything but Drudge-bait. Some days half its content seems to be relatively fact-free stories proposing or reinforcing Drudge-friendly narratives (Obama is angry and uses teleprompters, some say).

And there is the one-time “liberal Drudge,” the Huffington Post, which now has consumed the content portion of AOL itself. Breitbart was a co-founder of the site, and though he wasn’t there long, he made his mark. He loved the “celebrities blogging” gimmick that much of the early HuffPo was based around. This remains HuffPo’s most mockable and often detestable feature. (One other idea he might’ve brought to the table: hosting slightly rewritten newspaper and wire copy on the site itself, instead of linking out, as Drudge did, to Breitbart’s consternation.)

“Aggregators” like Drudge and HuffPo have mostly given way to partisan sites that specialize in the actual creation of content. Much of this content is designed as (unpaid) work-for-hire for larger news outlets — be it Fox & Friends or MSNBC — and Breitbart’s “Big” sites helpfully designed and packaged ready-made pseudo-scandals for Fox and others to fixate on.

A fixation of the online conservative movement is “scalp-hunting”: the elevation and demonization of some usually obscure liberal figure done in the hopes of getting them nationally shamed and fired. (Righties sort of do this as “retribution” for what happened to various conservatives who got in trouble and whose trouble was reported in the press, like Oliver North or Scooter Libby.) This is what the Shirley Sherrod video was supposed to be — a routine Van Jones’ing — and what it briefly was until it blew up in Breitbart’s face. It can be done with dead people, like Saul Alinsky, and organizations, like the New Black Panther Party, though the firing of still-living individuals is the primary means by which the conservative press “keeps score,” so it’s best to narrow your focus.

The Sherrod video was also an example of the limits of another of Breitbart’s gifts to modern media: the false “proof.” It is a sad fact of online publishing that some ridiculous portion of readers only read the headlines and look at the pictures before moving on. (The percentage of online commenters who do this is approximately 90 percent, according to studies I have skimmed and had strong opinions about.) Breitbart’s sites exploit this: “OBAMA MARCHES WITH NEW BLACK PANTHERS,” or something like that, goes the headline. The story can’t support the claim. It doesn’t matter. The headline means it’s true for the majority of the readership.

Shirley Sherrod’s anti-white racism became a “fact” that led to her firing because of that convention of online muckraking. The headline said she was racist and there was a YouTube video attached that probably proved it, if anyone bothered to hit play and listen.

This is how right-wing myths are created and sustained — did you hear that Oprah banned Sarah Palin from her show and Michelle Obama spent $30,000 on lingerie? Those are both lies, but they were also both Drudge headlines! — and in a media environment where, thanks to the work of activist/publishers like Breitbart, most previously agreed-upon facts are regularly up for debate anew, introducing new myths can be full-time work.

And in his war on the “mainstream press,” Breitbart played on a long-standing paranoia that Drudge’s rise also depended on: a fear that all the “liberal bias” claims were in fact true, and that what seemed to be nutty, conspiratorial nonsense emanating from the right-wing fringe media was actually the next hot story.

(Breitbart used the standards of traditional “objective” journalism as a weapon, and it often helped his cause that he was simply too exhausting to argue with, unless you were particularly pigheaded.)

The most modern thing about Breitbart was that he was so ridiculous, and so extreme, and yet taken more or less completely seriously by the mainstream press he claimed to despise. (This is in part because he was fun at parties.) Screaming — literally, screaming — vulgar, stream-of-consciousness insults on national television used to be your ticket out of respectability with the news crowd, but now it is basically indulged.

Honestly, if he helped make false civility less of a requirement for being “taken seriously” in the media world, that is almost certainly a good thing. The rest of his influence is too tied up in the influence of the Internet itself on the world of information for him to be directly blamed, but he was the raging, filter-less, irresponsible, vitriol-spewing, tireless avatar of the new way of doing things.

The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, has repeatedly touted the success of his efforts and disparaged critics. Earlier this week he compared compensation in the banking industry to the struggling media world, suggesting that the banking industry was far more successful. In speaking to journalists, according to Bloomberg, he noted, “Worse than that, you don’t even make any money… [while] we make a lot of money.”

Mr. Dimon is right. He and his colleagues are successful. But the real question is this: What are they successful at? By almost any criteria, the banks operate under rules that are so far from capitalism as to be unrecognizable. Let’s take Mr. Dimon’s comparison of the media industry and the banking industry further.

Both industries have been affected by unforeseen events. The Internet has undermined the viability of innumerable media businesses, leading to bankruptcies, changing business models and intense competition for advertiser and subscriber dollars. In the face of these changes, industry participants have been forced to adapt or die. The forces of creative destruction, which are central to capitalism, have operated with an unforgiving ferocity. Formerly dominant entities have been forced to declare bankruptcy, while new media competitors and business models emerge on a seemingly daily basis.

In contrast, the banks argued that TARP was warranted because the economic tsunami of 2008 was unforeseeable. One of the essential functions of a financial institution is to manage risk. The majority of our large institutions failed entirely in this central responsibility as the economic crisis struck. In effect, many of our leading financial services firms were (and often continue to be) led by such poor businesspeople that if the principles of capitalism were enforced they would be out of business. My friends who are media entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley actually laugh when they hear the “we should not be responsible because this was not foreseeable” claims from the bankers. Every entrepreneur knows that they must make payroll each week or they are bankrupt.

At the same time, no one in Washington seriously believes the too big to fail legislation in Dodd-Frank will ever work. Inevitably, as in the case of AIG, counter-parties will declare that they will suffer irreparable harm if one of our leading banks is allowed to fail. I have come to call this “the Washington wink.” You ask a federal official if too big to fail legislation will work, they dutifully say of course it will. However, the “of course” is inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink.

In another divergence, the government has not subsidized media businesses. The banks may be showing profits, but they are on government life support. These so-called zombie banks can borrow from the Federal Reserve at almost no cost, and a long list of government initiatives have served as additional “stealth” bailoutsof the banks. In the absence of this government support, would the banking industry still be successful? If media companies could borrow funds at almost no costs, I suspect their balance sheets and profits would be dramatically enhanced.

Capitalism is built on the idea that compensation and profits reflect the relative contribution an individual or firm makes to the total wealth of a society. Real societal wealth is anything that can be consumed or experienced. Profits are an accounting proxy meant to measure wealth. As I have written before, this proxy has failed miserably with regard to the banking industry. Given the loss of real societal wealth that accompanied the economic crisis as a result of poor bank management, the employment crisis, and the ongoing support the industry needs from the government, there is only one possible conclusion: at this moment the financial services industry is far more of a destroyer of real wealth than a wealth creator.

Meanwhile, media companies don’t profit by repeatedly breaking the law. The lack of enforcement against Wall Street undermines our democracy and capitalism, and is effectively another form of stealth government support for the industry. As noted here, JP Morgan Chase (like several of the large banks) is in the middle of a host of potential scandals. In a true capitalist economy, the government would enforce the law to prevent repetitive malfeasance. The executives leading a firm that repeatedly violated the law would be held accountable by the firm’s board for failure to exercise this basic responsibility to society.

Since the start of the economic crisis, the financial services industry has grown even more concentrated. It’s hard not to regard our largest financial services institutions as effective monopolies. Yet, to my knowledge, no investigation of antitrust issues related to the industry is underway. This is yet another stealth government subsidy. By contrast, in an earlier article I wrote about the misguided Justice Department investigation of e-book pricing, another area that is already suffering badly.

Yes, Mr. Dimon, you are a success. However, I would suggest that the success you so proudly proclaim reflects the loss of two of our nation’s most important values. The first is the failure of individuals and leaders to simply take responsibility for their actions and the actions of their companies. The second is that Wall Street, which should be the heart of American capitalism, has instead become the heart of a dysfunctional system that is destroying the nation’s wealth.

No, bankers are not capitalists. At every turn, they demonstrate that the last thing they want is the return of real capitalism to America.

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

In Brisbane’s formulation, when a reporter corrects a falsehood made by a source or public figure, that reporter is a “truth vigilante,” because he or she took the truth into his or her own hands, before some slick fast-talking lawyer got the lie out of truth-jail on a technicality. (Hand in your truth-badge and truth-gun, New York Times! You’re getting too close! That untrue assertion has major connections at City Hall!)

Another line: “Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?” Haha what? Probably?

Basically everyone on the Internet is slack-jawed and stunned by this entire thing, because, man, “should we print the truth or not” is a hilarious question to just throw out to readers.

(The “public editor” has no power or authority at the Times, for the record. It is just the Times’ phrase for “crusty old newspaper veteran who answers reader complaints about stock photo usage and anonymous sourcing by hassling editors to give him defensive quotes for his column,” or “ombudsman.” The position was created after Jayson Blair published a bunch of untrue “facts” in the newspaper. The Times eventually corrected those “facts.”)

John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.

Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:

One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?

But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:

Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)

The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”

Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:

But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!

As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.

The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.

And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.

Some are wise enough to bemoan the entire remaining slate, though they of course blame outsiders, and not the actual rank-and-file of their own movement. Jim Geraghty hates Iowa, and says the kooky results (Ron Paul!!!) can be blamed on the lack of a Democratic primary sending unreliable “independents” — presumably baked out of their minds — to GOP caucuses to spoil the entire campaign.

Erick Erickson — a longtime Santorum hater and one of the few pundits brave enough to label the culture warrior a false conservative, because Erickson declares everyone he dislikes for any reason to be Not a True Conservative — was so dispirited that he literally blamed Bush. (Well, Bush and those damned Paul-voting independents: “If you take out the non-Republicans who came into the caucuses last night for Ron Paul, the Republican turnout was less than 2008 — even considering the ratio of independents to Republicans who turned out in 2008.” And if you take out the votes for Santorum, Romney, Paul and Gingrich, Rick Perry won!)

The problem, per Erickson, is that Bush picked Cheney instead of a likable young president-in-waiting. The GOP, he has heard, likes “orderly processes” of succession. If only Bush had shown the foresight to select Marco Rubio as his running mate! In Erickson’s eyes, Bush’s failure to appoint an heir is what led to the John McCain campaign and Mitt Romney’s painful stumble toward the nomination. There is still hope, we’re told, for someone else (unnamed!) to enter the race and build momentum for the really important contests, which are now apparently scheduled for April.

If I were Perry, I’d wake up tomorrow, say I refuse to surrender the Republican Party into the hands of big government conservatives after all the gains the tea party has made, and then announce I’m firing all my political staffers and communications staffers and ask South Carolina to help me reboot to victory. Make it an Alamo stand and, if like at the Alamo Perry goes down, perhaps there’ll at least be a rallying cry for small government conservatism left over.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what makes Rick Perry “more conservative” than Rick Santorum but something something Alamo guns a-blazin’ cowboy Custer etc., etc. (Erickson then promoted a blog from a diarist making the case that perhaps Mitt Romney isn’t such an unmitigated socialistic big government evil.)

Kathryn Jean Lopez, of course, truly has always liked Rick, because they share a religion and a twisted puritanical revulsion for the whole of modernity.

As Roy Edroso noted, Jennifer Rubin’s been a Santorum fan since about August, so with the race now down to her two favorites, I imagine she’s thrilled. She certainly seems pleased — in her usual dyspeptic loathsome way — to stick it to those liberals who hoped vaguely for a Ron Paul victory. (She knows liberals like Paul because of his “bizarre views on Iran” and they hate Santorum for “his robust foreign policy.” She used the word “robust” again later, because it is code for “wants to bomb Muslims.”)

That post was just a warmup to her true defense of Santorum, whom she defends from Ericksonian charges of secret man-on-big government love. The case boils down to the facts that Santorum — like everyone else in the Republican Party — promises to repeal Obamacare and slash taxes yet further on our put-upon 1 percenters. (And let’s be honest — Santorum got into politics solely to be a soldier in God’s war on gays and abortionists. On every other issue he always has and always will just do whatever the think tanks and well-connected interest groups say, making his “record” on something like Medicare Part D entirely beside the point. If the party doesn’t like Medicare anymore, he doesn’t either!)

Ira Stoll makes the entirely unconvincing case that Santorum’s slight victory over Ron Paul was because voters were hungering for “a candidate who was willing to take on Ron Paul on foreign policy,” which, last I checked, was all of them. Those who vote Republican solely on “foreign policy” issues (bomb Iran) will likely continue pretending that the race from here on out will come down to which man can sound the hawkiest, even as the candidates themselves run on which one promises to ban the most abortions and deport the most immigrants.

There is, in other words, plenty for “establishment conservatives” to talk themselves into liking about Mr. Santorum as he takes his Iowa victory lap. Those who consider him an unlikable and decidedly unelectable boob will probably just keep quiet until he begins fading.