-By Warner Todd Huston
Coming years late to the story, The New York Times finally took a look at the Pigford scandal that Andrew Breitbart, Lee Stranahan and the Breitbart team exposed starting in 2010. At last the story is making an appearance across the media.
On Friday morning, April 26, the Times published a long piece titled, “U.S. Opens Spigot After Farmers Claim Discrimination” in which Andrew Breitbart and Congressman Steve King were credited for early criticism of the government’s corruption in the scandal.
It should be remembered that the left-wing Media Matters for America scoffed at Andrew Breitbart calling his interest in Pigford the “stupidest conspiracy theory” on the Internet. Now that MM’s precious New York Times has at last come to Andrew’s side on this issue, one wonders how long MM will keep its anti-Breitbart/Pigford posts up on its site.
A nice recap of the scandal penned by Joel Pollak can be seen on Breitbart.com.
But, after the NYT finally hit the story, by Friday afternoon it broke on several sites and across several media outlets. Now that the Times finally noticed the fraud endemic in the tale, many leftwing sources have taken up the banner.
Politico took its cue from the Times with its piece sensibly titled, “Blogs: New York Times vindicates Andrew Breitbart,” in which the news website quotes Byron York’s Tweet celebrating that Andrew has indeed been vindicated.
The Daily Beast/Newsweek’s Megan McArdle also delved into the scandal, without mentioning all the work done by Breitbart, of course.
Mother Jones hit the story, too, though strangely acted as if this was a tale of “inevitable ugliness” and white racism instead of massive government waste and fraud.
For his part, Dave Weigel of Slate took to Twitter to hat tip Andrew Breitbart in his Tweeted reference to the Times’ story.
Oddly, by the afternoon of April 26, no TV or radio networks bothered to cover the story. Perhaps as more progressives start discovering the Times’ coverage more light will be shed on the story.
As to the more conservative leaning sites, many of them also revisited the story today. Most of these had been covering it all along just as Andrew had, to be sure.
John Hayward of Human Events celebrated Andrew’s victory as did Fox Nation. Twitter chronicler Twitchy also took note of Andrew’s vindication.
Legal Insurrection, one of the country’s top-notch law blogs, also has a very informative piece on the re-emergence of the story.
Certainly there will be more to come.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
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