Andrew Breitbart Biography

Andrew Breitbart was the right-wing activist and Internet publisher whose special blend of outrage, muckraking and openly biased reporting made him a major American media figure before his untimely death at age 43.

Andrew Breitbart was “A revolutionary eager to overthrow a media establishment that he viewed as a front for left-wing social causes,” the LA Times called him after his death. Breitbart grew up in Brentwood, California, where he was adopted as an infant by Jewish parents. He graduated from Tulane University in 1991 with a degree in American Studies, and then returned to Los Angeles, where in 1995 he met conservative news blogger Matt Drudge.

Breitbart worked for Drudge’s website, The Drudge Report, as it grew into an online media powerhouse. Breitbart then helped Arianna Huffington create The Huffington Post, a successful Internet news and liberal opinion site. By then, Andrew Breitbart had grown into a popular right-wing commentator, known for his bursts of righteous indignation and sneers at the left and especially for his hatred of major American news media companies.

Breitbart left The Huffington Post and founded his own site for news and political activism, Breitbart.com. It soon expanded to include the sites BigJournalism, BigHollywood, and BigGovernment, all of which became terrifically popular with conservative readers and put Breitbart at the forefront of the Tea Party movement in 2010. His most attention-grabbing coup came in 2011, when he brought down New York Congressman Anthony Weiner by posting a lewd photo of a man’s torso in underwear, which he said Weiner had sent from his Twitter account to a woman who was not his wife. (Weiner at first denied the charge, then admitted it and resigned.)

Andrew Breitbart also wrote the 2011 book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save The World. Andrew Breitbart collapsed and died in 2012 while taking a nighttime walk near his home in Brentwood. An autopsy pinpointed heart failure as the cause of death.