Your Liberal Media, Ladies And Gentlemen

Digby wraps up yesterday's announcement that ABC has indeed hired Andrew Breitbart of "Hey I lied on my website and got Shirley Sherrod fired for being a racist when she wasn't" and "Hey I lied on my website and destroyed ACORN when they were innocent" fame as one of their Election Night talking heads.

ABC must know that the Shirley Sherrod or ACORN stories aren't the only examples of his mendacious ways. He's made his career out of these racist video hoaxes. It isn't a coincidence. So I think we have to assume they think having a lying racist on the air will bring in some ratings. Whether they foolishly see this as adding "edge" to their allegedly hip "Facebook" program or whether they are making a pitch for Fox's white supremacist audience, it's a journalistic travesty to allow this man and his lying lieutenant anywhere near a legitimate news organization.

But then these news outlets are all making huge profits from the right wing buy out of our democracy, so maybe it's just the price of doing business. 

As I said last night on Twitter, a healthy chunk of Breitbart's shtick is that he believes his website is the future of journalism and the mainstream media is worthless, especially for political coverage.  So now he's doing Election Night political coverage for the mainstream media.  Funny how that works.

But Digby's dead on about the normalization of hard core right wing nut job bloggers like Breitbart, Erick Erickson, Michelle Malkin and Pamela Geller becoming the new class of political mainstream pundits in order to compete with FOX's pundits: Palin, Gingrich, Huckabee, etc.

And that, my friends, really is the future of journalism for the next two years.  Drudge made his bones on Clinton's impeachment, and everyone's lining up for another possible six years of the carnival of the damned.