Friends of Hamas, Conservative Media, and Andrew Breitbart's War : The New Yorker
Now, Shapiro and Breitbart.com are refusing to admit that Shapiro made a serious mistake, and attacking anyone who suggests otherwise. This kind of behavior from them is unsurprising, and not just because it’s an outgrowth of the worldview and strategy of their founder, Andrew Breitbart. (For more on Breitbart, who died last year, see Rebecca Mead’s Profile of him from 2010.) To be embarrassed about the story, they’d have to understand that the hypothesis of Shapiro’s story was “Chuck Hagel may have been the recipient of funding from a group called Friends of Hamas,” and they’d have to care about proving it true. Their version of the hypothesis is much simpler, and more vicious: “Someone told us that Chuck Hagel may have been the recipient of funding from a group called Friends of Hamas.” This has the virtue, from a certain perspective, of being completely unfalsifiable—as soon as the source gave them the tip, the story was true by definition and in perpetuity, no matter what.