Since I landed my new job as executive editor at Breitbart London, my old Fleet Street friends and colleagues have reacted with a mix of envy and horror. The envy part comes from the fancy title and their ludicrously exaggerated idea of how much I’m being paid; the horror from the fact that I’ve gone and joined what’s known disparagingly in the trade as a ‘vertical’.
A vertical — the opposite of a horizontal, obviously — is an online enterprise that caters to a niche audience: dog owners, say; or foot fetishists; or, in the case of Breitbart.com, readers of a mainly American persuasion who like their news curated and served up in an uncompromisingly right-wing way.
So, for example, at Breitbart.com you won’t find too many stories on the shining genius of Barack Obama or the government’s lamentable failure to provide more social housing for one-armed lesbian single mothers. But you will find plenty on Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Islamic extremism, enviro–lunacy, fake Republicans and all those other push-button issues guaranteed to send red-meat conservatives into paroxysms of ecstasy or righteous rage.
All this is fine by me. When Lee Rigby was nearly decapitated with a cleaver in broad daylight in Woolwich by two Islamist converts, my instinctive response was not to agonise over what more could be done to prevent the rise of Islamophobia in Britain. When I hear a Cameron loyalist agitating for the selection of more MPs solely on the criterion that they possess breasts and vaginas I don’t go: ‘Yes! This is exactly what needs to be done to drag the Conservatives kicking and screaming into the modern age.’
And although they’re American conservatives, which can sometimes be a worrisome thing, Breitbart are the right kind of American conservative: the freedom-loving, classical-liberal variety who aren’t going to be disapproving if you ask as your next assignment — as of course I have done — if they wouldn’t mind sending you to Colorado to check out the quality of the weed in all those newly legalised dope emporia….
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