The New Republic needs to correct its Breitbart story

From TNR [emphasis added]:

While bashing the media, Breitbart is a firewall against some of the tea party movement's more extreme, insular elements. His sites have never veered into birtherism, and he defended Generation Zero director Steve Bannon when the crowd instinctively booed the filmmaker's Harvard-to-Goldman Sachs career track.

False. As Media Matters has documented, Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood site has routinely veered into birtherism.

And yes, that made it a bit hard to believe Breitbart's claim over the weekend that birthers are suddenly out of bounds.

UPDATED: TNR has noted my correction request and changed the wording to this:

While bashing the media, Breitbart is a firewall against some of the tea party movement's more extreme, insular elements. His sites have only occasionally* veered into birtherism, and he defended Generation Zero director Steve Bannon when the crowd instinctively booed the filmmaker's Harvard-to-Goldman Sachs career track.

That strikes me as odd; sort of like being half pregnant. Birtherism is not something folks dabble in. Either you're in (i.e. Obama wasn't born here) or you're out (that's crazy talk.) Why would TNR point with approval to the fact that Breitbart's sites “only occasionally” veered into birtherism? Readers are supposed to be impressed by that?

And that goes to the larger point TNR was trying to make about Breitbart; that he's not “extreme” or “insular.” It's just not true. And if you spend five minutes reading his sites, that fact becomes quite obvious.