All is not well at the house that the late Andrew Breitbart built. According to staffers, the deceased conservative provocateur's network of blogs (Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Hollywood, etc), are beset with infighting, disorganization and a lack of vision for the future following Breitbart's surprising death due to heart failure in March. Word of the turmoil comes from a series of interviews by BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins with current and former staffers.

"[Breitbart.com] has nothing to do with what Andrew stood for," one staffer tells Coppins. "I don’t think he would even read the site or like it. I think he would detest what it’s become.” The laments seem to range from gripes about communication workflow ("emails and phone calls go unreturned for days") to editorial quality (editors don't know how to write ledes, the content smacks of official GOP propaganda). "Andrew wasn't a flack. He wanted to take them all on," a former staffer says. 

The list of complaints stack up pretty high in Coppins's piece, but the site itself is not without its post-Breitbart successes depending on how you measure the success of a Breitbart property of course. In September, the site had a record traffic month of 2.9 million unique visits, according to comScore. It also did its part in plucking the "Unkskewed Polls" meme from obscurity. You might not consider the organized rejection of polls unfavorable to Romney an achievement but it was the sort of noisy and conspiratorial stick-it-to-the-media type stunt Breitbart used to revel in. Is the website now mired in civil war? Hard to say without the existence of a mass shakeup. Coppins certainly highlights a number of serious grievances  but it's hard to imagine how anyone could've wholly filled the void left by Breitbart, given his unique brand of conservative punk rock pranksterism that has yet to be emulated. (Read the whole Coppins piece here)

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John Hudson