Liberal Forum

Amid all the speculation about Breitbart, one of the more grounded analy­ses is a project at Harvard, where a law professor named Yochai Benkler has been studying the company’s rise and influence. A few weeks ago, I met up with Benkler in his office, and we sat at a long table cluttered with books and papers to discuss his findings. Benkler was a muscular figure in his early 50s, with cropped gray hair and a trim gray beard, and he wanted to make clear from the outset that his work on Breitbart was A. the collaborative undertaking of more than a dozen interdisciplinary colleagues throughout Harvard and M.I.T., and B. a total mistake.

‘‘We didn’t set out to study Breitbart,’’ he said. ‘‘Breitbart came from the data, not the other way around.’’

The project, Benkler said, began with a friendly argument about how the internet works — whether it serves mainly as a distribution network for the articles on major media, or if small blogs and websites can funnel their own stories back into the mainstream press. ‘‘I had taken the position that it created significant democratization and open pathways for diverse voices to speak,’’ Benkler said. His friend and colleague at M.I.T. Ethan Zuckerman disagreed. ‘‘Ethan thought you saw more amplification and circulation of stories from the mainstream.’’

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/maga ... annon.html