Obama v. Oprah

This weekend, during a precious hour of free time, I was reading through GQ magazine and I came across an interview with Andrew Breitbart, prior editor of "The Drudge Report" and current head of right-wing news aggregate website "breaitbart.com." According to Breitbart "The media is dominated by the academic Marxist crowd's worldview  [I know; I didn't know this either . You learn something everyday]". Accordingly, Breitbart's mission is "To expose the counternarrative that has been hidden by those controlling the reins of popular culture." I am intersting to find out what this "counternarrative" is ( I tried by visitng breitbart.com; it was extremely unhelpful) but I am even more intersted in what Breitbart says about culture. He argues that

"The right has focused its energy on the political process and shrugged off culture. But culture is everything  in this country."

There seems to be a kernel of truth in Breitbart's web of extreme (and mostly unclear) statements. Culture occupies a salient position in our society, and its power is often weilded through the media. Social networking sites, in addition to allowing us to make more "friends" than we ever thought possible, allows us to share music and videos--much of which can be found on youtube. Politicians are already tapping into this media. Obama's "Yes We Can" video is full of popular music and popular musicians and actors. This phenomenon of combining media with culture is not new; we've seen campagain ads from past elections featuring famous people throwing in their weight with one candidate or another. However, in a political enviornment in which the use of new media is already recognized as essential for awareness, fund-rasing, advocacy,  and rallying, the power of culture when linked with the media for political purposes may be even more potent.

Who knows? Maybe Andrew Breitbart will come out with his own beautiful and inspiring popular-culture oriented video in order to demonstrate this phenomenon...and reveal his mysterious "counternarrative."