While most of us have been studiously not watching, one of the biggest conservative “news” sites has been enmeshed in what only can be described as civil war. The cause was one of their own reporters, Michelle Fields, being manhandled by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, which left bruises on her arm and led to her filing a police report against Lewandowski. Lewandowski, for his part, continues to claim the incident never happened despite a Washington Post reporter witnessing the event, an audiotape backing up his account, and videotape showing that Lewandowki was next to Fields just beforehand.
The problem for Breitbart News (and reporter Michelle Fields, who soon resigned) is that Breitbart is a conservative conspiracy site. Not just any conservative conspiracy site, but the big cheese of the modern conservative hoax-as-news movement. It was Andrew Breitbart that first brought us videographer James O'Keefe's tapes edited to make it look like ACORN staffers were engaging in criminal behavior; the accusations were easily debunked, but the Republican congress still used the known-fake scandal to cripple the organization and its efforts to register poor voters. The site continued along with a long series of similar video hoaxes (against Shirley Sherrod, etc.) all just as lavishly promoted by supposed serious outlets like Fox News, building its pattern of forget the truth, we'll tell you something juicier into a polished and semi-lucrative home for wayward hoaxers, conspiracy theorists, and mid-tier crackpots. It was a site for theories about Barack Obama's birth certificate, or whether the ornaments on the White House Christmas tree were, I shitteth thee not, a communist conspiracy.
Being so outlandishly and gleefully wrong on so many stories did not at any point, you will note, ever hamper Breitbart’s popularity in movement-conservative circles, nor has the constant stream of error-riddled buffoonery seemed to cause any second thoughts among the cable news programs that book Breitbart wags, or among the pundits and politicians that still regularly cite them.
And that, children, is the shorthand version of how the whole sodding Donald Trump wing of the party came to be. Which ties us right back around to the current fireworks.
You see, the Breitbart site is very strongly pro-Donald Trump—to such an extent that angry but anonymous Breitbart staffers were even six months ago leaking claims that the Trump campaign was paying the site for favorable coverage, a claim the site's management continues to deny. He shares their conspiracy theories; they share his belief that government would be so much easier if we just got rid of all the losers and put a grotesque walking toilet in charge. So when a female Breitbart staffer was physically roughed up by one of Donald Trump's top lieutenants, it was just about as nasty a test as you could devise for divining whether Breitbart was a "news" site or a den of lunatics.
One of the first reactions to Fields' account of being assaulted was from one of her fellow staffers, who tweetstormed skepticism that it actually happened. Which is not surprising, because the Breitbart organization is founded on the principle that people who say bad things about your preferred politicians are probably lying.
Then the site's CEO issued a statement condemning the incident—"if that's the case" that it happened as their reporter said it did—and the site's staff was told to stop talking about it. This was not to last, however, as the Breitbart site proper followed up Fields' original account of what happened to her with a story suggesting that, from the looks of one videotape someone found, it couldn't have happened as their own reporter said it did.
Which is again not surprising, because the Breitbart organization was founded to take snippets of poor-quality videotape and misinterpret them however is necessary in order to "prove" the organization's agenda, all other evidence to the contrary be damned. For this particular incident, however, Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro resigned, citing the post as "a poorly-evidenced conspiracy theory" against Fields while apparently feeling no sense of irony or shame whatsoever in having participated in the daily poorly-evidenced conspiracy theories that have made up the bulk of the Breitbart oeuvre for his entire previous tenure there.
Shapiro's complaint, indeed, seems to be that while Andrew Breitbart himself would happily malign and slander random ACORN employees or publish clearly forged tapes of a supposed Shirley Sherrod speech in which she, somewhat astonishingly, manages to change outfits and venues between the various phrases in her scandalous "speech," Andrew would never support maligning and slandering someone for this particular cause.
“Andrew’s life mission has been betrayed,” Shapiro wrote. “Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew’s legacy. In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda, to the extent that he abandoned and undercut his own reporter, Breitbart News’ Michelle Fields, in order to protect Trump’s bully campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly assaulted Michelle.”
All the previous poorly-evidenced conspiracy theories? Those were golden. But Andrew never meant them to be a tool for defending Donald Trump, you bastards.
The theme continued in the resignations of the latest pair, who sound considerably more aggrieved about the site's machinations for Donald Trump than about the bit where one of their colleagues was essentially called a liar.
"The company no longer resembles the ideals that inspired me to start writing for them three years ago. Some of us have been fighting behind the scenes against the party-line Trump propaganda for some time, but without any success, unfortunately," Schachtel said in a statement. "Breitbart News is no longer a journalistic enterprise, but instead, in my opinion, something resembling an unaffiliated media Super PAC for the Trump campaign. [...]"
So let's recap what's happened here. One of the conservative movement's most reliable purveyors of conspiracy theories found itself torn asunder when one of their own reporters was assaulted by a top member of their preferred conservative political campaign, and in this deeply awkward moment site management had to decide whether to believe the facts their own reporter brought them or believe the thing that would make the preferred conservative political campaign look better.
And they chose to believe the campaign, because the entire site is premised on presenting whichever version of a story makes the preferred conservative campaign look better.
And then they piped up with a comically bad video "proof" purporting to show that their own reporter was wrong and their preferred campaign was right, despite there being other evidence and other videos debunking their story—
—because the entire site was founded on peddling conspiracy theories cribbed from snippets of bad video, ignoring whatever other evidence or video might debunk that story.
Well, there you go then. It's not like everyone involved didn't know what they were signing up for.
You can almost feel bad for are those studiously neutral-ish reporters who have been citing Breitbartian works for some time, and to hell with the victims of his smears, but who now are seeing the group smear a fellow reporter and are just beginning to wonder about the moral standing of these fellows. It must be a bit of a shock.
Then again, those of us that have to keep track of the various players in the soup of batshit crazy that has taken over the conservative movement have been piping up for a good long time about how maybe you shouldn't trust peddlers of ridiculous conspiracy theories regardless of whether their target is someone you like or someone you don't, so don't expect anything we can say here to have an impact. Yes, it turns out that certain conservative "news" sites will lie blatantly if doing so can be seen as helping the "movement," where the movement might be anything from "crude oil is delicious" to "Donald Trump is a decent and upstanding man." Go figure.