Believe it or not, the tax scam bill wasn’t the only major outrage from last week. Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow made a startling admission to CNN. He not only reiterated that he and his buddies went all in for Roy Moore to protect Trump—but that he did so even though he believed one of the accusers’ accounts was credible.
Though Marlow concedes that Breitbart made coverage decisions around protecting Trump, before the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore, Breitbart had been hammering the news media and Hollywood for supposedly protecting individuals like Harvey Weinstein. Asked about the view from critics that Breitbart had done exactly that with Moore, Marlow claimed the website has been "much more careful" than other outlets when covering ongoing allegations of sexual harassment and assault, saying the website looks for "certain factors," such as "a certain level of detail" in allegations.
Marlow also stressed that he was personally uncomfortable with the behavior attributed by The Post to Moore, and noted that he did believe the accusations from Leigh Corfman, who said Moore assaulted her while she was 14 -- they were "not perfect," he said, but had "a lot of credibility." (emphasis mine)
It cannot be stated enough. The number-three man at Breitbart, and the operating head of its newsroom, believed that Corfman’s claims were credible. And yet, even in the face of all this, Breitbart not only went all in for Moore, but engaged in one of the most ham-handed episodes of victim-shaming in recent memory. It’s so damn obscene that there are almost no words for it.
Conor Fleischdorf of The Atlantic notes that the right-wing media said a lot about this affair by not saying much at all. That’s very telling, given how much they supposedly abhor librul media bias.
One notable exception was David French of National Review.
In other words, Breitbart facilitated the continued persecution of a credible childhood assault victim for purely political purposes. It subordinated fact-finding to its political agenda. It acted not as a journalist enterprise but as a partisan opposition research firm with a quasi-journalistic platform. It exploited the good name of its founder and the trust of its audience to try to drag a probable child abuser across an electoral finish line.
So was Rod Dreher of The American Conservative.
Do you understand this?
Even if they believe that you were sexually assaulted at 14 by an older man, they will continue to destroy your reputation as a way of protecting that older man, because their real mission is to protect Donald Trump — and extremism in the defense of Trump is no vice. Truth, fairness, and ordinary human decency don’t matter. Only winning.
Both French and Dreher say that this latest episode shows Breitbart is not to be trusted. As I note at Liberal America, that’s not enough. If Breitbart is willing to engage in victim shaming even when the operating head of its newsroom believes a victim might be telling the truth, it’s time to drive Breitbart out of existence.
While Priority #1 for 2018 is taking back the House and Senate, it looks like Priority #2 is putting Bannon and his minions out of business.