When he was alive, there likely wasn't a glossy magazine or major newspaper in America that didn't publish a feel-good profile of Andrew Breitbart, the site's founder, as journalists worked overtime to whitewash the noxious hate that fueled Breitbart's often manic behavior and the site's racist content. A chronic liar like Donald Trump, Breitbart oversaw a hateful opposition research firm that pretended to be in the news business, and the Beltway press loved him, eagerly puffing up his reputation.
Perhaps the most famous (and regrettable) example of the traditional media enabling a hate site like Breitbart was when The New York Times in 2015 openly helped market the anti-Hillary Clinton book Clinton Cash, written by a Breitbart acolyte and published by Rupert Murdoch. It was the Times that trumpeted the “focused reporting” of Clinton Cash as “the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy,” and said that it would prove to be “problematic” and “unsettling” for the Clintons. The book featured an extraordinarily long list of errors, corrections, and retractions, but that didn't seem to bother the Times.
What's especially regrettable today is that Facebook is elevating Breitbart at a time when liberal activists, led by the Sleeping Giants online collective, have convinced so many advertisers to pull their business from the toxic site. Since 2016, more than 4,000 advertisers have severed ties with Breitbart, causing the site to lose 90% of its ad revenue, according to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who once ran Breitbart. The site has also been losing traffic at an alarming rate in recent years. "Since Trump became president, monthly traffic has virtually collapsed, plummeting nearly 75 percent," The Washington Post reported in July. Yet against a backdrop of vanishing advertisers and vanishing readers, Facebook steps forward and rewards Breitbart with a seal of approval from the largest media entity on the planet.
There should be no debate about whether Breitbart is a legitimate news site or deserves to be treated as such. It is, quite often, a sewer—and one that functions in an ethics-free zone.
In 2018, when Republican Roy Moore was running for one of Alabama’s U.S. Senate seats and was accused of having sexually assaulted a teenager, the attorney representing his accuser was approached by two Moore supporters who wanted the attorney to discredit his client in exchange for a large cash payment. The lawyer's statement would be given exclusively to Breitbart News. But that's not all: Two Breitbart reporters actually attended the meeting with the attorney and reportedly pressured him to sign the incriminating statement against Moore's accuser.
Two years ago, BuzzFeed News published explosive documents confirming that Breitbart actively solicited story ideas from neo-Nazi leaders. Maybe that's why in 2017 the credentials committee for Capitol Hill reporters denied Breitbart a permanent press pass. Then, last year, a Bloomberg report revealed that during the 2016 election, Breitbart reporter Dustin Stockton worked as an “off-the-books political operative” for the Trump campaign.
The background of all this is that Facebook has a long, shameful history of kowtowing to the right-wing mob. In 2016, a dubious press report suggested that Facebook editors were "suppressing conservative news," which set off right-wing hysteria. In frantic reaction, Facebook eliminated human editors, or "news curators," from the news selection process and replaced them with an algorithm. That move unleashed a tidal wave of fake news stories on Facebook, which helped Trump get elected. Incredibly, Zuckerberg then hired a retired far-right Republican U.S. senator to investigate whether Facebook is guilty of conservative bias.
Today, a bullied Facebook is continuing the media’s shameful tradition of mainstreaming Breitbart hate.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.
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