Liberal journalists reportedly sent tips to Breitbart — now they’re scrambling
Tech’s toxic masculinity and Breitbart: Male journalists secretly leaked intel to former editor Milo Yiannopoulos
KEITH A. SPENCER10.06.2017•1:50 PM
A recently released cache of email correspondence revealed direct collaboration between popular alt-right website Breitbart and purported white nationalists and neo-Nazis. While the revelations are damning, they are not entirely surprising to those who follow Breitbart’s editorial strategies. More shocking, perhaps, is that a number of purportedly liberal journalists have also secretly colluded with Breitbart over the years.
On October 5, Buzzfeed News published Joseph Bernstein’s exclusive report detailing emails and documents internal to Breitbart News staff which detailed the relationship between the right-wing sensationalist news site and the fringe elements that kept correspondence with its former tech editor, right-wing bomb-thrower Milo Yiannopoulos.
As such, the revelations contained in Buzzfeed's report were damning on two different political axes: First, Buzzfeed refuted the notion that Breitbart was the “normal” news site it always claimed to be, by discovering more intentional connections to the white nationalist and neo-Nazi elements that the site and its lawyers persistently disavow. (As Buzzfeed wrote, “Yiannopoulos led the site in a coy dance around the movement’s nastier edges, writing stories that minimized the role of neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”) And second, the report suggested that some journalists had been “double-agents” for Yiannopoulos and his Breitbart cohort.
Buzzfeed reported that a number of purportedly liberal journalists sent Yiannopoulos story ideas, even asking the provocateur with an army of online trolls at his disposal to mock specific feminist figures. Since publication, those journalists have become the locus of a storm of controversy.
"Yiannopoulos had hidden helpers in the liberal media against which he and Bannon fought so uncompromisingly,” Buzzfeed wrote.
Breitbart has become a focus of sorts for its possible connections to hate groups in part because it looms so large within Trump’s inner circle; the president himself has described it in glowing terms. Yet rumors of overt connections to hate groups have dogged Breitbart for years. Politically, Breitbart has a very direct connection to President Trump and his acolytes: its executive chairman is former Trump strategist Steve Bannon. Likewise, Yiannopoulos’s reverence for Trump is so deep that he has been known to utter Plath-esque ululations of “Daddy” upon hearing the president’s name. New York Times reporters asked Trump about Breitbart when he was president-elect; at the time, Trump attempted to normalize the site. “Breitbart cover things, I mean like The New York Times covers things,” he told reporters. “Breitbart, first of all, is just a publication. And, you know, they cover stories like you [the Times] cover stories. Now, they are certainly a much more conservative paper, to put it mildly, than The New York Times. But Breitbart really is a news organization.”
While Breitbart claims to disavow connections to white nationalism or avowed Nazi movements, its content is often clearly written to appeal to those who might sympathize with said politics. Steeped in xenophobic and nationalist rhetoric, the site’s reporting and op-eds routinely scapegoat immigrants, poor people, non-whites and Muslims. Yet until Buzzfeed’s report, Breitbart News had done a half-decent job of hiding any overt hate speech — no swastikas, racist caricatures or author headshots donning white hoods — by masking politics in dog-whistles and the slippery slope of white identity politics. (The site includes a "Black Crime" tag).
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