Breitbart News
Breitbart News Network (known commonly as Breitbart News, Breitbart, or Breitbart.com) is an American far-right[5] syndicated news, opinion, and commentary[6][7] website founded in mid-2007 by American conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart. Its content has been described as misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by academics and journalists.[8] The site has published a number of conspiracy theories[9][10] and intentionally misleading stories.[11][12] Posts originating from the Breitbart News Facebook page are among the most widely shared political content on Facebook.[13][14][15][16]
"Breitbart" redirects here. For other uses, see Breitbart (surname).
Type of site
Politics
News and opinion
English
Breitbart News Network, LLC[1]
Alex Marlow (editor-in-chief)[2]
Wynton Hall (managing editor)[3]
Joel Pollak (senior-editor-at-large)[4]
Yes
Optional (required to comment)
2007 (as Breitbart.tv)
Active
Initially conceived as "the Huffington Post of the right",[4][17][18] Breitbart News later aligned with the alt-right, the European populist right, and the pan-European nationalist identitarian movement under the management of former executive chairman Steve Bannon,[19][20][21] who declared the website "the platform for the alt-right" in 2016.[22] Breitbart News became a virtual rallying spot for supporters of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.[23] The company's management, together with former staff member Milo Yiannopoulos, solicited ideas for stories from, and worked to advance and market ideas of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups and individuals.[24][25] After the election, more than 2,000 organizations removed Breitbart News from ad buys following Internet activism campaigns denouncing the site's controversial positions.[26][27][28] Breitbart News has promoted climate change denial[29] and COVID-19 misinformation.[30]
The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, with bureaus in Texas, London, and Jerusalem. Co-founder Larry Solov is the co-owner (along with Andrew Breitbart's widow Susie Breitbart and the Mercer family)[31] and CEO, while Alex Marlow is the editor-in-chief, Wynton Hall is managing editor,[32] and Joel Pollak[4] and Peter Schweizer[33] are senior editors-at-large.
Content and coverage
Accuracy and ideology
Breitbart News is a far-right[5] American news, opinion, and commentary website.[6][7] Some news outlets describe it as a conservative news outlet or as part of the alt-right.[7][90][91][92] One of the site's objectives is to court millennial conservatives.[46] It supported Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign,[23] and political scientist Matthew Goodwin described Breitbart News as being "ultra-conservative" in orientation.[93] Breitbart News publishes articles that critique feminism, Islam, and immigration.[94] The site has also been associated with the counter-jihad movement, having employed anti-Muslim writers such as Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney and Robert Spencer.[43][95]
In August 2017, Joel Pollak, the senior editor-at-large for Breitbart News, described the "mission" of Breitbart News in this way: "#WAR has been our motto since the days of Andrew Breitbart, and we use it whenever we go to war against our three main targets, which are, in order: Hollywood and the mainstream media, number one; the Democratic Party and the institutional left, number two; and the Republican establishment in Washington, number three."[96]
Breitbart News has published a number of falsehoods and conspiracy theories,[9] as well as intentionally misleading stories,[11] including a story that the Obama administration had supported ISIS during insurgency against the Syrian regime.[10] It has sometimes published these misleading stories as part of an intentional strategy to manipulate media narratives via disinformation.[12][97][11] In July 2010, Shirley Sherrod was fired from her appointed position as Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the United States Department of Agriculture.[98][99] Her firing was largely in response to coverage in Breitbart News of video excerpts from her address to an event of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in March 2010, though it was later picked up by Fox News.[98] Both NAACP and White House officials apologized for their statements after a longer version of her address was reviewed.
In April 2016, Stephen Piggott wrote in a Southern Poverty Law Center blog that the "outlet has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right" and was using "racist", "anti-Muslim" and "anti-immigrant ideas".[100] Piggott wrote that the website was openly promoting, and had become associated with, the beliefs of the alt-right.[100] Breitbart News has published material that has been called misogynist, xenophobic, and racist.[23] The owners of Breitbart News deny their website has any connection to the alt-right.[46]
The Anti-Defamation League described Breitbart News as "the premier website of the alt-right" representing "white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists."[101] The Zionist Organization of America rejected accusations of antisemitism, saying that Breitbart News instead "bravely fights against anti-Semitism" and called for the ADL to apologize.[102][103] An article in The Jewish Daily Forward argued that Bannon and Andrew Breitbart are antisemitic.[104] An article by Shmuley Boteach in The Hill disputed the allegations, arguing that Breitbart defends Israel against antisemitism.[105] Alex Marlow, editor-in-chief of Breitbart News, denies that Breitbart is a "hate-site", stating "that we're consistently called anti-Semitic despite the fact that we are overwhelmingly staffed with Jews and are pro-Israel and pro-Jewish. That is fake news."[106] Science magazine called Breitbart "a far-right site that avoids explicit white nationalism."[107]
Breitbart News has had staff members associated with white supremacists. An exposé by BuzzFeed News published in October 2017 documented how Breitbart solicited story ideas and copy edits from white supremacists and neo-Nazis via the intermediation of Milo Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos, together with other Breitbart News employees, developed and marketed the values and tactics of these groups and attempted to make them palatable to a broader audience.[108][109] According to BuzzFeed News, "These new emails and documents ... clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum—and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream."[108] In November 2017, British anti-fascism charity Hope Not Hate identified one of the website's writers as an administrator of a far-right Facebook group that serves as a platform for fascists and white supremacists.[110]
In 2017, the Mueller investigation examined the role of Breitbart News in Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and its role in both amplifying stories from Russian media and being amplified by Russian bots in social media.[111][112] In 2017, a Breitbart News reporter left the company to join Sputnik.[113]
In a 2017 survey among US readers, Breitbart News was voted the third least trustworthy source among American readers, with BuzzFeed and Occupy Democrats being lower-ranked.[114] In an October 2018 Simmons Research survey of 38 news organizations, Breitbart News was ranked the sixth least trusted news organization by Americans in a tie with the Daily Kos, with the Palmer Report, Occupy Democrats, InfoWars and The Daily Caller being lower-ranked.[115] An August 2019 internal Facebook study found that Breitbart News was the least trusted news source, and also ranked as low-quality, in the sources it looked at across the U.S. and Great Britain.[82]
Breitbart News has published several articles accusing the English Wikipedia of having a left-wing and liberal bias.[116][117][118] In March 2018, Breitbart News responded negatively to a pop-up on Facebook containing content from the Wikipedia article on Breitbart News that described the news website as "intentionally misleading", resulting in several users attempting to change the article's content.[117] In September 2018, Wikipedia editors "deprecated" Breitbart News as a source due to its unreliability; Breitbart News can still be cited on Wikipedia as an opinion or commentary source.[119][120] Breitbart News is also on Wikipedia's spam blacklist, requiring special permission for links to the website to be used.[121]