Breitbart News

"Breitbart" redirects here. For other uses, see Breitbart (surname).

Breitbart News Network
Screenshot
Type of site
Politics
News and opinion
Available inEnglish
OwnerBreitbart News Network, LLC[1]
Created byAndrew Breitbart
EditorAlex Marlow (editor-in-chief)[2]
Wynton Hall (managing editor)[3]
Joel Pollak (senior-editor-at-large)[4]
CEOLarry Solov
URLbreitbart.com/masthead
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional (required to comment)
Launched2007; 17 years ago (2007) (as Breitbart.tv)
Current statusActive
This article is part of a series on
Conservatism
in the United States
Schools
Principles
History
Intellectuals
Politicians
Jurists
Commentators
Activists
Literature
Concerns
Parties
Active

Defunct

Think tanks
Media

Newspapers

Journals

TV channels

Websites

Other

Other organizations

Economics

Gun rights

Identity politics

Nativist

Religion

Watchdog groups

Youth/student groups

Miscellaneous

Other

Movements
Related

Breitbart News Network (/ˈbraɪtbɑːrt/; 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]

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.

  1. ^ "Breitbart News Network LLC – Company Profile and News". Bloomberg Markets. Archived from the original on December 10, 2018. Retrieved February 24, 2021.
  2. ^ Byers, Dylan (October 17, 2013). "Breitbart News shakes up masthead". Politico. Archived from the original on May 6, 2015. Retrieved August 17, 2015.
  3. ^ Collins, Eliza (March 27, 2017). "Breitbart staff list reveals additional ties to Bannon and Mercer". USA Today. Archived from the original on November 13, 2020. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  4. ^ a b c Cite error: The named reference Rainey_20120801 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Multiple sources:
  6. ^ Abbruzzese, Jason (March 15, 2016). "Breitbart staffers quit over the news site's 'party-line Trump propaganda'". Mashable. Archived from the original on February 28, 2017. Retrieved November 11, 2016.
  7. ^ Piggott, Stephen (April 28, 2016). "Is Breitbart.com Becoming the Media Arm of the 'Alt-Right'?". Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on March 25, 2019. Retrieved November 11, 2016.
  8. ^ Multiple sources:
    • Higdon, Nolan (2020). The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education. University of California Press. pp. 105–109. ISBN 978-0-520-34787-8. Retrieved September 9, 2022 – via Google Books. Breitbart relied on fear-inspiring racist and xenophobic narratives that had salience with whites who were reacting to the economic anxiety over the Great Recession with racial resentment over the election of the first self-identified black president and the increase in the proportion of the US population made up of racial minorities. [...] The election of President Barack Obama saw Breitbart continue the long-standing American practice of spreading racist-laden fake news stories. For example, Breitbart stories claimed that Obama was born in Kenya and supported terrorist organizations. Breitbart's fake news stories were not only racist but xenophobic and Islamophobic
    • DiMaggio, Anthony R. (December 30, 2021). "The Trojan Horse "Conservative" Media and the Mainstreaming of Neofascistic Politics". Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here. Routledge. pp. 93–97. doi:10.4324/9781003198390-3. ISBN 978-1-000-52308-9. S2CID 244786335. Retrieved September 9, 2022 – via Google Books. But an analysis of Breitbart's content demonstrates the venue's commitment to normalizing neofascistic ideology, even as it refuses to acknowledge what it is doing. As Rolling Stone identified when it ran a November 2016 profile piece, Breitbart has a troubling history of promoting misogyny, Islamophobia, homophobia, and racism. [...] Concerning black-white relations in the United states, Breitbart also has an eliminationist-style rhetoric that depicts protests of racial inequality and police brutality as a fundamental threat to the nation.
    • Bhat, Prashanth; Vasudevan, Krishnan (May 20, 2019). "National Review: Opposing "Trumpbart"". In Atkinson, Joshua D.; Kenix, Linda (eds.). Alternative Media Meets Mainstream Politics: Activist Nation Rising. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 56–57. ISBN 978-1-4985-8435-7. Retrieved September 9, 2022 – via Google Books. Third, writers at National Review took a moral high ground and accused Breitbart and Donald Trump of enthusing extremist groups associated with the alt-right, which the publication claimed were known for their misogyny, sexism, racism, and xenophobia. [...] By calling Breitbart "the homepage for peckerwood-trash racists and the white-power basement dwellers," National Review accused the far-right media outlet of paving the way for white supremacists to enter the mainstream.
    • Andersen, Robin (September 29, 2017). "Weaponizing Social Media: "The Alt-Right," the Election of Donald J. Trump, and the Rise of Ethno-Nationalism in the United States". In Andersen, Robin; de Silva, Purnaka L. (eds.). The Routledge Companion To Media and Humanitarian Action. Routledge. pp. 487–500. doi:10.4324/9781315538129-49. ISBN 9781315538129. Retrieved September 9, 2022. A key to Breitbart's success has long been the fake news modules, misinformation and propagandized narratives that form the content core of the Breitbart News website. Breitbart has carefully honed an anti-immigration, anti-Muslim online presence in a media universe complete with stories that raise fears of "white genocide".
    • Bhat, Prashanth (December 10, 2019). "Advertisements in the Age of Hyper-Partisan Media: Breitbart's #DumpKelloggs Campaign". In Gutsche, Robert E. Jr. (ed.). The Trump Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy (PDF). Routledge. pp. 192–205. ISBN 9780367891527. Retrieved September 9, 2022 – via Open Research Library. By March 2017, they have collectively purchased less than 0.5 percent of Breitbart's inventory. These agencies have listed Breitbart to their list of brand-unsafe websites because the far-right site violated their hate speech policies (Benes, 2017). [...] In the case of Breitbart, brands such as Kellogg's withdrew ads because they didn't want to be associated with a media outlet that produces racist and xenophobic content.
    • Victor, Daniel; Stack, Liam (November 14, 2016). "Stephen Bannon and Breitbart News, in Their Words". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved September 9, 2022. Critics, including some conservatives formerly associated with it, have denounced Breitbart in its current incarnation as a hate site steeped in misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, white nationalism and anti-Semitism.
    • Grynbaum, Michael M.; Herrman, John (August 26, 2016). "Breitbart Rises From Outlier to Potent Voice in Campaign". The New York Times. Archived from the original on August 27, 2016. Retrieved August 28, 2016.
  9. ^ Multiple sources:
  10. ^ Multiple sources:
  11. ^ Novak, Viveca (July 21, 2010). "Shirley Sherrod's Contextual Nightmare". FactCheck.org. Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Archived from the original on August 27, 2010. We've posted no shortage of pieces on political attacks that leave context on the cutting room floor to give the public a misleading impression. ... The latest victim of the missing context trick is U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod. ... a clip of several minutes of her roughly 45-minute speech surfaced on conservative Andrew Breitbart's website, where he labeled her remarks 'racist' and proof of "bigotry" on the part of the NAACP. ... It quickly became clear that the climax, not to mention the moral, of Sherrod's tale had been edited out of the version Breitbart posted.
  12. ^ Elridge, Scott A. II (2018). "Visualizing journalism: evaluating the field, and its dimensions". Online Journalism from the Periphery: Interloper Media and the Journalistic Field. Routledge. p. 171. ISBN 978-1-3173-7005-5. LCCN 2017017472. Archived from the original on July 3, 2023. Retrieved October 15, 2020 – via Google Books.
  13. ^ "Facebook offers a distorted view of American news". The Economist. September 10, 2020. ISSN 0013-0613. Archived from the original on March 24, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2022. According to CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that tracks how web content is shared on social media, the two most popular American media outlets on the site last month (..) were Fox News and Breitbart, two right-wing news sites.
  14. ^ Ellison, Sarah; Izadi, Elahe (October 26, 2021). "'Definitely not the results we want': Facebook staff lamented 'perverse incentives' for media". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on October 30, 2021. Retrieved March 27, 2022. An August article from Breitbart, an early and loyal media ally of former president Donald Trump, touted three months of CrowdTangle data to boast that it was 'demolishing its establishment foes on Facebook.'
  15. ^ Alba, Davey (September 29, 2020). "The Facebook Pages With the Largest Share of Debate Conversation". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on March 15, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2022. At the top was Fox News (with a 25 percent share of the conversation), followed by Breitbart (15 percent of the conversation) and then the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro (12 percent share).
  16. ^ Roose, Kevin (July 14, 2021). "Inside Facebook's Data Wars". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on March 21, 2022. Retrieved March 27, 2022.
  17. ^ "How Breitbart became Donald Trump's favourite news site". BBC News. November 14, 2016. Archived from the original on April 7, 2019. Retrieved April 5, 2018.
  18. ^ Coaston, Jane (January 14, 2018). "Bannon's Breitbart is dead. But Breitbart will live on". Vox. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018. Retrieved April 5, 2018.
  19. ^ Cite error: The named reference Weigel was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  20. ^ Cite error: The named reference Ebner was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  21. ^ Multiple sources:
  22. ^ Posner, Sarah (August 22, 2016). "How Donald Trump's New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists". Mother Jones. Archived from the original on April 4, 2019. 'We're the platform for the alt-right,' Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July.
  23. ^ Grynbaum, Michael M.; Herrman, John (August 26, 2016). "Breitbart Rises From Outlier to Potent Voice in Campaign". The New York Times. Archived from the original on August 27, 2016. Retrieved August 28, 2016.
  24. ^ Garcia, Catherine (October 6, 2017). "Leaked emails show how Milo Yiannopoulos worked with Stephen Bannon, alt-right to transform Breitbart". The Week. Archived from the original on October 30, 2019.
  25. ^ Kassel, Matthew (October 17, 2017). "The beat reporter behind BuzzFeed's blockbuster alt-right investigation". Columbia Journalism Review. Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Archived from the original on February 26, 2019.
  26. ^ Kerr, Dara (February 3, 2017). "Lyft, HP won't advertise on Breitbart. Uber, Amazon remain". CNET. Archived from the original on June 11, 2019. Retrieved February 11, 2017.
  27. ^ Henley, Jon; Oltermann, Philip (December 8, 2016). "German firms including BMW pull advertising from Breitbart". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on April 26, 2019. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  28. ^ Raza, Sheeraz (May 8, 2017). "Coalition Gather More Than One Million Petition Signatures Urging Amazon To Drop Breitbart". ValueWalk. Archived from the original on October 30, 2019.
  29. ^ Cite error: The named reference Fountain was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  30. ^ Cite error: The named reference Passantino-2020 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  31. ^ Gold, Hadas (February 25, 2017). "Breitbart reveals owners: CEO Larry Solov, the Mercer family and Susie Breitbart". Politico. Archived from the original on May 7, 2019.
  32. ^ Collins, Eliza (March 27, 2017). "Breitbart staff list reveals additional ties to Bannon and Mercer". USA Today. Archived from the original on March 29, 2017.
  33. ^ Tracy, Abigail (November 3, 2016). "Why an anti-Clinton book from Breitbart got the FBI's attention". Vanity Fair. Archived from the original on November 3, 2016.