It’s been amply established that Breitbart News has few, if any, standards at all. Well, apparently we may be about to find out where one of that fake news shop’s bright lines are. Breitbart brass is reportedly giving serious thought to booting out its tech news editor and troll-in-chief, Milo Yiannopoulos, after it emerged that he defended and condoned pedophilia in a 2016 interview.
Fox Business’ Charlie Gasparino detonated this bombshell on Monday afternoon, hours after the Conservative Political Action Conference yanked Yiannopoulos from this coming weekend’s schedule. Watch here.
Gasparino revealed that there is considerable debate inside Breitbart about whether to keep Yiannopoulos on the payroll. He was a favorite of Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s longtime chairman who is now Donald Trump’s top political operative in the White House. He is still very popular there, and Breitbart has defended his incendiary statements on many topics in the past. Gasparino reports that a number of “senior people” there are saying that these comments were “a bridge too far.”
Gasparino has learned that Yiannopoulos is going to have to explain himself to Breitbart brass if he has any hope of keeping his job. However, even that may not save him if he “digs himself deeper” with his explanation. After all, Gasparino said, there’s really no way to explain such remarks except in a “theoretical” manner.
If Yiannopoulos does end up getting the boot, it won’t come without some prodding. According to Washingtonian Magazine, the videos sent the Breitbart newsroom into open revolt. Two senior Breitbart staffers say that “at least half a dozen people” are prepared to resign if Yiannopoulos isn’t fired. One source, a senior editor, said that while Milo has done and said a lot of outrageous things over the years, “this is something far more sinister.” The other source believes that “everyone in the company would vomit” if they saw those videos.
Ultimately, Gasparino said, any decision to oust Yiannopoulos will be solely “a business decision.” According to a source who is close to the discussions about Yiannopoulos’ future, it will come down to “how damaging his comments are to the Breitbart brand.” Breitbart’s balance sheet is already taking a beating from advertisers who have fled in the wake of the site’s ties to the alt-right. According to Gasparino’s source, this latest imbroglio “doesn’t help the business side.”
Frankly, it says a lot about Breitbart that this is even a debate. Any employee of a legitimate news organization who defended pedophilia would have been gone within seconds. There is no defensible reason for why Yiannopoulos should have even been on the payroll at the start of business on Monday. Frankly, he should have been gone long before now. This is a guy who was permanently banned from Twitter for leading the trolling of Leslie Jones, and fobbed off the rape culture on the Harvard men’s soccer team as “locker room talk.”
But even if Breitbart give Yiannopoulos the boot, it still may not be enough.. At the very least, Breitbart’s senior management–including Bannon–wasn’t aware that one of its highest-profile personalities was giving these interviews. And when that’s the best-case scenario, that’s not a good sign. It means Breitbart lacks the most basic safeguards that any self-respecting news organization has to prevent itself from being brought into disrepute.
Bannon, Breitbart editor-in-chief Alexander Marlow, CEO Larry Solov, and the rest of Breitbart’s leadership need to give a full accounting about what they knew about these interviews. Moreover, basic decency demands that Breitbart take steps to ensure that there is never a next time for this kind of behavior. And if–God forbid–anyone at Breitbart knew about these interviews and their content and didn’t do anything about it, they must be fired. And that especially applies if–again, God forbid–Bannon knew about it.
(featured image courtesy Kmeron, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
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