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
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.
