Breitbart News has suffered a dramatic decline in the “quality” (if you can call it that) of their yellow journalism since the sudden demise of their guiding blight, Andrew Breitbart. They embarrassed themselves by falling for a hoax from the same satirical site they previously blasted the Washington Post for believing. They published a “scoop” claiming that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel took donations from a group that, as it turns out, didn’t exist. Their practice of “vetting” President Obama yielded dud after dud. And their attempt to cinematically canonize their namesake bellyflopped at the box office. The magnitude of their collapse is almost too painful to watch.
Consequently, they seem to have grabbed a life line from Fox News to prevent any further shrinkage. Their web site now features a section where they post headlines from their “partners,” but the only partner listed is Fox News. They have posted adoring homages to Fox personalities like Kirsten Powers who pretend to be liberals while bashing everything to the left of Attila the Hun. And for their sycophancy, they now get regular promotions of their articles on Fox News.
Have you got your copy of “Fox Nation vs. Reality” yet?
But this week revealed the most blatant Fox fluffing yet between the two conservative lie factories. On June 5, Breitbart published an article defending Fox News CEO Roger Ailes from disclosures contained in a new book by reporter Jonathan Alter: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies. For some reason it took the the three biggest cheeses at Breitbart News to compose this syrupy ode to Ailes: Stephen Bannon, Executive Chairman; Larry Solov, President; and Alexander Marlow, Managing Editor. And just last week the same three stooges penned a fawning tribute to Ailes titled “The Ailes Manifesto: America Rallies Around Roger Ailes and Fox News.” Of course, America did no such thing, but the Breitbart executive sweets sure exposed their deep infatuation.
This week, Breitbart’s sensationalistic headline called Alter an “MSM Tool in the War Against Roger Ailes and Fox News,” and dismissed him for being employed by a news enterprise owned by a partisan billionaire (Michael Bloomberg). Amazingly, the BreitBrats displayed no sense of irony considering they themselves are busy licking the boots of their own partisan billionaire (Rupert Murdoch).
After several paragraphs of self-righteous and predictable carping over their delusional perception of the media as hopelessly liberal, the BreitBrats think they have nailed Alter with this assertion: “Breitbart News did some checking, and according to authoritative Fox and News Corporation sources, Ailes never talked to Alter for this book.” Well, they didn’t have to check with Fox for that because Alter never claimed to have talked to Ailes for the book. Then, after that criticism that failed to cite any Fox Newser by name, the BreitBrats complained that Alter failed to cite “any inside Fox or News Corp. sources” by name.” Then they followed that up with another quote from “one Fox source.” In fact, the rebuttal to nearly every criticism the BreitBrats made of Alter’s book was based on either an unnamed source, or had no attribution at all. There were thirteen itemized passages from Alter’s book with which Breitbart took exception. They were all summarily dismissed with ambiguous notations like…
- “…declared a high-placed figure…”
- “…security sources at Fox…”
- “…according to a longtime hand at News Corp…”
- “…According to our reporting…”
- “…Says a News Corp. building source…”
- “…according to Fox sources…”
- “…Sources tell Fox that…”
So after castigating Alter for deigning to employ unnamed sources, the BreitBrats rely almost entirely on unnamed sources for their rebuttal. But even worse, they tally up the results of their own missive and report that six of Alter’s thirteen allegations were false. That means, of course, that 7 were true or partly true.
Someone may need to inform the BreitBrats that if you’re trying to refute a list of assertions in a critical book, you are not making much headway if a majority of them, by your own reckoning, are true. And that doesn’t even take into account the likelihood that the ones Breitbart tagged as false may still be true, despite their objections. After all, as Alter said in response to an article in Politico where Ailes rebuffed his book, “The question is, do you believe me or Roger Ailes?”
Setting aside for the moment that Ailes is a professional liar, for the BreitBrats the answer to alter’s question is obvious. They believe their corrupt and corpulent sweetheart, Roger Ailes. And they would follow him anywhere, as long as he continues to plug their pitiful blog. Romantic, aint it?