After reading Breitbart for a week, I learned three things: the election is rigged, Hillary Clinton is a liar and I am a masochist.
In the week before Donald Trump and Clinton faced off in a third presidential showdown, I decided to read political news exclusively on the conservative site. The reasoning, mainly, was that Breitbart isn’t just any conservative website. Throughout the 2016 presidential race, it’s been the journalistic voice of a candidate who likes to claim that the media will “lie, lie, lie, and then again they will do worse than that.”
And the relationship between Breitbart and Trump isn’t just idealistic — it’s mutually beneficial. The Trump candidacy is likely responsible for the large, election-cycle bump in Breitbart readership, and in August, Trump made Breitbart executive chairman Stephen Bannon his campaign’s CEO.
“I believe Breitbart News is becoming less of a news site and more of a propaganda organization dedicated to the Trump campaign,” said former Breitbart associate editor Jarrett Stepman when he resigned from the site in March.
But despite — or maybe because of — the incestuousness of the scenario, reading Breitbart is one of the best ways to glance into the minds of Trump and his passionate supporters (many of whom, naturally, visit the site).
And who can really blame them? For a Trump-supporting conservative — especially an internet-savvy one — Breitbart is like the Gawker of the alt-right; snarky and biting. I mean, shit, I couldn’t resist clicking on articles titled “Madonna: ‘If You Vote for Hillary Clinton, I Will Give You a Blowj*b‘” or “DNC Campaign Bus Dumps Human Waste into Georgia Street.”
But while skimming the orange and blue cluttered homepage of the site is a fun exercise in conservative clickbait, reading it exclusively for a week starts to highlight the problems that caused Stepman and a number of other Breitbart employees to resign. On any of the seven days I perilously browsed the site, I was bound to come across articles that didn’t just promote conservative philosophies or insult Democrats, but warped facts completely to create new narratives.
One of the worst offenders was a piece titled “Criminal Aliens Sexually Assault 70,000 American Women — But Paul Ryan Targets Trump” by Julia Hahn. The story, which takes its titular statistic from a 2011 Government Accountability Office report, conflates graphic descriptions of sex crimes by undocumented immigrants with Trump’s 2005 comments bragging about sexual misconduct — all in an attempt to bring down Paul Ryan.
“Ryan has remained passive and quiet as criminal aliens have assaulted tens of thousands of American women, but when an 11-year-old audio tape emerged of Donald Trump caught on a hot mic discussing women in crass terms, Ryan declared himself ‘sickened’ and spoke out,” Hahn wrote.
The article — which isn’t particularly unique by Breitbart standards — is wildly reckless in both its sensationalist storytelling and its comparison of two unrelated issues. It’s the localized, journalistic version of Trump’s own ISIS defense of the videos during the second debate — a quick “well, here’s a real problem,” meant to distract not defend.
But give the article credit where it’s due: at least Hahn’s story mentions the Trump tapes. The other realization about Breitbart News — and the Trump supporters that read it — is that neither follow the traditional news cycle set by Trump’s enemy-at-large, the “mainstream media.” The biggest news story of the past two weeks has been Trump’s 2005 tapes and the slew of accusations of sexual assault that followed. On Breitbart, the biggest news event was easily the leak of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails by Wikileaks — a story that got national coverage but minimal in-depth analysis.
Which in some ways is a good thing — alternative viewpoints are a media necessity, and at the very least no one will accuse Breitbart of hiding their biases: the site wears them proudly. But it’s certainly not a viable news source, there were multiple news stories I missed important information on or didn’t see completely after only reading the website’s stories for a week.
But on the bright side, there aren’t that many fights in the comments section — a rarity in the world of online journalism. Mostly, thousands of people shout the same thing in all caps, an online version of a Trump rally screaming “Make America Great Again” until their throats are sore.
Or, in this case, their fingers numb.
