Fox News and CNN have not yet covered BuzzFeed report that Bannon gave editorial control of Breitbart to neo-Nazis

Report exposing Breitbart as a white supremacy propaganda mill has only been covered by MSNBC's AM Joy and All In with Chris Hayes

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

BuzzFeed News published a story on October 5 featuring internal documents and emails showing that Breitbart.com, run by President Donald Trump's former chief strategist and campaign CEO Steve Bannon, served as a mouthpiece for neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Among the revelations in the documents was proof that Breitbart actively solicited stories from neo-Nazis and white supremacist leaders, allowing them to make contributions and even kill stories proposed for the website. One story that was edited by an outside white nationalist was quoted in a speech Trump gave in Warsaw, Poland this past July.

MSNBC's Joy Reid reported the story on AM Joy, noting that former Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos “was actually tossing back and forward story ideas with people like Devin Saucier,” the editor of white nationalist website American Renaissance. 

JOY REID (HOST): There's one piece from the BuzzFeed -- a little clip from the BuzzFeed piece, Kurt, in which Milo Yiannopoulos reaches out to a guy named Devin Saucier. And he is the editor of a white nationalist publication called American Renaissance, he's the editor of it. And he says, “I think you'll like what I'm cooking up.” And then Saucier responds, “I look forward to it.” He was actually tossing back and forward story ideas with people like Devin Saucier and others, and that's what came out. When you were consulting with Breitbart, did you get any inkling that Milo was sourcing his stories by going back and forth with white nationalists? 

KURT BARDELLA: I thought this was one of the most shocking revelations of the BuzzFeed piece, that there is a, quote, unquote, “reporter” who would go outside of the organization and essentially take content written by someone else and want to essentially publish it, and have that be the editorial direction that that story would go. And I think it just shows you though that Breitbart News, it's not a news network. They are not a media organization. They're a propaganda machine. And the fact that they would be so willing to collude with outside groups, outside interests to try to pander to this white nationalist, racist demographic, tells you that their objective isn't to tell truth, it isn't to report stories, it's to gin up a certain segment of the population to try to advance a radical agenda. 

A search by Media Matters on SnapStream for coverage of BuzzFeed's Breitbart story found only one other cable news report on it, on the October 6 edition of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes. CNN and Fox News have so far failed to even mention it.