Breitbart: viciousness as a business model

The K-Landnews very own grumpy TheEditor coined the title of today's post and added, for good measure, think German tabloid Bild Zeitung, the British SUN or a bunch of others, but with the world's biggest military and the world's biggest bigots behind it. Breitbart is so much like Bild Zeitung or the SUN, you can't even give them credit for innovation in linguistic harm.

Reading Breitbart for several days felt like eating junk food piled high on white bread all day. Followed by a deep visceral urge to vomit.

In addition to time tested emotional trigger word choices, such as calling Planned Parenthood an "abortion chain", Breitbart produces copy like this, for example on a right to healthcare:

How a right to healthcare would "force others to ensure you are healthy" fails the most basic test of logic, but they print it anyway because logic does not matter.

What worries me most, TheEditor continued, is how they have embraced the concept of "fake news", they really weaponized it. 

You can see this in the piece on the CBS Sunday news show 60 Minutes, where they write Curtis Houck at NewsBusters notes that 60 Minutes’ Sunday report, “How Fake News Becomes a Popular, Trending Topic,” admits that the audience for “fake news” tailored to the left is mostly “affluent and college educated.”

The piece is nothing more than a few highlights from a site called Newsbusters, which in turn bills itself as "Exposing & combating liberal media bias". Not only do Breitbart and Newsbusters feed off of each other, for example with both featuring the same Planned Parenthood story.

They also feed on the allegedly biased liberal media, absorbing articles one could highlight as proof of unbiased writing by the New York Times or reporting by Spanish speaking TV channel Univision into their narrative of the evil liberals.

A Univision report on deportees finding work in Mexico and being happy with their new life is swiftly turned into an argument that deportation can be beneficial - for their own good, so to speak. Despite the wide spread U.S. conservative "speak English" mentality, Newsbusters also offers a Spanish version of its Latino section, showing that the dividing lines in society go right through communities and ethnic groups. Saying this just in case you hadn't noticed Ben Carson chiding black people.

Breitbart has added several locations to its site over time with their focus very much "traditional conservative/FOX News derived":

Breitbart London: Brexit is freedom, Muslims are bad.
Breitbart Jerusalem: Don't ever call us anti-Semitic again, and Iran and Hamas are the evil ones.
Breitbart Texas: H1-Bs, rape & more rape (but not by Americans), the left and its bathroom bills and 'sanctuary cities'
Breitbart California: more evil liberals, good news from the USGS is that many liberal areas could fall into the sea

If Breitbart actually comes to Germany in 2017, the section will be Breitbart Germany or Breitbart Berlin, and you can probably expect Muslims are bad, Social Democrats are destroying Germany, the country's social security system rewards moochers, the EU exploits Germany.