How right-wing activists are using The New York Times to undermine Hillary Clinton

(Image credit: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

published 8 October 2015

Everyone loves a good story — especially if it's also a good scandal. For Steve Bannon, the successful executive chairman of the right-wing publication Breitbart News, it's all about reaching "everybody" — even, and sometimes especially, the left.

The strategy, reported by Bloomberg, involves digging up "rigorous, fact-based indictments against major politicians" and then gaining the attention of "mainstream media outlets conservatives typically despise to disseminate those findings to the broadest audience." The most recent example of this strategy was the book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Business Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, published by Peter Schweizer, the president of the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute (GAI) — the group masterminding this media takeover, which was co-founded by Bannon.

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The reason GAI [will spend months on a story] is because it's the secret to how conservatives can hack the mainstream media. [Writer Wynton] Hall has distilled this, too, into a slogan: "Anchor left, pivot right." It means that "weaponizing" a story onto the front page of The New York Times ("the Left") is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart.com. "We don't look at the mainstream media as enemies because we don't want our work to be trapped in the conservative ecosystem," says Hall. […]Once that work has permeated the mainstream — once it's found "a host body," in David Brock's phrase — then comes the "pivot." Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative. "With Clinton Cash, we never really broke a story," says Bannon, "but you go [to Breitbart.com] and we've got 20 things, we're linking to everybody else's stuff, we're aggregating, we'll pull stuff from the Left. It's a rolling phenomenon. Huge traffic. Everybody's invested." [Bloomberg]

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.