Several top executives and journalists at the site have resigned in the last week, saying the organization has turned into a shill for the Trump campaign and failed to support Michelle Fields, a Breitbart reporter who accused Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, of grabbing and shoving her at a Florida rally last week.

But in an ironic twist, Breitbart, a news and opinion website that welcomed the rise of Donald J. Trump as an outsider candidate, is now facing a problem similar to the one roiling the Republican Party it likes to torment: a scathing internal dispute, with Trump at its center.

As a proudly renegade voice of the populist right, Breitbart News has long delighted in bedeviling liberals and establishment Republicans alike, emerging in recent years as one of the nation’s leading conservative media outlets.


Fields reported the episode to the police, and a journalist for The Washington Post, Ben Terris, identified Lewandowski as the person who grabbed her. The Trump campaign has denied Fields’ account, and Breitbart, after initially requesting an apology, later published an article casting doubt on whether Lewandowski was involved.

In a telephone interview, Fields, who also resigned on Monday, said that she “felt like my employer was working with the Trump campaign to assassinate my character.”

“They were more interested in protecting Trump and coordinating with him on a message than they were about finding out the truth,” said Fields, who is 28. Messages left with Breitbart executives on Monday were not answered, and the site’s spokesman was among the employees who quit.

The uproar entwines the growing concerns about violence at Trump’s rallies — protesters have been attacked, and reporters ejected — with the squabbling that has erupted among right-leaning media organizations over Trump’s improbable political rise.

It also offers a glimpse into the growing pains at Breitbart, which began as a cousin of the Drudge Report and has expanded into a broader, if still ideologically driven, news operation with journalists in London, Los Angeles and on the campaign trail.


The present site retains the tabloid-style, shoot-from-the-hip mentality of its outspoken founder, Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012. But employees who left in recent days said that Breitbart’s unabashed embrace of Trump, particularly at the seeming expense of its own reporter, struck them as a betrayal of its mission.

The site’s ethos, said Kurt Bardella, the spokesman who resigned, had been that “everyone should unilaterally be held accountable — whether it be Donald Trump or someone else.”

Bardella acknowledged that the site’s readership had substantial overlap with Trump’s base of supporters, saying, “Anyone who reads Breitbart is fundamentally generally angry at the Washington establishment.”

But he said that Fields was not treated as a team player. Or, as Ben Shapiro, another editor who resigned on Monday, put it, “You don’t throw your own campaign reporter under the bus to satisfy the whims of a political campaign.”

Some staff members at Breitbart disputed that characterization of events, although none agreed to be cited by name.

Briefly on Monday, the site published what appeared to be a facetious column that mocked Shapiro for resigning and compared him to a snake. The column was later taken down, and a Breitbart executive, Joel B. Pollak, apologized.

Trump’s rise in the presidential race has paralleled a significant growth in Breitbart’s readership: The site’s traffic rose 120 percent, to about 14 million unique monthly visitors, from a year ago to January, according to data from comScore. Traffic to The Daily Caller, a conservative site more closely associated with the party establishment, dipped 3 percent in the same period.


Fields, in the interview, said she had been happy at her job since starting in November. “People would ask me, ‘How do you work at Breitbart, oh my goodness?’” she recalled. “But I enjoyed it. I liked my co-workers. I didn’t cover Trump. I didn’t have to sit there and write all these pro-Trump pieces.”

Fields said she believed superiors questioned her account in exchange for more access to Trump. She said she had stopped reading posts about herself on social media, citing threatening messages from Trump supporters, including accusations that she had falsified a photograph of a bruise on her arm.

“I’m in a tough spot,” Fields said. “If I go to the police, people say I’m taking advantage, I’m a crybaby.” She added, “Anything I do, it seems like it is the wrong decision.”

Her next move, she says, is uncertain, although she said she would like to continue covering the presidential race. But, she added, “Not the Trump campaign.”

---

Here’s the full text of both Shapiro and Fields’ resignation statements.

From Shapiro:

As a close personal friend and mentee of Andrew Breitbart’s, it saddens me tremendously to announce that as of 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time, I have resigned from Breitbart News as editor-at-large. I met Andrew Breitbart when I was seventeen years old and remained his friend until his tragic death; I signed on with Breitbart News two weeks before Andrew’s death because I believed in his mission.


I am proud of what we accomplished in the years following his death, fighting back against the leftist media and debunking the left’s key narratives. I have many good friends at Breitbart News, including editor-in-chief Alex Marlow and editor-at-large John Nolte, and I admire CEO Larry Solov for his dedication to ensuring a financial future for Andrew’s widow, Susie, and his four children.

Andrew built his life and his career on one mission: fight the bullies. But Andrew’s life mission has been betrayed. Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew’s legacy. In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda, to the extent that he abandoned and undercut his own reporter, Breitbart News’ Michelle Fields, in order to protect Trump’s bully campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly assaulted Michelle. I spoke with Michelle the night after the incident. She told me her story. That story was backed by audiotape, eyewitness testimony from The Washington Post’s Ben Terris, physical bruises, and video tape.

Both Lewandowski and Trump maligned Michelle in the most repulsive fashion. Meanwhile, Breitbart News not only stood by and did nothing outside of tepidly asking for an apology, they then attempted to abandon Michelle by silencing staff from tweeting or talking about the issue. Finally, in the ultimate indignity, they undermined Michelle completely by running a poorly-evidenced conspiracy theory as their lead story in which Michelle and Terris had somehow misidentified Lewandowski.


This is disgusting. Andrew never would have stood for it. No news outlet would stand for it.

Nobody should.

This truly breaks my heart. But, as I am fond of saying, facts don’t care about your feelings, and the facts are undeniable: Breitbart News has become precisely the reverse of what Andrew would have wanted. Steve Bannon and those who follow his lead should be ashamed of themselves.

From Fields:

Today I informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation. I do not believe Breitbart News has adequately stood by me during the events of the past week and because of that I believe it is now best for us to part ways.

As a close personal friend and mentee of Andrew Breitbart’s, it saddens me tremendously to announce that as of 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time, I have resigned from Breitbart News as editor-at-large. I met Andrew Breitbart when I was seventeen years old and remained his friend until his tragic death; I signed on with Breitbart News two weeks before Andrew’s death because I believed in his mission.

---