Donald Trump and Steve Bannon with a park ranger in Pennsylvania. AP Photo/ Evan Vucci While mainstream news outlets search inwardly for answers after the shocking victory of President-elect Donald Trump, Breitbart News appears to be riding his wave to the presidency.

The far-right website, which bolstered Trump's candidacy in its infancy with positive coverage, has been run since 2012 by Steve Bannon, who was named Trump's chief strategist on Sunday. Bannon's appointment set off a firestorm of criticism, as politicians of all political stripes argued that he harbored sympathies for white-nationalist arguments and rhetoric.

The website has since appeared emboldened by its political clout, boasting of record-shattering traffic and announcing plans to expand its US operations and launch new sites in Germany and France. It has also vowed to sue a "major media company" over claims that Breitbart is a white-nationalist website, and it is reportedly trying to recruit Billy Bush, the disgraced ex-host of NBC's "Today" show who exchanged crude sexual remarks with Trump in a 2005 meeting captured by a hot mic.

All the while, Breitbart's coverage has continued to flaunt its provocative spin on the news, to the outrage of mainstream reporters and fact-checkers. A recent article, for instance, went viral for declaring that Trump won a "7.5 million popular vote landslide" in the US heartland — a misleading assertion that, as The Washington Post noted, can be made true only by arbitrarily defining "heartland" and discounting 52 counties that Clinton won.

Breitbart's status as a brazenly pro-Trump news outlet is prompting questions around what role the website will play in media coverage of the Trump administration and how close its ties will remain to Bannon and the president-elect.

As former Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella told Business Insider recently, it's unclear where Breitbart ends and Trump's government begins — perhaps there is no division.

"I don't look at them as a news source — I look at them as a de facto wing of the Trump administration," Bardella said. "As long as he is in office, they are his mouthpiece.

"Just consider Breitbart the official vehicle of the Trump White House."

Andrew Breitbart at an event in 2011. Getty Images/Brendan Smialowski

The evolution of Breitbart

Breitbart was founded in 2008 by Andrew Breitbart, the conservative firebrand known for his commentary accusing the larger media of liberal bias and excoriating political corruption.

Under his leadership, the website generated news coverage that was hailed by the right for its populist, antiestablishment voice and reviled by the left, which accused it of inflaming partisan tensions and using details devoid of context to mislead readers.

Breitbart remains notorious for offering provocative, even deliberately outrageous commentary that is separate from its news coverage, written by far-right bloggers such as Milo Yiannopoulos, who frequently denounces feminism and was banned from Twitter in July after the service accused him of inciting his followers to send a wave of harassment and abuse to "Saturday Night Live" star Leslie Jones.

But the website first began gaining prominence years earlier, after its staunch defense of the tea-party movement and its role in the downfall of Anthony Weiner. (Breitbart was the first to break the news of that the married New York congressman had sent lewd photos and texts to women online.)

After Andrew Breitbart died of heart failure in 2012, however, the website took on a more nationalist tone under the direction of Bannon, who became its executive chairman.

Breitbart was propelled into mainstream attention during the 2016 presidential campaign when its reporters began providing strikingly positive coverage to Trump during the Republican primaries.

It was a shift that disgusted establishment Republicans and even some Breitbart staffers. The turmoil came to a head in March when Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields accused Trump's campaign manager at the time, Corey Lewandowski, of assaulting her at a Florida event.

Breitbart's perceived defense of the Trump campaign in the matter eventually prompted the resignations of Fields, editor-at-large Ben Shapiro, and Bardella — all of whom are now vocal critics of both the website and Bannon.

Bannon in the lobby of Trump Tower. Getty Images/Drew Angerer

The embracement of the 'alt-right'

Speaking with journalist Sarah Posner at the Republican National Convention in July, Bannon described Breitbart News as "a platform to the alt-right."

The alt-right is a growing movement that has shunned establishment conservatism and openly embraced white nationalism and promoted racist and sexist rhetoric. It largely rejects the label of bigotry, however, arguing that it instead seeks to fight political correctness.

Breitbart's own "guide to the alt-right," written by Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari, says the movement aims to reemphasize the value of Western European culture and describes the many racist and bigoted memes created by members as a means of shattering cultural taboos. The guide acknowledges that the alt-right has attracted and grown to encompass "real racists and bigots" as well as neo-Nazis, but it says "there's just not very many of them."

Breitbart News has similarly rejected accusations of racist or sexist coverage, contending that its goal is merely to "hold the global permanent political class in contempt," as Matthew Boyle, the site's Washington political editor, recently told Business Insider.

"We are doing what journalists throughout said mainstream media are supposed to do: challenge the conventional wisdom, hold politicians' feet to the fire, ask tough questions, report facts that are in many cases inconvenient truths for career politicians, and give a voice to the millions of people worldwide who have had theirs taken away from them by world elites who consider the ordinary person beneath them," he said.

Breitbart's vilification of other media outlets, as well as Trump's embracement of its coverage, has significantly boosted Breitbart's popularity — even elevating its traffic on Election Day to rival that of Fox News, CNN, and The New York Times.

Now, instead of being damaged by its "alternative-reality bubble," as conservative talk-radio host Charlie Sykes called it, Breitbart has become weaponized, Sykes said.

"We are now going to see what (state-controlled media) really looks like in this country, where you are going to have this media network that will act like an echo chamber and an enforcer for somebody in power in the White House," he told The Washington Post.

"It will be deployed to attack and vilify other conservatives who might want to oppose Trump on initiatives."

Oliver Darcy contributed to this report.