Stephen Bannon, the newly appointed chief strategist in the Trump administration, has no experience in government. But before he joined Trump’s campaign as CEO in August, he spent four years as executive chairman of Breitbart News.



Bannon himself has described the website as a “platform for the alt-right”, the same movement denounced by Hillary Clinton as “a fringe element [that] has effectively taken over the Republican party”.

So what is Breitbart News, who is Bannon, why is he accused of being a white nationalist, and what does it mean that he has been given such a key role in the Trump administration?

Where did Breitbart news come from?

The website Bannon oversaw was co-founded by the late rightwing loudmouth and entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart in 2007. He got in on the ground floor of the new media revolution after being mentored by conservative new media maven Matt Drudge.

Initially, the motivation was a single issue.

“Breitbart thought that American Jews were insufficently pro-Israel” and too attracted to liberalism, says Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies conservative media. Early in the site’s life, he says, “you got this very weird case of antisemitism in the service of Zionism”. But anyone on the left was fair game.

Concerns about antisemitism at the site persist. Bannon himself has been accused by his ex-wife of making antisemitic remarks, and Breitbart is still criticised for the antisemitic overtones of some articles.

One point of difference from all the other websites competing to be the conservative Huffington Post was the site’s consistent funding of an aggressive, sensationalist brand of original journalism. The kind of story that brought the site notoriety and traffic was the 2009 hidden camera “exposé” of community organising group Acorn.

Breitbart’s story was amplified by other conservative media, and then mainstream outlets. By the time several inquiries cleared Acorn of serious wrongdoing, the 40-year-old organisation had shut its doors, and Breitbart had claimed a major scalp.

The site also broke the first of many Anthony Weiner sexting scandals, a story that stayed alive long enough to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in its final weeks.

How did Bannon change Breitbart?

Breitbart News quickly found that, as Cassino puts it: “The stuff that got them the most hits and the most attention is the most extreme clickbait they could come up with.”

In the online media economy, hits are money. After Andrew Breitbart’s sudden death in 2012, there was what Cassino calls a “civil war” inside the company about branding and direction. The Bannon faction won, he took over as executive chairman, and moved the whole site in a new direction.

“Bannon doubled down on an economic model that worked for the site: rightwing clickbait headlines.”

Shane Burley, a journalist and researcher who has produced several in-depth articles on the alt-right throughout the election campaign, says that “what distinguishes Breitbart is sensationalism”. The ideal Breitbart headline is provocative and designed to offend progressive sensibilities.

They love to offend, too. Professor George Hawley, a historian of the American right who is currently writing a book about the alt-right movement, says that Breitbart “tends to take offensiveness as a virtue. There’s a trollish element to it.” When Hillary Clinton read some out in a speech, or when outraged liberals circulate them in memes, they receive a perverse kind of validation.

Long before he joined the campaign, Bannon oversaw the site’s full-throated support for Trump, even throwing one of his own reporters under the bus after she accused then campaign manager Corey Lewandowski of manhandling her.

Ben Shapiro, a former high-profile writer for the site, accused Bannon of betraying Breitbart’s legacy, and turning the site into a “Trump Pravda”.

So, who reads Breitbart?

According to Cassino, Breitbart attracts a “younger crowd” than is normal for conservative media like Fox News, whose median viewer is 68.

Incidents like Gamergate were tailor-made for a site trying to craft rightwing messages for millennials. Breitbart’s tech editor, Milo Yiannopoulos, parlayed his involvement in Gamergate into a remarkable form of global rightwing celebrity. He now tours the US with a message of misogyny and antifeminism to audiences largely made up of young men.

Milo Yiannopoulos, tech editor at Breitbart. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

When we burrow into Breitbart’s traffic figures, we find that the audience it has attracted is uncommonly engaged.

According to Comscore web analytics, the site’s monthly unique visitors have jumped around between 13 and 18 million in the last year. But the page views have increased 89% in a year – meaning people are engaging with more content while they are there.

Like Donald Trump, the site also makes spectacular use of social media. Mike Barry, head of audience at Guardian US explains that data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook analytics service, shows that compared with an average of Facebook pages like those of BuzzFeed, NYT, WaPo and HuffPost, Breitbart’s fans interact at a six times higher rate.

“Breitbart’s Facebook fans aren’t just reading what Breitbart posts”, he says, “They are liking, commenting and sharing those posts far and wide – and building a huge community of social-connected, like-minded individuals along the way.”

Is Breitbart an alt-right site – and what does it mean?

Breitbart is commonly described as an alt-right website, but that may be underselling the extremism of the core sites of that movement. Unlike old school alt-right figures like Jared Taylor, Breitbart does not openly advocate for racial separation, or publish endless articles linking race and IQ.

In the Financial Times yesterday, Richard Spencer, who coined the term, said: “I don’t think Bannon is alt-right in the way I would define it.”

Professor Hawley concurs, and agrees with Spencer that it is “alt-light”. “I’ve never seen anyone on the site push outright white nationalism, as on Daily Stormer. It’s still more like a generic civic nationalism.”

“They revel in political incorrectness,” he says, but the main difference between Breitbart and more familiar kinds of conservative media is one of “tone and style”. He does concede that “it may act as a kind of gateway drug to the harder stuff”.

Shane Burley affirms that after flirtations with the Tea Party and hard libertarianism, Breitbart has settled into “populist American civic nationalism”. They retail populism, but it is of a particular kind. “They have made it somewhat counter-cultural to resemble a certain kind of white male internet populism – the populism of message boards, or gamergate.”

Their appeals may be more coded, and less baroque than the alt-right proper, says Burley, but they still center a politics based on the idea of an imperiled white male identity, and as such “they are willing to go after race and immigration, and absolutely willing to go after transgender people and women”.

But really – does Bannon believe what he preaches?

Everyone’s saying that Bannon is a white nationalist, but the experts can’t say for sure.

Burley says his rule of thumb is self-identification. “Bannon never has identified himself in that way, so I don’t think it is really accurate. Proto-white nationalist may be accurate. It seems that all of his political ideas signal an unspoken white nationalist politics.”

It may be that, while he is certainly on the right and carries personal prejudices, Bannon, like Trump, is more of a shape-shifting, even cynical populist. “Breitbart was willing to shift its politics according to what is popular with its audience,” Burley says. Under Bannon, it “would go where the clicks were”.

What about the relationship between the Trump White House and a publication whose former executive chair is now in power?

Cassino says that “it becomes like what Fox News was for Bush”, arguing that Bannon will see it as a media source he can trust, has access to and where he can get his message out.

He points out that Trump is already appearing to freeze out other media sources. If true, this would leave Bannon as the main point of contact between an administration with a “bunker mentality” and its favored outlet. Breitbart will become “an influential source for the mainstream media to find out what’s going on inside the White House”.

Were it not for the election of Trump overshadowing all, this would count as one of the stranger outcomes of a very strange year.

