The Wikipedia Post — Appendix B: Breitbart
Breitbart News was not always the focus of so much attention as it has been since its role in favoring Trump during the 2016 election made it a source of such unrelenting ire for the left. Prior to its coverage of GamerGate, Wikipedia’s page about Breitbart was largely left alone by editors. However, it was a target for many of the site’s left-wing editors. During the early days of the GamerGate controversy, opponents of GamerGate several times pointed to Wikipedia’s page on Breitbart, even as some were editing the page(See Part 3), to justify excluding its coverage on the GamerGate story such as the GameJournoPros leak published in mid-September.
Originally just redirecting to the page on its founder and namesake Andrew Breitbart, following his death in 2012 an editor split the material about the site off into its own page. The page on Breitbart the man was often targeted by left-wing editors known for pushing their agenda on the site. Among them was Xenophrenic who has the second most edits to the page and made several slanted edits. He had in one case been banned from making edits about the Tea Party Movement for repeatedly attacking one of the editors trying to protect the page on the movement from smears. In subsequent years he was repeatedly blocked for breaching “edit-warring” policies on topics related to atheist, specifically communist, regimes persecuting religions.
Another editor with a history of left-wing bias was BullRangifer who repeatedly added smears and attacks to his page in the days and months after Breitbart’s death, seemingly trying to cite comments Breitbart made about Ted Kennedy as rationalization. Rangifer has more recently been seen trying to spin the outcome of the Mueller investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and “collusion” with the Trump Campaign, which exonerated Trump. This included defending the discredited Steele dossier that originated most of the salacious “collusion” conspiracy theories.
When the article on Breitbart News was created, it consisted mostly of the few significantly notable controversies at the site. However, editors began to expand the page with negative material, adding every controversy no mater how trivial, including a case where the Wikipedia page didn’t note for a year that the errors were due to the site reporting something as true after a source considered “reliable” on Wikipedia had published a false report. In one incident, an editor added a section several paragraphs long due to a report by Ben Shapiro claiming Chuck Hagel visited a “Friends of Hamas” group, which did not exist. The section was conspicuously the longest in the article at the time. Although Shapiro only reported what he was told by a source on Senate staff and noted in the article it was his source’s claim, which likely originated with gossip inadvertently spread by a journalist at another outlet to the point three different people relayed the same story, the section failed to reflect this detail.
Editor Goethean, who like Xenophrenic had been banned from editing about the Tea Party Movement for his bias against the movement, was also one of the users adding “controversies” to the list on the Breitbart News page. Anti-GamerGate editor Travis “NorthBySouthBaranof” Mason-Bushmann’s own editing to the page took place as he was participating in the dispute about GamerGate‘s Wikipedia article where Breitbart was repeatedly raised as a source.
Bushmann added an incident involving an ultimately retracted story that had confused then-incoming Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch with another woman by the same name who represented the Clintons during the Whitewater investigation. The latter woman did not have widely-publicized photos to make her easily distinguishable. Bushmann framed it as “false statements about Loretta Lynch” and rejected an editor’s attempt to note it more correctly as confusion about two identically-named people in the legal profession tied to Democrats, though he later changed it to “misidentification” due to the concern.
GamerGate prompted many other editors to show up. An editor removed one minor controversy where Breitbart reported a story that had been published on the Boston Globe website following a chain of sources originating with an Austrian satirical site, which was subsequently retracted, as being too trivial to mention. One of the editors active on the GamerGate article, Aquillion, restored the controversy. Left-wing editors repeatedly restored mention of the incident and expanded on it, particularly Xenophrenic, until it was one of the largest sections in the list of stories. Months after this determined effort to retain the section, it would be removed due to a wide-ranging discussion.
Although Breitbart News has made mistakes, many other news outlets have similarly made mistakes. Editors active on the page during the GamerGate controversy would add any flash-in-the-pan story about an error, inconsistent with policies on giving undue focus on recent events and news. They also excluded the major story of GameJournoPros by deeming it somehow not “relevant” to the article on the outlet that broke it. The section on Breitbart’s influential role in the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, which had at that time already led to the Democratic Representative’s resignation from Congress, ended up as the smallest section on the page during this time. By contrast to the treatment of Breitbart News, the article on CNN itself gives very little information about its controversies and even the page dedicated to controversies at the outlet has been heavily edited by some of the same editors above to keep out as much negative information as possible.
Return to Table of Contents
