Newt Gingrich tried to argue otherwise on Monday, telling Fox & Friends it’s “baloney” to fault President-elect Donald Trump’s “chief strategist” for stories published under his tenure as executive chairman of the news outlet, including “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew” and “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”
The site continues to devote a special section to “Black Crime,” but Gingrich, a member of Trump’s transition team who may well be the next secretary of state, holds Bannon blameless:
They now want to come back and say that anything that anybody ever published in Breitbart is Steve Bannon. That’s baloney. That would be like accusing the publisher of The New York Times of being responsible for the dumbest thing his newspaper ever did, which would be a lot of things, by the way.
In fact, the publisher of The New York Times is responsible for everything that appears in the newspaper, and if he were headed to the West Wing his work would be scrutinized, too.
Bannon deserves extra scrutiny, given how his former employees describe him. Conservative writer Ben Shapiro, who resigned from the site in March, said in a statement that “Bannon is a bully, and has sold out [Andrew Breitbart’s] mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda.”
When Jarrett Stepman resigned as associate editor in March, he said, “I believe Breitbart News is becoming less of a news site and more of a propaganda organization dedicated to the Trump campaign. Breitbart News has also now openly embraced the ‘Nationalist/Populist’ viewpoint, which is in direct opposition to limited-government conservatism that channels the philosophy of the Founding Fathers.”