The matter of blatantly false, subtly biased news and the embarrassing spread of so-called "hate speech" in the mainstream of public debate is on the agenda in Europe and above all in the United States. Geert Wilders, the head of the Dutch Freedom Party, received a three-month prison sentence for his offensive speech against Moroccans. The CIA has evidence of Russian interference in American elections to the detriment of the Democrats. The Obama administration is introducing sanctions against Russia. It rains in the wet. In all of this, liberal public opinion sees a plot by Putin who would pull the strings of a subversive international group of hackers and social troublemakers (in the sense of social media) with the aim of undermining the credibility of candidates from parties hostile to Russia, basically all centre-left and moderate right parties. Even Wikileaks would take the rubles. Snowden also shops in rubles. The far right makes no secret of considering Putin the "leader of the free world".
It may be all of this, but conspiracy theory has never explained anything. Not even in the golden age of the Third International and Yuri Andropov's KGB, the Soviet Union, which could boast a much more sophisticated, capillary and authoritative network of fifth columns, agitators and agents (including Putin himself), is managed to significantly influence the outcome of elections in countries with solid democracy such as the United States, France or Germany.
The New York Times has spent three columns of the precious space of its printed edition to describe how the Russians, in connection with subjects close to the M5S and Salvini, have spread, through the network and social networks, news of questionable reliability to orient towards the no the Italian electorate in the constitutional referendum. It is true that many lies have been circulated, but whether these could have shifted public opinion by 20 percentage points is highly questionable.
We already have the term that defines this revolution in the world of information. The term is “post-truth era”. And the term post-truth was chosen by the Oxford English Dictionary as "word of the year". Also in Germany the word of the year is “Postfaktisch”. So we're fine, the matter is legitimized at least linguistically. Looking closely, post-truth is nothing more than an extreme manifestation of the well-known phenomenon of truth that is shaped to enter a very specific ideological form. Today, more than the ideological factor, it is the transversal identity factor that triggers this mechanism which is hysterically bounced on social media like a crazy particle. This identity factor is determined, above all, by the material conditions of certain social classes and groups which, in developed countries, experience the brutal face of globalisation. And speaking of the relationship between the material and the ideal, it would be appropriate to re-read Carl Marx's German Ideology.
Or is the network responsible?
The cause of this nefarious trend in information is not Putin, but it is the network and mechanisms absolutely beyond any control that its universality has produced in the dissemination of information, ideas and in the aggregation of subjects with similar visions and problems, well across national borders and linguistic areas. Then there is the economic aspect of the web: sensational news brings traffic and traffic brings money. The so-called "meme factory" has erupted on the political scene of Western democracies. Just look at what happened to some teenagers from the small town of Veles in Macedonia.
Instead of working as waiters for 300 euros a month in some café in the town, these guys have registered hundreds of domains and produced thousands of Facebook pages through which to spread news that is as sensational as it is clearly without foundation (Pope Francis calling for a vote for Trump or Clinton involved in child trafficking) aimed at voters with Trump sympathies who in turn compulsively bounced them on social media until they entered the tweets of the twitter in chief. One of these Macedonian teenagers stated that he receives about 8000 euros a month from Google for the advertising he runs on these pages. A smaller, but interesting amount, he receives from Facebook. Now these good guys are preparing for the French and German elections and also for the Italian ones if they happen soon.
The diffusion vehicles of this real junk are precisely two of the top ten most capitalized companies on the planet, Google and Facebook. Now they say they are doing something to prevent the spread of false news, but as they are they can't do anything that has any effect. In this regard, Kenan Malik writes in an essay on the New York Times: “The problem of fake news is more complex than commonly believed and its solutions are often worse than the problem itself. We ask Facebook to censor feeds and root out false stories and the law to severely punish those who spread lies. But who should decide what is false from what is not? Do we want Mark Zuckerberg or the US government to determine the truth?” Of course not. Timothy Garton Ash, author of the book Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, in the Financial Times of 24 December suggests an endogenous solution to the meme factory, a sort of immune reaction that sees the sane part of public opinion transform into a sort of "watchdog" of fact that acts on the same tools that the meme factory uses.
Breitbart's cooks
There are counterfeiters like Veles' teenagers, but there are also information chefs. And what a chef!. The master chef is undoubtedly Steve Bannon, president of Breitbart News and now Donald Trump's chief strategist. Bannon and the Breitbart News team truly understood the unimaginable potential of the Internet to effectively recruit and activate a well-defined electorate and operate it like a pack of biting zombies. The folks at Breitbart aren't "a bunch of assholes" as a Mitt Romney aide put it, but they're a bunch of highly polished news professionals who know how to cook the news like Walter White of Breaking Bad could cook methamphetamine. After all, if it works, what's wrong with the information being a bit malicious? What's wrong with taking the reality distortion field principle to its extreme consequences? Wasn't the latter the mantra of Steve Jobs, the most admired and celebrated person of the last 10 years? In reality, there are some problems, but it's not just Breitbart that has it.
To be objective, this field of reality distortion not only encompasses the alt-right, the hard-right, the supremacists, the klu klux Clan, conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazis, but also includes publications that refer to liberal culture. Even the New York Times seems to have been attracted by this distorting field in covering the life and works of Donald Trump. It was precisely the liberal and anti-system constellation of the Gawker Media sites, founded by the former Financial Times journalist Nick Denton, that created the academy of a certain type of information without rules, without regard for people's privacy and vulgarly mocking like certain performances by Crozza. Gawker's team went so far down this path that they faced the harshest fine in the history of journalism; a fine, handed down by a Florida court, that led to Gawker's bankruptcy and Denton's retirement. A bitter epilogue that made New York liberals and her friend Arianna Huffington shed a few tears. The experience of the liberal Gawker built on the concept of "radical transparency" postulated by Nick Denton and that of the post-truth sites of the alt-right linked to the election of Trump shows how well founded the theory of extremes touching like the Alaska and Siberia.
But let's go back to Breitbart News which announced it is opening its doors in continental Europe with two new initiatives, one in German and one in French. Bannon's team already has a newsroom in London targeting a UK Brexiteer audience. The Economist dedicated an article (Breitbart News pushes deeper into Europe) to the landing of Bannon's creature in Europe. We have translated it into Italian for our readers. If you're annoyed by the headlines of the Giornale, Libero or the daily Fatto, well! you haven't seen anything yet. In any case Sallusti, Belpietro and Travaglio can rest easy dreams: Breitbart will not open in Italy… for now.
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A well-defined target
A well-known American commentator, Charles Krauthammer, writes that the success of Fox News is due to the ability of its founder, Rupert Murdoch in having identified a niche market: half of the country. The same can be said of Breitbart News, a conservative online publication whose fortunes have grown alongside Donald Trump and whose chairman Stephen Bannon is now its chief strategist.
Milo Yiannopoulos, editor at Breitbart, explains that after Trump's victory, half of the voters "are disgusted by Lena Dunham (abortion activist), Black Lives Matter, third wave feminism, communists and the "kill everyone" policy the white men” of the progressive left. And he adds, “Breitbart saw this trend emerge quite some time ago.” The expansion plans of the magazine suggest that something similar is also happening in Europe. It is already present in the UK and will launch the French and German sites in January.
Founded by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative journalist who died in 2012, the newspaper is just 9 years old. His formula – offending to mobilize readers with a great desire to bite, spreading occasional hoaxes, polemics and attacks against the major media – has taken flight. 10 days after the elections, it said it had registered 45 million visitors in one month, a modest number compared to the major news sites. But his profile is growing rapidly. In a certain period of time – for example between 13 May and 13 June 2016 – it saw the highest number of social interactions for political content, surpassing publications such as CNN, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. During the same time period, its closest competitor, the liberal Huffington Post, fell behind by 2 million clicks and shares.
How does Breitbart survive?
Until now, Breitbart's political achievements have been more transparent and visible than his economic achievements. Breitbart does not divulge any economic information concerning it, but some experts assess that advertising revenues are not sufficient to support operating costs in America and the United Kingdom. It is privately funded, particularly Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire and a major donor to Donald Trump's campaign, who is said to have invested $10 million in Breitbart a few years ago. Compared to traditional online publications, its costs are small: a handful of professional journalists, a few interns and readers who voluntarily fill the site's pages with comments and insults.
Breitbart's ad revenue, as it stands now, could prove volatile. His content is often toxic, his comments section a platform for far-right hotheads railing against immigration and Jews. On October 29, Kellogg's, the corn flake company, announced it was pulling its ads from the site. Kellogg's is not alone. Allstate, an insurance company, Warby Parker, which sells eyeglasses, EarthLink, an internet provider, and SoFi, a fintech firm, have blacklisted Breitbart. Soon after, BMV, the Bavarian car and motorcycle manufacturer, joined the boycott. The more Breitbart becomes radicalized, the more the advertisers feel uncomfortable. Breitbart said Kellogg's exit did not cause any financial damage. In fact, the opposite has happened: since Breitbart launched the hashtag "#DumpKelloggs", inviting consumers to share it, shares of the most well-known corn flake maker have dropped quite a bit. Majority of investors such as Nissan, a Japanese automaker, have decided to stay.
Target : European right
The decision to push deeper into Europe may seem an eccentric choice for a publication that abhors the idea of globalisation. In reality, Breitbart has a clear operational strategy: to operate where it can win an audience by leveraging anti-globalization and anti-immigration sentiments and aligning itself with opposition parties. Linking to existing political entities gives it credibility and also allows it to aggregate fragmented online communities into a single organizational platform, notes Angelo Carusone, of Media Matters for America, which monitors conservative media outlets in Washington, DC.
In the United Kingdom where it was launched in 2014, Breitbart has vocally supported the campaign of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to leave the European Union. Brexitari have used the content proposed by Breitbart and the leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage, has become a columnist. Raheem Kassam, an editor at Breitbart, became Farage's aide. He then returned to the masthead to take over the editorial direction and capitalize on the success of the referendum.
In France and Germany, according to observers of the media world, there are equally ripe circumstances for the landing of Breitbart. In 2017 there are general elections in both countries and far-right candidates — Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France Frauke Petry of Alternative for Germany — are hoping to do well. Breitbart can root for these parties.
It's not that there is no competition. In France, for example, conservative publications such as Valeurs actuelles are mushrooming, driven by Le Pen's growing popularity, explains Paul Ackermann, director of the Huffington Post in France. But these realities do not have a significant presence on the net. The supporters of the National Front, many of whom are young, do not have an online reference site to refer to and on which to exchange their ideas. Ackermann sees "an open door" for sites like Breitbart. François Godard, a media analyst, sees a rift between the country's major media and increasingly populist-leaning readers. Commentary on the Le Monde and Le Figaro sites, Godard continues, is often more toned down than Breitbart's standard or the content of the newspapers themselves.
The European version of “American First”
In Germany, where many outlets lean to the left, the right-wing media landscape is underdeveloped, due to a kind of cultural aversion Germans have towards the country's fascist past. Breitbart is faced with rather stringent legislation targeting incitement to ethnic hatred and anti-Semitism. Junge Freiheit is one of the few conservative newspapers. It has grown tremendously since Chancellor Angela Merkel opened her doors to migrants in 2015. But its circulation is still under 30 copies, probably due to its weak online presence. Breitbart could aim to build just that, by attracting right-wing information consumers within one platform.
If Breitbart can attract well-known personalities to local audiences, as the Huffington Post did, the feat could become within reach. In the UK, together with Kassam, he recruited James Delingpole, a conservative journalist who writes for the Spectator, a 180-year-old centre-right periodical. In fact, things are going well in this country: the audience has grown by 135% on an annual basis and the page views per month have risen to 15 million in July. This means that Bretibart has a superior ability to make contacts and shares than the Spectator. Not bad for a publication recently described by a Mitt Romney spokesman as "a bunch of balls".
The business of outrage and insult, pioneered by Rush Limbaugh - radio and television talk show host - and then perfected by Fox News, can become another ubiquitous American commodity like Kellogg's corn flakes.
