Post-Bannon landscape

Conservative media face a post-Bannon landscape

Some see an opportunity to grow, while others simply bask in the former Trump strategist's downfall.

By JASON SCHWARTZ

One day after Steve Bannon’s ouster from Breitbart News roiled the conservative media world, some saw new opportunity on Wednesday for other sites to rise, others felt that Breitbart would be just fine, and still others were simply happy to see the former master of the media dark arts vanquished.

“It’s been a good week and a half for me,” said Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart writer, who quit the site in 2016 after saying that Bannon did not adequately support fellow reporter Michelle Fields when she alleged that Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager, assaulted her.

Shapiro, who is now editor-in-chief of another conservative site, The Daily Wire, still loathes Bannon but said he harbored no ill will against Breitbart, a nationalist and populist outlet.

“They should live and be well,” he said. “I don’t hope other sites fail so we can succeed. I don’t think people are going to move from Breitbart to us. I think people visit more than one site. The idea that it’s an opportunity for us, I don’t see why. I think it’s an opportunity for them to move beyond Bannon.”

Many former Breitbart hands and devotees, like Shapiro, have bemoaned the site’s shift from its original, culture-warrior mission under Andrew Breitbart — who died in 2012 after founding the site in 2007 — to being a more nakedly political animal under Bannon, openly campaigning for candidates like Donald Trump and the failed Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Geoffrey Ingersoll, editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller, said he wasn’t concerned with whatever the future held for Breitbart, but also portrayed his own site as carrying the torch for the vision of its founder.

“We haven’t paid much mind to the state of Breitbart’s site, mostly because we’re busy producing stories and content our readers love,” Ingersoll wrote in an email. “But our best to Breitbart. We’ve always embraced their founder’s legacy — being happy warriors for truth. As for Steve Bannon, we believe in second chances. The Daily Caller has a fantastic spring internship program starting in two weeks.”

The world of online conservative news has become a crowded and, according to researchers, insular place. A study out of Harvard and MIT found that, during the 2016 election season, readers of conservative sites rarely ventured outside the right-wing bubble for news. And as Trump rose in the GOP primary ranks, Bannon’s Breitbart became the hub of that world, as its most linked and shared site.

To the extent that any instability at Breitbart causes readers to wander elsewhere for news, they would probably be moving to other conservative outlets.

“If there’s a website or any product that is having an issue, and clearly, with Steve leaving, there’s a change going on, that’s an opportunity for others,” said Charles Herring, who owns the conservative One America News Network, “and the websites that are going to benefit are those that attract a similar target audience, which would be people that are independent or right-leaning.”

Herring said that his company’s focus was primarily on television, “but we’re putting more and more effort into our website.”

He said if Breitbart struggled with its transition, it could be reason to look at more digital investment — but that right now, it was too soon to know.

“From that standpoint, there’s obviously a potential opportunity, but then again, there’s an opportunity for Breitbart to bring in more talent,” he said.

Shapiro, the Daily Wire editor, said Breitbart had become so slavishly pro-Trump that if readers did for some reason wander away, they’d be more likely to go to sites that were equally so.

“Is there a world where there’s a more pro-Trump site that now steals Breitbart’s thunder?” he said. “That’s a possibility, but it’s not going to be people like me who gain from Breitbart going down. It’s going to be Gateway Pundit,” a far-right website.

Nicole Hemmer, a University of Virginia professor and author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” said it was “hard to imagine” the site would abandon Trump, and that she expected Breitbart to more or less continue on its current trajectory without Bannon.

“There doesn’t seem to be any reason its influence would rise or fall in his absence,” she said in an email. “Bannon isn’t really a figurehead. He himself doesn’t have followers. It’s unlikely most readers will even notice he’s gone.”

Other agreed that, for Breitbart, the real issue probably wasn’t whether Bannon is or isn’t there, but whether the site continued to be, as Shapiro described it, “a Trump fan-zine.”

“Breitbart will remain a force,” Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax Media, wrote in an email. “Don’t forget that they ran very effectively while Steve was in the White House, he wasn’t managing the site at all. The question is whether they will remain tightly aligned with President Trump, especially if he starts doing deals with the Democrats.”

Ruddy agreed with Shapiro’s assessment that if readers did leave, it would probably be for sites that lean even more right.

“Breitbart occupies a very narrow niche of conservatives that support isolationism, nativism and protectionism,” he said. “Newsmax has a very broad, influential audience, but we look at the conservative movement more as a big tent with unifying principles that Reagan espoused and we champion.”

Breitbart’s influence soared during the election, and as Trump has struggled, the site’s standing has dipped.

“Breitbart News is the #45th most trafficked website in the United States, according to rankings from Amazon’s analytics company, Alexa.com,” the site crowed in a January post. A current check of Alexa rankings shows Breitbart at 243rd.

At the same time, FoxNews.com, which has lately beefed up its staff and moved in a more Breitbart-esque direction, has seen its traffic surge. Its Alexa rank is 59, and the site counted 2017 as its best year ever, with a 29 percent increase in average monthly unique visitors and a 17 percent jump in page views, year over year.

Nevertheless, given the political climate, said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, there appears to be plenty of room for everyone, including Breitbart.

“The company’s organizational culture and business plan will inevitably get recalibrated in the coming months, but its core product — lightning rod news for the far-right — will probably hold steady,” he wrote in an email. “The appeal of politically antagonistic news seems larger today than in the recent past. Meaning that there should be room for competing news outlets to move into Breitbart’s market without necessarily crowding them out.”