How Breitbart London Led The News: The Belgian Newspaper and Obama

On Saturday evening, Breitbart London began to pick up information about a Belgian daily newspaper – described to us as “the Belgian version of The Guardian” – published a grossly offensive image of U.S. President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle looking like apes.

The paper claimed this was ‘satire’, but we didn’t buy it. It had abhorrent racist overtones, and De Morgen‘s apology, claiming they thought racism was so far confined to the annals of history that this was now okay, smells a little bit fishy to say the least.

On Sunday morning, Breitbart London splashed this: 

Followed by this: 

“Where’s the mainstream media?” I wondered. 

If a Murdoch paper had done this, or even a comparably-sized, right-wing newspaper had published the image, there would be outrage. Cue the opprobrium from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee. The headlines would read: ‘The right-wing press wants to eat your babies’ or ‘How Rupert Murdoch hates all black people and their friends’. 

But there was nothing. And that’s not to say that people hadn’t read it. I know for a fact that they had. Left-wing journalists had been in touch with me over the matter. I even e-mailed it to some. Still nothing. Could it be that they were too lazy to run the translation from Flemish to English? 

Or was it because of this?:

[

I concluded they were all going to let it slide, until The [London] Metro almost carbon copied my original article, and ran it for Monday morning. 

Then came the Independent. Same sort of copy (no credit this way for breaking the story, of course).

Then Breitbart London ran the fact that De Morgen had issued an apology. Admittedly, Belgian-based papers beat us to the scoop on this one. But wait… now suddenly everyone was on board.

“Oh, this progressive outlet has seen the light, the error of its ways and are penitent sinners!”

Cue the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, the New York Times and Talking Points Memo: 

Isn’t the liberal media a thing of beauty?

I imagine editors sitting on their sofas on Sunday, receiving calls from their journalists: 

Journo: “Hey, there’s this progressive Belgian newspaper running ‘satire’ about Obama being a monkey. Shall we run it?”

Editor: “Who else has got it?”

Journo: “Breitbart London”

Editor: “We can’t follow them. Wait until there’s a new angle… like an apology”. 

Or am I giving them too much credit here? Is it simply that these guys are too slow, lazy and with their heads rammed so far up their own… newspapers… that they can’t pick up things like this?

In reality, readers will know that were this published elsewhere, it would have been a major story for the liberal media. Because it was ‘one of their own’ that dropped the ball, they couldn’t give a monkey’s. Pun intended.