Breitbart radio’s Sirius XM expansion has the potential to influence key races across the country like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been able to do, according to a report in Bloomberg News.
Last week, Breitbart News announced that former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon would be returning to co-host Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM Patriot Channel 125 with Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow. In addition, editors Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak launched Breitbart News Tonight, an evening show that airs from 9:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m. ET / 6:00 – 9:00 p.m PT. Breitbart political editor Matt Boyle has a show in development along with other top Breitbart editors.
“That could prove crucial to Republican efforts to maintain their majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives,” Bloomberg noted, pointing out that Rush Limbaugh, the conservative media godfather, and Sean Hannity, who Bannon said is the most important voice for the “deplorables,” have used “talk radio to reach millions of listeners, influencing elections across the country.” Sirius, as the outlet noted, has 32.2 million subscribers.
In the Alabama Senate race between Judge Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones, Breitbart News and Breitbart radio have been instrumental in resurrecting Moore’s candidacy, according to Bloomberg News reporter Josh Green.
Green, the Devil’s Bargain author, writes that “conservative media resurrected” Moore’s candidacy, and it did so because of Bannon and Breitbart News’s various platforms.
“In doing so, he’s illustrated the growing power of conservative media to shape the perceptions of Republican voters, something that may keep Alabama’s Senate seat in Republican hands when polls open on Tuesday,” Green wrote of Bannon.
Green points out that in 2016, “Bannon’s narrative-building energies were chiefly directed at the mainstream media.” For instance, as Green notes, Bannon “helped conceive and produce the book ‘Clinton Cash’ as a way of injecting negative storylines about Hillary Clinton into major outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post to discourage potential Clinton voters and grease the skids for the Republican nominee.” Clinton Cash was arguably the most influential book during the 2016 election cycle because it provided the media an endless source of accurate news stories about Hillary Clinton’s corruption on a range of issues.
In the Alabama Senate race, Bannon needed to move the GOP base instead of general election voters. As Green notes, he sent “two top Breitbart editors, Boyle and Aaron Klein, to attack Moore’s critics and churn out a fusillade of stories designed to raise doubts about the motives of Moore’s accusers and the mainstream reporters covering them.”
“Bannon turned his daily SiriusXM radio show into the broadcasting hub of the Moore counter-narrative that was fast emerging. It disseminated Breitbart’s stories across the conservative universe, parts of which remained committed to opposing Moore,” he continues.
Boyle, the grassroots conservative bulldog who eviscerates the preferred left-wing and pro-establishment narratives the legacy media want to push, told Green that legacy media’s onslaught against Moore “was a missile launched at the conservative movement by the mainstream media.”
Boyle and Breitbart also helped with missile defense by helping local radio outlets combat the mainstream media’s pile-on, which is something that can be replicated in other states heading into the 2018 election cycle.
“Without Bannon and Breitbart, it would have been almost impossible for us to get the message out there,” Scott Beason, an influential Alabama radio host on the SuperStation FM 101.1, told Green. “They had a big effect. They’re giving people information that’s not making it into our local reports, that gave us a reference point to refute these stories and say, ‘Here’s the part you don’t know.’ And that often flips the situation on its head and changes people’s minds. I really believe because of the work they did that that’s how Roy Moore is going to be able to get over the hump on Tuesday.”
Breitbart radio’s growing influence is perhaps why left-wing agitators like failed presidential candidate Howard Dean and “celebrities” like Seth Rogan, Melissa Etheridge, and John Leguizamo have thrown public hissy-fits about Breitbart radio’s expansion on Sirius XM.
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