PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — VICE News, an edgy new media company, produced a special on Breitbart News Network at the Democratic National Convention here that shows the political team at Breitbart News in action.
“Our job here is to go in there, find the stories that are not being told with these Bernie delegates and give them a voice,” Breitbart News’ Washington Political Editor Matthew Boyle opens the special by saying amid an impromptu editorial meeting that VICE filmed.
Supporters—both delegates on the inside and protesters on the outside—of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont feel like they have been taken advantage of by a rigged political system. That rigged system, as evidenced by emails contained in the WikiLeaks dump of internal Democratic National Committee (DNC) communications, led to Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic nomination for president.
The VICE special walks through a behind-the-scenes look at the Breitbart News operation in Philadelphia, showcasing Breitbart’s live streaming team downtown in a suite at the Marriott across from City Hall—where Breitbart focused on highlighting the protesters outside the convention—to reporting on the street and live interviews. The special includes Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos as well.
“I think in many cases we agree more with the Bernie Sanders people in that there’s a rigged political system out there than we agree with establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan,” Boyle says.
“Bernie people are our people,” Yiannopoulos says in his interview. “They’re very similar to us in all sorts of ways. To be that kind of libertine or whatever, you kind of have to be a Trump supporter because there’s really no other option.”
The VICE special walks through how Breitbart News has hit record traffic levels in 2016, generating 150 million page views in June alone—and 805 million for the first half of 2016. VICE’s Scott Conroy notes that Breitbart News has reached that record traffic level by bucking the system and the established order of things, including a “disregard for their more genteel right-leaning competitors.”
“There’s a lot of these guys who have been around since before Ronald Reagan even had a shot at the White House—and they’re great people, they’re great people to learn from and to hear from,” Boyle says of older publications on the right of center that don’t understand the 21st Century. “But they don’t get what’s happening in the current day and age. They don’t understand new media.”
The special notes how Boyle was singled out by Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for president, as a “very good reporter” earlier this year.
“Most Republicans in Washington, your Marco Rubios and your Mitt Romneys, are guys that like sit around and smile and try to kowtow to the mainstream media,” Boyle says is the reasoning partly behind Trump’s rise. “They’ll try to slip their points out there in a very subtle way. But they won’t aggressively come right up in your face and make their point.”
The special from VICE concludes by following Boyle and the Breitbart News team around downtown Philadelphia interview several “Never Hillary” progressives and Sanders supporters, who pledge they will never vote for Hillary Clinton no matter what.
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