Steve Bannon Is Out At Breitbart

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Steve Bannon left the White House in August of last year to a hero's return at Breitbart News, the far-right news site he helped turn into the leading voice of conservative politics in America.

Now, less than five months later, the former chief strategist for the president is gone from the job that made him.

Breitbart announced Tuesday that Bannon would step down from his post as executive chair of the site, a position he first held between 2012 and August 2016. The move follows a brutal week for Bannon, after President Trump — and Bannon's patrons, the Mercer family — disowned him. The split followed the release of a behind-the scenes book, Fire and Fury, in which Bannon strongly criticized members of the Trump family.

In a statement, Bannon wrote that he was “proud of what the Breitbart team has accomplished in so short a period of time in building out a world-class news platform.”

The announcement completes what has been a shockingly fast fall from power for Bannon, who had hoped to use Breitbart, in concert with a new political action committee, to fund insurgent conservative challengers to mainstream Republicans in 2018 congressional races.

Now, the man who took considerable credit for President Trump's shocking win in 2016 finds himself cast out — crucially, from the good graces of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the billionaire GOP donors who fund Breitbart and a variety of other Bannon-linked ventures. Without the Mercers' support, and that of the rest of the Breitbart board, including CEO Larry Solov and Susie Breitbart — wife of the site's deceased founder, Andrew Breitbart — Bannon was forced to step down.

Bannon's departure leaves Breitbart — already in the midst of a traffic plunge —without its strongest editorial figure. In the months since leaving the White House, Bannon had become the site's public face, with Breitbart selling Bannon-themed merchandise and slavishly covering his public remarks. Without Bannon and former tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who left Breitbart after appearing to condone pedophilia in a video released in February 2017, the site will lack name recognition.

At the roaring height of its effectiveness, the news site Bannon referred to fondly as his “killing machine” was able to capture the resentment of a wide range of readers opposed to the liberal trajectory of American culture and turn it into ferociously partisan and highly shareable content. The targets of this resentment ranged from Black Lives Matter activists to liberal journalists to Silicon Valley executives. (And Bannon at least plotted to subvert multiple tech companies.) At times, as BuzzFeed News reported in October, that machine drew directly on the extremist fringe of the right wing — white supremacists and white nationalists — for ideas, guidance, and writing.

Still, it was this very connection to a base of cultural resentment against immigrants, coastal liberals, social justice activists, and others that President Trump seemed not to want to lose even after pushing Bannon from the White House last August. And for months, Trump seemed to waffle between supporting the far-right, identity politics–detesting candidates Bannon proposed for Congress and the more mainstream Republicans favored by the GOP establishment. The loss of an Alabama Senate seat — which Republicans had held for 25 years — by Bannon-backed Roy Moore seemed to settle the debate in favor of the latter.

Then came the stunning remarks attributed to Bannon in Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury. Though Bannon later apologized for the statements, Trump and his allies had already publicly turned on him. And when the Mercers followed shortly thereafter, Bannon's time at Breitbart was all but over.

Quelle: <a href="Steve Bannon Is Out At Breitbart“>BuzzFeed

Is Nicki Minaj Doing An Ad For Mattresses Here?

Was this Instagram #sponsored?

The Case

Nicki Minaj posted an Instagram of herself in front of the distinctive blue and white Casper mattress box on December 30 with the caption, “Love it @casper haven’t slept in daze.”

Casper is the mattress startup that makes flexible, reasonably priced mattresses that ship in a box (their standard model is $950 for a queen size). It’s a big business, and it's doing well!

This instagram was sort of confusing – was it a paid ad? Did she receive a free gift and liked it so much that she posted about it? BuzzFeed has reported on Casper gifting free mattresses to celebrities in the past, so that seems highly possible. Or does she truly just love this mattress?

And if it was a free gift, does using the gift box and kiss emojis meet the standards for the FTC’s guidelines for how social media influencers and celebrities should disclose ads on social media? (I’ll go ahead and answer that: almost certainly not).

The FTC’s guidelines are straightforward: Ads should be unambiguous – the ideal version says #ad at the beginning of a caption, rather than at the end of a long caption that gets cut off when viewed in the feed. The FTC also tells celebrities and influencers to avoid terms like #sp that aren’t totally clear to everyone.

The Evidence

The question of how to disclose a free gift turns out not to even be relevant here.

Casper confirmed to BuzzFeed News in an email on Monday that it compensated Nicki Minaj to post about the mattress. It wasn’t just a gift – she was paid $$$.

So shouldn’t have she disclosed it was an ad in the caption? Casper said, “we asked that she include the proper disclosure (#ad) in her caption. After she posted, we reached out – early last week – to ask that she update the copy to clarify.”

As of yesterday afternoon, Minaj had still not updated her post to say that it was an ad. Her record label did not reply to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.

But wait, there’s a twist!

As of today, the caption is gone.

10 days later, Minaj deleted the caption on the photo entirely.

Still, deleting the caption that implied the mattress was a free gift doesn’t solve Minaj’s failure to disclose that her post is a paid ad. It wasn’t just the caption that mattered – what’s left is still a photo of her face in front of the distinctive Casper packaging. Even though she no longer tags the brand's name, someone seeing her post is still likely to think that Nicki Minaj loves Casper mattresses.

It seems that the case of Nicki Minaj and Casper is an interesting example at what happens when the negotiations between a celebrity and brand sponsor go awry. While a Casper mattress might give you a great night’s sleep, that’s probably not the case for whoever was in charge of dealing with their celebrity partners.

Quelle: <a href="Is Nicki Minaj Doing An Ad For Mattresses Here?“>BuzzFeed