THE HILL: How Breitbart turned on Ted Cruz

The Hill has some interesting reporting today, explaining how Steve Bannon and Breitbart turned on Cruz to embrace Trumpertantrum.

This is really a story of how Breitbart became Trumpbart and threw Ted Cruz under the bus along the way.

Here’s how it begins:

In late January, Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon was tipped off about a story that he hoped would damage Ted Cruz.

Bannon, who this week became CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, was told that a radio advertisement would be landing in Iowa aimed at hurting Cruz with evangelical voters — the very constituency the senator was depending on to win the state’s caucuses on Feb. 1.

The line of attack, which was being pushed by Cruz’s presidential rival Mike Huckabee, was that Cruz had donated only a small fraction of his income to his church, not enough to fulfill his tithing duties of 10 percent.

Bannon was excited by the story, stating that it could spell the end of Cruz’s candidacy. He told his reporters to chase the story hard, though their efforts turned up nothing new.

Bannon didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment from The Hill, but a spokeswoman for the conservative news sight downplayed any work Breitbart’s reporters did on the tithing story.

“With regards to your question on Ted Cruz: Breitbart did virtually zero reporting on this,” Breitbart spokeswoman Alexandra Preate said.

Preate would not comment further, however, and did not deny that Bannon was pushing reporters to pursue the storyline.

In the early stretch of the presidential campaign, Breitbart was seen as a staunch supporter of Cruz, with Bannon leading the charge. Coverage of the Texas senator was favorable, with Breitbart at one point getting an exclusive look at Cruz getting his children ready for bed.

But Breitbart’s allegiances shifted as Trump’s campaign caught fire.

The story of how that happened, which has never before been told in such detail, provides a vivid illustration of how Trump’s rise has changed the balance of power in the conservative media, and by extension, the entire Republican Party.

It goes on to explain that Bannon hated the fact that Cruz went to the border with Beck on a humanitarian mission, and he also didn’t like Cruz’s initial stance on ‘fast track’ and TPP.

It got to the point that by the middle of 2015, all stories about Trump or Cruz had to be vetted by Bannon or his lackey Alex Marlow:

A directive went out to Breitbart staff over their internal Slack channel in mid-2015 that any stories involving Trump or Cruz, or conflicts between the two of them, needed to be approved by Bannon and editor-in-chief Alex Marlow.

CLICK OVER TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE THERE’S A LOT MORE…


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