This is "Gaza Population Explodes, but They're Definitely the Victims of Genocide" levels of cope
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 25, 2023
For those who might not get what’s going on with this tweet, here’s an explainer: The Associated Press is a non-profit commercial collective, funded by subscriptions from local and national news outlets, to provide coverage of stories not everyone can send a reporter to. Like the above story about endangered sea turtles carried on Breitbart. Founded in 1846, the AP is one of the few concepts originating in the print media age to prove extremely durable in the digital era. Just as, for example, the Denver Post in 1943 was able to deliver their readers updates on fighting between American and German troops in North Africa without the Denver Post having to send a reporter there, AP wire reports enable local and national outlets’ websites to carry stories they wouldn’t otherwise have on their own in 2023. You can see it in a number of articles we’ve published here at National Zero that, even though we correctly attributed them as “the AP reports” their links go to the websites of ABC News, WRAL in North Carolina, NBC News, PBS, 1010 WINS in New York City, Politico, CTV News in Canada, and others rather than their official APnews.com site.
Breitbart’s one of those websites. We have no idea what it actually costs for them to license AP stories – as opposed to simply copying and pasting them like we did in the earliest version of National Zero. That was free… and possibly civilly actionable. As with a lot of high-level enterprise services, the pricing is opaque and appears to be based on traffic, just as the print-centric era AP was based on newspaper circulation. The best data point on that we could find was in a 2009 Harvard Nieman Lab article where the publisher of the 9,000-subscriber Norwalk Reflector in Ohio said they were paying $48,000 a year to carry AP content before they dropped it.
Even if we don’t know the parameters of Breitbart’s Associated Press subscription it is safe to say they’re spending significantly more on AP stories (and photos) than they do for, say, custom Breitbart.com domain-branded Gmail inboxes you can get for $13 a month each from Google.
Which is what makes this tweet so fucking funny. They’re not wrong that the headline is stupid, it does sound like a New York Times Pitchbot joke about something good being bad news for Biden, but there’s something sort of maybe, uh, counterproductive to the Breitbart social media team pointing out their reliance on “cope”-filled Associated Press content like the sea turtles story.
As far as we know Breitbart is definitely an outlier among its fellow far right niche publications in carrying AP stories. We haven’t seen the other guys like Gateway Pundit or the Daily Wire do the same. We don’t know why the AP takes their money or why they pay for it. Breitbart sure as hell wouldn’t be assigning their own staff to write a story about sea turtles for the same reason it’s so puzzling that they carried the AP’s story about sea turtles: Their readers don’t give a shit.
Really the only use case we’ve seen for Breitbart to pick up AP stories that at least sort of makes sense is when they want to “cope” (or really not cope) with bad news for their reader base of demented MAGA assholes. See their “coverage” of the acquittal of the second suspect who went to trial in the Durham Investigation, the leaders of the Proud Boys getting convicted of seditious conspiracy over the Capitol riot, and Biden “whistleblower” Gal Luft getting hit with an indictment on charges of spying for the ChiComs and other scumbaggery. The last one was actually by UPI, but same MO by Breitbart, who just couldn’t muster the will to type the bad news themselves.