ABC News has officially and completely dropped conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart from the network’s online news coverage. ABC News flew Breitbart to Phoenix last night, but network executives did not tell him they were dropping him until it was too late for him to get picked up by another network.
“I will give ABC News tactical points here,” Breitbart said in a phone interview with The Daily Caller.
The network, Breitbart said, waited to announce his cancellation “until the afternoon, when voting is being done, and when the story gets out, it will all kind of be election results. They certainly know their business and how to break the bad news and to make sure that the word doesn’t get out about how bastardly ABC behaved. They capitulated to a predictable intimidation campaign and McCarthyite strategies of Media Matters, George Soros, John Podesta, The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo and the rest of the totalitarian-minded who can’t bear to share another point of view.”
In a letter to Breitbart released to the press Tuesday afternoon, ABC News’s digital division chief Andrew Morse wrote:
We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABCNews.com and Facebook. The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News. We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall. Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage. As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.
Breitbart said he will “fight back” with “everything he has got,” and described ABC’s letter, which does not point to a specific example of malfeasance on his part, as evidence that the network has a left-wing political agenda.
Breitbart told The Daily Caller and announced on his website earlier this week that he had been asked to appear on the network’s television broadcast in addition to its town hall digital coverage. After Breitbart posted audio of two local Alaska CBS-affiliate reporters plotting to ruin GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller’s campaign by connecting him to a potential child molester at one of the Tea Party favorite’s campaign events, ABC News dropped Breitbart from its broadcast election coverage.
“When they created that line in there that said it was online-only, at no point did I demand airtime,” Breitbart said Tuesday night. “I said I’d still go, but that it would be preferable if they put me on the air to show, at best, that they didn’t acquiesce to the Left.”
Instead, the network canceled Breitbart entirely.
Neither Facebook nor Facebook’s marketing director, Randi Zuckerberg, would comment on Breitbart being dropped. Zuckerberg is one of the participants in ABC’s town hall.