'This is vile': Conservatives scorn Breitbart for believing Roy Moore's victims but backing him anyway

The Atlantic columnist Conor Friedersdorf said that some members of the conservative media are disgusted to learn that Breitbart News supported Alabama ex-Chief Justice Roy Moore's bid for the U.S. Senate in spite of the fact that the editorial staff believed accusations that Moore molested underage girls.

Friedersdorf said that if right-wing media cared as much about the truth as it purports to, "they would’ve treated an admission by the most highly trafficked conservative web site that their coverage is dishonest as a major piece of scandalous news."

He went on, "The same goes for websites like The Daily Caller and The Federalist, which ought to inform their readers about corrupt right-wing elites -- as best I can tell, none of those sites found this story worthy of much coverage, let alone saw it as a hugely damning indictment that everyone on the right ought to know about."

The admission by Marlowe has been largely met with silence among conservative media figures, who nonetheless delight in manufacturing scandals from the slightest errors by mainstream media outlets.

Among the few conservatives to call out Breitbart's editorial dishonesty were Rod Dreher of The American Conservative and David French of The National Review.

"Do you understand this?" wrote Dreher. "Even if they believe that you were sexually assaulted at 14 by an older man, they will continue to destroy your reputation as a way of protecting that older man, because their real mission is to protect Donald Trump — and extremism in the defense of Trump is no vice. Truth, fairness, and ordinary human decency don’t matter. Only winning."

French wrote, "I’m sorry, but this is vile."

"Breitbart facilitated the continued persecution of a credible childhood assault victim for purely political purposes," continued French. "It subordinated fact-finding to its political agenda. It acted not as a journalist enterprise but as a partisan opposition research firm with a quasi-journalistic platform. It exploited the good name of its founder and the trust of its audience to try to drag a probable child abuser across an electoral finish line. It’s clear that Breitbart subscribes to the belief that to make their nationalist omelet they have to break a few abuse-victim eggs."

He concluded, "This is wrong."

"Whether the American right is represented in media by decent people or deplorable hucksters going forward depends in no small part upon who wins the ongoing fight between nihilistic right-wing populists and principled conservatives and libertarians," said Friedersdorf.

There must, he insisted, be "consequences for knowingly pushing misinformation," but, "many conservative news outlets didn’t consider Alex Marlow’s admissions about Breitbart worth covering at all."