The Daily Beast is the 342nd most trafficked website in the U.S., out of tens of thousands, according to Alexa.com.
Under Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman, The Daily Beast has aggressively joined the anti-Trump “Scoop” wars, sometimes with actual reporting, other times in Gawker-style clickbait, leading Recode to ask last November, Is the Daily Beast the new Gawker?
“I think that we like to embrace the gonzo and that Gawker was an inheritor of that gonzo spirit that didn’t originate with Gawker, but that they carried that mantle for a little while,” Shachtman said. “We really like the gonzo. We really like the weird. We really like the fun and we don’t give that many fucks. We don’t give zero fucks, but we don’t give that many fucks.”
If Gawker-style is The Daily Beast’s goal, they certainly accomplished it with an article about a pastry chef at Mar-a-Lago who posted QAnon theories on her personal social media. QAnon is a crazy conspiracy theory that has made its way around social media.
The pastry chef story started at a newsletter published by someone whose livelihood is monitoring Trump’s Washington, D.C. hotel. Had the story just been in the newsletter, it would not have spread very far. But The Daily Beast author Will Sommer decided to promote it to The Daily Beast’s large platform.
Here’s the original headline:
The original headline didn’t contain the pastry chef’s name, but it was updated to add her name:
The article was promoted by Shachtman and author Will Sommer on Twitter, exposing the pastry chef’s name to people who might not otherwise go to The Daily Beast website.
The story now has been picked up by Rolling Stone and shared by an MSNBC producer with half a million followers.
If the pastry chef were involved in the Trump campaign or other politics, perhaps there would be some news value. But there is nothing in the newsletter or The Daily Beast article that indicates that the pastry chef played such a role. She’s not a political staffer or involved in policy, and there’s nothing in the coverage to indicate she aspires to those goals.
Nothing in the story indicates she used her politics to harass or intimidate co-workers or subordinates. She simply posted her political conspiracy theories on her personal social media accounts, which is a lot less than hundreds of blue-check-mark journalists and anti-Trump nutters do every day on Twitter with their Russia collusion conspiracy theories.
The ONLY reason she has been singled out by The Daily Beast is that she works at a Trump property. That’s it. It’s not about the pastry chef, it’s about media hate of Trump and an eagerness to take down anyone associated, even remotely, with Trump.
Yet that pastry chef’s name, image and work details now are exposed to millions of readers of The Daily Beast for one reason only — she works at a Trump property.
What’s next for The Daily Beast? A deep dive into the personal political views of Mar-a-Lago groundskeepers, bellhops and janitors?
How about we leave low-level employees, who have not joined the political battle, alone?
The reaction to The Daily Beast has been harsh. You could say conservatives “pounced” and seized. Look at the “ratio” and scroll through the tweet replies:
Here are some reactions, including ours:
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