News and Commentary

Hayden Disses Breitbart: ‘Illegitimate’ And ‘Kind Of Scary’

   DailyWire.com

In an interview with Business Insider’s Oliver Darcy, Former Central Agency (CIA) Director Michael Hayden described Breitbart as a news media outlet with an illegitimate worldview that operated in a realm of fiction.

“There are some outlets that have incredibly powerful lenses by which they view the facts they collect. I think the Breitbart and the likes are off the chart in terms of shaping data to meet the preconceptions,” said Hayden.

Hayden described Breitbart as animated by an “illegitimate worldview,” engaging in distortion of facts:

“They have a worldview, and they are playing with it. I think it’s an illegitimate worldview, and I think it’s a non-fact-based worldview. It’s a worldview in which preexisting visions seem to be being used to distort the fact pattern that exists.

Presumably invited to do so by Darcy, Hayden described as “very troubling” the premise that President Donald Trump “[seems] to value Breitbart reports over data compiled by intelligence agencies.”

“You have a Breitbart News story essentially launching the Starfleet of the federal government about one of the most horrible political scandals in American history, if true,” said Hayden.

“Breitbart doesn’t do any creative journalism — it just moves the parts around,” said Hayden. He claimed others had told him Breitbart misrepresents information it sources from other news media outlets.

Hayden pushed the left-wing and Democrat narrative of the news media landscape operating in a “postfact world” as a function of the rise of right-wing, conservative, and anti-communist news media outlets.

“It’s kind of scary — a postfact world. How does intelligence survive in a postfact world?” asked Hayden.

Hayden also drew parallels between English-language propaganda outlets operated by the Russian state such as Russia Today (RT) and “conservative American” news media outlets and personalities such as the Drudge Report, Sean Hannity, and Breitbart.

“There are powerful parallels between the Russian narrative and things being said [by conservative American/pro-Trump news media outlets],” said Hayden, alleging the existence of “an amazing consistency” in perspectives across the aforementioned news media outlets.

No such comments were published regarding the broad commonalities between narratives pushed by left-wing and Democrat-aligned news media outlets (i.e. CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post) and English-language propaganda outlets operated by both allied and adversarial governments (i.e. the United Kingdom’s BCC, Canada’s CBC, France’s France24, Russia’s RT and Sputnik, Qatar’s Al-Jazeera, and Iran’s PressTV).

Hayden’s former roles in the federal bureaucracy include Director of the National Security Agency under former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence under former President George W. Bush, and Director of the CIA under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Hayden retired from the US Air Force in 2008 as a four-star general.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

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