Politico Newsroom In Uproar Over Ben Shapiro’s Guest Playbook Column

Politico faced an internal uproar on Thursday after its decision to let right-wing podcast host Ben Shapiro write a guest column in its widely read Politico Playbook newsletter, with staff asking editors why a pundit with “a long history of bigoted and incendiary commentary” would be given such a massive platform.

Shapiro, who rose to prominence as an editor at far-right media outlet Breitbart before founding right-wing aggregation site The Daily Wire and becoming a YouTube and talk radio personality, routinely courts online outrage through bigoted rhetoric. After supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the country’s democratic elections last week, Shapiro made the false equivalence of comparing the far-right siege to recent anti-racism protests, and blamed President-elect Joe Biden for being “divisive” when Biden mentioned race in his condemnation of the insurrection.

During a 3 p.m. newsroom-wide Zoom meeting, Politico Editor-In-Chief Matt Kaminski defended the decision to publish the column while telling staff that the publication was “above the ideological warfare” and that “a lot of care went into trying to identify potential contributors,” a Politico staffer told HuffPost.