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Breitbart Just Tried Smearing Immigrants, Failed, And Became An International Joke

Breitbart Just Tried Smearing Immigrants, Failed, And Became An International Joke

In just his second day back at the helm of Breitbart News, disgraced former White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon back to peddling fake news at full speed.

An article with the headline “Spanish Police Crack Gang Moving Migrants on Jet-Skis” appeared Sunday morning on the Breitbart home page.  The thinly sourced story attempted to connect the terror attack in Barcelona Friday to Muslim immigration into Europe – normal propaganda for the alt-right news service.  The photo selected to accompany the story, however, raised eyebrows immediately.

Photo editors chose an image of what we’re sure they thought were two guys on jet skies that looked like they could be immigrants or gang members.  The problem is that one of them was German international soccer star Lukas Podolski.

Most of Breitbart’s readers think soccer is a leftist plot to kill football and turn Americans into globalist weaklings, and so it’s doubtful any of their regular  followers recognized the World Cup winning star in the photo.  But soccer is world’s most popular sport, and has a massive and growing following here in the States, so it was only a matter of time before someone noticed.

Inevitably the picture was removed – but not before it was shared multiple times across social media. The article still appears on the site, but with a different photo, and with this embarrassing apology:

“A previous version of this story included an image of Lukas Podolski on a jet ski. This image appeared as an illustration of a person on a jet ski. Breitbart London wishes to apologize to Mr. Podolski. There is no evidence Mr. Podolski is either a migrant gang member, nor being human trafficked. We wish Mr. Podolski well in his recently announced international retirement.”

Not exactly the homecoming Stephen Bannon was expecting, now, was it?

Peter Mellado
Peter Mellado is a writer, producer, and a branding and messaging specialist with over 15 years experience. He studied history at San Jose State University, and resides in Los Angeles.

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