Joe.My.God. LGBT News
The Hill reports:
The Daily Caller has fired its opinion editor amid controversy over the site’s publishing of a column by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, the editor-in-chief confirmed to a CNN reporter Saturday.
Geoffrey Ingersoll, the right-leaning news site’s top editor, confirmed Saturday to CNN’s Oliver Darcy that opinion editor Rob Mariani was fired. The confirmation came shortly after Yiannopoulos posted about his column ending on Facebook.
“Sad news: The Daily Caller has caved to pressure and cancelled my weekly column after a day, claiming, falsely, they never planned to run weekly contributions from me,” Yiannopoulos wrote Saturday. “The Daily Caller is also throwing its opinion editor Rob Mariani under the bus: we are told he has just been fired. I’m disappointed, to put it mildly.”
Shortly before the firing, Salon weighed in:
The former Breitbart star has become the latest of several white nationalist writers to be welcomed by the Daily Caller. The site is owned in part by Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson although he has said he is uninvolved in the site’s operations. The primary financial backer of the enterprise is said to be Foster Friess, an investor who has donated to a number of Christian nationalist causes.
Geoffrey Ingersoll, the Caller’s editor-in-chief, told Salon via email that Yiannopoulos is receiving no compensation for his writing. “He has no contract, he has no salary, he’s not being paid,” Ingersoll wrote. Founded in 2010 as a conservative response to the Huffington Post, the Daily Caller’s lower profile than Breitbart News has allowed its turn toward white nationalism to receive less press coverage than Bannon’s infamous attempts to make Breitbart “the platform for the alt-right.”
Last week Breitbart’s primary financial backer Robert Mercer sold his stake in the site to his daughters, announcing the move in a statement that also denounced Milo, who is currently promoting an “It’s OK To Be White” campaign launched last week by far-right extremists at 4chan.