later, a look at senate initial findings on russian interference in the 2016 u.s. elections. ♪ q&a,ncer: this week on will hilton. about his featured story about breitbart news and the journalists of who worked there. his featured story is down the breitbart hole. i saw a piece in 2015 that said that idea of skipping college might seem outlandish to some, but not to you. what is that about?

business 26nto this years ago. it was a quite young introduction to the field. my interest began young. it -- ihat i wanted knew i wanted to do this for a living by the age of 12. was 16 and in the public high school system in baltimore, there was an internship program, a work-study program. i do not know who supported my name for it, i did not apply. i was the editor of the high school newspaper, and i did not think you could do both. but someone applied for me. thereee months of getting , the job was to basically fetch copy -- coffee, that half the

staff left. suddenly, there is a situation, where is the intern? can he write? so i was publishing stories as a 16-year-old. a sick portfolio of feature articles. i had been on the front page of the features section. sufficient to go to other newspapers across the country and get internships or paying jobs. during the same time, i leveraged the baltimore sun writing to obtain a page in a weekly paper of the baltimore times. i wrote an opinion column the same year, 16 or 17 years old, and edited other news related to youth events in baltimore.

it clicked in the way i hopes it would when i was even younger. of colleges here workinge, always was for the local paper wherever i was taking classes. , workingk in baltimore at baltimore magazine, contributing articles. job, and it-time seems like, i have the job i want, i am not going to continue with this halfhearted attempt of university. i am not sure i would recommend the same approach to my kids.

peopleound telling other what to do for their masters theses when i don't even have an undergraduate degree. i think the best thing to do is to learn this trade from people who have done it before and made mistakes. but i learned it by making all the mistakes myself. we have a cover story in the new york times magazine back in august that we ask you to talk about. it came out at an interesting time. it is called breitbart goes to the white house. if my numbers are right, it came out two days after steve bannon resign from the white house. was a few days before him, and a couple days after charlottesville. host: what was your assignment on writing this piece? wil: it is a complicated

over the lastuse six years at the new york times magazine, where i am a contributor, i have a long-term relationship with them, i will write may be cover stories per year. these articles take months to put together. and boundaries are vague and loose. often, when i am beginning a story, i do not even know what the story is about. was i began this story, i interested in the way the media was behaving in the trump presidency. this was after the inauguration.

i was bewildered by what i found in the white house briefing room. marvelous.self is i am sure you have spent time there. not at all the environment one imagines from watching the briefing on television. fought -- the fox anchor, chris wallace, said, man this place stinks. it stinks in its own way, but it malodorouslly has a quality. i was interested in how many people had started to come to this awful place. since the trump, the number of

reporters attending the briefings at least doubled. froman observe this looking at photos taken from the podium. during the obama years, you saw plenty of room. even room for reporters to sit down. briefings, sean spicer was giving them when i was there, the room was so crowded that it is a good thing it is on federal property, because i do not think the d.c. fire code would have permitted it. was wall-to-wall people. i was fascinated by who those people work. -- first going around -- informallyrly interviewing cameramen. there 30them had been

years, they had seen everything. they were able to comment on the new tenor of the environment. they could also point out specific people. for example, there was a very serious young guy who was there who runs his own small website. he is able to get into the white house briefings. from what i could tell, he has never published anything that you would consider a professional publication. yet he managed to get in there. another guy who was sputnik. net -- it is a russian propaganda machine. he was there working for the russian government to report back what was going on in the white house. it was a remarkable environment.

main white house correspondent for breitbart news is in his early 30's. that who is on the cover. photograph taken -- did he pose for that? wil: i believe he did. scenarioto drum up a where we could get a picture of him in front of the white house without getting -- without going through a whole lot of hoops. a photographer went in with a white house press pass, and charlie went in with -- with his, and on the way in they posed. protocol to stage a photo shoot in front of the white house. it is much easier for someone with a camera to just take a

picture of someone with a press pass. i don't know if he was actually taking a call. charlie is an interesting guy. he has been a white house correspondent for breitbart since before the presidency. but under this administration, breitbart is stepping up. with the whitele house correspondents association about whether they qualify and should be able to have passes. in the meantime, what they have been doing is getting temporary credentials for for reporters to go in. breitbart trained people on how to navigate the internal politics of the white house briefing room. and i thought, maybe this story

andbout the briefing room correspondents association, but through the lens of this man who has an arm is power. at that time, i thought of breitbart as having this quality of being on both sides of the white house podium. steve bannon, other breitbart intor staffers, had moved the west wing employees. now there were going to be reporters -- some videont to show that started it. >> i have a website, breitbart.com which is a news aggregation source. myself,t want to branch

i was father-in-law said crazy not to do it in my name. i do not regret it. but what i wanted to do was create a news organization from the bottom up. host: when did he die, and why did he start the publication? wil: he had started a series of discrete websites. sites thatndividual linked to each other's stories but not under one umbrella. they were big hollywood, government, media. merge thatin 2012 to all into breitbart.com center help. all the news would then become vertical rather than standalone sites. then he died, right before he

came to pass. in his early 40's. just dropped dead. thinkracy see theorists -- conspiracy theorists think it -- he left a great merger into a single white house that -- website that had already gained traction. i can remember back in 2005 going on the drudge report and seeing half of the headlines considered to be the closest to the world view that he wanted to represent. you mentioned that the

original financial man behind this would not talk to you. talk to anyone. i would be happy to talk to larry if he ever feels like it. there have been no formal interviews. he was andrew's best friend growing up. went andrew graduated from tulane university, not only larry but larry's parents came to the graduation ceremony. from anything i have gathered -- a particularly ideological figure. one of the interesting things about andrew breitbart is he did not necessarily surround himself with acolytes. he had a broad ranging personality. he was sharpening himself against the whetstone of others. he was very good friends with

gary on a huffington for some time. -- he was very good friends with arianna huffington for some time. host: let me show you some video the editor ine, chief of the breitbart site. >> people in american life right now are having huge distain for washington. this is a liberal and conservative thing. --ple do not like the breitbart does not identify with a party. we hold republicans just as accountable as democrats. in 2016.t was how much time did you spend around alex? wil: tons of time.

he is fascinating. he is very young. he was brought into the world of a -- rightolitics as out of college. he and andrew breitbart met. breitbart put him to work doing things like monitoring comments on various websites. breitbart died and websites were merging, and this new title had to be staffed. alex became the defect oh editor in chief. alex was doing more of the organizational work. the following year, it was made official. in 2013. says, i don'tne care about breitbart, i have the new york times. why should people care?

as you are going along, when did you start to say, this is not the story i expected? wil: one thing that happened early on as i became aware of a scholar at harvard who has been doing work study breitbart's influence. i looked at his work and went to cambridge to meet with him. it became clear that my asression of breitbart having an outside influence on the 2016 election was an extreme understatement. in fact, breitbart was the driving force on the right side of the political spectrum. computer software called media cloud in collaboration with people in m.i.t.. when harvard and m.i.t. agree

there is a conclusion to be drawn from their data. article about the election, they pulled in literally millions of articles from the web over the full cycle of the election season. storiesluated which were being linked and discussed the most. created an elaborate matrix analysis. ofyou look at the left side the graph, you see predictable major media. c-span, cnn, they are times. they are given a center left alignment. not to say the news

organizations consider themselves centerleft, but who reads them. iselle full -- people self describe as centerleft. on the right, you see representatives fox news, radio programs like rush limbaugh, people associated with the right. all tiny.re 2016, election season for the one that is represented as the biggest driver of the political conversation is breitbart. not by a small margin. here is what it looks like. what does the red bean -- what does the red mean? the size of each of the

bubbles represents the influence it has on the conversation. how much it is is being talked about, and by whom. video.et me show some you said there were 10 professors at harvard involved in the research? wil: yes, 10 or 12 were involved. host: levy show you. -- let me show you. this will then be linked to a website, it will be amped up on conspiracy sites, it will be generated on tv and fox news. all of these network of propaganda sites are directly tied to someone sitting in the white house. people can go online and

20,the articles from august 2017 new york times magazine. get to him and till the last part of your article. what was your decision on telling the story about breitbart and then leading to the conclusion you found, instead of starting with him first? wil: it's a question that gets to the problem of craft. what you hear so often from journalists and followers of journalism are truisms like do not bury the lead. formed narrative nonfiction, you do want to kind of bury the lead. you want to give the reader a path to information. you want to give them but youion all along, want to allow stories to unfold.

if i came right out at the beginning of the story with a heavy data driven analysis of breitbart's influence, i think you would lose a lot of the question that is most about what is me, this influential organization? what do they want? what is their strategy going forward? i wanted the questions to hover in the air. it is the responsibility of nonfiction books or long magazine articles, the responsibility is to maintain a certain openness. it should not feel didactic. to --s will not stick stick with you if you are hammering them with data. two all of a sudden, cross

that -- affect, i had never heard of that. wil: i have a fixation on recursive imagery. tail,ake eating its own or a photograph of someone looking at a book, and in the and there is a photograph, in the photographs there is a man reading a book. it goes on infinitely. are strangelyon life.nt in every day i do make an effort to identify them where i see them. host: how many words were you asked to write? wil: 7500. the way it works with the times magazine is they commission something for the centerpiece feature. you never want to promise the subject that they will be on the

cover. bethey tend for the story to of this long, exploratory quality. but it may or may not be the actual cover image. a shorter piece might be on the cover that is closer to the news cycle. process after the assignment. periodr the assignment where you ask, will this make the cover? piece on i think wednesday, august 17th. i finished it late at night the friday before that. my math skills are bad.

talking about this piece and how you do your work. but here is another person i want you to explain. a guy named milo. tell us how he fits into all of this. >> conservatives have accomplished nothing to win in the last 13 years. they have managed to scramble into office, but once there, they do nothing with it. most notoriouse writer who has ever worked for breitbart. because the kind of work i do does not fit neatly into the , i feelcategories comfortable saying he is a somewhat odious figure.

his stock in trade is trying to offend others. he is quite successful at it. one of the things that happened in breitbart was as milo became stereotypes, using misogynistic, homophobic, he himself is gay but that did not stop him, xenophobia although he is from england, that did not stop him from being xenophobia , it got to ac point where breitbart could not stomach it anymore. is thing about breitbart breitbart is by no means on the progressive end of the spectrum. tolerance is not their calling card. so you have to get pretty far of there in an overt form

bigotry to alienate breitbart. they cut ties with milo. moderate impulse at breitbart. in august of last year, trump made steve bannon his executive chairman of the campaign and invited him to the white house in january. that meant breitbart was no asserting authority over alex at breitbart news. host: who was in charge then? wil: alex was the editor in but he reallyhen, got the power to act more fully once bannon was gone. steve's departure allowed alex to say, i want breitbart to be

what it was. not as provocative. much closer to a real news organization. that is why when i was at the white house briefing room, i saw them training reporters to be at the daily press briefings. host: how many days did you go to the press room? wil: maybe half a dozen. a white house correspondent. how old is he? wil: 34. he is still there reporting. he is at a roundtable discussion about journalism. ofthe president made a lot promises to our readers. feel is we at breitbart important to hold him accountable. he talked about immigration, building a wall, helping our vets, he made a long list of

promises. we are one of the conservative outlets that took him at his word. host: where is he from? wil: wyoming. this is a great american story. he discovered he was interested in politics well driving a tractor. he was driving the tractor on the family farm at after a while he got a walkman and started listening to the radio. he was into npr and rush limbaugh. he brian: is this a picture of them? wil: that is alex. brian: what did they do when this came out? i don't know if i can take blame or credit, but since the story came out and tried to figure out who they really are and what they're really doing,

they have spent a lot more time in mainstream media. guy who is the breitbart london editor suddenly finds himself and find it on cnn to give interviews. the editor in chief of the site after andrew breitbart's death, is on nbc all the time. for better or worse, i would certainly expect a fair amount of criticism for normalizing by bark -- breitbart, which is done some very essence of things and helped elect a president half the country is very upset about. not everybody would consider this a good thing, but i think it is true that putting breitbart in the magazine and looking at closely seriously has changed a little bit of the place occupies an ecosystem. brian: you went to london. wil: i did. brian: this is the gentleman you

went to see. they have eight people in their london bureau? wil: it is nine now. i just tired someone else good brian: let's see what he is about. londons born in west into a muslim family. i am proud to say i am a conservative good -- conservative. [applause] englishman and a robust americaphile. brian: what did you find when you met him? wil: first, he is not getting about being an americaphile. the data jumps out most clearly was election day. they had their special election, basically a referendum on brexit. on that day, he was wearing a liningazer with an inner

of the american flag. were the his socks stars and stripes or the union jack, i cannot remember. he often wears an american flag lapel then an absolutely adores this country. he was raised by immigrants in the u.k. who were and remain practicing muslims. mosque for atended brief peering of time. -- brief period of time. some of that was social, just going because his friends were there good -- there. then he went to the university of westminster where he became in some of the muslim student organizations. things happened that turned him off. he lost faith, lost confidence in the religion, and over time has become an incredibly

vociferous critic of i would say islam itself. not just islamic extremism. i think he is become someone who -- he also decries the other religions, so it is not just islam. he is a vocal atheist. i would put him in the camp of he thinks religion is abysmal. he thinks that islam is especially troubles right now -- especially troubled right now. it is an amazing thing to hear from someone like this, who has come so far to get to that conclusion. you tolike it forces listen, forces me to listen and not be dismissive, this is islamophobia or failed bigotry. -- veiled bigotry. brian: what about the charge

that breitbart is anti-semitic? theyof all the bigotries flirt with, and they are numerous, that is the one that is flatly false. it would make a great case did is they chosedy to investigate how it became the case that, for example, when there was all this vandalism, people made a link to breitbart. was, of the conversation this is not only connected to the front presidency and the presence of anti-cements -- anti-semites in his coalition, breitbartension influence. it is simply not the case. , thereread the website

is not anti-semitic bias. andrew breitbart was jewish. jewishmarlowe is of percent. he is now a practicing catholic but i don't think there is an anti-semite bone in his body. brian: are there any black reporters? wil: there are a couple of black reporters at my bar, there are some latino reporters. one of the things that was be will to bring -- he will drink to me about breitbart. you have these people running around saying reprehensible things come and then you also this otherrently, thing that looks like a conservative website. guilty of the things that is been accused of, has a

worldview that is more interesting at a minimum. how may people did you ask, say around the new york times or anybody in the media world, if they had ever really read breitbart? wil: i started asking everybody. basically no one ever read it. brian: you're talking about the establishment. wil: i'm talking about everybody i know. the people i work with at the times. people i have a beer with. i live in baltimore, in a myghborhood where many of neighbors are in the construction trade. we will have bonfires and sit in the backyard and talk about putting on roofs or whatever. baltimore is a pretty liberal city. everybody was an obama fan. most of those folks strongly opposed president trump and they all blame breitbart in large election --trumps

for the trump election. they see breitbart as a key factor in his election. opinions, whether we are talking about well-informed journalists or average folks having a beer, to a person, i found they could not tell me one story breitbart had published in the last three months, did not know the name of any breitbart writers except for milo yunnan bliss. they were placing this on a story that had emerged of what breitbart is that is not always in evidence a lot of the time on the website. brian: why did they let you hang around? wil: i don't know. brian: who did you call first? wil: charlie spearing at the white house. i started talking to him regulate. know,e point he said, you i don't think alex is going to talk to you. why don't you send him and

email? there were things i was asking charlie that he did not know about. management decisions and things like that. i had this long, maybe three week long email exchange with alex before he agreed to meet me. we met off the record at first and had a very long dinner. enough, alex is studious that he had read all of my stuff. he told me that he came to the anclusion that i had sort of -- he did not see me as being politically predictable. i had written things that were endorsements of nuclear power, i had written that paul wolfowitz was misunderstood. including a lot of things that fell on the left side of the spectrum. i think he felt that if we are ever going to try to explain ourselves publicly, this is the chance to do it.

but he never really quite articulated to me why he was going along with it. in that also record dinner, i suggested we do the same thing on the record and he agreed. we continued to have all of these meetings, almost always in informal settings baird we would go out and walk his dogs, take them to a dog park. casual environment. i would have tape recorders running. brian: this is alex marlowe. where is he from originally? wil: california. brian: what is a story about him working for a conservative like talkshow house -- talkshow host? wil: he worked for him right after stephen miller, who is in the white house now. we saw him in july tangling with jim acosta over the statue of liberty and if the text on the statue of liberty should be

considered part of the statue of liberty and silly things like that. stephen miller had been on larry elder's program expanding on his objection to immigration in california at high school student couple of years ahead of alex. alex, living in los angeles, was listening to this radio program and thinking this kid is on fire, he is hyped up about these things. think,as part of alex, i in a way was just a rebellious kid. he went to a fancy prep school. i think he has a sense that everybody agreed about everything, everybody was left of center, everybody wanted to recycle within an inch of their lives. think,s a lot of this, i among young conservatives. they start out kind of rebelling against the general leftward thrust of use and positioning

themselves to the right as a way of kind of thumbing their nose at their peers. brian: what was the reaction of your editor at the times magazine when he saw your finished piece? and how many words was it? wil: about nine. brian: what was the reaction of journalists you know? wil: i got a very mixed reaction. i think a lot of people found it to open the conversation in a way it had not been before. it is not a trope, it is not a myth on the right when they say the mainstream media leans left. it is true. at least in my experience, everywhere i have worked. i could get in trouble for saying that, but that is the story. brian: why would you get in trouble? wil: i think at times they

prefer to not see themselves that way. i can't imagine how they could convince themselves otherwise, but it seems like when you say things like this paper is to the left, or left of center, the editors will say, show me proof. or why do you say that? brian: why are they so afraid of that? wil: i don't know. i think that is one of the key things we have to confront, way outside of the breitbart piece or how it was deceived internally, into this much longer arc of journalistic history which i spent a lot of time thinking about. the construct of caused ory has really journalistsforced to accept a certain lie about the craft. and it is not constructive. you can find examples in history

where it has been destructive, the best examples probably from 1890's when you had the new york times covering lynchings, and they would create a false equivalency between the horrific atrocity of someone being hung by a vigilante mob, and they would try to offset that by explaining what the person was accused of having done. paritynd of outrageous on the page has been documented thoroughly by journalistic historians should -- historians. at the time, the times was attacking people like ida b wells, who was out reporting on lynchings in a more clearheaded vigilante, this is nihilistic a severed to, just murdering black people for the accusation of crimes they might not have committed. even if they had been committed, the vigilante justice was

outrageous. and the times attacked her ruthlessly. i think you can trace some of these impulses back to that time period, the times was positioning itself against pulitzer and hearst and the yellow press and trying to create a sense that we call balls and strikes. if a bunch of people murder a guy and hang him from a tray, we are going to explain their theons in addition to crimes they committed. from: here is some video 2013. steve bannon is the person we will look at for 20 seconds, in case someone does not know who he is. that i want to ask you how he fits into all of this and what difference it makes now for alex marlowe now that he is back at breitbart. >> go to our site every day, we will have your back in this long fight. people have said today, you own

these buildings, you may own them, but they are occupied i a permanent political class out for your destruction. we will be there every step of the way because of these people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. brian: the men worked for goldman sachs, worth millions of dollars, he was in the white house about eight months. what is his connection, and how important is he to the breitbart site? that was back in 2013. wil: his connection is huge. immediately after breitbart's , larry was not going to be giving speeches at tea party rallies, he decided to approach his friend steve ballin -- steve bannon and basically asked him face --e topic

public face of breitbart. he and andrew breitbart had bonded on that basis, he had given andrew breitbart office space early in the site's career. the website emerged and relaunched in 2012, steve bannon was perched atop the empire next to larry sotloff as the executive chairman of breitbart. brian: does larry still control the finances of breitbart, and how did he make his money? wil: larry's personal finances are a mystery to me. he gets his money for the site from the mercer family. the mercer family, robert and rebecca mercer, have put $10 million into breitbart. brian: father and dollar -- and got her. wil: exactly.

they are the koch brothers of the even further right. brian: where did their money came from -- come from? wil: i don't really know. they have tentacles and everything. peanutstually kind of what they put into right-wing media. they were also finding -- funding milo's new endeavor, it is going to be a website. they backed his book tour. two us it may seem like a lot of money, but to them it is a small part of the portfolio. brian: how many people work at breitbart? wil: 40 or 50 people. brian: how much does it cost them to operate? wil: they will never tell anyone. brian: does it make money? wil: they say it does. i don't know that i believe that. when they will not show you the

books, you have to wonder. you have to wonder what is in the books. they say they make money, they say they do not dip into the $10 million trust fund by much but it gives them the freedom to operate a little bit closer to the margins. brian: did you try to talk to the mercer's? -- mercers? wil: no. brian: did you try to talk to larry -- wil: all the time. indirectess through channels, but he does not want to speak to anyone. he says he has a financial stake. -- steve bannon says he has a financial stake. he said that when he went into the white house. brian: let me ask you about another get you found in andrew breitbart's memoir about the 1930's german philosophers that came to the united states. why did that intrigue you and

what does that mean, do you think? wil: it is this preposterous theory that andrew breitbart, it reads like a delusional manifesto, this part of his book. legendaryter six, the chapter six of his book. he lays out his about where america went wrong. in reading chapter six, and i encourage every viewer to go read it for the amusement, it is the most preposterous theory about how a handful of philosophers from the frankfurt school migrated to sunny andfornia in the 1930's were temperamentally ill-suited to the joys of california. and so having despite escaped naziscendant not seize --

and being surrounded by sun and surf, they were grouchy and started complaining. of abecame the creators sort of philosophical framework that has now taken over academia in which all intellectual credibility goes to the person with the most critical attitude toward american life, culture and history. brian: these names, i wrote them down. horkheimer was one. wil: i am not a great student of the frankfurt school or anything. but i knew one of them because i was interested in art. gets him allt wrong. apart from the laughable quality of blaming what he perceived as america's demise on six jewish german philosophers in the

1930's, he does not seem to have read those people very much himself. brian: at the end of the article, you started some intellectual discussion about others, meaning one of the fellows and want to show you, mead, he hadll a book called "special providence." here he is talking about some of the conclusions. >> the jacksonian idea is you cannot trust other countries, you certainly cannot trust international institutions. big comfort -- big corporations maybe r.o.k. but they can be greedy and self-centered. the government's job is to make the people rich, things like social security, giving away western land in the 19th century. and in foreign policy, you don't trust other countries. you don't start fights, but when somebody attacks you, you attack with everything you have got. you don't fight a limited war,

you fight with everything you have got, to win. brian: that was 16 years ago. he is now associated with the hudson institute and i believe the professor. why did that intrigue you? where did you get that tip? politicall of the philosophy that steve bannon seems to have drawn his thinking from, i think that book may be the most significant. "special providence." if you want to understand how steve bannon explains his political views, maybe slightly different from how he actually forms them. ,ome of this might be a veneer that he enjoys the credibility bestowed by this book, but he certainly knows it backward and forward. it is an interesting book. it defines a sort of four

general threads of thought woven through american history about america's relationship to the world, how americans perceive the relationship to the world. me,of those it seemed to and mead's real purpose was what he was just speaking about, the jacksonian point of view. certainly steve bannon identifies himself as part of that world view. verbatim thatou his jacksonian ideals are in sync with walter russell mead. brian: is that how the portrait of jackson got on the wall in the oval office? wil: i believe so, yes. lengthen to a lengthy and perhaps dull exposition about all of that, because i think they misunderstand jackson. brian: one last clip. this is an interview from 1998,

almost 20 years ago. , bill the gentlemen strauss, is no longer alive, but the other fellow is to with us. here is the fourth turning. turning, when we look at the cycle and rhythm of american history, we see an interesting pattern. the country as a society seems to encounter crises about every 80 or 90 years. this is a cycle of american history. mostly 1850's a and the 1760's, which means you better repair your roof because it will be an interesting time at the next 25 years. get that -- did you wil: it is interesting that in that interview he talks about the cycles of american history, because in the book it is not about american history.

it is about society. they actually break it into four components. takes 20he components some odd years to complete. what they posit in the book is thisamerica is entering , one of the four components of the cycle, in which civil order and society's disposition is being rebuilt after a collapse. the 2008ramework, financial disaster is the crash, and since then we are rebuilding american politics. brian: quick questions. what happened to the breitbart website when steve bannon left the white house and went back? wil: i think this is really what gets to the disparity between

how i always heard and continue to hear people talk about breitbart as this hysterical, shouting machine for creating offense, and a much more anodyne, quotidian organization as it functions on a day-to-day basis. twoink the reason those understandings of breitbart can exist, one in the public mind and one in observable reality, is because breitbart actually did change. metamorphosisd to in the wake of trump's election. when steve bannon left just over a year ago, it liberated alex marlowe to run the site as he saw fit without the political impulses of steve bannon sort of a guiding and point him in different directions, very overt, procomp -- pro trump directions. at the end of august last year,

you started to see alex running stories that were much more skeptical of political figures that steve bannon had been allied with. you saw he perched the staff, the most polarizing people, that includes milo. he fired an editor may be three or four months ago finally after a series of really offensive tweets. she had toned down her writing. she was not publishing things that were obnoxious, but she was known to be on twitter picking fights and being offensive to people, and he let her go. brian: we are out of time, but what happened to the numbers? wil: according to breitbart, and this is a private company so they do not have to release this publicly, what they said to me record, isexa can that the number of readers has stated fairly constant. however, the number of advertisers has plummeted.

brian: this is what has started this discussion, this magazine cover on the new york times magazine, august 20. wil hylton lives in baltimore and has two kids. he does not have a college degree, as we talked about, but rights for cover torn -- four cover stories for the new york times magazine each year. is there a place they can find you? wil: if you search my name, you will find my website. brian: fix for being here. wil: thank you for having me. ♪ >> for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this at q&a.org.it us

q&a programs are also available as c-span podcasts. ♪ >> if you enjoyed this week's q&a interview with wil hylton, here are some other programs you might like. roger ailes of fox news talking about the state of journalism. brooke gladstone, managing media of wnyc's on the discussing her book, the trouble with reality. and, lynn university professor mark cheetham talking about his book, andrew jackson, southerner. you can watch these anytime or search our entire video library at c-span.org. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> on the next "washington journal," jeff mason looks at the week ahead in washington.

host larrydio o'connor discusses the conservative agenda and president trump. and syndicated talkshow host bill press looks of the progressive agenda and the trump presidency. as always, we will take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. "washington journal," lives at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. american history tv on c-span3 is in prime time this week starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern. and a night, from the national constitution center in philadelphia, discussions on landmark supreme court cases including korematsu versus united states and brown versus board of education. tuesday night, the life and influence of william buffalo bill cody on the 100th anniversary of his death. wednesday night, the 60th anniversary of little rock central high school's

integration with former president bill clinton. thursday night, a discussion on the lead up in response of the 1957 forced desegregation of little rock central high school. in friday, from american history tv's oral history series, interviews from prominent photojournalists who documented major events throughout american history. watch american history tv this week in primetime on c-span3. >> next, british prime minister theresa may speaks at her conservative party conference. then, initial senate findings on russian interference in the toy 16 u.s. elections. after that, vice president mike pence speaks at the las vegas memorial for victims of the mass shooting. at 11:00 p.m., another chance to see q&a with wil hylton talking about the influence of breitbart news. the british parliament is in

recess. prime minister's questions will not be seen tonight. wednesday, prime mister theresa may gave the closing speech at her conservative party's annual conference in manchester. halfway through her remarks, a british comedian known for franking powerful people walked up to the front of the room and handed her a form, the uk's version of a pink slip. this is just over an hour. ♪