Times Attacks ‘Offensive’ Breitbart London One Day After Claiming Not to Read It

Liam Deacon

The Times Red Box has written an entire article alleging that someone from the Britain Stronger In campaign found a video made by Breitbart London Editor in Chief Raheem Kassam “offensive” and “insensitive”.

Only the day before the article appeared, however, Red Box editor Matt Chorley had attacked the video’s creator, Breitbart London Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam, on Twitter, insisting he didn’t “follow your work” and “output”.

https://twitter.com/RaheemKassam/status/736213362615287809

Mr. Chorley had initially entered into a discussion about a Times story “outing” Daniel Hannan, Douglas Carswell, and Boris Johnson as historical supporters of Turkey’s membership of the European Union (EU).

The story, however, had been covered by Breitbart London months previously. Mr. Chorley initially blamed the slip on the fact that he did not read Breitbart London. He then backtracked, insisting that it was “more timely to write about it during the real campaign when Turkey was on the agenda”.

Confused, one user asked if he had been ignorant of the story as he first said, or had sat on it, waiting for a “politically convenient” time to publish, as he later implied.

“Dude that’s not reporting, that’s activism,” the user pointed out.

“For the thousandth time I didn’t sit on anything because I didn’t have the information because I don’t follow Raheem’s output,” he replied. The next day his site was reporting on Mr. Kassam’s output.

The story was based on an anonymous, partisan quote claiming to be “offended” by a video made by the Breitbart London Editor-in-Chief, which had been shared on Facebook by the pro-Brexit Leave.EU campaign group.

The video, of course, was a spoof of a widely mocked video from the Stronger In campaign, aimed at the “youth vote”.

Others, meanwhile, were amused. As the Red Box also reported: “One follower wrote: ‘Raheem Kassam is such a legend!’ while another said ‘haha this is funny.’”

The article claimed the joke video was somehow “accusing the EU of ‘rape’”.

In reality, it featured an image of a controversial, and widely reported, Polish magazine cover referring to the New Year’s Eve migrant sex attacks across Europe – which were widely associated with EU immigration policy.

The article was written by Hannah McGrath, a journalist at the Times who subsequently attempted to prompt the ire of hard line feminists by tweeting the link at them.

At the time of publication, neither Chorley nor McGrath responded to requests for comment from Mr Kassam about whether or not they think Europe’s migrant rape crisis should be reported on, or commented upon, or not.

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