The Daily Caller clarified its relationship with right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos on Saturday a day after publishing his first opinion column for the conservative news site.
Mr. Yiannopoulos made his Daily Caller debut with an opinion piece published Friday containing an editor’s note stating: “This is the first installment in his new weekly column for the Daily Caller.”
The language labeling Mr. Yiannopoulos as a weekly columnist disappeared by Saturday, and the Daily Caller has since pushed back against news reports involving its newest writer.
“Contrary to some recent news reports The Daily Caller did not hire Milo Yiannopoulos,” Neil Patel, the website’s co-founder and publisher, said in a statement to The Washington Times. “He is not working for us. He has never worked for us. Yiannopoulos published a single op-ed on The Daily Caller.”
“News outlets trying to play our publication of an op-ed as some sort of Daily Caller endorsement of Yionnopoulos are just trying to score cheap political points,” Mr. Patel added.
Mr. Yiannopoulos, on his part, blasted The Daily Caller on Saturday for allegedly changing course.
“The Daily Caller has caved to pressure and cancelled my weekly column after a day, claiming, falsely, that I was never signed up for weekly contributions. The DC is also throwing its opinion editor Rob Mariani under the bus: we are told he has just been fired,” he said in a statement to The Washington Times.
“I’m disappointed, to put it mildly. Never mind book publishers — even right-wing media these days are spineless in the face of outrage mobs, Twitter protests and frothing establishment Republicans. Where will it end? So: no new MILO column for now. This sort of cowardice is why the Right loses and will keep losing.”
“They were perfectly happy having my name and face on their site when we were paying for ads for my New York Times bestselling book,” he added.
Mr. Yiannopoulos’ Daily Caller debut came a day after billionaire hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer publicly announced he was withdrawing support for the conservative fire-brand on account of allegedly causing “pain and divisiveness undermining the open and productive discourse that I had hoped to facilitate.”
“I was mistaken to have supported him, and for several weeks have been in the process of severing all ties with him,” Mr. Mercer wrote.
Mr. Yiannopoulos, 33, first made waves for his controversial articles published by Breitbart, another beneficiary of Mr. Mercer’s bankrolling, but resigned from his role with the website in February 2017 after a controversy erupted over his previous comments concerning pedophilia.
Publishing house Simon & Schuster subsequently canceled plans to release Mr. Yiannopoulos’ latest book, “Dangerous,” and he was disinvited from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) a as a consequence of his comments.
Breitbart chairman Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, previously encouraged Mr. Yiannopoulos to use his persona and social media following to “help save western civilization,” according to leaked emails published by BuzzFeed News last month.
Mr. Patel, a former advisor to former Vice President Dick Cheney, founded The Daily Caller in 2010 with Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The site averages 50 million page views each month, including 7,000 unique views from visitors on Capitol Hill, according to its own statistics.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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