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ABSTRACT
Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of roughly 700 articles published on the Breitbart News ‘Cartel Chronicles’ site between 2015 and 2021, this article analyzes the ways conservative citizen journalism projects strategically mobilize key tropes from international human rights to justify calls for militarization on the US/Mexico Border. Specifically, it details how widely accepted human rights frameworks like freedom of the press and protection of the rights of children are used both as evidence of humanitarian breakdown within Mexico and as a condemnation of the Mexican government. I argue that through its selective and motivated employment of human rights, Breitbart is promoting a form of ‘bullshit human rights’, defined as the purposefully misleading mobilization of rights claims deracinated from their context and repurposed without consideration for the truth they hold for the individuals who experience them. The suffering documented by ‘Cartel Chronicles’ serves only as fuel for Breitbart’s larger political project of militarizing the US/Mexico Border without consideration of human costs. Paradoxically, bullshit human rights call for an increase in violence in order to protect against human suffering.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Though not mentioned in any of the press coverage of the project, a closer analysis of materials published and interviews with founders of Cartel Chronicles indicates that a sizable portion of the unnamed ‘citizen journalists’ who contribute to its site are in fact law enforcement officers including those with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), employees of private security firms like Omni, and the Mexican military.
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Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York, Baruch College. He is co-editor of Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-economic Strategy“ (Brill/Haymarket, 2022). He also has published roughly 30 journal articles or book chapters in venues including Communication Theory; Communication Monographs; Information, Communication, & Society; International Journal of Communication; International Communication Gazette; Digital Journalism; Journalism Practice; Development in Practice; and South Atlantic Quarterly.