Mitchell Sunderland has been fired from Vice

Apparently Mitchell Sunderland was feeding stories to far-right white supremacist sites such as Brietbart. Yet Sunderland was working at a progressive site. The revelation brought up the question of whether he was being honest in his main work. He does not seem to me very well suited to his main job at Vice.

Vice has cut ties with a senior writer from its feminist vertical Broadly after a BuzzFeed report revealed that the writer pitched story ideas to then-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, and once requested that Yiannopoulos mock a “fat feminist” writer.

Mitchell Sunderland, who at the time he sent emails to Yiannopoulos was managing editor of Broadly, was spotted departing Vice’s offices with a box of his belongings. (Mic saw a photo of Sunderland departing.)

A Vice spokesperson confirmed to Mic that Sunderland was let go Friday, and that Vice is continuing to look into the matter.

On Thursday, BuzzFeed published a massive report about Breitbart and its relationship to white nationalists and the alt-right. In the piece, BuzzFeed reporter Joe Bernstein identified several members of mainstream and left-leaning media outlets who were part of an email chain in which members mocked stories about social justice and liberal causes, pitched ideas to and “tipped” Yiannopoulos story ideas.

I agree with Laura Wagner’s take:

Is there a word for when you feel embarrassed about your naïveté? Because I feel dumb as hell. I assumed that when Nuzzi and her down-the-middle cohorts wrote things like this glowing profile of Mike Cernovich in New York magazine, they went home and immediately took a hot shower to wash off the stink. I didn’t realize they were just writing about their friends.

Maybe these reporters think associating with Pepes makes them look like they know something everyone else doesn’t? That they’re cool enough to get into the club? That this is all just a no-stakes game that ends with a few more Twitter followers? Maybe they feel subversive? Maybe they’re just so caught up in a big media circle jerk that their brains have been jostled out of their ears and they don’t realize or care they’re enabling the work of literal white supremacists? I’m not sure why anyone would want to be best friends with Ann Coulter.

Except, I would say, having grown up in a political family, where we were constantly shocked about how my parent’s friends were drifting to the right (during the 1970s and 1980s) I am partly immune to this kind of shock. Nowadays I assume all white-people are far-right until I have reason to believe otherwise. I mean, we just had the most openly misogynist Presidential candidate in history, and 53% of all white women voted for him.