Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra Steals Big League Scoop Without Credit After Trying to Steal Northam Photo

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Feb 2, 2019

Up next on the list of internet “news” frauds – people with large Twitter followings who aggregate news and “break” stories without crediting the outlets who originally reported the stories – is Ryan Saavedra of Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s multi-million dollar GOP establishment-funded blog.

“Virginia Democrat Governor Ralph Northam refused to shake the hand of his black opponent E.W. Jackson during a 2013 debate for the lieutenant governor’s seat. Jackson tries to shake Northam’s hand and Northam wouldn’t even acknowledge his existence,” Saavedra Tweeted.

We broke that story seven hours before Saavedra Tweeted it without giving us credit. It was linked on DRUDGE. This is a habit of Saavedra’s. Nearly every original story that we write ends up on his Twitter feed, without referring back to Big League Politics. 

This Tweet was only a few hours after Saavedra called Big League Politics demanding that we hand over a non-watermarked image of the Ralph Northam yearbook photo from the story that we also broke. Of course, we refused, knowing that Saavedra would simply steal our scoop. He hung up in a tizzy after vowing to find the photo himself. (Maybe try that before calling us next time, Ry-guy!)

One can only conclude that Saavedra has no real sources of his own. He simply recycles the original work of others onto his Twitter feed, slaps a “BREAKING” tag on the Tweet, and pretends it’s his own. This is not journalism – it is news aggregation. Exclusive stories by Saavedra, despite the millions of dollars behind the outlet he works for, are few and far between. The same goes for the rest of the Daily Wire crew – a bought-and-paid-for mouthpiece for weak establishment “conservatism.”

He is simply another internet huckster, like Mike Cernovich, who we wrote about yesterday.

Self-aggrandizing by aggregating news on Twitter is one thing. Doing the work to cultivate sources and report the news that people like Saavedra aggregate is another. The latter is journalism. The former is not.

Saavedra and others like him can expect their names to show up in our headlines every time we see this type of behavior going forward. Give others credit for their original work, or get called out.

Follow Peter D’Abrosca on Twitter: @pdabrosca

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