Defense One, a website owned by Atlantic Media, labeled White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as a "white nationalist aide" on Monday but later issued a correction to take back the smear against the former Breitbart executive.
"Trump elevates white nationalist aide over military, intel community chiefs in top national-security leaders group," read the first sentence of the sites daily D Brief newsletter, which is written by site editors Bradley Peniston and Ben Watson.
After the Washington Free Beacon reached out to Defense One regarding the characterization of Bannon in the brief, the site's executive director Kevin Baron issued a correction the piece, substituting the word "controversial" for the phrase "white nationalist."
"I meant to describe Bannon as being commonly associated with the white nationalist movement, not a white nationalist, but missed the mark," Baron wrote in an email. "We have updated today's D Brief and issued a correction."
The brief now also notes that "Bannon was executive chairman of Breitbart, a conservative site popular with white nationalists," a sentence that did not initially appear in the version that called Bannon a white nationalist.
It links to a Washington Post article which claims that Breitbart is a site with "racist, misogynist and Islamophobic perspectives," but does not go as far as calling him a white nationalist.
The labeling of Bannon as a white nationalist in the original version of the D Brief, a screenshot of which can be viewed here, marked a change for Atlantic Media outlets.
The Atlantic, which is also under the Atlantic Media umbrella, has regularly pointed out Bannon's association with Breitbart and its belief that the site promotes white nationalism, but is yet to go as far as calling Bannon a white nationalist.
In reporting the same news of Bannon's role on the NSC, the Atlantic wrote that "Bannon has been among the most controversial of Trump’s advisors, because of his association with the racist and anti-Semitic "Alt-Right."
Baron told the Free Beacon that Atlantic Media does not give guidance or input on any of Defense One's editorial decisions.
Previously only far-left outlets such as Huffington Post, Slate, and Mother Jones have directly labeled Bannon as a white nationalist.
There is no evidence that supports the claim that Bannon is a white nationalist, which is a label that he has also rejected.
The Washington Times declared the media attempt to associate Bannon with white nationalism one of its top ten "fake news" pieces of the year.
"There is absolutely no evidence of this, but the mainstream media loves to splash the idea around—or at least infer that Mr. Bannon, because of his association with alt-right website Breitbart, is a white supremacist, racist, bigoted, xenophobe," wrote the Times.