The difference between reporting objectively and creating a hit piece is a line many writers have been aggressively grinding down since the dawn of the United States. Although we can laugh at the outrageous back-and-forth scuttles between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson now, this pattern of deception has developed progressively worse as information has become more freely available.

Whether it’s for ad dollars or to propel themselves into the spotlight, modern writers create divisions in our society’s perception of what being a journalist means versus the definition of being a celebrity or political pundit.

Bomb shelters of ideologies have been built like the imaginary border wall in Donald Trump’s mind with the advent of the internet. Websites like Breitbart on the right and the Huffington Post on the left force people to stew in the good, the bad and their respectively skewed interpretation of life to brainwash masses and solidify their beliefs.

Milo Yiannopoulos, a professional provocateur and former editor at Breitbart, is an exemplary figure to explain the difference between journalist and celebrity writer, not only because of his own work but as well the reasons why he has been recently under fire by mainstream media.

As he progressed from a technology writer to a conservative Jewish catholic gay figure in the political media atmosphere, his writing has become more sensational. He has evolved into a sort of comedic political pundit with the amount of provocation he has blazed across America, from his click-baiting articles to his “Dangerous Faggot” college tour he conducted throughout 2016.

As the saying goes, you either love him or you hate him. With his college tour, he has polarized people across the political spectrum through illustrating the need for free speech. He has made comments about everything, from using a car battery to electroshock the gay out of people to pointing out professors who force their opinions down the throats of students with the threat of failing their class.

This past week, Yiannopoulos has been under fire by an entire spectrum of media for comments he made on a podcast that he was a guest on over a year ago, pertaining to his own sexual past. When he was a 13, he was sexually involved with a man who was well over 18. This experience has led him to the opinion that young teenagers under the legal age of consent have the ability to mindfully consent to sex with an older male.

On the podcast, he specifically stated that the current legal age is “probably about right,” however his experience and his interpretation of it has obviously skewed his point of view. In the podcast, he compares high school boys having sex with their female teachers to his own experience, where he was the sexual predator and how beneficial he thought it was having this encounter at an early age. Afterwards, he then talked about him beginning a 10-year-long relationship with a 29-year-old man when he was 17.

Is he defending pedophilia? Yes.

No one can deny he was talking about how a 13-year-old having consensual sex with an adult can be beneficial to the younger party’s sexual development. That is advocating statutory rape. However, the media vilifying him is backwards due to this sort of opinion being closely related to Stockholm Syndrome behavior.

The media sat on this story for over a year until the information was permeant to destroy Yiannopoulos’s career. It’s obvious due to how as soon as he was announced to be speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) as a figure of the conservative movement, this information leaked and it ultimately dismantled multiple parts of his life.

He was automatically barred from speaking at CPAC, he lost his book deal with Simon and Schuster, and he resigned from his Tech Editor position at Breitbart as to not hold his colleagues back from this bad publicity.

If the media cared about catching a pedophile supporter, then why would they wait until he becomes such a big figure in the conservative movement to release the information? The media used this ammunition to detriment and belittle a victim of sexual abuse rather than help him.

The media is obviously scared of Yiannopoulos due to his boisterous nature, and how powerful he has become in the conservative movement, especially with college-age new voters. His words resonate sharply in people who despise the modern left-leaning college campus. With that power in his hands, the media saw it fit that the only way to take him down was to make him fall farther than he could ever imagine by making people believe a victim of sexual abuse is a pedophile.

This was a hit piece to destroy someone’s career, not journalism. The difference between the two is that one is keeping a person accountable for their behavior, while the other is malicious and toxic to the entire media community. To be a journalist, one must keep an objective view and display all the facts to their readers. This distortion of reality took advantage of Yiannopoulos’s soft spot and damaged his image through treachery, not integrity.