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The Daily Wire has become a conservative media powerhouse. Co-founder Ben Shapiro says the company was founded with intentionality in mind.
While appearing on The George Janko Show, Shapiro was asked about his falling out with former Daily Wire host Candace Owens. He said that he doesn’t believe Owens should no longer have a platform just because he disagrees with her stances, but does believe his company has no obligation to continue paying her.
“We don’t purport to be anything but conservative. We’re conservative,” Shapiro reiterated. “If you show up and I hire you, and Jeremy (Boreing) hires and Caleb (Robinson), we all hire you, and you say ‘I’m a pro-life person’ and then the next day you come out and you say ‘Abortion up till the point of birth is a moral virtue’, do I have a moral obligation to continue paying you to be on the platform? I think absolutely not.
“Now, does that mean you should be ‘silenced’? No. I mean, it’s just we’re signing a check. For that check, you are paid to provide the viewpoint that you are going to provide, within limits that we are happy subsidizing. But I’m not going to pay for somebody to — and neither will our company — come on the air on Daily Wire and spend an entire episode talking about the great virtues of late-term abortion, right? In other words, we are a self-stated company with a self-stated mission. If that mission is violated, then we have not served not only our customer, we haven’t served ourselves.”
Ben Shapiro continued by noting that he had more than financial prosperity in mind when he and Boreing teamed together to found The Daily Wire.
“We didn’t get into this business really to make money. We’re very happy that we made a lot of money,” he shared. “I’ve been in this business a lot longer than that … I did not get into this business making money. I got in this business because I believe certain things. If ever I’m responsible for forwarding the opposite of the things that I believe, I have not done my job. I’ve not done my job for the American people, I’ve not done my job for the consumers, I’ve not done my job for myself. I can’t sleep at night.
So if the idea would be, for example, that I have a moral obligation to hire somebody or pay somebody whose views I find morally reprehensible on any topic, including abortion, is that my moral responsibility? I think not. I’m not a platform. If I’m Facebook, if I’m X, then the idea is the Overton Window should be pretty damned broad, because that’s essentially the town square. You’re almost mimicking what the First Amendment was built for. But I feel the opposite of moral obligation to hire somebody or pay somebody for expressing viewpoints that I find to be personally outside the window of what we want to be subsidizing.”
