Taking a Kostabi-ish assembly-line approach to writing is nothing new for big-name popular novelists who become small industries. James Patterson has long been the commander of a brigade of potboiler-producing privates and Robert Ludlum’s estate hasn’t allowed his death to slow “his” output. These are light entertainments, though, and no one is trying to fool anyone, so no harm is seemingly done.

It’s a different thing, however, for a journalist to surreptitiously sign his name to work turned out by a team, using an approach similar to the one employed by the resolutely unfunny Fat Jewish in collecting the “best” jokes about how white girls order Starbucks. Breitbart.com, a conservative site that reads like the offspring of Matt Drudge and a Chernobyl zookeeper, apparently does something of the sort. According to a BuzzFeed piece by Joseph Bernstein, the prickish provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos takes credit for the efforts of a stable of unpaid interns. It’s crowdsourcing in a sense, though the many are hidden and the one not what he appears to be.

The opening:

A leading voice of the new “alt-right,” Breitbart.com tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos, does not write many of the articles that appear under his byline on the conservative news site, two sources who have worked directly with him told BuzzFeed News.

These sources — a former intern and someone who has worked with Yiannopoulos for years both in and outside of the Breitbart News Network — as well as a video taken from a private chat offer a glimpse behind the curtain of one of a new movement’s leading provocateurs. The sources also suggest that much of the commentator’s work is written by a bevy of mostly unpaid personal interns.

Yiannopoulos confirmed in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he has “about 44” interns — “a mix of paid and unpaid” — writing and conducting research for him. But he denied that other people write stories for him start to finish.

“Two people write Breitbart stuff for me,” he told BuzzFeed News, but “ghostwriting is too great a word.” He said that the majority of his interns are researchers and that some write speeches for him. “I have two books coming out this year,” he said. “It’s completely standard for someone with a career like mine to have researchers and assistants and ghostwriters.”

Yet the sources who came forward to BuzzFeed News tell a different story. “Milo Yiannopoulos is not one person,” said the Breitbart employee. “That person does not exist. It is a collective consciousness of various different people who come and go.”•