As it turns out, people are interested in hearing Anthony Scaramucci mock colleagues with profanity filled rhetoric — a whole lot of people.
The piece detailing the new White House communications director’s explosive phone call with a New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza has broken traffic records for the magazine.
“To date, the piece has generated: 4.4 million unique visitors, making it newyorker.com’s most-read piece of 2017 so far and 1.7 million entries from social-media platforms,” the New Yorker told Poynter.
The story also racked up “more than 100,000 concurrent visitors in the hours following publication, a record for newyorker.com,” according to Poynter.
The explosive interview made global news and prompted Scaramucci to say he won’t trust reporters going forward. He chalked it up to “colorful” language.
“I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own c–k,” Scaramucci said about Trump’s chief strategist during the heated phone call that occurred when he wanted the reporter to reveal a source.
Scaramucci also called now-former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus “a f–king paranoid schizophrenic” during the phone call that featured a variety of profanity. The New York Times decided to published the profanity on its front page because the comments were “newsworthy,” and editors didn’t want Times readers to seek the comments elsewhere.
“After top editors, including Dean Baquet, discussed whether it was proper… We concluded that it was newsworthy that a top Trump aide used such language,” deputy managing editor Clifford Levy tweeted. “And we didn’t want our readers to have to search elsewhere to find out what Scaramucci said.”