Thought that you might find this analysis interesting reading. Keith Boag has posted very in-depth articles on CBC for some time and they are always thought-provoking.
If Bannon is such a master manipulator of the media, if he recognized that Trump's weakness was his addiction to public sense of power, he may know, as a drug dealer would know, that when the media no longer feeds the addiction of public adulation, the addict will suffer withdrawal that will increase in severity. Trump will not cope very well with that. Who knows what will happen?

As I have read various media reports over the past two years, it has struck me that the principle of "united we stand, divided we fall" has been under serious stress. When will shared principles make the United States agenda impervious to media's manipulation?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/steve-b...rump-1.4253381

Quotes:
The former Breitbart CEO turned senior strategist in President Donald Trump's White House was one shrewd innovator in the dark arts of weaponized news, and he was able to parlay that into the biggest political upset in modern American history.

But it looks as if Bannon's skill in manipulating media might have helped spark the friendly fire that killed his political career.

It might be that this skill was what made Bannon the prime suspect when Oval Office gossip turned against the national security adviser, Gen. H. R. McMaster, as it did this month...
Day after day the Breitbart home page has opened with a story, even two, about Bannon's nemesis, McMaster — recall it was McMaster who, soon after joining the White House team, removed Bannon from the National Security Council.

Breitbart had it that McMaster is a closet globalist (Aug. 2), anti-Israel, pro-Iran and soft on terror (Aug. 3) too politically correct (Aug. 4) and unstable (Aug. 4) — "Report: H.R. McMaster 'Increasingly Volatile' and 'Frequently Blows His Top'"...
But when you look at many of the Breitbart stories about McMaster they are actually sourced in other media — Politico, the Atlantic, the Jerusalem Post — and that's exactly the tactic Bannon bragged of using in the 2016 campaign, one he describes as "anchor left and pivot right."

The quote is from Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, a page-turner for the political substance abuser by Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. It's mostly about Bannon.

Green describes how Bannon was seeding mainstream media with anti-Hillary Clinton stories even before the 2016 campaign.

Bannon realized years ago that for a news story to get "the biggest blast radius" it had to first appear in the media of the liberal establishment. And that was true even for stories attacking the liberal establishment.

Never mind all the bluff about "fake news." Bannon saw the reputation of the New York Times, for example, as a guarantee that a story from its pages would seep into other media and migrate across the political spectrum.

By contrast, stories that begin outside the establishment mainstream often don't seep anywhere but remain "trapped in the conservative ecosystem."...
The billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were key backers of Trump's campaign and investors in Breitbart. It was they who insisted Bannon take control of Trump's campaign last summer and that he bring on Kellyanne Conway. How will that play out?

Read the article for the rest. It is a possible explanation for the WH leaks.