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Comment by ryanlol | Hacker News Reader

Buzzfeed news actually has a pretty solid pulitzer-winning team behind it, this story definitely isn't one of their best.

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They were Pulitzer finalists for a couple of years, but I don't think they won. Also, one of the articles that got them that was pretty bad - and I mean Russian mind control chemicals levels supposedly driving someone to suicide bad. (Though to be fair, Buzzfeed initially made it look like an article about the British police and coroners treating a Russian assassination as suicide for no reason, only mentioning that there was evidence no-one else was present and that he had a history of depression and suicide attempts which they suggested were caused by Russian mind control towards the very end. It also took a certain amount of digging to realise that they massively overstated his role in the Litvinenko investigation to justify why Russia would assassinate him.) https://www.buzzfeed.com/janebradley/scientist-who-helped-co...

The teams itself may not have one any Pulitzers, but several members of the team have.

This is the third time im seeing them messing up- the news yesterday about trump was something

I don't think its very clear that they messed up the Trump story, special counsels office called it inaccurate but I don't really see any reason to blindly believe them.

Look I'm a liberal and all but at this point im beginning to wonder if my side is really stupid or just doesn't want to believe in reality?

I certainly don't blindly believe the BuzzFeed story either. Actually, I haven't even bothered to read it as I don't really care very much about the US president.

I find it bizarre that you think that being a liberal has anything to do with this.

Proclaiming yourself to be a member of the "other" side to try to undermine their arguments by association is becoming a favorite tactic of trolls.

Doing exactly that is called 'concern-trolling'

It is, but it’s easy to undermine without resorting to accusations of trolling, by pointing out that attacks on the character of a source of information rather than critique of the information is unconvincing. It also helps as ryanlol did, to point out non sequiturs such as injections identity politics into the mix for no good reason.

Especially the way this is phrased. “I am a liberal” is not something liberals actually say.

For Reddit there is a Chrome plug-in that lets you highlight users who frequently post on specifically troll-heavy subreddits such as The_Donald so you can spot this kind of shit easily.

True, but assuming that everybody's general world view matches our own is what got Trump elected in the first place.

My guess is they do have actual law enforcement sources who told them what they reported but their sources were wrong.

I’m not sure they messed up. Go read the Special Counsel’s statement. They say the “characterization” was wrong, not the facts. And when specifically asked, no one in the Administration has actually denied the allegations that Trump directed Cohen to lie.

I don't think Mueller breaks his silence for the first time in 2 years to comment on a news story, just to adjust some marginal details.

This is slightly different though, the Democrats did just take over the House. So a somewhat inaccurate story has a much greater impact on congressional investigations. I'm thinking that Buzzfeed wrote a well-sourced story that wasn't entirely correct. I don't know how inaccurate it was, I'll have to wait until investigations are made public, so I don't think we should believe the Buzzfeed story. But I also don't think that everything in the story was false, and I'm not sure that they badly messed up.

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