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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

Do people read BuzzFeed because it's something to talk about during breaks at work? Other than clickbait, does the site provide any kind of meaningful content? Does BuzzFeed operate on a 'vision' or 'goal-driven journalism' ?! I never saw the site for more than a junkyard selling bullcrap to make money.

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They do some serious journalism: https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news

Makes me wonder if they've had difficulties selling their work as credible to the general public, considering what the BuzzFeed name entails.

I absolutely discounted and avoided BuzzFeedNews work for the longest time, until I accidentally read one of their investigative pieces [1] and was blown away. I almost even think it vindicates the relentless stream of garbage from their main site, if it allows them to fund such stellar journalism.

  [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-trump-around-the-world

Yeah I think their news and investigative journalism are top notch https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/intake

The thing is that Buzzfeed cannot be trusted to write about topics like this. They have an explicit and overt anti-Trump bias and this article is suspect because of that. Really, any mainstream news organization using the term "fake news" and suggesting it impacted the 2016 election cannot be trusted.

It was Buzzfeed News that released the unsubstantiated Steele Dossier and more recently unsubstantiated and refuted claims against Michael Choen.

They are not journalists, they are activists.

Calling the Steele Dossier unsubstantiated is just objectively wrong considering we've seen many claims within it bear fruit over time. There's a reason why many agencies take it very seriously.

What exactly is your bias here?

It's not objectively wrong, even the author himself says only 70-90% of it is accurate and opinions go downhill from there. You can see for yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier#V...

Now you're intentionally moving the goalposts. The author says it's only 70-90% accurate because you cannot ever expect an intelligence dossier to not be potentially contaminated by other agents or sources looking to intentionally provide false or conflicting information.

That does not render the dossier unsubstantiated as you claimed because you have to evaluate the merit of each claim and use it as an avenue for further investigation. Which is exactly what the Wikipedia article you linked says: in that many claims have proven to be true over time despite some disinformation.

So can you tell me again what exactly makes it unsubstantiated?

Actually it's you who moved the goal posts. I said it's unsubstantiated, provided a link with examples and now you want to debate what level of unfounded rumor a report must contain before we can say it's unsubstantiated (>30% is enough imo).

You provided a link that proves the opposite. The fact is that the Steele Dossier has mostly credible claims, many of which has gone under investigation and proven to be truthful. To claim otherwise is to lie and/or deny the reality of the dossier. You can't talk about bias while also denying the facts.

On January 11, 2017, Newsweek published a list of "13 things that don't add up" in the dossier, writing that it was a "strange mix of the amateur and the insightful" and stating that it "contains lots of Kremlin-related gossip that could indeed be, as the author claims, from deep insiders—or equally gleaned" from Russian newspapers and blogs.[177] Former UK ambassador to Russia Sir Tony Brenton stated that certain aspects of the dossier were inconsistent with British intelligence's understanding of how the Kremlin works, commenting: "I've seen quite a lot of intelligence on Russia, and there are some things in [the dossier] which look pretty shaky."

It's funny that you share complaints about Buzzfeed, and yet you decide to quote me a website that does not run fact checkers and frequently shares literal fake news as cited in their own Wikipedia article.

It would be fitting that you would focus in on that paragraph on Wikipedia and not the fact that security professionals clearly took the document seriously enough to use it as a reasonable basis for investigation.

Well at this point I don't think we're going to agree on much. I see all of the literally unsubstantiated claims in the report as cause for suspicion and you don't. I don't think there's anything that's going to convince you of its shaky foundations. Do remember that only buzzfeed reported this though. No other major news source was comfortable with its unsubstantiated nature. Again from wikipedia:

BuzzFeed was harshly criticized by several mainstream media outlets for releasing the dossier without verifying its allegations.[6][7] Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan called it "scurrilous allegations dressed up as an intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump,"[85] while The New York Times noted that the publication sparked a debate centering on the use of unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources.[86] BuzzFeed's executive staff said the materials were newsworthy because they were "in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media" and argued that this justified public release.[87] The dossier's publication by BuzzFeed has always been defended by Jack Shafer, Politico's senior media writer, as well as by Richard Tofel of ProPublica and the Columbia Journalism Review. Shafer defended the public's right to know about the allegations against Trump, and saw a parallel in Judge Ungaro's ruling in the defamation suit filed by Aleksej Gubarev.[8]

This guardian article is relevant:

Blend of stupidity and seriousness does BuzzFeed no favours

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/dec/17/buzzfeed-city-...

It definitely doesn't do it any favors (although many people will debate the quality of the "serious" side of Buzzfeed) but it's too ironic hearing this from The Guardian, a media platform many people avoid due to an overwhelming amount of stupidity it has published.

Also the Guardian article is from December 2017, so the writing has been on the wall for quite some time.

> an overwhelming amount of stupidity [the Guardian] has published

I think on BuzzFeed's part, at least the stupidity is intentional.

Buzzfeed-news is a separate entity if i am not mistaken?

Presumably that’s the entity that hires these journalists and is relevant to this discussion though?

Well there goes any respect I had for Pulitzer.

Buzzfeed the site and Buzzfeed journalism are separate departments. The latter is very high quality despite the parent brand's reputation.

Buzzfeed journalism is far from very high quality. It shouldn’t even be called journalism. It’s storytelling. They take huge liberties to leave out information that doesn’t fit their intended narrative.

- Someone with first hand knowledge

Can you list some journalistic outlets that don't do this? Because I can probably find articles by whatever that outlet is that mangle stories to fit business, political, ideological, and other interests. Even when unintentional, stories that depend on complex information are often dumbed-down and result in incomplete, inaccurate narrative. Not to mention the benefit of hindsight, and important sources whose additions or subtractions substantially change the result.

Can you list any journalistic outlets that have a CEO that openly talks about how they only publish information that fits a venn-diagram of "What Do People Care About" and "What is the Brand Message"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pr-s-6dEEk

Before anyone starts claiming this only happens to BuzzFeed and not BuzzFeed News, there's plenty of interviews of him discussing how there should not be any separation of editorial oversight and marketing as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE9WWF85Zq4

Journalistic outlets don't typically have CEOs because they never make enough money. They're owned by other companies or rich people, and have other companies that actually generate the revenue, and there's something like a CEO that lords over both that has to balance the making-money part with the journalism part. The only "journalism" that doesn't suffer from bias are ones that never have to worry about money... so basically, school newspapers.

The Federalist

NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio, Los Angeles Times, to name a few.

The Chronicle is the only outlet where I could not find clear examples of the biases I listed, but obviously they'll be biased towards certain reporting of news about academia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Criticism_a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post#Criticism_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal#Editor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times#Other_contro...

These are just the "big controversies". They all have stories which slant in particular directions as benefits the paper, its owners, writers and editors.

Didn’t they just have their faces rubbed in bad journalism last month when they made some claim about Trump that was so ridiculously untrue that Mueller made a public statement saying it was factually incorrect? [0]

No. I reject the notion that Buzzfeed News is on any level professional. I accept that they work on the stopped-clock principal at best.

[0] reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1PD01J

Nope. From your own link:

> “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller office, said in the statement.

This is a very carefully-constructed statement. Note how it doesn't actually say BuzzFeed was wrong. It just says specific statements and characterization are "not accurate", but doesn't elaborate on what statements or characterizations, or on how inaccurate they are. This reads like a statement designed to placate Trump without actually refuting much of anything.

> Note how it doesn't actually say BuzzFeed was wrong.

It literally says Buzzfeed's statements were inaccurate.

They were "not accurate". That's a deliberate choice of words. There's a ton of ways to say "BuzzFeed's story is wrong", and they went with the phrasing that could mean "BuzzFeed's story is 99% accurate but there were some minor errors", and then declined to elaborate on what about it was wrong even when BuzzFeed put out a public statement standing by their story and calling on the Mueller investigation to explain.

This comment describes nearly all of the Alexa Top 100 [0]. Turns out people like to waste time, and advertisers like to advertise to people wasting time.

[0] https://www.alexa.com/topsites

None of that has anything to do with the topic of unionization.

At best they operate as a "news laundering" service. They publish unverified or uncorroborated stories, and that provides the other "more reputable" outlets the ability to talk about the story with the smoke screen of "we're just reporting on the fact that it was reported by someone else."

This is the best way to describe what they do.

I love one of their video series called Worth It: https://www.buzzfeed.com/worthit

Most businesses are “bullcrap to make money”. What does your comment have to do with unionization?

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