Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not going to miss them. The News Division put their foot into bad journalism repeatedly.

For starters, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), a left-wing watchdog with Progressive right in their website title, denounced BuzzFeed News' coverage of Obama during his term as "almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic," and even "creepy" for literally having only one negative article about him in their assessment out of one hundred random samples from Google (though they specifically call out the majority assessed were News Division, not BuzzFeed the tabloid). Their top tech reporter, Ryan Broderick, was fired after plagiarizing for almost a decade, and basically the entire time he was working there. And publishing the Steele Dossier as though it was actual news at first, even though even Wikipedia says many of the statements in it were false, was also a low point; even the Washington Post in 2017 said it was bad journalism. So bad actually, that the editor of BuzzFeed felt the need to publish an opinion piece in The Atlantic today (yes, today, 6 years later) defending his actions. Another Pulitzer-prize winning journalist (Barry Meier) called the whole event a "media clusterfuck of epic proportions."

FAIR: https://fair.org/home/buzzfeeds-obama-coverage-is-99-percent...

Broderick: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/markschoofs/a-note-to-o...

Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/01/... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/11/th...

Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/ben-smith-...

Meier: https://bookshop.org/p/books/spooked-the-trump-dossier-black...

That may be why people in this thread love them so much - confirms their priors and defends their idols

BuzzFeed News also lost credibility to me during the Trump administration, when the Mueller team publicly disputed the outlet's report on a Cohen-Trump story.

From The New Yorker [0]:

"The story was sourced to “two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.” However, once it was published, other federal officials spoke up. Mueller’s office released a rare public statement, saying that “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.” BuzzFeed, and its editor, Ben Smith, have stood by the story."

[...]

"I recently spoke by phone with Leopold about his reporting of this story and his other work on the Trump-Russia affair. Leopold, who was previously at Vice News, is considered an expert at using Freedom of Information Act requests and was part of a team of BuzzFeed reporters who were Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2018. He has also been the subject of controversy. In 2002, Salon removed an article from its Web site after Leopold was accused of inaccuracy and plagiarism. Four years later, he incorrectly reported that Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, had been indicted in the investigation into the outing of the C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame. (Leopold was open about past substance abuse and mental health issues in a 2006 memoir, “News Junkie.”)"

I still respect the outlet's FIFA story, but BuzzFeed News remained a step below mainstream outlets with investigations like The Washington Post.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-buzzfeed-reporter-e...

The whole "Buzzfeed News is actually good" was pushed after they released the Trump dossier (which multiple other news orgs passed on) while including a statement basically saying "we haven't corroborated any of this, good luck". They were basically used as a dumping ground for "sources close to the matter" journalism which WaPo and CNN then could use as a source to make it look more legitimate (same with business insider).

> The whole "Buzzfeed News is actually good" was pushed

That most certainly wasn’t when that push started.

e.g. Here’s a piece from Reuters in 2015, prior to Trump, “FEATURE-Beyond cute cats: How BuzzFeed is reinventing itself”: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-media-buzzfeed-idUSL2N0L...

All that article is saying is they were hiring journalists.

Buzzfeed News' side of this controversy can be found here, with some additional details from the final Mueller report: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bensmith/how-we-charact...

My take is that Mueller was trying so hard not to find Trump guilty that he bent over backwards to interpret Cohen's testimony in an unrealistically benign light, splitting hairs over whether Trump's coaching amounted to "directing" or not.

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