Free Republic

BuzzFeed News is no more, but its former editor, Ben Smith, spearheading the new Semafor media venture, decided to reflect on the moment he gave the green light to post the infamous Steele Dossier. The document was unverifiable and has now been dismissed as anything but legitimate. This tranche of papers is what set off the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into Donald Trump, the investigation that formed the core of the Russian collusion hoax that later evolved into the Mueller investigation. The media circus destroyed the last vestiges of credibility with many reporters in the legacy media. No bombshell development ever...

The same media figure who led the leftist news outfit that peddled and pushed the Steele Dossier cast shade on Twitter owner Elon Musk’s warnings about the dystopian elitism that undergirds the World Economic Forum (WEF). Semafor Editor-In-Chief and gaslighting savant Ben Smith pooh-poohed Musk “whipping” “up” right-wing ire on Twitter about the WEF, an organization that promoted an Orwellian proposal to microchip children. He mocked conservatives with well founded concerns, smugly calling them “people who think that the CEOs here are gathering to make you take vaccines and to eat bugs,” on the Jan. 19 edition of CNBC’s Squawk...

The Atlantic last week hosted a conference titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” at the University of Chicago, where I’m a student. Barack Obama, Amy Klobuchar, Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Goldberg, Ben Smith, Brian Stelter, and other boldface names studded the program, alongside many lesser-known members of the prestige press. They would gather, as a news release put it, to explore “the organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it.” The Atlantic gabfest was billed as a space for rigorous dialogue, where the light of truth would scatter the darkness of disinformation. But the dialogue and criticism, it...

Tucker Carlson is the left’s “current Bogeyman No. 2, after Donald Trump”. Tucker Carlson is the left’s “current Bogeyman No. 2, after Donald Trump,” observes J. Peder Zane in a commentary at Real Clear Politics, and I think he is right. Night after night, Carlson goes in depth uncovering hypocrisies, lies, and outrages being perpetrated by the powerful and connected elites that run the country and its media. So, as with Trump, powerful members of the media are willing to break the old rules of journalism to take him down. The object of Zane’s critique is Ben Smith, formerly the...

Last month, I texted Tucker Carlson to ask him a question that was on my mind: “Did you get vaccinated?” “When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position?” he replied. “We can trade intimate details.” [...] One question you may be asking, if you are a New York Times reader, is: Why are you exchanging texts with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who recently described the media at large as “cringing animals who are not worthy of respect”? [...] The answer is one of Washington’s open secrets. Mr. Carlson, a proud traitor...

The New York Times excoriated CNN in a column Sunday that indicated the liberal network either “amped up outrage and righteousness” with anti-Trump coverage to increase ratings or CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker simply wants to destroy the man he helped turn into a star. Times media columnist Ben Smith’s latest piece, “Jeff Zucker Helped Create Donald Trump. That Show May Be Ending,” argues that the bizarre relationship between the TV honcho and the president has left the once-nonpartisan CNN “competing with MSNBC for the same enraged American audience” of anti-Trump viewers. Smith wrote that “Zucker’s professional passion has never...

Democrats are contemplating secession and potential civil war as they game out possible scenarios for a closely contested election, according to a report by Ben Smith in a New York Times column Sunday. The bulk of Smith’s column is devoted to the question of how the media will handle Election Night coverage, given that the result may not be known for weeks. Vote-by-mail, which many states have only recently adopted — ostensibly, to prevent the spread of coronavirus in polling places — could lead to an uncertain result. [...] In one scenario, John Podesta — the former chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential...

A leaked memo addressed to higher-ups pulled back the curtain on the Washington Post's newsroom, revealing how dramatically Twitter scrambles priorities and distorts the paper's daily coverage. A leaked memo addressed to higher-ups pulled back the curtain on the Washington Post’s newsroom, revealing how dramatically Twitter scrambles priorities and distorts the paper’s daily coverage. This is not a surprising revelation, but it’s useful to see in print. Twitter is single-handedly exacerbating the media’s already serious flaws.Drafted at the request of National Editor Steven Ginsberg by a committee of 10 national reporters in late April, Ben Smith of the New York...

The Washington Post editorial board on Wednesday called on former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to address allegations of a 1993 sexual assault from former aide Tara Reade and release documents relating to his Senate career. In the editorial, the board says there are “no clear conclusions” regarding the accuracy of Reade’s account but notes that the 1,875 boxes and 415 gigabytes of Senatorial records, which were donated to the University of Delaware in 2012, could confirm whether Reade filed a complaint over the alleged incident. Examining the documents, the editorial board states, would not necessarily...

There are similarities in the sexual assault allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford and Tara Reade. Ford accuses Justice Brett Kavanaugh of pinning her to a bed, groping her over her clothes, and covering her mouth at a high school party in the early 1980s. Reade accuses Biden of forcibly penetrating her with his fingers when she worked for his Senate office in 1993.The allegations are both decades old. Both are denied by the accused men. That does not render them false. It does, however, offer an instructive case study in media bias.Reade’s allegation is against a Democrat, Ford’s...

Buzzfeed News got into hot water over the weekend, after the Special Counsel’s Office issued a rare public rebuke regarding the outlet’s claim President Trump directed his attorney to lie to Congress. Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith and co-author of the dubious piece Anthony Cormier appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources to defend themselves and “to talk about process”, but what viewers got were shady deflections. After being introduced by host Brian Stelter, Smith shared his pleasure for being on the show: “I'm glad you began with the question of the truth of the allegations because ultimately, this is a media show, we're...

Trade unions at Air France called Thursday for the company to name a French chief executive amid reports that the board is set to nominate Canadian Ben Smith at the helm of the group. Nine out of ten unions issued a joint statement, saying it was “inconceivable that the Air France company, French since 1933, falls into the hands of a foreign executive whose candidacy is being promoted by a competitor”. The statement appeared to be referring to Delta Airlines, the US airline which owns 8.8 percent of the capital of Air France-KLM, the parent group formed out of the...

A BuzzFeed columnist has declared that "Cars donÂ’t belong on the streets of big cities, and we should do everything in our power to get rid of them." She can't be serious? The headline is "We Should Ban Cars from Big Cities. Seriously." We've seen this idea proposed by environmentalists from time to time based on "climate change," and by urban planners in the name of creating a few blocks of open space, but Jessie Singer's advocacy of a total ban is largely in response to Tuesday's terrorist attack in New York City. Singer's column clearly has management's approval, given...

A Russian-tied tech firm named in a controversial dossier containing uncorroborated allegations about President Donald Trump and the hacking of Democratic National Committee email accounts announced late Friday that it has filed defamation suits against the online news site BuzzFeed, its editor in chief and a former British intelligence agent. The lawsuits were brought by XBT Holdings, a Cyprus-based company owned by Russian tech magnate Aleksej Gubarev. Lawyers for his firm filed complaints Friday in London against the former spy and his company, and against BuzzFeed and its editor in chief, Ben Smith, in Broward County Circuit Court in Fort...

Buzzfeed is being sued for defamation regarding Russian interference in U.S. election. Aleksei Gubarev, a Cyprus-based businessman, is suing the tacky “news” and media outlet Buzzfeed for defamation in regards to their publishing of “an unproven dossier on President Donald Trump’s purported activities involving Russia,” along with allegations of Russian interference in the recent U.S. election. Gubarev alleges that his companies, as well as himself, were linked without validity in the dossier to the Russian hacking of Democratic Party figures. The damages Gubarev is seeking from Buzzfeed and Ben Smith, their top editor, is currently unspecified.

See also: Ben Smith and the Memory Hole. Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith has had a rough week. As the man who decided to publish the “secret dossier” about Donald Trump’s alleged hijinks in Moscow, he has suffered the ultimate indignity of having even MSNBC call him out for publishing fake news. Earlier he sent a note to Buzzfeed staff explaining his decision. “Our presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers,” he wrote. “We have always erred on the side of publishing.” If true, Ben Smith has come a long way...

During a discussion of BuzzFeed’s story on a dossier regarding Russia and President-Elect Donald Trump on Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “MTP Daily,” host Chuck Todd told BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith “you just published fake news.” Todd said BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the dossier was an instance where they “would not have made the same decision in the pre-Trump era.” Smith stated that it was more “the pre-Internet era.” And that there was a time “where we could act as gatekeepers. Where we could say, you know what, crazy people are claiming that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is forged, but we’re...

The New York Times leaked off-the-record conversation with Donald Trump in January recently to Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed’s editor in chief Ben Smith wrote this week that Mr. Trump reportedly told the NY Times that his extreme position on deporting immigrants was fluid and developing. Senator Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio lashed out at Trump and immediately demanded that Donald Trump order the release of the off-the-record conversation.

The New York Times is sitting on an audio recording that some of its staff believes could deal a serious blow to Donald Trump who, in an off-the-record meeting with the newspaper, called into question whether he would stand by his own immigration views. Trump visited the paper’s Manhattan headquarters on Tuesday, Jan. 5, part of a round of editorial board meetings that — as is traditional — the Democratic candidates for president and some of the Republicans attended. The meetings, conducted partly on the record and partly off the record in a 13th floor conference room, give candidates a...

BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith told staff in a memo on Tuesday that it's permissible for them to call Donald Trump a racist as a fact on social media. Smith wrote the memo in response to queries from staff about what was OK for them to post on social media networks such as Twitter or Facebook about Trump.