Has Buzzfeed Lost Journalistic Integrity Through Anti-Trump Bias?
This Tuesday CNN Money published a report that a chairman over at BuzzFeed would be hosting a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) the following Wednesday evening.
The article suggests that BuzzFeed‘s support for the DNC during the same week that the media company announced they were rejecting ads by the Republican National Committee (RNC) on their site would cause Republicans to “raise eyebrows”.
The Inquisitr reported on BuzzFeed‘s rejection of the RNC’s $1.3 million dollar ad deal, detailing the decision over Donald Trump’s offensive platform, according to the CEO Jonah Peretti, which he explained in an email to the media company’s staff.
“The Trump campaign is directly opposed to the freedoms of our employees in the United States and around the world and in some cases, such as his proposed ban on international travel for Muslims, would make it impossible for our employees to do their jobs.”
The deal that they ‘nixed’ was apparently for ads that look like journalism news pieces, which are usually funded by Super PACs and political groups.
Last month, The Inquisitr published an op-ed about the Facebook controversy over conservative media where Zuckerberg is mentioned as reaching out to conservatives as a way to get in front of the accusation that they were being biased with their news feed against conservative media.
In that case the response from conservatives has been very abrasive, mimicking the common tone already set by conservatives against liberals and progressives.
In other cases, those progressive companies that have taken a stand against the RNC — which The Inquisitr also wrote about, as with Credo Mobile/Action protesting Google’s involvement with this year’s convention over Donald Trump — have had some help from other companies, such as those from the conservative-led Hewlett-Packard, which has also turned down providing any support to either convention this year because of Donald Trump.
Many see BuzzFeed‘s decision as a media company to be unprecedented and shocking, as they cannot understand how a media corporation its size could turn down $1.3 million in ad revenue or that there could be a reason at all.
An article on this by The Washington Post suggests “that Trump has ‘threatened to limit the free press’ by vowing to weaken protections against libel suits — a change that would have sweeping implications for not only BuzzFeed but also the rest of the media.”
As to the question of whether BuzzFeed’s investment in news is waning, an article by Politico covered a panel discussion at NYU School of Professional Studies Center for Publishing in Manhattan. It refers to BuzzFeeds‘s news editor in chief, Ben Smith, who says that The Huffington Post’s era of news aggregation is over.
“You’ve got to break the news if you’re in the news business,” Smith said at the panel, which was moderated by Huffington Post senior media reporter Michael Calderone. “In the early HuffPost era, aggregated news won because search dominated. But social media has reversed that. No one is saying, here’s a great rewrite of that New York Times story that only took 30 minutes and is a third as good.”
Certainly their fundraiser for the DNC and their choice to reject ad revenue from the RNC over Trump have gotten the attention of conservative media, who have suggested that BuzzFeed is not only biased, but they’ve also make the connection with those who refuse to serve same-sex couples as the same kind of discrimination with the hypocrisy they claim the media corporation is showing by rejecting ads by the Republican Party.
[Image by Richard Vogel / AP Photo]
