BuzzFeed Offers Pathetic Excuse For That Fake Dossier Story…

Of course BuzzFeed would talk about this on a weekend when no one’s paying attention to them…

You all remember that “OMG-HUGE-BOMBSHELL-(but oops, not really ’cause it’s a complete fake)” 35-page dossier that BuzzFeed and CNN reported on a few weeks ago? The one about Russia and peeing prostitutes that was supposed to make Donald Trump look bad, but turned out to be completely unverifiable and full of untruths? The one that utterly killed the left’s “Fake News Lost Us The Election!” narrative?

Yep. That one.

According to this, BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith is now blaming CNN for running the story first and that’s why BuzzFeed decided to run the story themselves –

CNN originally posted a heavily hedged report on the Trump-Russia dossier Jan. 10. Later that day, BuzzFeed posted the entirety of the memo with a note at the top of the piece saying, “The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.”

[…]

Smith then pins the blame on CNN, and writes that BuzzFeed posted the full dossier because they trust readers can understand the “messy, sometimes uncertain reality” better than all the journalists who had been trying to verify the dossier. Journalists may not have been able to, as [Tom] Brokaw put it, “close the book on” the dossier, but Smith expected his readers to.

Sooo… professional journalists refused to run the dossier story because of the unverified information and they’d rather not deal with it and wanted to stick to reporting Actual News. But BuzzFeed – who is seeking to be a serious news source (underneath their cat memes and 90s nostalgia listicles, that is) – decided to post the whole dossier and leave it up to their readers to figure out what was true and what was complete bullcrap?

Wanna know what’s even dumber about this? Smith claims that because BuzzFeed published the entire dossier, they actually “advanced” the story. If by “advanced,” he means “Torpedoed whatever credibility his news outlet ever had in the first place) –

We at BuzzFeed News had, of course, considered that someone else would post the dossier, and planned in that case to follow by adding what we knew on it. We hadn’t anticipated what actually happened: a bombshell report that described the document, while the document itself remained secret.

That halfway position ran contrary to how we think of our compact with our audience: You trust us to give you the full story; we trust you to reckon with a messy, sometimes uncertain reality. And with other news organizations already trumpeting the dossier’s central allegation — that the Trump campaign maintained secret ties to the Russian leadership — our decision to publish it in full rapidly advanced the story.

Here’s a clue for BuzzFeed Ben – if you’re trying to report the news, it’s best that you not become news in the process. And blaming another news outlet’s stupidity for your own miiiiiiight not be the best way to cover your own butt.

(On the other hand – watching the leftist media constantly snipe at each other over this stuff definitely has entertainment value.)

Yep. Fake news did lose the election for the left. And if the mainstream media keeps this up, it will continue to lose elections for the left.