Perhaps since they have a partial seat in the White House press room. Between BBC/Boston Globe, with Scripps, next to Guardian/FT. If you asked me to name some varying trustworthy news sources there's three top ones there.
A more cynical interpretation might be that the White House wants to get in cozy with the media that younger people consume, regardless of its merits as an actual news source. I think Buzzfeed is far better than what it was, but I don't think it merits comparison to Real News Outlets.
It is not cynical at all. The white house has a duty to fill the press room with diverse range of press that reaches as much of america as possible. "Serious" isn't really the criteria.
And anyway, buzz feed's news articles are as serious other publishers. The presence of other silly stories isn't any worse than the Boston Globe having a comics page.
BuzzFeed definitely still publishes Mashable-like "top-n" list pieces and similar entertainment pieces, but their news section[1] has improved significantly over the years.
I'm a frequent defender of BuzzFeed as a legit news source...they've hired several colleagues and friends of mine and there are multiple Pulitzer winners among their large data/investigations team.
But this latest incident is pretty disturbing...I would've figured that BuzzFeed's clout (and funding) was so high that annoying a couple of advertisers with articles was a cost of doing business that could easily be swallowed, rather than compromise their integrity.
But as the famous Watergate saying goes, it's not the crime, it's the coverup. Not only were the deletions done secretly, but when exposed, the excuses were so transparently lame. The post critical of Dove was deleted because it was a "hot take", and deleting it was necessary to get the point across to the writers? That's an editorial-style kerfluffle, one that could be explained through a memo, not _retracting the article_. Keep in mind that a retraction is traditionally done for very serious screwups, like the time Rolling Stone accused UVA of covering up a gang-rape but didn't interview anybody involved. Making a low-quality post should not be grounds for deletion.
And this became a lot worse when the Hasbro/Monopoly article was discovered...when the Dove post was deleted, BuzzFeed's editor said that was the first and only time such a deletion had been done...the Monopoly post was deleted a month or so ago. And the lame reason for that deletion was that the post was too opinionated, and that it too was a one-time-action.
Kind of strange that of the thousands of posts BuzzFeed makes in a single week, the only two that of such egregious quality that they were completely deleted (and done so in such a way as to be removed from the Internet Archive and Google Cache) had to do with two prominent advertisers.
I know publishing is a business, and all journalism institutions make various compromises/cutbacks for bottom-line reasons. But the cover-up here is more egregious than most.
>I researched the newspaper’s coverage of HSBC. I learnt that Harry Wilson, the admirable banking correspondent of the Telegraph, had published an online story about HSBC based on a report from a Hong Kong analyst who had claimed there was a ‘black hole’ in the HSBC accounts. This story was swiftly removed from the Telegraph website, even though there were no legal problems. When I asked HSBC whether the bank had complained about Wilson's article, or played any role in the decision to remove it, the bank declined to comment. Mr Wilson’s contemporaneous tweets referring to the story can be found here. The story itself, however, is no longer available on the website, as anybody trying to follow through the link can discover. Mr Wilson rather bravely raised this issue publicly at the ‘town hall meeting’ when Jason Seiken introduced himself to staff. He has since left the paper.
Most reputable papers wouldn't do this with a new piece though. Opinion pieces seem to get removed at times, mainly when there is a backlash and the paper feels that a column crossed the line from controversial clickbait into something that's drawing too much heat (e.g. http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/01/14/observer-editor-john-mu... ).
Regardless of anyone's opinion of GamerGate, they have uncovered quite a bit of unethical behavior on the Guardian's behalf. It's sad too because I really respected their Snowden coverage (obviously!).
Indeed, they have. That's part of the problem I think. Even if a journalist was reporting on a truly heinous group, like say the KKK, I would expect some objectivity. The Guardian has been very aggressive about their stance against GamerGate, often not labeling their articles as op-eds.
For example, there are leaked emails from The Guardian with the subject Killallmen about how to handle GamerGate reporting:
For those who don't know, Leigh Alexander was one of the journalists who wrote the most aggressive of the gamers are dead articles where she calls traditional gamers "obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers" among other things. http://archive.today/l1kTW To say she poured gasoline on the GamerGate fire is an understatement.
The irony here is that The Ralph Retort is ALSO very unethical. Ralph isn't liked by many GamerGaters but in this case he did break this story and there was no other reporting on it. His outlet exists because mainstream media has created a vacuum by only reporting one side of the GamerGate story. He's an amateur and most definitely biased, but I'd expect more from the Guardian and if they were more objective, there wouldn't be as much a need for untrained reporting.
If you are going to bend over backwards to massage GamerGate into this conversation, you should disclose that your past account has been shadow banned and that your current account has the same trajectory.
Note that the Telegraph article is just about the Guardian moving an advert from one page to another. It had nothing to do with changing the news or editorial content of the paper. The story about Iraq still ran. Advertisers not wanting their ads next to tragic stories is something that goes on in every paper and is substantially different to what happened at Buzzfeed and the Telegraph.
The only reason The Telegraph published that article is that their chief political commentator had just resigned over the papers failure to cover the HSBC tax story (among other things) and the Telegraph were engaging in shit-tier whataboutery to try and stop their readership collapsing. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-...
>The coverage of HSBC in Britain's Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.
The Telegraph is in the middle of a huge meltdown at the moment, and they are lashing out at everybody else. They also ran this particularly appalling story on their front page to try and detract from their own crisis: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/daily-telegraph-anonymou...
>A senior Daily Telegraph reporter wrote an anonymous front page story suggesting suicides at a rival newspaper may be connected to stress caused by commercial pressure – just days after the Telegraph itself faced allegations of blurring the lines between advertising and editorial.
According to their source, "the headline of an article about Iraq on The Guardian's website was changed amid concerns about offending Apple, and the article was later removed from the home page entirely." Changing a headline of a story and making it much less prominent (removing it from the home page) so as not to offend an advertiser is quite a big deal. They quote the 'insider' at The Guardian saying: "If editorial staff knew what was happening here they would be horrified."
I'm no fan of The Telegraph, and also think they published the piece because the Guardian revealed their own timidity in standing up to an advertiser (HSBC). But that doesn't mean the Telegraph piece about the Guardian is untrue. My own interpretation is that this kind of thing must be more common than we think when these publishers rely so heavily on advertising money. Of course it's not in their interest to be so open about it, so we probably hear little - except when they start flinging mud at each other.
I don't think hypocritical is the word. Unless you happen to know that they typically read buzzfeed for it's integrity. Then that would be hypocritical.
BuzzFeed may be 90% silly lists, but the fact that they want to be taken seriously as a source for real news and journalism means that it is important to hold them accountable to some basic standards of ethical behavior, like not quietly purging content at the behest of their advertisers and then lying about it.
The listicles are the man source of clicks, both for BuzzFeed itself and the people writing articles like "You won't BELIEVE these TWENTY TERRIBLE ARTICLES BuzzFeed is running RIGHT NOW!"
Add a little bit of "Internet: Threat Or Menace?" bias from the people whose audience is skewing older faster than the general population and BuzzFeed is now terrible beyond words.
The inane listicles are just money drivers for BuzzFeed News, which is where much of the real journalism takes place. The site was founded in the late 00s as a simple lifestyle website in the vein of the AOL homepage but over time it's branched out into other areas, one of them being news. If they want to be taken seriously as a source of journalism (which they have in the past), then this sort of thing needs to be called out and punished accordingly.
buzzfeed is complete and utter trash and in no way a legitimate news organization.
However, with White House now using buzzfeed as a medium link up with the younger generation, it's become a source of "information" (see below) to see what agenda Obama is peddling to the kids today.
28 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] threadAnd anyway, buzz feed's news articles are as serious other publishers. The presence of other silly stories isn't any worse than the Boston Globe having a comics page.
[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/news
But this latest incident is pretty disturbing...I would've figured that BuzzFeed's clout (and funding) was so high that annoying a couple of advertisers with articles was a cost of doing business that could easily be swallowed, rather than compromise their integrity.
But as the famous Watergate saying goes, it's not the crime, it's the coverup. Not only were the deletions done secretly, but when exposed, the excuses were so transparently lame. The post critical of Dove was deleted because it was a "hot take", and deleting it was necessary to get the point across to the writers? That's an editorial-style kerfluffle, one that could be explained through a memo, not _retracting the article_. Keep in mind that a retraction is traditionally done for very serious screwups, like the time Rolling Stone accused UVA of covering up a gang-rape but didn't interview anybody involved. Making a low-quality post should not be grounds for deletion.
And this became a lot worse when the Hasbro/Monopoly article was discovered...when the Dove post was deleted, BuzzFeed's editor said that was the first and only time such a deletion had been done...the Monopoly post was deleted a month or so ago. And the lame reason for that deletion was that the post was too opinionated, and that it too was a one-time-action.
Kind of strange that of the thousands of posts BuzzFeed makes in a single week, the only two that of such egregious quality that they were completely deleted (and done so in such a way as to be removed from the Internet Archive and Google Cache) had to do with two prominent advertisers.
I know publishing is a business, and all journalism institutions make various compromises/cutbacks for bottom-line reasons. But the cover-up here is more egregious than most.
>I researched the newspaper’s coverage of HSBC. I learnt that Harry Wilson, the admirable banking correspondent of the Telegraph, had published an online story about HSBC based on a report from a Hong Kong analyst who had claimed there was a ‘black hole’ in the HSBC accounts. This story was swiftly removed from the Telegraph website, even though there were no legal problems. When I asked HSBC whether the bank had complained about Wilson's article, or played any role in the decision to remove it, the bank declined to comment. Mr Wilson’s contemporaneous tweets referring to the story can be found here. The story itself, however, is no longer available on the website, as anybody trying to follow through the link can discover. Mr Wilson rather bravely raised this issue publicly at the ‘town hall meeting’ when Jason Seiken introduced himself to staff. He has since left the paper.
Most reputable papers wouldn't do this with a new piece though. Opinion pieces seem to get removed at times, mainly when there is a backlash and the paper feels that a column crossed the line from controversial clickbait into something that's drawing too much heat (e.g. http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/01/14/observer-editor-john-mu... ).
http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/search?q=guardian&res...
For example, there are leaked emails from The Guardian with the subject Killallmen about how to handle GamerGate reporting:
http://theralphretort.com/internal-email-shows-guardian-mind...
For those who don't know, Leigh Alexander was one of the journalists who wrote the most aggressive of the gamers are dead articles where she calls traditional gamers "obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers" among other things. http://archive.today/l1kTW To say she poured gasoline on the GamerGate fire is an understatement.
The irony here is that The Ralph Retort is ALSO very unethical. Ralph isn't liked by many GamerGaters but in this case he did break this story and there was no other reporting on it. His outlet exists because mainstream media has created a vacuum by only reporting one side of the GamerGate story. He's an amateur and most definitely biased, but I'd expect more from the Guardian and if they were more objective, there wouldn't be as much a need for untrained reporting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=exstudent
You know, if it's about transparency and ethics.
The only reason The Telegraph published that article is that their chief political commentator had just resigned over the papers failure to cover the HSBC tax story (among other things) and the Telegraph were engaging in shit-tier whataboutery to try and stop their readership collapsing. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-...
>The coverage of HSBC in Britain's Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.
The Telegraph is in the middle of a huge meltdown at the moment, and they are lashing out at everybody else. They also ran this particularly appalling story on their front page to try and detract from their own crisis: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/daily-telegraph-anonymou...
>A senior Daily Telegraph reporter wrote an anonymous front page story suggesting suicides at a rival newspaper may be connected to stress caused by commercial pressure – just days after the Telegraph itself faced allegations of blurring the lines between advertising and editorial.
I'm no fan of The Telegraph, and also think they published the piece because the Guardian revealed their own timidity in standing up to an advertiser (HSBC). But that doesn't mean the Telegraph piece about the Guardian is untrue. My own interpretation is that this kind of thing must be more common than we think when these publishers rely so heavily on advertising money. Of course it's not in their interest to be so open about it, so we probably hear little - except when they start flinging mud at each other.
suddenly disappeared.
If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation, I guess.
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Now, worrying about the integrity of BuzzFeed strikes me as slightly hypocritical - I mean, it's yellow pages 2.0 at the end of the day - isn't it?
maybe myopic? misaimed?
maybe just stupid.
Check out this amazing article covering the writing of the AUMF after 9/11 http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-w...
Add a little bit of "Internet: Threat Or Menace?" bias from the people whose audience is skewing older faster than the general population and BuzzFeed is now terrible beyond words.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/09/05/tv...
However, with White House now using buzzfeed as a medium link up with the younger generation, it's become a source of "information" (see below) to see what agenda Obama is peddling to the kids today.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/02/12/385867076/wat...