The Media Industry Destroyed BuzzFeed News after BuzzFeed News Helped Destroy the Media Industry

Yesterday morning, BuzzFeed announced that it was shuttering BuzzFeed News, its journalistic arm. Whatever employees of the news division remain after layoffs will be resorbed into the otherwise clickbait-driven site (presumably to be later replaced by an improved ChatGPT algorithm). This was an occasion for wistful reflection on the left and among mainstream-media journalists/academics (but, as the old joke goes, I repeat myself), indifference among the masses (“What, the cat-meme listicle site? They had a news division?”), and grimly smug amusement on the right, whose denizens have long regarded BuzzFeed as the original bad actor in what became “Russiagate.”

Russiagate, of course, was the never-ending scandal that dogged Trump’s administration and clearly drove him to personal distraction. It began formally with BuzzFeed News’ publication of the Steele dossier: a bundle of opposition research alleging (among other scandalous items) that Trump was compromised by the Russian government. It was funded by the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 campaign, who then farmed it out to the media after Hillary Clinton’s shock loss in November. Published in December, it immediately swamped his administration in not just a torrent of political scandals but an overarching narrative approach to Trump as an “illegitimate” president.

It was quite coincidental, then, that former BuzzFeed News editor in chief Ben Smith, now helming the news startup Semafor, published an excerpt from his upcoming book in the Atlantic Monthly reflecting on BuzzFeed News’ decision to publish the Steele dossier on the same day BuzzFeed News ceased to exist. The fact that even Smith cannot fully defend having done so (despite the headline assertion of his piece) suggests something about the relationship between the two events.

That, of course, is not what many journalists and media types will tell you about BuzzFeed News’ demise. They will instead tell a story about a shifting media-consumption landscape and unpredictable shocks to the business model, driven by changes to social-media algorithms as much as anything else. The idea of BuzzFeed News was to fund a legitimate newsroom — shorn of the stylistic pieties of places like the New York Times or even Politico, for that matter — on the back of those free viral moneymaking listicles that the main BuzzFeed site cranked out. It worked until it didn’t work — until, ironically enough, the media’s moral panic about “disinformation” stampeded Facebook and other sites into tweaking their algorithms, deemphasizing BuzzFeed’s content (frivolous or otherwise), and denying them ad revenue. This is, in fact, the case Smith himself made today at Semafor, in a piece that focuses exclusively on the business side of the equation when addressing the causes of the news division’s failure.

At this point I must acknowledge that I owe a certain debt to both BuzzFeed News and Ben Smith himself; when I was with the elections-reporting startup DecisionDesk HQ in 2016, Smith hired us to tabulate the results nationwide, quickly and accurately, for election-night coverage. BuzzFeed News beat everyone else in the mainstream media that night in calling the race for Donald Trump, and it was because Smith had the courage to go with a scrappy, nontraditional organization. So I cannot pretend that I don’t appreciate his unorthodox instincts. Moreover, Smith and others are not wrong in pointing out the importance of the collapsing business model of clicks-for-cash as a key force here. A business that depends on the whims of tech companies for financial sustainability is permanently fragile.

However, there is a larger narrative implicated in BuzzFeed News’ collapse, and it inevitably returns to that decision to publish the Steele dossier. BuzzFeed News was a beautiful idea that failed, not just because of the financial model, but because BuzzFeed News itself could never differentiate itself as being more trustworthy than either its parent company or the rest of the media. Why not? Because by publishing the Steele dossier — which we now know to have been partisan bunk concocted and spread with malevolent intent — BuzzFeed immediately rendered itself the least trustworthy news organization in America. I am not kidding about that, unless you consider “Occupy Democrats” to be a news organization. In February 2017, two months after publication of the dossier, they ranked as less trusted than either Breitbart, “social media,” or (this is the punchline) Trump himself.

And by setting the tone for mainstream-media coverage to follow, BuzzFeed News was — this gives me no pleasure to write — literally responsible for helping take down the entire rest of the media with its own reputation. Russiagate became the story, the obsession, the overriding narrative lens through which every other development was interpreted, even if subconsciously. And it destroyed the media as a whole. Once again, I am not kidding here. Before Trump took office, a mainstream media already vociferously opposed to Trump still held a net positive trust-and-approval rating among American voters. Now it’s at 26 percent and falling. While political polarization, Covid-19, and the demands of woke politics no doubt played their roles as well, the founding event is well understood to be Russiagate, as the Columbia Journalism Review ruefully pointed out earlier this year. It all begins here. It begins with this specific push of the button, this specific decision to publish.

The counterargument Smith offers is that if BuzzFeed News hadn’t published the Steele dossier, then someone else would have. (Jake Tapper is gently placed under the bus here for having mentioned its existence on CNN — another bad idea — without specifics that afternoon.) If it was inevitably going to leak, then why should BuzzFeed be blamed for having done it first? This sort of logic, alas, demonstrates exactly where ethics break down and financial and ego gratification begins. For if it was inevitable that some other outlet would publish the dossier, then let that outlet take the reputational hit. Not only was it unconfirmable, it had already been partially debunked (by their news team’s own efforts, no less) prior to publication. But of course that wasn’t the real imperative here: BuzzFeed News simply wanted “a piece of the action” — the big scoop that would make them central (if upstart) players in the world of political journalism. When someone argues that “the people deserve to know,” more often than not it comes with an unwritten rider: “and they deserve to know via my website.”

The only ethical choice to make in this case would have been to remember Solzhenitsyn’s admonishment: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph; but not through me.” Instead, and specifically because of BuzzFeed News’ direct actions, there really isn’t much of a mainstream media left, at least in terms of public credibility. It’s a shame that BuzzFeed News is gone now. It’s a far greater shame that they took everybody else with them down the road to perdition.