This past Thursday, a BuzzFeed News report by jouralist Anthony Cormier and editor-in-chief Ben Smith claimed, based upon two anonymous sources, that President Donald Trump told his ex-lawyer Michael Cohen to lie about the timeline of talks on a Trump Tower Moscow project. Soon after, news spread all over the airwaves, with the word “impeach,” or a form of it, uttered a combined 200 times on CNN and MSNBC. CNN mentioned impeachment 82 times while MSNBC mentioned it a whopping 97 times. The media took the BuzzFeed story and ran with it, like hungry wolves looking for any kind of dirt on a President who, whether they like to admit or not, keeps upping their viewership and clicks on a daily basis. However, what happened next was completely shocking and unpredictable. Robert Mueller‘s Special Counsel Office, the very people investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, did the unthinkable: they debunked the Buzzfeed story. Mueller has turned into the poster boy for the resistance against Trump, with Trump’s most vehement haters all but showering Mueller with God-like praise ever since he launched his investigation back in May 17th of 2017. Terms like ”It’s Mueller-Time” have become synonymous with Twitterverse vocabulary. However, now, the man most of the left deemed to be have the most ethically-driven persona imaginable, even though he doesn’t deserve that reputation at all, stated that the story that MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and company thought would be the smoking gun to impeach President Trump was “not accurate.” Those were the special counsel’s exact words. The aforementioned dossier included the story that Trump was working as Russia’s puppet because they had video of him getting peed on by Russian prostitutes in the same Moscow hotel where Barack and Michelle Obama once stayed in. It was circulating among “the highest levels of American government and media” for months before BuzzFeed decided to publish it. In other words, well-known media outlets, I presume the usual warhorses like The New York Times, The Washington Post etc, had in their possession Christopher Steele’s dossier for weeks, maybe even months, before BuzzFeed decided to publish it. And so, you may ask, how come they never published it but BuzzFeed did? The answer is simple: they most likely didn’t believe or couldn’t corroborate any of the info that was included in the dossier. It says everything that not even the President of the United States was briefed on it. BuzzFeed didn’t care about all that. They lacked the journalistic integrity of those other media outlets, they saw it as click-bait and ran with it. Fact of the matter is this, the dossier was unsubstantiated information from anonymous and uncorroborated sources. In fact, it still hasn’t been corroborated in any way shape or form. Nearly 30 months after its publication there is no evidence that any of the events written by Steele in the dossier actually happened. The case against BuzzFeed news is further valued when you add into the equation that the lead reporter of the Tump/Cohen story, Jason Leopold, was accused as a “serial fabulist” by none other than the Columbia Journalism Review. Furthermore, in 2006 Leopold shook Washington D.C. in 2006 when he claimed that Karl Rove told “President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials” that he would be indicted for leaking Valerie Plame’s name to the media. Leopold much like this latest ‘fake news” fiasco, promised that he had multiple sources that “confirmed Rove’s indictment is imminent. Of course, the “sources” wanted to remain anonymous. Columbia Journalism Review: Oh, and it gets much worse. The day after the story broke, the second reporter of the BuzzFeed story told CNN that he hadn’t “personally” seen up the claim that Trump told Cohen to lie in front of congress. This then had Leopold calling his colleague a “liar,” claiming to MSNBC that he had seen documents. Who would you seriously believe in a case like this? Rowman & Littlefield, the book’s publisher, cancelled production just before it went to press after one of the book’s sources threatened to sue. That source, Steven Maviglio, who was a spokesman for California Governor Gray Davis, said that Leopold “just got it completely wrong” when recounting how he allegedly told Leopold that he “might have broken the law by investing in energy companies using inside information.” BuzzFeed is “popular” media, not “reputable” media. Their news department is in the business of making in-depth reporting payed for by that clickbait money. The fact of the matter is this: putting Donald Trump in any of your headlines these days can be qualified as clickbait. BuzzFeed is in the business of clickbait, no matter how ethically-driven their journalists may be. Ben Smith is in the business of making money and growing the BuzzFeed news division into some kind of money-making endeavor. The fact that many news organizations have now decided that Smith’s enterprise is a reliable source for news makes it all the more damaging for the media’s claim that they don’t produce “fake news.” Contribute Hire me
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