Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith on Wednesday was forced to defend his outlet’s decision to publish an entire dossier of unsubstantiated lurid claims about President Trump.
In an interview with CNN contributor and former Obama administration official David Axelrod, Smith said he believed Buzzfeed’s audience was smart enough to view the information with skepticism and that the dossier shouldn’t have been left exclusively in the hands of journalists, lawmakers and intelligence officials.
“Why did you decide to do it,” Axelrod asked Smith. “Was it, ‘Well, this is interesting. This will get clicks’?”
Smith admitted that Buzzfeed, which published the document in January, was unable to verify the claims in it but that he wanted to be transparent with his readers.
“The criticism was that you couldn’t verify any of the facts in them,” said Axelrod.
“I do think from our perspective our responsibility is to our audience,” Smith replied. “And the question we’re asking is not so much, what will other reporters think or what will Donald Trump think. But if you’re a reader of Buzzfeed, do we think you can’t handle this?”
Smith’s comments were largely in line with a column he wrote for the New York Times in January that defended his publication.
In the column, he said modern-era journalists may need to publish “unverified information in a transparent way.”
