This week, President Trump’s administration continued to fire verbal salvos at the media, following press secretary Sean Spicer’s remarks from just after the inauguration. Trump himself acknowledged a “running war” with the media, while chief strategist Steve Bannon demanded the press “keep its mouth shut and listen for awhile” (ironically) in comments to the New York Times.
Most journalists do well to keep their biases in check and ably perform their jobs. Going back decades, however, presidential administrations (especially Republican ones) have detected a lack of fairness from the press and responded accordingly. The resulting First Amendment hysteria tends to be much ado about nothing. The unsurprising, mildly antagonistic relationship between the press and the president is old news.
And then there’s BuzzFeed.
In the wake of its nakedly partisan, journalistically-shoddy dump of a wholly unverified dossier 10 days before Trump was due to be sworn in as president, BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith made the rounds on cable news shows attempting to justify the editorial call he’d made.
Smith was unable to extricate himself from the fact that he’d published unsubstantiated hearsay not at all dissimilar from the sort of “fake news” elite media was decrying in the days and weeks following Trump’s election. Spicer countered, characterizing the site as a “left-wing blog” at a press conference. It wasn’t an unfair charge, given the implication of the document’s unproven claims and BuzzFeed’s editorial standards guide regarding several issues it feels “do not have two sides.”
More recently, BuzzFeed had a revealing reaction to President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban.” With many conservatives joining liberals in criticism of the president’s executive order as an Islamic State recruitment tool rooted in paranoia, BuzzFeed took the unhelpful step of conducting a corporate witch hunt, seemingly compelling large companies to publicly speak out against the action, while shaming those that have not. (The post is continually updating.)
There’s room for critique of Trump’s executive order, but BuzzFeed doesn’t do anyone a favor by giving the president a partisan target where an objective critic belongs. Trump’s elevation to the presidency is a response from Americans tired of being lectured about how to think and act during the Obama years, while their concerns about security and the economy fell on deaf ears. This administration, by contrast, is animated by crafting genuine, if imperfect responses to those concerns.
BuzzFeed has long asserted the mere presence of such anxieties is wrong, racist and illegitimate, both before and after defending an ethically questionable publishing decision under the guise of letting readers make an informed choice for themselves.
Trump won in 2016 by railing against precisely this sort of narrative. He’ll cruise in 2020 if it continues.
Tamer Abouras (@iamtamerabouras) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a writer and editor from Williamstown, N.J. If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
