Ben Smith, editor in chief of the popular news and entertainment website Buzzfeed, told staff in a memo on Wednesday that if they want to call leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a racist, they are free to do so.
Smith made the memo public on social media.
“We’ve gotten a question or two about how to talk about Donald Trump in social media — and whether calling him, say, a liar and a racist violates our policy asking that you not to be [sic] political partisans on social media,” Smith said. He said that the “goal” of the policy is to maintain fairness and also not to “undermine” the work of the site’s political reporters.
Smith said, however, Trump is “operating far outside the political campaigns to which those guidelines usually apply” and so it would be “entirely fair to call him a mendacious racist. …”
Smith’s memo comes in light of increasingly incendiary rhetoric from Trump, who said this week that Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S. as a precaution against more Islamic State-related terrorist attacks.
“[Trump is] out there saying things that are false and running an overtly anti-Muslim campaign,” Smith said, adding that Buzzfeed staff would not “get in trouble” for publicly calling Trump a racist.
“[T]here’s nothing partisan about accurately describing Donald Trump,” he said.
Trump’s comments on Muslims inspired public rebukes from commentators and elected officials, Democrat and Republican, including almost all of Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination.
He is leading national and early primary state-level polls for the nomination and ranks second in the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings.
