![]() ![]() Simpson’s firm is being berated at the moment but there are a lot of companies in Washington who do the same thing - namely produce political and business intelligence for paying clients - and they operate openly and everyone, including journalists, know who they are. I’m generally in favor of disclosure of documents behind stories and love to read the sort of salacious tales in the dossier, but I think it was wrong for BuzzFeed to publish it and the media company bears responsibility for this debacle, which has made the entire profession look even worse and generated sympathy for, of all people, Donald Trump. I have a lot of respect for Glenn, who was a great journalist and whose firm is known to produce excellent research. Let’s talk about the Trump Dossier, which I have written about previously, including here in a piece entitled “ BuzzFeed‘s Golden Showers.” I started that story by acknowledging that I’m a friend of Glenn Simpson, whose company reportedly produced the dossier via a subcontractor, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer. Sydney has said, “ Porn is preferable to BuzzFeed.” Also, once wrote an incredibly dishonest piece about me, which I’ll discuss below.) (Disclosure: BuzzFeed has never written anything about me as far as I can recall, but it did totally slime Washington Babylon‘s Senior Contributing Writer, Sydney Leathers, who has written about her vile experience with them here and here, for example. It also explains why his rag is known as The Second Least Trusted Name in News, ahead only of Occupy Democrats and behind Breitbart (which is actually not bad half the time). That doesn’t change the fact that it overwhelmingly publishes total shit and that the waste of money it spends doing so is alone enough to send to the metaphorical guillotine. Let’s get out of the way here the obvious fact that BuzzFeed has a few good reporters and periodically published good work that people will point to in its defense. (I’ll explain why it’s equally cynical below.) The website that mercilessly and effortlessly mocks BuzzFeed is the delightful - “Because all content deserves to go viral” - which is a far more reliable and accurate news outlet than Smith’s rag, which is best known for publishing harmless but stupid cat pictures and listicles, and the dangerous, stupid Trump Dossier, as well as the “ SHITTY MEDIA MEN list, which was equally cynical even if exposing shitty media men is an eminently good cause. How shitty do you have to be to have a whole website set up for the sole purpose of mocking you? Very shitty, indeed, and that brings me to the Hack List 2017 application of BuzzFeed and its editor-in-chief, aka a man as bland and boring as his name implies, a sort of Willy Loman or Caspar the Ghost of the editorial world. ![]()
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