For your temporary delection, Yasha Levine takes a big steamy NSFWCorp dump on journalist-for-rent Ben Smith:
… Visiting BuzzFeed.com, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The site’s entire “Politics” subsection was plastered with the name of Charles Koch, the world’s scariest billionaire-brother, who runs the biggest private company in America. His name boomed out from every corner. It crowned the top banner and sat prominently atop a column of featured posts, including a link to a page announcing BuzzFeed’s “Special Edition Immigration Summit” — an event proudly “sponsored by the Charles Koch Institute.”
But that wasn’t all! BuzzFeed had also set up an entire customized BuzzFeed page for the Charles Koch Institute. The page featured a fat diagonal banner introducing its sponsor as a place of “Dialogue & Discovery for Societal Well-Being and Progress,” and included Twitter feeds for both the Charles Koch Institute and its Economic Freedom Project. If readers followed the links, they’d be educated about the danger of Big Government and “The Disgusting Consequences of Plastic-Bag Bans”…
The tweet weirded a lot of people out, particularly news media types who, like me, had assumed BuzzFeed was a conduit for cat videos rather than Koch propaganda. Those who clicked further got really freaked. BuzzFeed’s immigration summit, which would be moderated by Editor in Chief Ben Smith, wasn’t just sponsored by the Kochs. It included a host of rabid rightwingers, racists and representatives from a half-dozen Koch-funded corporate frontgroups, including the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation — yep, that’s the same Heritage Foundation that just had to fire one of its immigration experts because he believes that Hispanics have genetically lower IQs than white folks….
Smith came to BuzzFeed from Politico, where he’d built up a reputation as a connected, credible reporter who reliably delivered scandalous DC insider scoops. BuzzFeed poached him to beef up the site’s news reporting operation and to turn it into a trusted source of news. With him at the helm, BuzzFeed was going to grow out of cat videos and link bait and mature into a sort of Huffington Post for the millennial demographic. And the HuffPost metaphor is not just lazy shorthand for ambition: Buzzfeed’s founder and CEO Jonah Peretti was one of Arianna Huffington’s key lieutenants at HuffPost, and HuffPost co-founder Ken Lerer is now the Chairman of BuzzFeed….
I’d never paid close attention to Smith before, but on scanning his record I saw a surprising consistency: every time the Koch cartel comes under serious criticism, every time someone tries to expose another layer of their toxic influence and political corruption, every time a news item threatens their well-guarded racket, Ben Smith is there, calmly and coolly redirecting traffic and reassuring people that everything is okay. His tactic is simple: downplay the importance of the news and deflect attention…
Of course, Ben Smith’s shilling isn’t restricted to the Kochs. He’s a Movement guy — and he’s there wherever there’s money and PR demand for his service.
Case-in-point: While at Politico, Ben Smith became widely seen in the news media world as a press flak for Michelle Rhee and her astroturf school privatization outfit StudentsFirst…. That’s the kind of PR defense racket Ben Smith was running under everyone’s nose at Politico, and it appears that he’s been setting up the same sort of operation at his new BuzzFeed home…
The signs of the baggerfication of BuzzFeed are many and multiplying fast….
Assuming I (and the coders at NSFWCorp) did this right, you have until 5pm Monday to click over and read the whole story. (Bonus points: Levine takes a swipe at Dave Weigel, and I know some of you hate Weigel, too.) Or you could just sign up for an NSFWCorp subscription, which IIRC is $7.95 a month, and get similar goodness delivered to your own personal mailbox every week…
Corner Stone
I personally don’t *hate* Weigel. I just think he’s an idiot clownshoe glibertarian who never grew up.
His insight is unremarkable, also, too.
Corner Stone
Actually, I’m forced to give some props for this:
Stuffed Dough
“like the “15 Delicious Things You Can Stuff In A Crescent Roll” post it created for Pillsbury”
I mean, who doesn’t want to know this?
Comrade Mary
Ignoring Buzzfeed. Waiting for the Preakness. No terrestrial Canadian channels are broadcasting it. The fuck?
Corner Stone
@Comrade Mary: Holy shit. Does this mean you’re in contact with some form of extra-terrestrial?
Fuck it. I’ve already started making a mountain out of mashed taters.
Just in case.
Comrade Mary
@Corner Stone:
Let’s just say this upcoming baby ain’t no haploid.
Mino
A scary look at the end-results of Chile’s 30-year experiment in privatizing public education. I’m sure we can implode even faster. washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/you_want_to_know_what_competit.php
Corner Stone
@Comrade Mary:
Thank Job. If it were a hapless then there’s a chance it coulda been mine. So, …whew!
Corner Stone
@efgoldman:
Errrr…”playoff” games for what, exactly?
SiubhanDuinne
@Comrade Mary: Wait whut congrats??
Comrade Mary
Aw, fuck.
Comrade Mary
@SiubhanDuinne: Heh. No, just a nod to my namesake. Not Jewish, not virginal, but a baby right now would still be one hell of a miracle.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: Now drop the mic and walk away.
Tyro
What I don’t get about Ben Smith is why he is so quick to jump to the Koch brothers’ defense at every possible opportunity. It is one thing to take money from and be connected to a variety of conservative groups, and Lord knows that the Kochs have a hand in so many of them. It’s another to serve an unpaid PR spokesman when you’re off the clock. You only do that when you are a true believer in their work.
PsiFighter37
I think Buzzfeed perfectly personifies what news media has become nowadays; that is, it’s full of stupid, pointless posts meant to entertain the mindless masses. And seriously – who the fuck ever took Ben Smith seriously? His blog during the 2008 primaries on Politico was a constant source of scornful amusement for me…he was as equally worthless as Halperin was/is.
I wonder how much those assclowns at Buzzfeed make for dumbing down the American public. Bet it pays decently.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Mary:
You’d better hope so, since normal humans are diploid. Our only haploid cells are gametes.
Brandon
This is wrong. BuzzFeed’s entire business model I’d unabashedly built on being link whores. Smith was hired for the sole purpose of generating link bait for the ’12 elections. His big niche as a political blogger/reporter was dregging up embarassing stories about Democrats from a liberal perspective, e.g. “Obama is going to call Romney ‘weird’ that means he’ll attack his religion which isn’t right”. Now that the elections are over, he needs a new niche because people that read BuzzFeed don’t care about the inner workings of Washington as much as they do about cats. Considering that Smith worked for Politico, it seems he doesn’t care who pays his freight. Internet advetising revenues are down because people hate it and never click the ads or use services like AdBlock, so he and BuzzFeed are casting a net to and fro for idiots to pay for his wonderful Park Slope lifestyle and the Koch’s stepped up to the plate. Smith is basically a Kinsley for the internet age. I know DougJ likes him but I just ignore him and I believe that pretty soon he’ll be about as important as Mr. Megan McArdle. Which is to say that he’ll be collecting his Koch booty but be rather ignored by most. Who cares about Ben Smith, I say.
imonlylurking
Agh! I just tried to post a link to a picture of the new dog and it thinks I’m spam! AL, can you free me??
NotMax
delectation
imonlylurking
i192.photobucket.com/albums/z45/imonlylurking/2013-05-18171847.jpg
SiubhanDuinne
@Comrade Mary: Your namesake has a lot to answer for :-)
But thanks for the clarification.
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman: Likewise. Never met a mic I didn’t lic.
Wait, that looks so wrong.
Roger Moore
@Comrade Mary:
Mary’s “Virgin” explanation made Joseph suspect upstairs neighbor.
imonlylurking
OK, I tried to post a link, FYWP thinks the link is SPAM and is blocking that post. When I hit ‘Reply’ to post 23, the picture appears! So, if you want to see Manny, try hitting reply to post 23.
I’m about to head out for a bit-we had plans, which my roommate is going to skip so she can stay home and gloat over Manny, but I will be happy to hear any advice anybody has for this big guy.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: See, this is why you should have dropped the mic and walked away.
/facepalm
BillinGlendaleCA
@Corner Stone:
There, FIFY
JPL
Maybe it’s time to ignore Glenn Greenwald too.
Brandon
I forgot to add that BuzzFeed are originators and innovaotors of “native advertising” so as a company they are constantly look for these types of opportunities to sell advertising in the guise of something else, primarly entertainment but now it appears that they also don’t mind cashing in on political money and who would blame them when you see how much cash Repulican “consultants” grifted from campaigns and donors during the last cycle. I don’t begrudge Ben Smith for parting fools with their money, I begrudge him for being an obvious link whore relying on a tired Kinsley-esque formula updated for the internet age.
JPL
The Koch brothers won’t be happy until we party like it’s 1890.
Corner Stone
@JPL: Never! His is an essential blog.
karen
Ben Smith is the first name on my new list “People Who Need To Be Blinded By Sporks.” This is a list of people whose non rabidness lets them pass for decent human beings when they really deserve to have their fingers broken and their larynx torn out. Not to be confused with “Need To Suffocate To Death.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve noticed Buzzfeed has been going for whatever anti-Obama spin they can out of Benghazi!, and Smith on Friday was saying that the talking points are a “problem”, I think was the word he used, though he didn’t say why, and no one asked. I find him almost indistinguishable from Chuck Todd or any other CW salad shooter.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore:Can you figure this one out? BBRoy of Great Britain had a very good wife.
Roger Moore
@JPL:
That beats a large chunk of the Republican party, who want to party like it’s 1862.
ChrisNYC
I’ve always heard that Ben Smith actually owns a part of Politico. A lawyer who is a libertarian and frequent donor to conservatives here told me that way back when Politico started. Smith’s father is a very very economic freedomy judge on the NY Court of Appeals (our highest court) so absolutely is hooked into conservative politics. Anyway, Ben Smith is not a shill for the Koch’s, he’s a fellow traveler. I think the Koch/Buzzfeed thing is to get the youngs on board for immi reform conservative style, which the Kochs support. The anti-immi conservatives are spitting mad about it.
Why anyone would think Smith is covering anything from a liberal perspective I have no idea since his blog was like the Drudge Report with frequent posts during 08. All “Obama’s a muslin!” Ha ha. Smith was big on the Bill Ayers beat. Ha. So funny.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
That sounds like a poor mnemonic for the resistor color codes. I like XKCD’s one about Glen Beck.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: You got it! Its not all that witty, but that’s what my lab instructor taught us.
lojasmo
I Have read exactly one half of one Ben Smith article, ever.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yeah, that’s just because any instructor these days would be fired for teaching “Black Boys rape our young girls, but Violet gives willingly”, which was one of the mnemonics I stumbled on when googling the topic. It’s hard to imagine that anyone ever would have taught students that.
MikeJ
@Roger Moore: I was taught that Bad Boys do the raping, not black.
jshooper
@JPL:
kindness
Not really shocking if you had paid attention to Ben Smith’s odd preferences for anything Republican. Well, I’d be more worried about the Koch’s owning the Tribune Corp than BuzzFeed. I’ll hand it to them though. They are obviously pulling down more coin now than they did with the cat vids.
central texas
How in hell could anyone take a former Politico staffer seriously? If you need a junior high version of recycled GOP talking points, then maybe you have the right man, but if you are trying to be any type of news organisation I can’t think of a worse source for hiring unless it is Michelle Malkin or World Nut Daily.
Lurking Canadian
@MikeJ: These days, the bad boys raCe our young girls but Violet Generally Wins.
Kay
I don’t “hate” Weigel but I do think Weigel’s stuff on voting rights is terrible. It would be fine if he presented himself as a partisan or ideological actor on voting rights, but he doesn’t.
He should.
He flat-out promoted True the Vote in 2012. True the Vote is the “Tea Party” group that were completely discredited in Ohio. Even (local and state) Republicans wanted them gone.
True the Vote have a documented record of voter suppression in Texas. That a national political reporter is promoting them, as Weigel has done, is damaging to his credibility.
He can believe that we have problems with “ballot security” (a term he uses), that’s fine, I think it’s nonsense, but he can believe it. But he should show his cards when he’s “covering” voting rights issues. He’s promoting a viewpoint and a “side”.
lee
smaller gov will help not harm our society I believe, writing that because dc is bought and sold. you should see all of the regulations in europe and even beautiful africa holding back people while all the press praises advances there. the left or say the third wayers are heavily promoting ‘community’ and universal common core for today’s kids for a reason. soft gentle kind control is still control. never ever trust bill gates, jobs didn’t. source niki rapaana.