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…
Open Thread: Buzzfeed Ben Smith’s Koch HabitPost + Comments (45)