BuzzFeed just added ammo to the war on free press

BuzzFeed just made every reporter’s job even harder. By recklessly publishing an unverified intelligence report filled with humiliating assertions and factual mistakes about President-elect Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, they handed the ball to Trump and his cronies who dismissed the entire dossier as “fake news.”

At his first press conference since winning the election, Trump trashed BuzzFeed as a “failing pile of garbage” and got into a shouting match with CNN’s Jim Acosta, blasting the cable network as “fake news” and refusing to take a question from the reporter.

CNN had run its own, far more responsible report Tuesday about the existence of the dossier and its circulation among government officials and members of the media, but did not disclose its contents.

For Trump fans who are already trained to bash media reports that the President-elect doesn’t agree with, the entire situation will of course reinforce their distrust and outright hatred of mainstream media.

A CNN representative defended the network’s decision to offer its own, well-vetted version of the dossier story shortly after Trump spoke on Wednesday.

“CNN’s decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the operations of our government is vastly different than BuzzFeed’s decision to publish unsubstantiated memos,” CNN officials said in a statement.

“The Trump team knows this. They are using BuzzFeed’s decision to deflect from CNN’s reporting, which has been matched by the other major news organizations.

“We are fully confident in our reporting. Given that members of the Trump transition team have so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate.”

BuzzFeed has also defended its decision. In a staff email Tuesday, which he posted on Twitter, BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith wrote that while the dossier was riddled with errors and unverified, BuzzFeed has “always erred on the side of publishing.”

“In this case, the document was in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media,” he added.

Reporters have spent months trying to verify or falsify its contents and have been unable to do either.

“Publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017,” Smith explained.

Meanwhile, for all of Smith’s earnestness, it didn’t take long for BuzzFeed to try and profit from Trump’s rage. Within hours of the President-elect’s swipe at the website it was selling $30 T-shirts with the words: “Failing Pile of Garbage.”

Journalism, a job that was already an uphill battle, is about to become more difficult than mountain climbing.