You have probably heard by now that Buzzfeed broke several codes of journalistic integrity and published wild accusations against Trump that were completely unverified.
In other words, they sacrificed their integrity in order to attack a political candidate they didn’t like.
Not exactly the most honorable thing in the world.
They have been getting absolutely destroyed by their colleagues in the media and even liberals like Chuck Todd agreed with Donald Trump’s conclusion that Buzzfeed had published “fake news”.
There are many reasons to doubt Buzzfeed’s report.
Here is Jim Geraghty breaking down a few of them.
From National Review:
Last night, in response to one of the memo’s claims, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen denied that he had ever been to Prague and posted a photo of his passport. Elaina Plott confirms: “Two USC baseball sources confirm for me that Michael Cohen and his son visited campus on August 29th, time report places him in Prague.”
Wait, there’s more, from the Wall Street Journal: “The FBI has found no evidence that he traveled to the Czech Republic, where the meeting allegedly took place in August of last year, officials said.”
Various items in the memo that jumped out at me as being odd:
— Advertisement — The author uses the term “e-mail,” not “email”. This is generally the older way of referring to electronic mail.
The author refers to “US” not “U.S.” Some pages have hand-written numbering in the corner, some do not.
These are photographs of the document, not scans. On pages 10, 11 and some others you can see the shadow of the hand and (presumably) the cell phone used to take the pictures.
Two explosive but implausible claims on page 7. First, “PUTIN motivated by fear and hatred of Hillary CLINTON.” Hatred, I guess I can see, but fear? Really? You think he was afraid of what a Clinton administration would do to Russia? After Hillary’s State Department signed off on a deal that gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States?
You can read more of the overwhelming evidence in the rest of Jim’s piece but you get the idea.
This was nothing more than a smear from the very start.
And people wonder why no one takes the media seriously?
Sad day for journalism.