BuzzFeed News — the news outlet that infamously published the so-called Steele Dossier, a.k.a. the Golden Showers Dossier, a.k.a. an anti-Trump smear document paid for by Hillary Clinton — is shutting down.
In a memo to employees, CEO Jonah Peretti said the decision to shutter the news brand follows struggles to generate a profit from the left-leaning social-media-centric website.
“We are reducing our workforce by approximately 15% today across our Business, Content, Tech and Admin teams, and beginning the process of closing BuzzFeed News,” said Peretti, who also runs the left-wing Huffington Post blog.
BuzzFeed, founded in 2006, became popular by publishing listicles, blogs about cats, and “Which Harry Potter Character Are You?” style quizzes.
In 2011, the company developed a news operation, BuzzFeed News, which would go on to win major journalism awards.
While there’s no disputing that journalists working under the brand uncovered some major scoops, BuzzFeed News will forever be known as the first journalistic operation to lend legitimacy to a Hillary Clinton-funded smear operation targeting then-candidate Donald Trump.
The “Steele Dossier” was a collection of unverified rumors and potential foreign disinformation that had circulated in political back channels for months. The document appeared to be raw intelligence about Trump, including claims that he was an asset of Russian intelligence.
The most notorious claim made in the dossier was that Russian intelligence had compromised Trump by obtaining secret recording of him being urinated on by prostitutes at a hotel room in Moscow.
Despite the lack of verification for almost everything in the dossier, it would fuel years of baseless conspiracy theories that hampered and undermined Trump’s presidency. The document led to countless inquiries against the president, including a Special Counsel investigation led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Mueller’s investigation was ultimately unable to conclude that there was any kind of “collusion” or conspiracy between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
Nonetheless, the dossier became something of a religious cornerstone of modern liberalism, with the guiding idea being that Trump is a Russian stooge.
Only after the dossier had sent shockwaves through American politics did it emerge that it was not an intelligence document. Instead, the dossier was revealed to be a campaign product paid for by anti-Trump political forces, including Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
In March 2022, the DNC and Clinton agreed to pay a $113,000 to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to settle a complaint that they improperly reported payments made for the dossier. The method of those improper payments helped intially to conceal their role in funding the smear document.
Although several outlets had filed reports based on information contained in the dossier, BuzzFeed News was the first major outlet to publish the document in full. They did so in a Jan. 10, 2017 story.
Editor-in-Chief Mark Schoofs, reporter Ken Bensinger, and reporter Miriam Elder all shared a byline on report.
Schoofs is now a professor of journalism at USC Annenberg.
Bensinger is now a reporter for the New York Times.
Elder is a freelance reporter.
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