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Buzzfeed

investigative reporter/ press pending w/ TDbeast

peretti ucsc alum

mit media lab

uber1

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-6800

a corp that hired pvt security, sold rights to another corp oann, which is being sued for libel but raising dark $ for audit?? ~ trans b/c proproetary, NDA's

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/arizona-audit-oan/

ah

no twt

With devotees of former Present Donald Trump currently conducting a blatantly partisan audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Arizona, One America News Network has been offering glowing coverage of that event. Journalist Sarah Mimms, in an article published by BuzzFeed News on May 18, examines the connection between OAN employees and the audit — which was ordered by Republicans in the Arizona State Senate and is being conducted by the Florida-based firm Cyber Ninjas, whose founder Doug Logan is a far-right Trump supporters who pushed the former president's false claims of voter fraud in 2020.

"Two reporters at One America News, a far-right TV station, are running a dark money organization that they say is helping fund a counter-reality 'audit' that former President Donald Trump and his supporters believe will overturn Arizona's 2020 election results in his favor," Mimms explains. "What's more, one of those reporters, Christina Bobb, is the network's most visible correspondent covering the very 'audit' that she is helping scare up money for on OAN's airwaves, while she and the network enjoy unique access to the process where private contractors and volunteers are searching for fraud and have examined ballots for nonexistent watermarks and 'bamboo fibers.' OAN has a deal as the exclusive livestream partner for the audit."

Bobb hosts a program on OAN called "Weekly Briefing," and Mimms points out that on April 9, she tweeted that she had founded a group devoted to promoting the audit: Voices and Votes. According to Bobb, the group raised $150,000 that day.

"According to its website," Mimms observes, "Voices and Votes is run by Bobb as the CEO and president, as well as OAN's White House correspondent Chanel Rion, who is listed as the chief marketing officer, and Courtland Sykes, Rion's fiancé, who is listed as the group's chief operations officer."[twt dANGEROUSLY UNDERFUNDED"

although the Maricopa County audit is being slammed as a joke by Trump's critics on both the left and the right, legitimate audits or recounts of the election results in Arizona have been conducted — and they showed that now-President Joe Biden won Arizona fair and square. Biden's Arizona victory was reported by the decision desk at Fox News on Election Night 2020 and was later certified by conservative Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

Mimms explains why the current Maricopa County audit is a "farce," noting, "It's important to pause here and note that the audit itself is not really an audit at all. What happened is the Arizona Senate, which is controlled by 16 Republicans to 14 Democrats, sent a subpoena to Maricopa County — which was upheld by a judge, forcing the county to hand over 2.1 million ballots,as well as vote tabulators and a bunch of election data. The 'audit,' which is being run by outside contractors hired by the Senate, will have no force or effect on the 2020 election results; Joe Biden is president, andArizona already did an audit of Maricopa County in the presidential race and didn't find a single ballot discrepancy.The county itself, which is not involved in the current Senate audit either, also hired two independent firms to review its elections equipment in February, which came back clean as well."

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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahmimms/arizona-election-results-oan-reporters-fundraising

two reporters at One America News, a far-right TV station, are running a dark money organization that they say is helping fund a counter-reality “audit” that former president Donald Trump and his supporters believe will overturn Arizona’s 2020 election results in his favor.

What’s more, one of those reporters, Christina Bobb, is the network’s most visible correspondent covering the very “audit” that she is helping scare up money for on OAN’s airwaves, while she and the network enjoy unique access to the process where private contractors and volunteers are searching for fraud and have examined ballots for nonexistent watermarks and “bamboo fibers.” OAN has a deal as the exclusive livestream partner for the audit.

:{

Christina Bobb hosting her show Weekly Briefing on OAN pix]

}:

Bobb has not made a secret of her work to keep that audit going. On April 9, she tweeted that she’d founded a group called Voices and Votes to help the Republican-led Arizona Senate complete its audit of the vote in Maricopa County. The group reached its $150,000 fundraising goal that same day,according to Bobb, and she’s continued soliciting money for the audit since, both on Twitter and on air.

According to its website, Voices and Votes is run by Bobb as the CEO and president, as well as OAN’s White House correspondent Chanel Rion, who is listed as the chief marketing officer, and Courtland Sykes, Rion’s fiancé, who is listed as the group’s chief operations officer. The group’s website also says that Voices and Votes is registered as a 501(c)(4) organization, meaning its donors will never be made public.

That also means that the group will never have to give an accounting of how much money it has raised or where that money actually went. Bobb did not respond when BuzzFeed News asked how much Voices and Votes has brought in, but insisted that all of the money raised “has gone to the auditors.”Cyber Ninjas, the firm leading the audit, and its CEO did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether it had received money from Voices and Votes.

twt]

it’s important to pause here and note that the audit itself is not really an audit at all. What happened is the Arizona Senate, which is controlled by 16 Republicans (to 14 Democrats) sent a subpoena to Maricopa County, which was upheld by a judge, forcing the county to hand over 2.1 million ballots, as well as vote tabulators and a bunch of election data. The “audit,” which is being run by outside contractors hired by the Senate, will have no force or effect on the 2020 election results; Joe Biden is president, and Arizona already did an audit of Maricopa County in the presidential race and didn’t find a single ballot discrepancy. The county itself, which is not involved in the current Senate audit either, also hired two independent firms to review its elections equipment in February, which came back clean as well.

On Monday, Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors, which is majority Republican, wrote a scathing letter to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, calling the audit a threat to democracy and telling her to end it. “The Arizona Senate is not acting in good faith, has no intention of learning anything about the November 2020 General Election, but is only interested in feeding the various festering conspiracy theories that fuel the fundraising schemes of those pulling your strings. ... The result is that the Arizona Senate is held up to ridicule in every corner of the globe and our democracy is imperiled,” the board wrote.

But, as Bobb told her OAN audience a few weeks ago, the new Senate audit will “unravel the Democrats' schemes from 2020” and Trump “will determine our next House and Senate” — whatever that means. In the same segment, she backtracked slightly, saying that “maybe” the audit would show there was no fraud. “Maybe,” she said, laughing, “Biden legitimately won Arizona.”

Needless to say, no legitimate newsroom would allow its reporters to fundraise for an actual news event they’re covering. Nonetheless, Bobb has continued soliciting donations for Voices and Votes, actively fundraising to keep the story she is covering going. Bobb tweeted as recently as April 28 that the audit isn’t “fully funded yet” and asked followers to “please help get this audit across the finish line!” That weekend she dedicated segments of her Weekly Briefing show to her reporting from the audit and an interview with the Arizona Republican Party chair.

[twt]

after reaching her $150,000 goal, Bobb announced the group’s “second pledge,” this time without naming a monetary goal, tweeting, “Let’s get this audit funded!” with a donation link.

Just a week later, the Arizona Republican Party tweeted that OAN would be the exclusive livestreamer of the audit. The network now runs nine cameras 24/7 showing contractors examining the 2.1 million ballots. And Bobb herself has been there reporting on it for OAN the whole time, posting photos of herself alongside some of the architects of the audit and thanking those “true Patriots” for making it happen.

Bobb and OAN are getting access to the audit that no other news outlets have, reporters on the ground say. While reporters at other Arizona and national media outlets have had to rotate through a few select spots to cover the audit, Bobb and a writer with the Gateway Pundit, another pro-Trump outlet, are exempted from that pool. She reported live from the coliseum where the audit is taking place every day last week.

Bobb disputed that she and OAN had received any “special treatment” in an email to BuzzFeed News on behalf of Voices and Votes. While she acknowledged that she had different access than members of the Arizona press corps, she said her access to cover the audit depended on “availability.” “I have been denied access at certain times and had to go on different days or at different times,” she wrote. “I am not permitted to attend whenever I want.”

Bobb also noted that OAN is not “in any way” affiliated with her fundraising group “other than allowing me to mention my efforts on air” and said the network “has not received anything as a result of Voices and Votes' donations.”

“I have openly and honestly disclosed all my efforts on air, and have handled the funds exactly as I said that I would,” she said.

Rion did not respond to requests for comment. Fann, the Senate president, deferred questions about OAN’s access to former Arizona secretary of state Ken Bennett, who is serving as an audit liaison. Bennett did not respond to multiple requests.

OAN correspondent Chanel Rion asks then-president Donald Trump a question during a White House press briefing on April 6, 2020. pix ]

Bobb noted last week that Arizona senators won’t say what would happen if the audit does find “some type of fraud” — which won’t happen, because legitimate audits have already been conducted — and that senators have said this audit is about promoting trust in future elections, not about 2020. “They would not commit to saying that they would overturn anything, but they did say they were certainly taking a look at it,” she said, citing anonymous Arizona legislators.

OAN did not respond to requests for comment on the conflict between Bobb and Rion’s work for their network and their affiliation with Voices and Votes or whether the network has a conflict-of-interest policy.

The audit itself has so far been a farce, enough so that one of the Republican state senators who voted for it told the New York Times that in practice the audit is “ridiculous” and “makes us look like idiots.” At one point, workers were checking for any traces of bamboo in the ballot paper in a frankly stupid and racist attempt to test a conspiracy theory that thousands of illegal ballots were shipped in from Asia. They were shining UV lights on ballots for reasons that weren’t really explained by officials at the time but seemed to line up with a QAnon-adjacent theory that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security had watermarked real ballots so the Democrats’ fraudulent ones could be easily found. That prompted the Maricopa County Elections Department to publicly post a fact check: “There are NO watermarks on Maricopa County ballots.”

Then there’s the firm that the Arizona Senate hired to run the whole thing, Cyber Ninjas, owned by Doug Logan. As the Arizona Mirror reported, Logan repeatedly posted conspiracies about the election being stolen and falsehoods about Dominion Voting Systems on his since-deleted Twitter account. Logan is also the author of a three-page document of “election fraud facts” posted to former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s website intended for senators to use in explaining why they would object to the election results and try to give the White House back to Trump, the Mirror also reported. Logan, it's worth noting, stood behind the document in a statement to the Mirror.

His firm and three others are now paying contractors $15 an hour and bringing in volunteers to examine the ballots — among them was a former state representative who lost his 2020 race and was also filmed on the Capitol steps during the Jan. 6 insurrection. With the process taking way longer than expected, a big bill is coming and it’s unclear who is paying it.

The Arizona Senate only gave $150,000 in taxpayer money to the project, which they knew was a laughable sum for an election audit of this size, and is allowing Cyber Ninjas to raise the rest from whoever. And several prominent Trump supporters have stepped up. Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who has peddled some of the more out-there election conspiracy theories, kicked in $1 million and has his own dark money group raising funds, per the Arizona Republic. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell told the Daily Beast that he had donated. And Lin Wood, an attorney who filed a bunch of lawsuits trying to overturn the election, told Talking Points Memo and confirmed to BuzzFeed News that his 501(c)(4) #FightBack had donated to Bobb’s Voices and Votes.

Meanwhile, reporters at other outlets who are not paying for the audit had to fight to cover it at all. At one point, the Arizona Senate told media that they could only have access to the audit if they signed up for at least five six-hour shifts as volunteer observers. To be clear, they wouldn’t then get to report on the audit, their only access under this plan was as workers for the audit they were trying to cover. And, the Senate said, they could not bring laptops or cellphones or even a paper and pen with them. “People observing even executions are allowed to bring their notebooks in with them,” Arizona Capitol Times reporter Julia Shumway, who has since covered the audit, told BuzzFeed News.

Shumway and her colleagues eventually did get press access to the audit, but only after the Arizona Mirror, the Arizona Republic, and the Arizona Broadcasters Association got lawyers involved. Now, reporters have to pool their resources with one print journalist, one videographer, and one photographer allowed into the audit at any given time, and they must be escorted, even to the bathroom, Shumway said. Meanwhile, Bobb and a reporter for the Gateway Pundit can report outside of the pool.

When asked about the discrepancy in treatment for OAN and the Gateway Pundit and every other news outlet, Fann told PBS that OAN was given livestreaming rights to the audit because “they have covered this from the beginning. They are one of the firms that came in right off the bat and said we will help do all the 24-hour video so everybody has access to this 24/7, that they wanted to be a part of it. So I don’t think that’s a bad idea. If there was another network had come up and said that first, we would have went with them probably.”

She later accused other, unnamed reporters of trespassing and said they had worried about too many members of the media “walk[ing] all over the place and tak[ing] pictures.” Asked if she had any similar concerns about OAN, she responded simply, “No, huh-uh. Nope.”

UPDATE

May 18, 2021, at 2:13 p.m.

The Arizona Mirror, the Arizona Republic, and the Arizona Broadcasters Association brought the legal fight to get reporters access to the audit. A previous version of this story was unclear on who led the legal effort.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/oan-host-christina-bobb-has-been-helping-rudy-giuliani-with-trumps-legal-efforts

as it seeks to overturn the election results and keep President-elect Joe Biden from assuming power, President Donald Trump’s legal team, fronted by lawyers such as Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and until recently Sidney Powell, has been operating out of a conference room at the 2020 campaign’s downsized headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Aiding Trump’s so-called “elite strike force” team in that effort has been an on-air host at One America News Network (OAN), a vociferously pro-Trump cable-news channel that has been endorsed by the president.

Christina Bobb chairs the Weekly Briefing on OAN. She’s also a lawyer by trade.And in recent days, she’s been spotted by several Trump officials at their office in the conference room with the rest of the president’s team. Her presence has caused a bit of confusion among actual campaign staff, who wondered if she was there to embed with the Trump legal “strike force” as a reporter.

But according to multiple knowledgeable sources, Bobb has actually been assisting the president’s long, long, long-shot legal effort—effectively taking on a secondary role as a pro-Trump lawyer even as she continues her job as a pro-Trump TV host.

“Christina is an attorney and has helped with some legal work in her personal capacity and not on behalf of OAN,” Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Trump and his 2020 campaign, told The Daily Beast on Monday afternoon.

ONE AMERICA, UNDER TRUMP

Justin Baragona

Such an arrangement would be absolutely unthinkable in other newsrooms. But OAN’s editorial stance is so committedly pro-Trump that it almost, almost makes sense. Bobb certainly hasn’t hidden her feelings for the president or his current legal endeavors. Even when compared to the output of other OAN on-air staff, she has shown intense commitment to the premise that Trump actually won the election that he clearly lost.

Bobb’s Twitter feed is clogged with baseless claims of fraud and grand proclamations about Trump’s chances of overturning the election results and securing a second presidential term. During on-air segments, she has suggested that there was indeed a “massive amount” of voter fraud both in Trump’s election and potentially in others, including former Republican candidate Kim Klacik’s race in Maryland (she lost her race in a heavily Democratic district by over 40 percentage points).

In recent segments about the Trump campaign’s legal efforts, Bobb has not disclosed that she has been an informal consultant to those very same efforts.

During her weekend show, she interviewed Ellis—her current legal collaborator—about recent developments in the campaign’s challenges to election results in several states. But she did not note during the segment that she had any sort of role in the campaign’s legal fight. On Twitter, Bobb has cheered on the Trump legal team, even praising its performance in a press conference in which such wild conspiracies were spun about voting corruption that the president himself reportedly thought it too far fetched. Once more, she never disclosed that she has been working with that team.

Since Friday, Bobb has not responded to multiple messages seeking comment on this story. Reached by phone on Monday, network founder and president Charles Herring declined to comment on his employee’s activity with the Trump legal team, requesting The Daily Beast email him instead. He did not respond to an email.

Bobb’s cozy relationship with the president’s legal team may be the most brazen example of the cozy relationship Trump and his campaign have maintained with members of conservative media. But it’s hardly the first.

As The Daily Beast reported in 2018, the president has regularly consulted with Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs, who would call in to private Oval Office meetings and advise the White House informally on various policies. The president also regularly canvases his friends in conservative media about administration policy and messaging, phoning Fox News stars like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, and hosting Fox personality Laura Ingraham at the White House to advocate for the use of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.

NO LONGER OURS

Lachlan Markay

Other news networks have allowed their personalities to dip their toes into partisan political activity, though to varying degrees. During the 2020 election, CNN contributor Ana Navarro hosted a virtual fundraiser for Biden, a move that the network said did not violate their policies because she was not paid. High-profile on-air personality Van Jones also advised Jared Kushner on the police-reform executive order signed by Trump earlier this year.

To avoid conflicts of interest, news networks generally do not allow their on-air contributors to endorse or run for office or work on political campaigns or political action committees while appearing as a paid analyst. Over the past month, since Joe Biden’s election, MSNBC has cut ties with at least four contributors who have taken advisory roles in the president-elect’s transition effort.

But OAN stands out in its on-air fealty to Trump, even when compared to the standards observed by its competitors in pro-MAGA right-wing media.

Two days before Election Day, The Daily Beast asked OAN president Charles Herring if the network would call the election for Trump if the president, as he had planned to do, declared victory preemptively. Herring responded by messaging a lengthy statement that included, “OAN is a subscriber to the Associated Press’ Votecast data and Votecount elections results technology," and that for "Winner Projections," the network "will be utilizing primarily Associated Press’ Votecast data and Votecount." (The statement also references the “expert analysis” provided by “Christina Bobb, host of Weekly Briefing.”)

In propping up an alternate media universe in which Trump didn’t lose, OAN is ignoring its own system of data collection. The AP has long since called the 2020 presidential election for Biden.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trumps-history-libel-and-defamation-lawsuits-silence-critics

...

Trump has vowed to seek revenge on BuzzFeed for publishing the Steele Dossier almost a year ago. Now, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is suing BuzzFeed for defamation.

BuzzFeed stands by its decision to publish the dossier. Katie Rayford, a BuzzFeed spokesperson, told AlterNet: "The dossier is, and continues to be, the subject of active investigations by Congress and intelligence agencies. It was presented to two successive presidents, and has been described in detail by news outlets around the world. Its interest to the public is obvious. This is not the first time Trump's personal lawyer has attacked the free press, and we look forward to defending our First Amendment rights in court."

...

no link

trump loves both suing and threatening lawsuits over any perceived slight, whether it’s an artist who depicted the president nude with a micropenis, or an analyst who (correctly) predicted the Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino would fail. The president has a long history of using bogus claims of libel and defamation to bully opponents and tie them up in court. The American Bar Association has called him a "libel bully," but was afraid to make the claim public because its lawyers feared Trump might sue in retaliation. There’s even a nifty online counter tracking the number of hours since Trump last threatened a journalist or critic. According to the makers of the counter, he’s threatened to sue at least 45 times since the 1980s.

As outrageous as some of Trump’s claims are, being sued for defamation or libel is no laughing matter. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, not to mention the opportunity cost of time spent in court, plus the emotional strain and reputation damage that can occur during a complicated lawsuit. For someone as powerful as Trump, who can hand these burdens off to someone else, lawsuits are an easy way to threaten anyone who challenges him.

Here are some of the least credible and most obnoxious lawsuits Trump has followed through on in an effort to silence his opponents.

  1. The Chicago Tribune

Back in 1984, Trump sued Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Gapp for a staggering $500 million after the writer mocked a proposed Trump building in the New York financial district. Gapp called the building plan unrealistic and “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city”—and Trump was not having it.

The case was tossed out by a particularly sardonic judge, whose full statement is a delight to read. In Gapp’s defense, the building design was totally silly, as you can see below.

  1. Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien

In 2005, Trump sued his own biographer, Timothy O’Brien, for writing in TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald that the real estate mogul was worth only $150 to $250 million. Trump insisted he was worth at least $5 billion, and took the case to court. Seriously. A judge ultimately dismissed the case. After he lost, Trump bragged to the Washington Post: "I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees but they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make [O’Brien’s] life miserable, which I’m happy about."

  1. Miss USA contestant Sheena Monnin

In 2012, pageant contestant Sheena Monnin complained on Facebook that the Miss USA contest Trump oversaw was "fraudulent," "trashy" and "rigged.” Trump sued her for $5 million in response and won an arbitration award. Trump attorney Michael Cohen later bragged that he and Trump had “destroyed” Monnin’s life.

  1. The Daily Beast

Trump’s team sued the Daily Beast in 2015 after it published an article about Ivana Trump’s accusations of rape against her ex-husband. On that occasion, attorney Cohen, who headed many of these lawsuits, made it perfectly clear that the suit was intended to punish anyone who smeared Trump’s name.

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen told the Daily Beast. “So I’m warning you, tread very f---ing lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f---ing disgusting. You understand me?”

“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up…for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet…you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” he said.

  1. Union workers at Trump Hotel Las Vegas

In 2015, Trump sued the Culinary Union and Bartenders Union at his own Las Vegas hotel for printing “misleading” flyers that suggested Trump himself did not stay at Trump Hotel Las Vegas because the rooms weren’t luxurious enough. At the time, employees at the hotel were in the midst of efforts to unionize.

A union spokesperson told the Hollywood Reporter: "This lawsuit is an effort to distract from the unionizing effort...There are over 500 workers who are fighting for justice and respect at the Trump Hotel Las Vegas.”

  1. Univision

Trump's long and well-publicized feud with Univision has resulted in threats of several lawsuits, including one against programming chief Alberto Ciurana for posting an Instagram with Trump’s face spliced next to Dylann Roof’s. So basically, Trump threatened to sue over a meme calling out his blatant racism.

It's no wonder Univision's lawyers called Trump "thin-skinned" in response. Their memorandum to dismiss the suit nails Trump's tactics of intimidation perfectly: "There is a rich irony to Trump’s cry that he is the target of an effort to 'suppress [his] right to free speech,' when it is Trump himself—a candidate for president—who is attempting to invoke the coercive power of the courts to punish a citizen’s speech."

==

Koch Inst partner buzzfeed events 351 "fellows"

wikifluff

BuzzFeed is an American internet news media company. It describes itself as the "social news and entertainment company . . . redefining online advertising with its social, content-driven publishing technology . . . provides the most shareable breaking news."[3] BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 in New York City as a viral lab by Jonah Peretti, the company has grown into a global[4] media and technology company providing coverage on a variety of topics including politics, DIY, animals and business. In late 2011, Ben Smith of Politico was hired as Editor-in-Chief, in a move to expand the site into serious journalism, long-form and reportage while maintaining its popular fun and entertainment-oriented content.[5]

Contents

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History

:{

In August 2014, BuzzFeed raised $50 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, more than doubling previous rounds of funding.[6] The site was reportedly valued at around $850 million by Andreessen Horowitz.[6] BuzzFeed generates its advertising revenue through native advertising that matches its own editorial content, and does not rely on banner ads.[7]}:Funding

Acquisitions

Buzzfeed's first acquisition was in 2012 when the company purchased Kingfish Labs, a startup initially focused on optimizing Facebook ads.[8]

On October 28, 2014, Buzzfeed announced its next acquisition, taking hold of Torando Labs. The Torando team was to become Buzzfeed's first data engineering team.[9]

Content

BuzzFeed produces daily content, in which the work of staff reporters, contributors, syndicated cartoon artists, and its community are featured. Popular formats on the website include lists and quizzes. Whereas BuzzFeed was initially focused exclusively on such viral content, according to the New York Times "it added more traditional content, building a track record for delivering breaking news and deeply reported articles" in the years up to 2014.[1] In that year, BuzzFeed deleted over 4000 early posts, "apparently because, as time passed, they looked stupider and stupider", as observed by The New Yorker.[10]

The site’s content is divided into 28 sections: News, Buzz, Life, Entertainment, Quizzes, Videos, Animals, Beauty, Books, Business, Big Stories, Celebrity, DIY, Food, Geeky, Gif Feed, Ideas, LGBT, Music, Parents, Politics, Rewind, Sports, Style, Tech, Travel, Weekend, and World.[11]

BuzzFeed consistently ranked at the top of NewsWhip's "Facebook Publisher Rankings" from December 2013 to April 2014, until The Huffington Post entered the position.[12][13][14][15][16]

Video

BuzzFeed Video produces original content, and its production studio and team is based in Los Angeles. Since hiring Ze Frank in 2012, BuzzFeed Video has produced shows including "The Creep Series" and "Fun Facts." In August 2014, the company announced a new division, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, which may produce feature-length films.[1]As of April 11, 2015, BuzzFeed Video's YouTube had garnered over 2.5 billion views and more than 5.4 million subscribers.[17]

BuzzFeed also has many other channels other than “BuzzFeedVideo” on YouTube that dedicate content to specific categories, like “BuzzFeedBlue”, “BuzzFeedYellow”, and “BuzzFeedCentral”. For example, BuzzFeedYellow has “tasty short, fun, inspiring, funny, interesting videos from the BuzzFeed crew”, while BuzzFeedViolet has “the good kind of awkward. Short relatable videos”.[18]

Community

On July 17, 2012, humor website McSweeney's Internet Tendency published a satirical piece entitled "Suggested BuzzFeed Articles",[19] prompting BuzzFeed to create many of the suggestions.[20][21][22][23] BuzzFeed listed McSweeney's as a "Community Contributor."[20] The post subsequently received more than 350,000 page views,[21] prompted BuzzFeed to ask for user submissions[20][24] and received media attention.[21][22][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] Subsequently, the website launched the "Community" section in May 2013 to enable users to submit content. Users are initially limited to publishing only one post per day, but can increase their submission capacity by raising their "Cat Power",[32] described on the BuzzFeed website as "an official measure of your rank in BuzzFeed's Community." A user's Cat Power increases as they achieve greater prominence on the site.[33]

The Trending section of BuzzFeed is denoted by a white zig-zagged arrow pointing upwards on a red button. This section includes the two tabs “Trending Now” and “Top Posts This Week”. In “Top Posts This Week”, tops posts are determined by the number of views a post has received during the past week.[34]

Technology and social media

BuzzFeed receives the majority of its traffic by creating content that is shared on social media websites. The site continues to test and track their custom content with an in-house team of data scientists and external-facing “social dashboard.” Staff writers are ranked by views on an internal leaderboard. In 2014, BuzzFeed received 75% of its views from links on social media outlets such as Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook.[1][7]

Controversy

BuzzFeed has been accused of plagiarizing original content from competitors throughout the online and offline press. On June 28, 2012, Gawker's Adrian Chen posted a story titled "BuzzFeed and the Plagiarism Problem".[35] On March 8, 2013, The Atlantic Wire also published an article concerning BuzzFeed and plagiarism.[36]

BuzzFeed has been the subject of multiple copyright infringement lawsuits for both using content it had no rights to and encouraging its proliferation without attributing its sources: one for an individual photographer's photograph,[37] and another for nine celebrity photographs from a single photography company.[38]

In July 2014, BuzzFeed writer Benny Johnson was accused of multiple instances of plagiarism.[39] Two anonymous Twitter users chronicled Johnson attributing work that was not his own. Johnson had "directly lift[ed] from other reporters, Wikipedia, and Yahoo! Answers," all without credit.[40] BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith initially defended Johnson, calling him a "deeply original writer".[41] Days later, Smith acknowledged that Johnson had plagiarized others' work 40 times, announced that Johnson had been fired, and apologized to BuzzFeed readers. "Plagiarism, much less copying unchecked facts from Wikipedia or other sources, is an act of disrespect to the reader," Smith said. "We are deeply embarrassed and sorry to have misled you."[41] In total, 41 instances of plagiarism were found and corrected.[42] Johnson, who had previously worked for the Mitt Romney 2008 Presidential campaign, was subsequently hired by the conservative magazine National Review as social media editor.[43]

In April 2015, BuzzFeed drew scrutiny after Gawker observed the publication had deleted two posts that criticized advertisers.[44] One of the posts criticized Dove soap (manufactured by Unilever), while another criticized Hasbro.[45] Both companies advertise with BuzzFeed. Ben Smith apologized in a memo to staff for his actions. "I blew it," Smith wrote. "Twice in the past couple of months, I’ve asked editors — over their better judgment and without any respect to our standards or process — to delete recently published posts from the site. Both involved the same thing: my overreaction to questions we’ve been wrestling with about the place of personal opinion pieces on our site. I reacted impulsively when I saw the posts and I was wrong to do that. We've reinstated both with a brief note."[46] Days later, one of the authors of the deleted posts, Arabelle Sicardi, resigned.[47] An internal review by the company found three additional posts deleted for being critical of products or advertisements (by Microsoft, Pepsi, and Unilever).[48]

References

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External links

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Categories: 

AlterNet [1] / By Max Blumenthal [2]

Exposing the Dark Forces Behind the Snowden Smears

June 28, 2013

Since journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed the existence of the National Security Agency’s PRISM domestic surveillance program, he and his source, the whistleblower Edward Snowden, have come in for a series of ugly attacks. On June 26, the day that the New York Daily News published a straightforward smear piece [3] on Greenwald, the website Buzzfeed rolled out a remarkablysimilar article, [4] a lengthy profile that focused on Greenwald’s personal life and supposed eccentricities.

Both outlets attempted to make hay out of Greenwald’s involvement over a decade ago on the business end of a porn distribution company, an arcane detail that had little, if any, bearing on the domestic spying scandal he sparked. The coordinated nature of the smears prompted Reuters media columnist Jack Shafer to ask if an opposition research firm [5] was behind them. “I wonder who commissioned the file,” he mused on Twitter.

A day before the Greenwald attacks appeared, Buzzfeed published an anonymously sourced story [6] about the government of Ecuador, which had reportedly offered asylum to Snowden (Ecuador has just revoked a temporary travel document [7] issued to Snowden). Written by Rosie Gray and Adrian Carasquillo, the article relied on documents marked as “secret” that were passed toBuzzfeed by sources described as “activists who wished to call attention to the [Ecuadorian] government’s spying practices in the context of its new international role” as the possible future sanctuary of Snowden.

Gray and Carasquillo reported that Ecuador’s intelligence service had attempted to procure surveillance technology from two Israeli firms. Without firm proof that the system was ever put into use, the authors claimed the documents “suggest a commitment to domestic surveillance that rivals the practices by the United States’ National Security Agency.” (Buzzfeed has never published a critical report on the $3 billion in aid the US provides to Israel each year, which is used to buy equipment explicitly designed for repressing, spying on and killing occupied Palestinians).

Buzzfeed’s Ecuador expose supported a theme increasingly advanced [8] by Snowden’s critics -- that the hero of civil libertarians and government transparency activists was, in fact, a self-interested hypocrite content to seek sanctuary from undemocratic regimes. Curiously, those who seized on the story had no problem with Buzzfeed’s reporters relying on leaked government documents marked as classified. For some Snowden detractors, the issue was apparently not his leaking, but which government his leaks embarrassed.

Questionable journalism ethics, evidence of smears

At first glance, Buzzfeed's Ecuador expose might have seemed like riveting material. Upon closer examination, however, the story turned out to be anything but the exclusive the website promoted it as. In fact, the news of Ecuador’s possible deal with Israeli surveillance firms was reported [9] hours before Buzzfeed’s piece appeared by Aleksander Boyd, a blogger and activist with close ties to right-wing elements in South America. “Rafael Correa's Ecuadorian regime spies on its citizens in a way strikingly similar to what Snowden accuses the U.S. of doing,” claimed Boyd.

Later in the day, Boyd contacted Buzzfeed’s Gray through Twitter, complimenting her piece before commenting, [10] “Evidently Ecuadorian source leaked same info to you guys, seems I jumped the gun before you…”

Since Boyd contacted Gray, who has not publicly responded, Buzzfeed has not credited him or altered its headline to acknowledge that its story was not an exclusive. Buzzfeed’s refusal to acknowledge Boyd was not only a testament to the kind of questionable practices [11] that have plagued the outlet [12] since its inception, it helped obscure the story’s disturbing origins.

Boyd’s disclosure that a single source shopped opposition research to him and Buzzfeed at the same time confirmed the existence of a coordinated campaign orchestrated by elements exploiting the Snowden drama for political gain. Boyd’s remark that he “jumped the gun” suggests that the source intended for Buzzfeed to be the first to publish the story, and that he inadvertently embarrassed the site by running with it before them. There is also the possibility that Boyd was the source all along, and that his tweet to Gray was designed to establish deniability. Either way, the source seemed to be carefully managing the operation, wielding Snowden as a cudgel against the Ecuadorian government and timing the story for maximum impact.

Soliciting smears, dreaming of headless opponents

Who is Boyd, and how did he appear in the middle of the Snowden saga?

A London-based representative of Venezuela’s political opposition, Boyd solicits his services as an opposition researcher, informing potential clients through his official bio, [13] “Alek can be contracted to do due diligence on individuals and companies in Venezuela and LatAm.”

As I reported for The Electronic Intifada [14], Boyd has repeatedly promoted terrorism and assassination against members of the elected government of Venezuela. Back in 2004, Boyd wrote, “I wish I could decapitate in public plazas [Venezuelan politicians] Lina Ron and Diosdado Cabello. I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel … I wish I could fly over Caracas slums throwing the dead bodies of the criminals that have destroyed my country … Only barbaric practices will neutralize them, much the same way [Genghis] Khan did. I wish I was him.” A year later, he declared, “Re: advocating for violence yes I have mentioned in many occasions that in my view that is the only solution left for dealing with [Hugo] Chavez.”

In 2008, Boyd’s services were contracted by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an NGO run by a veteran conservative activist named Thor Halvorssen. [14] The son of a Venezuelan oligarch and former CIA asset who funneled money to the Nicaraguan Contras, Halvorssen founded HRF to publicize the human rights abuses of Hugo Chavez’s government. His first cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, the son of an oil industry executive, is one of the most visible leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, and as such, has received substantial financial support from the US. In 2002, Lopez was among the politicians who momentarily seized power from Chavez during a failed coup attempt. At the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum, a yearly confab Halvorssen promotes as “the Davos of human rights,” Lopez was presented to an audience of foreign correspondents and diplomats as a “human rights leader.”

Boyd claimed [15] that during his year and a half working for Halvorssen, he successfully campaigned for the release of Guadelupe Llori, an Ecuadorian opposition politician jailed by Correa under charges of sabotage and terrorism for her role in leading a crippling oil workers’ strike. (After her release, Llori was junketed to Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum). During this time Boyd visited Llori in prison in Ecuador while meeting [16] opposition activists “to coordinate future projects,” as he told an interviewer. Whether this was how he made initial contact with the source that supplied him and Buzzfeed with the documents on Ecuador’s deal with the Israeli surveillance firms is unknown.

Boyd may have never met Buzzfeed’s Gray, however, each are well acquainted with Halvorssen. This May, Gray was among the select cadre of journalists flown to the Oslo Freedom Forum to provide positive PR for Halvorssen and his global operation. Gray returned with a fawning profile [17] of Halvorssen, portraying him as an iconoclastic activist whose “job of opposing strongmen is arguably more media-friendly than that of anyone doing human rights work today.”

In contrast to Buzzfeed’s profile of Greenwald, Gray cast Halvorssen’s eccentricities as charming quirks that bore little relevance to the larger story. And his intimate ties to the right-wing Venezuelan opposition and the oligarchic forces seeking to topple socialist-oriented governments in South America went unmentioned.

Right-wing corporate lobbyists target Correa

Ecuador’s Correa is among the most popular of the Latin American leaders to embrace Hugo Chavez’s socialist economic model. Having defiantly defaulted on $3.2 billion in foreign loans, he has been able to leverage his country’s oil wealth to drastically expand social programs, improving access to education and doubling spending on healthcare while lowering poverty rates by a remarkable five percent since he took office in 2007. Naturally, Correa’s rejection of neoliberal policies has earned him a fair share of enemies, especially among the elites who have traditionally governed Ecuador. In 2010, he resisted a coup attempt [18] led by Lucio Gutierrez, a former president who earned the wrath of Ecuador’s poor by implementing crushing IMF-imposed austerity measures.

Correa’s opponents may have resorted to zero-sum politics, but his response has not always been judicious. He has, for example, advanced [19] criminal libel laws as a means of punishing opposition media and has battled indigenous groups that protested his attempts to open their land up to wide-scale state mining operations. The Committee to Protect Journalists has accused [20]Correa of leading Ecuador “into a new era of widespread repression.”

Of all the enemies Correa has earned, some of his fiercest reside not in Quito, but in the conservative think tanks of Washington. They include George W. Bush’s former Latin America handlers and a coterie of corporate-bankrolled right-wing radicals determined to unravel the South American socialist bloc.

Ezequiel Vazquez Ger, [21] an Argentina-born economist, is among the most aggressive of Correa’s antagonists. Vazquez Ger works for a DC-based lobbying firm run by Otto Reich, a Cuban exile who served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs under the second Bush administration. In 1987, Reich was singled out [22] during the US Comptroller General’s investigation of Iran-Contra for having “engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities” on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras. He is also suspected [23] of helping the anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch escape prosecution in Venezuela.

Reich contracted Vazquez Ger in 2011 to help him oversee a portfolio of corporate clients [24] that included Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, and Bacardi International, the rum company whose lawyers drafted much of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act tightening the US embargo of Cuba. Before he partnered with Reich, Vazquez Ger served as a Latin American fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, [25] a corporate funded think tank that promotes climate change denialism and sweeping deregulation policies.

To compliment their lobbying operation, Vazquez Ger and Reich have churned out a steady stream [21] of op-eds for publications from Foreign Policy to Fox News to the Miami Herald, [26]demonizing the socialist leaders of South America who have stifled the ambitions of multi-national corporations. During the past year, they homed in on Correa, assailing him for sheltering Assange while he cracked down on opposition media. In a June 2012 op-ed [27] for the right-wing Newsmax website, Reich and Vazquez Ger cited Assange as a key reason why the US should refuse to sign any further trade agreements with Ecuador. “Signing or renewing trade agreements with Ecuador will only allow Rafael Correa to continue undermining US foreign policy,” they wrote, “trading with our enemies, and destroying his country’s democracy.” (Following threats from Congress over its alleged offer to shelter Snowden, Ecuador’s government unilaterallyrejected [28] US trade preferences).

When Buzzfeed published its expose on Ecuador, Vazquez Ger was overjoyed. A heavily trafficked US news site had recycled he and Reich’s attacks on Correa’s support for Assange, this time framing Ecuador’s president as a hypocrite for supposedly offering asylum to Snowden. At 7:28 PM on June 25 -- a full 27 minutes after the article appeared -- Vazquez Ger took to Twitter topromote [29] the piece to his Spanish-language followers. Next, he personally thanked [30] Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith “for unmasking [Correa’s] hypocrisy.”

The following day, at a press conference in Ecuador, Interior Minister Jose Serrano was asked to answer for the Buzzfeed report. Buzzfeed’s Gray quickly picked up Serrano’s defensive comments,quoting them [31] in a follow-up story alongside a strident denunciation of Correa’s sheltering of Assange by Cléver Jiménez, a key opposition leader. Meanwhile, Alek Boyd projected the story of Ecuador’s surveillance deal into South American media, publishing it as an “exclusive” [32] in Semana, a leading Colombian daily.

Whoever planted the story with Buzzfeed appeared to have scored a major success, exploiting the Snowden drama to tarnish the image of Ecuador’s government. Though the identity of the source that triggered the operation may never be known, their agenda does not seem to be much of a mystery anymore.

See more stories tagged with:

buzzfeed [33],

Snowden [34],

ben smith [35]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/exposing-dark-forces-behind-snowden-smears