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Former BuzzFeed (RIP) editor in chief Ben Smith defends his decision to publish bogus Steele dossier

By now, you’ve probably heard about BuzzFeed News shutting down. Just came outta nowhere, right?

Anyway, news of BuzzFeed’s demise comes at a very interesting time. Because it just so happens that The Atlantic has a new piece today written by former BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith (the piece is actually adapted from Smith’s aptly named forthcoming book “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral”) about his decision to publish the bogus Steele dossier back when he was running the show.

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With a little help from David Brock, no less:

Anything for clicks! No, seriously. Ben Smith did this for clicks. Because if you keep something a secret, how can you get clicks?

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Let the record show that Smith is immensely proud of himself.

Smith writes:

Imagine the alternative, a world in which the American public knows that there is a secret document making murky allegations that the president-elect has been compromised, a document that is being investigated by the FBI, that the president-elect and the outgoing president have been briefed on, and that everyone who is anyone has seen—but that they can’t. This would, if anything, produce darker speculation. It might have made the allegations seem more credible than they were.

We faced a difficult series of lawsuits, but we won them all, in part because we’d maintained our journalistic distance. We argued, successfully, that we were not making these claims ourselves; we were making the “fair report” of what amounted to a government document. We’d published the dossier while holding it at arm’s length, noting that we hadn’t been able to verify or knock down its claims—even if we had inadvertently launched a million conspiracy theories in the process.

I have no pat conclusion. If I had to do it again, I would publish the dossier—we couldn’t suppress it, not once CNN had discussed it and its implications on air. But I would hold more tightly to the document, so that no one could read it without reading what we knew about it—that we weren’t sure it was true, and in fact we had noticed errors in it. Releasing a document that could be shared without context—and this is as true of the WikiLeaks material as it is of the dossier—created partisan symbols, not crowdsourced analysis.

In technical terms, that means I wouldn’t simply publish it as a PDF, destined to float free from our earnest caveats. At best, we could have published the document as screenshots attached to the context we had and the context we would learn. Perhaps in some small way, this would have limited its transformation from a set of claims into a banner of the “resistance.” But I’m not under the illusion that journalists could have contained its wildfire spread, any more than I think we could have concealed it.

I’m now leading a news organization, Semafor, that is also rooted in transparency. But I no longer think transparency means that journalists can be simple conduits for facts, obscuring our own points of view, leaving our audiences to figure it out. The best we can do, I think, is to lay our cards on the table in separate piles: Here are the facts, and here’s what we think they mean—and to retain some humility about the difference between the two.

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If Semafor is half the “news organization” that BuzzFeed was, well, let’s just say that Semafor employees shouldn’t get business cards printed just yet.

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Related:

BuzzFeed: Publishing explosive and unverified allegations against Trump ‘how we see the job of reporters’

Rake, meet face! BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith accidentally admits his site’s guilty of lazy ‘journalism’ [screenshots]

Fatality: Elon Musk drops Ben Smith and Semafor over bad journalism and ‘massive conflict of interest’

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