{"id":43051,"date":"2019-01-21T15:33:02","date_gmt":"2019-01-21T20:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=43051"},"modified":"2019-01-21T15:33:07","modified_gmt":"2019-01-21T20:33:07","slug":"beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-worst-most-embarrassing-u-s-media-failures-on-the-trump-russia-story%ef%bb%bf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=43051","title":{"rendered":"Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump\/Russia Story\ufeff"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2019\/01\/20\/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-worst-most-embarrassing-u-s-media-failures-on-the-trumprussia-story\/\">Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump\/Russia Story<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">BUZZFEED WAS ONCE&nbsp;notorious&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/bedtimesmagazine.com\/2014\/06\/6-buzzfeed-listicles-that-will-save-your-life\/\">for traffic-generating \u201clisticles\u201d<\/a>,&nbsp;but has since become an impressive outlet for deep investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the news this week&nbsp;thanks to&nbsp;its \u201cbombshell\u201d story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story that, like so many others of its kind,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/01\/19\/business\/media\/buzzfeed-news-trump-michael-cohen-mueller.html\">blew up in its face<\/a>, this time when the&nbsp;typically mute Robert Mueller\u2019s office took the extremely rare step to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/national-security\/inside-the-mueller-teams-decision-to-dispute-buzzfeeds-explosive-story-on-trump-and-cohen\/2019\/01\/19\/d89dba5b-fa0f-445b-9fd3-72f0e911e28d_story.html?utm_term=.3c52fc5cf4cb\">label its key claims \u201cinaccurate.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But in&nbsp;homage to&nbsp;BuzzFeed\u2019s past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures in two-plus-years of Trump\/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets (particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of&nbsp;worthy nominees&nbsp;is so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end with (dis)honorable mention status.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Note that all of these \u201cerrors\u201d go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle\u2019s connection to it. It\u2019s inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that\u2019s being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50\/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump\/Russia Story BUZZFEED WAS ONCE&nbsp;notorious&nbsp;for traffic-generating \u201clisticles\u201d,&nbsp;but has since become an impressive outlet for deep investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the news this week&nbsp;thanks to&nbsp;its \u201cbombshell\u201d story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story that, like [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5437,15282,1169,5567,1920],"class_list":["post-43051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-glenn-greenwald","tag-russiagate","tag-social-media","tag-the-intercept","tag-us-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43051"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43052,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43051\/revisions\/43052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}