Even before I started working for Andrew Breitbart in late-2008, I had been using every means at my disposal to expose Ben Smith, the current editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed, for the partisan sleaze he is. He was a leftwing partisan sleaze, chief-Obama protector and cover-up artist during his years at Politico.
And now that he’s running things at BuzzFeed, the former JournOLister‘s sleaze is red-lining.
Under Smith’s oily leadership, BuzzFeed has been caught memory-holing more than 4,000 articles. Vanished. Gone. As though they never existed. Many of those articles were deleted for the most Socialist of reasons, because they were critical of the Ruling Class among the one-percent.
Wednesday comes the news that should surprise no one familiar with how Smith operates: One of the rare BuzzFeed articles helpful to Republican nominee Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign was deleted entirely. No editor’s note. No nothing.
The deletion is of note because Smith assured everyone that none of the 4,000 deleted posts contained reporting.
The leftwing anarchist site Gawker says that for two weeks Smith ignored repeated inquiries into the deletion of the article. Eventually, Gawker reached out to Zeke Miller, the article’s co-author who is now at Time. With no place left to run, Smith finally responded with his infamous BenSmithing: “It seems to have been a technical glitch — that’s all I got.”
According to Gawker, the deletion of the Romney article occurred sometime after the left started complaining about it:
If someone at BuzzFeed removed the post intentionally, their motive would not be that hard to grok. Coppins and Miller’s dispatch landed with a thud on Twitter, an integral platform for BuzzFeed’s heavily promoted entry into political reporting. Left-leaning users, in particular, eviscerated the post’s reliance on an anonymous Romney aide to puff up Romney and kneecap Obama. (Indeed, one of the post’s earliest and most vocal critics, the journalist Michael Tracey, was the first person to notice its disappearance. Baffled by the lack of any explanation or editor’s note, Tracey eventually notified Gawker.)
The timing of the deletion is unknown.
Ben Smith is just a bad guy, and I wonder if in the face of all this scandal if the powers-that-be at BuzzFeed aren’t just waking up to that fact. If not they are in on it.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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