6 ms·
I read this expecting something super shady, but to be totally fair to BuzzFeed, the incidents cited (all three of them) were surprisingly benign. According to
by dewitt 11y ago
I read this expecting something super shady, but to be totally fair to BuzzFeed, the incidents cited (all three of them) were surprisingly benign.
According to the NYT, one of the articles was taken down because it accused Axe (the body spray people), who happened to also be an advertiser, of "advocating worldwide mass rape", which the editor-in-chief decided was beyond even BuzzFeed's questionable writing standards.
Another article, about Internet Explorer, was written by a editor who had recently worked on an ad campaign for Microsoft while on another job. BuzzFeed took the IE article down (again, according to the NYC) to avoid the appearance of conflict, and instituted a policy against such rotating-door behavior going forward.
And finally the last case involved removing an editorial piece that criticized a Pepsi advertisement created by BuzzFeed itself.
If those were really the only three cases of content being changed because of the relationship with advertising, I'm not sure even I think there's a major issue here. At least at this time. While reputable papers like the NYT or WSJ of course have firm policies in place to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest, I don't think anyone is putting BuzzFeed anywhere near their level yet.
To be honest, when I heard the rumors last week that "BuzzFeed was manipulating content due to pressure from advertisers", I admit I just assumed the worst of them, too.
But this might be a case of me (and probably a lot of people) expecting poor behavior from a company simply because we're not fans of their product.
Maybe that's actually the biggest lesson from this? (Or maaaybe... the NYT is in on it too, and this is all part of an elaborate cover up by Big Advertising.)
- seanp2k2 11y agoInteresting re: policies; didn't know about that. It seems like such a policy, if actually followed, would help with things like this. Further, this type of thing makes me sad that ads are the biggest winning revenue model for web companies, and as more people turn to the web as their primary news source, it becomes harder to differentiate between "eyeballs-for-sale" and "somewhat unbiased" news. TL;DR follow the money
- notahacker 11y agoYeah, this seems like a non-story compared with, for example, advertiser interference allegations at the Daily Telegraph, a 160-year old British broadsheet with a reputation for investigative journalism. The Telegraph saw its politics editor resign after claiming that the newspaper had suppressed stories other reporting investigations into money laundering against HSBC, a major advertiser, run the Chinese government's version of the repression of Hong Kong protests to similarly protect its relationship with HSBC and carried paid Russian and Chinese government propaganda supplements (although the newspaper proper did take an anti-Russian editorial stance). When the Guardian gleefully reported the troubles at their right wing rival, the Telegraph responded with an anonymous front page story insinuating the Guardian's advertising sales management were responsible for suicides on their team. A content mill deleting some questionable opinion pieces that wouldn't have passed editorial review at other media companies doesn't seem to fall into the same level of scandal...
- jrochkind1 11y agoAre you saying it's a non-story because you _expect_ Buzzfeed to lack journalistic ethics?
- notahacker 11y agoI'm saying both that I wouldn't expect Buzzfeed to have much in the way of journalistic ethics, and that brief opinion pieces on ad campaigns and board games are not journalism. It's not censorship when respectable publications won't publish a few hundred words and animated GIFs on "Why Monopoly Is The Worst Game In The World, And What You Should Play Instead" in the first place, so I'm not seeing it as particularly terrible if a more permissive editor takes it down after a complaint on the basis there's really no upside to keeping it. I think it's a pretty open secret that the comparable brief lightweight pieces and listicles on fashion, travel etc. that appear in the supplement sections of even respectable publications are heavily influenced by who the fashion columnist had lunch with and what freebies they've been given, and nobody really cares. We start worrying about chilling effects on free speech when they cheerfully ignore major scandals involving high street banks because that high street bank is attaching strings to their money.
- panglott 11y agoSo Buzzfeed's ethics are fine as long as they cheerfully ignore major scandals involving high street banks altogether? ;)
- pconner 11y agoBuzzfeed is journalism in the same way that semi-scripted "reality" shows are documentaries.