During a discussion of BuzzFeed’s story on a dossier regarding Russia and President-Elect Donald Trump on Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “MTP Daily,” host Chuck Todd told BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith “you just published fake news.”
Todd said BuzzFeed’s decision to publish the dossier was an instance where they “would not have made the same decision in the pre-Trump era.”
Smith stated that it was more “the pre-Internet era.” And that there was a time “where we could act as gatekeepers. Where we could say, you know what, crazy people are claiming that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is forged, but we’re not going to write about that, that’s crazy.”
He continued that this era doesn’t exist, and that while they had reporters trying to confirm or deny specific details, the dossier was “in play,” and “having consequences for the way our elected leaders are acting. The — you do have to ask the question of, why should I suppress that? There are then good reasons, right? Once though, it emerges, as it did last night in the public conversation that there is this secret document floating around, full of dark allegations that we will not repeat to you. That I feel like in this era, you really have to share [with] your readers what that is in an appropriate context. And our original report, I mean, if you read what we wrote, it stressed that there were real solid reasons to distrust this. It noted two specific errors.”
Todd then asked if BuzzFeed had a responsibility to not spread false information. Smith responded that, like with the Obama birth certificate issue, it’s a “difficult balance that everybody in our business navigates every day.”
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