Buzzfeed

Before taking a slight hit to his wealth last year, Vivek Ramaswamy was one of America’s twenty youngest billionaires. His latest venture — a $3 million investment to save BuzzFeed — has Cockburn questioning how he’s made it this far in business.  Last Thursday, news broke that Ramaswamy has acquired a 7.7 percent stake in the ailing digital media company, briefly sending its stocks soaring over 80 percent. The former presidential candidate had apparently been snatching up shares since March, but BuzzFeed, like everyone else, only found out last week. Since then, Ramaswamy has increased his stake to 8.37 percent, becoming the company’s second largest Class-A shareholder.

There is a recurring type of incident that reflects the insularity of today’s media class: “Everyone was talking about it, but no one reported it.” There is no stronger indictment of contemporary media bias — it doesn’t arise just out of partisanship, nor out of opposition to reporting stories that displease our ruling class. It reaches the point of actively lying and covering up things any average American knows to be true. The most prominent recent example is found in the reaction to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s findings regarding Joe Biden’s hoarding of classified documents.

Good riddance to BuzzFeed News. There is no other way to put it. BuzzFeed and its subsequent news division spin-off did more harm to the online journalism industry than almost any other media outfit. It placed importance on churning out content and putting twenty-something undertrained interns in charge of some of the most socially volatile news issues on the internet and in American culture. Their journalists became churnolists and the amount of content became king, not the quality of content. As media cancel culture continues to rear its ugly head and journalists still roam the countryside to make their audiences outraged about...

This week was a disastrous one for those of us who care about free speech, viewpoint diversity, and fighting censorship. To find out why, tune in to the latest episode of Censored in the City, in which Ben Shapiro and I dig into the nefarious ongoings at YouTube. ‘They’ve created this incredibly vague standard, if you approach an unspecified line, then, presumably, you will be downgraded or banned,’ Ben tells me. ‘And not only that, in their new standards they say they are going to upgrade what they call “authoritative sources”. Well who the hell are “authoritative sources”?

It’s a rough life, being a liberal media mogul. Balancing your aura of caring for your staff and their rights with the cut-throat demands of your investors is testing at the best of times...imagine how hard it gets when your business hits the skids. So pour one out for Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO, for whom this week isn’t looking any easier than the last. After suffering the embarrassment of having BuzzFeed News’s major Russia scoop unraveled by Robert Mueller’s office, Peretti had the unenviable task of laying off hundreds of employees across the country. Their entire national desk was culled along with many other BuzzFeed News staffers, in cuts brutally staggered over several days.