Ben Smith’s BuzzFeed Politics has been itching to fabricate a game-changer gotcha that might save the Senate for President Obama. Twice in two weeks these fabrications have blown up in BuzzFeed’s face, resulting in heckles even from BuzzFeed’s ideological soul-mates in the leftwing media.
Thursday, Bloomberg View pointed and laughed at BuzzFeed’s bizarre attempt Wednesday to defame Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst as a plagiarizer:
Here’s today’s installment of stupid and stupider from the campaign.
I’m a plagiarism hard-liner,1 but the hunt for offenders in this election cycle by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski is just silly. So today we get (via Weigel) Kaczynski and his colleague Ilan Ben-Meir calling out the Republican Senate candidate in Iowa, Joni Ernst, for sending op-eds to local papers “large portions” of which “appear to have been copied word-for-word from templates sent as guidelines to Republican members of the Iowa Senate.”
Yes, that’s right: Ernst (allegedly) cribbed from Republican talking points.
There’s nothing unethical about that. It’s what talking points are for!
BuzzFeed’s embarrassing hit-piece was quickly dismissed upon arrival by reporters from the New York Times and Politico.
Although Kaczynski denied it, Politico’s Dylan Byers speculated that the fiasco might have been due to BuzzFeed accepting without question oppo-research from American Bridge, a super PAC run by David Brock, the far-left political operative in charge of Media Matters.
Byers’ question was a reasonable one considering BuzzFeed’s sordid history with American Bridge. Just last week a BuzzFeed hit against Georgia Republican Senate candidate David Perdue blew up in the left-wing outlet’s face. This was due to the publishing of oppo-research from American Bridge that made it look as though Perdue was autographing a woman’s thigh. The truth was that Perdue was signing a woman’s diabetic monitor to raise awareness for juvenile diabetes.
The mainstream media humiliating itself to serve and protect Barack Obama is nothing new, it’s just so 2013.
John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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