Ben Smith Gives Buzzfeed the OK to Call Donald Trump a Racist

Image by Getty Images

By Anne Cohen December 9, 2015

Buzzfeed editor-in-chief has spoken: calling Donald Trump a racist is no longer a breach of journalistic integrity.

In a memo sent out on Tuesday, Smith told his staff that they are henceforth permitted to refer to Donald Trump as racist — as fact, rather than opinion — on social media.

According to Politico, the memo was released after several staffers inquired about whether or not calling out Trump in those explicit terms was a violation of Buzzfeed’s non-partisan policy when it comes to news. (As Politico rightly points out, the Entertainment section enjoys looser restrictions.)

Smith wrote that Trump “is operating far outside the political campaigns to which those guidelines usually apply.”

“It is, for instance, entirely fair to call him a mendacious racist, as the politics team and others have reported clearly and aggressively: he’s out there saying things that are false, and running an overtly anti-Muslim campaign. BuzzFeed News’s reporting is rooted in facts, not opinion; these are facts,” he added.

Smith, who is Jewish, has since posted the entire memo to his Twitter page:

Here’s a memo I sent to @buzzfeed staff today on our social media policy, and Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/zCiDds3C29

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) December 9, 2015

Other media outlets have made similar judgment calls when it comes to the rogue candidate. Earlier this summer, The Huffington Post symbolically placed coverage of Trump’s campaign in the Entertainment section. On Monday, Ariana Huffington reversed that decision, explaining that due to the candidate’s negative statements about women and minorities, he could no longer be considered entertaining. Huffington also declared that staffers would be allowed to call Trump racist or sexist if his actions or speech warrants it.

“If Trump’s words and actions are racist, we’ll call them racist,” she wrote. “If they’re sexist, we’ll call them sexist. We won’t shrink from the truth or be distracted by the showmanship.”

Anne Cohen was the Forward’s deputy digital media editor. When she’s not looking for the secret Jewish history of Voodoo in New Orleans, or making lists about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she writes for The Assimilator. She graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. magazine concentration in 2012.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO