Huffpo: Ben Smith, BuzzFeed 'Government-Subservient' Stenographers

The Huffington Post and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald got together to absolutely blister Ben Smith (watch the video here) and BuzzFeed for doing what Smith has done ever since Obama became president: become the government’s Chief Palace Guard.

The only real news here is that we learned that BuzzFeed apparently chose to protect the government at the expense of one of its own: left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore:

Guardian columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald joined HuffPost Live Tuesday and railed against what he called “reckless and irresponsible” journalism by BuzzFeed reporter Tessa Stuart.

Stuart wrote a story Monday claiming that Michael Moore had overhyped the recent detention of Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat at LAX as an attempt to seek publicity for Burnat’s Oscar-nominated documentary, “5 Broken Cameras.” Her story was based on a single government source, and she was forced to issue a correction after initially presenting it as based on multiple sources.

“The biggest problem with the story is that it granted anonymity to a government official to do nothing but defend and justify the government’s conduct. That’s almost never justifiable,” Greenwald told HuffPost Live host Ahmed Shihab-Eldin.

As of now, Moore is standing his ground and it’s BuzzFeed having to issue corrections. Time and again, though, both sides have proven themselves capable of audacious dishonesty, so we’ll probably never know the truth.

So we’ll just have to sit back and enjoy the show. Enjoy a triple-feature of awesome I’ve titled, “Attack of the Blue On Blue On Blue.”  

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