BuzzFeed News can’t admit it got January 6 so wrong
August 24, 2021
A Reuters report last week said the events of January 6 were neither an insurrection nor a coup attempt. But Buzzfeed can’t accept that.
Buzzfeed news’s obsession with events surrounding the January 6 protests and subsequent riot, they have practically one full-time reporter assigned to cover the story and a lot of part-timers who cover certain angles like technology and social media.
Even with all those resources, Buzzfeed can’t or won’t get the story right.
For nearly eight months, Buzzfeed has claimed, unchallenged, that the events of January 6 were part of an insidious party-wide “insurrection” or “coup attempt” by the GOP to overturn the election.
The Road To The Capitol Insurrection Was Paved With MAGA Disinformation!, boasted Buzzfeed in January.
Facebook Knows It Was Used To Help Incite The Capitol Insurrection!!, they trumpeted in April.
A House Select Committee Will Officially Investigate The Jan. 6 Insurrection!!! said Buzzfeed in June dramatically.
And then:
Prosecutors And Judges Really Don’t Want You To Call Capitol Rioters ‘Tourists’!!!!, they reported with somewhat less urgency on Sunday.
Tourists?
Last week Reuters reported in an exclusive story released on Friday that the FBI and DOJ have found no evidence that events on January 6 were anything other than a poorly thought-out protest, with poorly policed results.
“The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials,” said Reuters.
“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” a former senior law enforcement official told Reuters. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”
So, after trying and failing to frame the debate around some sort of nefarious plot by elite, conservative power brokers to overturn the democracy, all Buzzfeed has left is a pathetic attempt to further disgrace people who let their enthusiasm get the better of their judgment and now describe them as tourists.
If Buzzfeed would just do responsible serious reporting from the outset, there would be no need to backtrack.