Buzzfeed Tells Employees It’s Fair To Call Trump A ‘Mendacious Racist’

12.09.2015 | News | Daily Surge |

Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith has tweeted an internal memorandum he sent to staff Wednesday declaring that he condones their use of terms like “mendacious racist” to describe Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump on social media.

The goal of the company’s social media policy is to “preserve our readers’ confidence that we can be fair” and not to “undermine” reporters’ work, Smith writes. “It is, for instance, entirely fair to call [Trump] 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.”

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

The Huffington Post moved coverage of Trump to their “Entertainment” vertical over the summer. However on Monday editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post president and Arianna Huffington announced that policy had been reversed since Trump’s campaign has been exposing an ugly side of American politics.

“We believe that the way we cover the campaign should reflect this shift,” she wrote. “And part of that involves never failing to remind our audience who Trump is and what his campaign really represents. … So if Trump’s words and actions are racist, we’ll call them racist. If they’re sexist, we’ll call them sexist. We won’t shrink from the truth or be distracted by the showmanship.”