You may remember them…they were the beginning of the Steele Dossier.
Buzzfeed News was the first to publish the Steele Dossier which propelled them to new heights in media. However, a few years later, they are closing their doors for good.
BuzzFeed News garnered a lot of traffic during the Trump years. However, once Biden was sworn in as President the company struggled.
Peretti said that the move was part of the company’s cost-cutting measures, which include a 15% workforce reduction across various teams. He admitted that he had failed to “hold the company to higher standards for profitability” to give it a buffer for downturns. As a result, BuzzFeed News has been forced to shut down, along with other teams.
Peretti further added that BuzzFeed would now have a single news brand, HuffPost, which is a profitable news outlet with a loyal front-page audience.
On January 10, 2017, Buzzfeed was first to post the Steele dossier despite the fact that the entire document was unsubstantiated. We all watched what played out next and that document became a crux for the left in attacking former President Trump.
On March 31, 2022, it was reported by the Associated Press that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign agreed to pay $113,000 to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into whether they violated campaign finance law by misreporting spending on research that eventually became the infamous Steele dossier.
“By intentionally obscuring their payments through Perkins Coie and failing to publicly disclose the true purpose of those payments,” the campaign and DNC “were able to avoid publicly reporting on their statutorily required FEC disclosure forms the fact that they were paying Fusion GPS to perform opposition research on Trump with the intent of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” the initial complaint had read.
They started it all but now they are closing their doors for good.
