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May 17, 2018

BuzzFeed soils itself with extortion-style 'journalism' against Candace Owens

By Monica Showalter

Candace Owens is not easily intimidated.  We already know that because she's a diamond-hard black conservative who's enraged the left.  (See Robin Dolgin's fine piece here.)  Owens is the fierce person who apparently drew Kanye West out into the open as the admiring "brother" of President Trump, which drew a lot of black voters toward the same conclusion and created a crisis for Democrats they didn't see coming.

So it's no surprise to read that she's the subject of a hit piece, from BuzzFeed, which as of yesterday was still assembling the mess and apparently using extortion to do it.  Seriously.  Candace Owens tweeted this appalling story:

There's not a reason in the world to question what Owens is saying.  BuzzFeed is effectively extorting a group of young people to come out and say bad things about Owens and apparently threatening to ruin them if they don't.  BuzzFeed's reporter denies this but hasn't published his emails proving it.  If it's as Owens says, it doesn't sound like journalism anymore; it sounds like organized crime, something thuggy gangsters might do.

Owens is doing one of the most effective things to cut such a tactic dead, by exposing BuzzFeed's methods through her series of tweets.  What has BuzzFeed gotten as a result, by the way?  An embarrassingly stupid story about how a couple of anti-Trump posts went up on her blog two years ago by others, well before anyone really knew who Donald Trump was, along with the exposure of its creepy, worse-than-the-tabloids, unethical style of "news-gathering," which should drive journalism even lower than it already is in the public's estimation.

Seriously, shouldn't BuzzFeed be answering some questions about this at the journalism forums put on by the Pulitzer committee or at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism?  How can BuzzFeed justify such behavior to anyone?  Why aren't these reporters proving Owens wrong by publishing their emails?

Already their name is mud from their publication of the unverified Steele "pee" dossier, something even CNN wouldn't do, given its phony, salacious allegations, which amount to an imaginative reflection of what's in the anti-Trump mind rather than truth about what Trump did.  Yet only BuzzFeed was coarse and stupid enough to go there, and now it's got some legal troubles as a result of that leftist Trump-rage-driven blunder.

Now BuzzFeed is ganging up on Candace Owens, who isn't the sweet little Millennial daisy it thought she was.  Obviously, the idea out there is to discredit her as a phony and Stop Her, given the impact she's making on young Millennials and black people generally.  She's leading the way for it to be OK to be a conservative, and that poses a threat to the left.  That's why Democratic National Committee-style tactics are being employed against her by BuzzFeed.  It can't be pleasant for her.

Owens, in fact, says she's the target of 37 hit pieces:

Keep on keeping on, Candace.  Buzzfeed has soiled itself by the sunlight you've cast on it.  They'd be fools not to leave you alone.

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