(LifeSiteNews) — Left-wing media outlet BuzzFeed will no longer operate its newsroom after leadership determined the platform couldn’t be maintained amid company-wide layoffs.
Founder and CEO Jonah Peretti announced Thursday that BuzzFeed News will not continue its reporting since BuzzFeed Inc. laid off 15% of its employees. The parent company also owns the online news sites Huffington Post and Complex Networks.
“While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization,” Peretti wrote in a memo to the outlet’s employees. “Moving forward, we will have a single news brand in HuffPost, which is profitable, with a loyal direct front page audience.”
Peretti added that the news outlet and the parent organization “have signaled that they will open a number of select roles for members of BuzzFeed News.”
Over the years, BuzzFeed News has wavered in its publishing of conservative opinions and news. Peretti’s news outlet began as an experiment with viral media, sparked by an incident with Nike. In 2001, Peretti, then a graduate student at MIT, requested that the clothing brand customize a pair of sneakers with the word “sweatshop” printed on them. His act was meant to test the waters and see how the company would respond to being criticized as participating in child labor, and his email exchange with Nike became an early example of viral content.
In its early days, BuzzFeed often reported on stories that people of authority wanted to keep hidden, such as the Nike situation. But the company typically caved, allowing social pressure and political correctness to dictate its content. In 2013, just two years after the outlet’s founding, one of the famous BuzzFeed “listicles” exposed numerous scandalous incidents, compiled by Live Action, which took place at Planned Parenthood centers. Less than a month later, though, BuzzFeed staff removed the post due to protests from abortion supporters.
Three years later, the outlet released a report that questioned whether Christian HGTV stars Chip and Joanna Gaines believed that marriage is a union only between one man and one woman. A survey conducted by BuzzFeed in 2017 also selectively chose more liberal countries to gauge support for transgenderism around the world. The same year, the outlet exposed six centers in Mexico City that sold fake abortions to women for a profit, some of whom weren’t even pregnant.
Similarly, another BuzzFeed report from 2018 revealed that Facebook permitted a group page to operate that was designed for older gay men to trade sexual acts for shelter with young homeless men. More recently, in the wake of the historic overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the outlet published testimonies of celebrities who had decided to abort their unborn babies, most of them justifying their actions. Analyses from media bias assessment organizations have found that BuzzFeed presented to a mostly liberal audience and had shifted from left-leaning to solidly left wing.
The Huffington Post, which will become BuzzFeed Inc.’s sole news outlet, is also a liberal source. In 2018, the outlet’s Canadian chapter — which closed in 2021 — criticized a LifeSiteNews article for stating that drag queen story hours are a form of LGBT indoctrination.