Donald Trump famously called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage” but that won’t stop the digital news organization from covering Friday’s inauguration.
BuzzFeed has not had any problems gaining access to inauguration events and plans to go all-in with coverage, TheWrap has learned. BuzzFeed News will even have a Facebook Live broadcast called, “BuzzFeed News Live At Trump’s Inauguration: This Is Happening.”
BuzzFeed News reporters will be stationed at locations throughout the D.C., with White House Correspondent Adrian Carrasquillo hosting coverage that will include trips to protest sites and a variety of historic locations.
A BuzzFeed spokeswoman told TheWrap that the site’s reporters are expected to adhere to the site’s Standards and Ethics guide during the inauguration events.
Trump opened his first press conference since the election by denying a report released by BuzzFeed last Tuesday regarding an unverified Russian dossier, calling it a “tremendous blot” on the intelligence community if it had been released as part of an agenda against him.
Trump called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage” when asked to comment further on the published documents.
The president-elect suggested that the document had been leaked to the press “maybe by the intelligence agencies, who knows, but maybe the intelligence agencies, which would be a tremendous blot if they did that… because it never should have been written and certainly never should have been released.”
BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith used Twitter to post an internal email that explained his logic for posting the documents, which had been known to several journalists and politicians for some time.
Smith wrote that BuzzFeed’s “presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers,” saying the site has “always erred on the side of publishing.”