Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Ben Smith Gives Buzzfeed the OK to Call Donald Trump a Racist

Buzzfeed editor-in-chief has spoken: calling Donald Trump a racist is no longer a breach of journalistic integrity.

In a memo sent out on Tuesday, Smith told his staff that they are henceforth permitted to refer to Donald Trump as racist — as fact, rather than opinion — on social media.

According to Politico, the memo was released after several staffers inquired about whether or not calling out Trump in those explicit terms was a violation of Buzzfeed’s non-partisan policy when it comes to news. (As Politico rightly points out, the Entertainment section enjoys looser restrictions.)

Smith wrote that Trump “is operating far outside the political campaigns to which those guidelines usually apply.”

“It is, for instance, entirely fair to call him 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. BuzzFeed News’s reporting is rooted in facts, not opinion; these are facts,” he added.

Smith, who is Jewish, has since posted the entire memo to his Twitter page:

Other media outlets have made similar judgment calls when it comes to the rogue candidate. Earlier this summer, The Huffington Post symbolically placed coverage of Trump’s campaign in the Entertainment section. On Monday, Ariana Huffington reversed that decision, explaining that due to the candidate’s negative statements about women and minorities, he could no longer be considered entertaining. Huffington also declared that staffers would be allowed to call Trump racist or sexist if his actions or speech warrants it.

“If Trump’s words and actions are racist, we’ll call them racist,” she wrote. “If they’re sexist, we’ll call them sexist. We won’t shrink from the truth or be distracted by the showmanship.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.