BuzzFeed publishing a dossier containing several allegations against President-elect Donald Trump was not journalism, but rather a copy-and-paste job filled with unverified accusations, Wall Street Journal editor James Taranto told Newsmax TV.
During an appearance on "America Talks Live," Taranto told host Bill Tucker the memo should have been cross-checked before it was made public.
"I think what I might have done is what our columnist Kim Strassel does in today's paper, which is she looks at the origin of this memo and what BuzzFeed did was not just publish a story," said Taranto, who serves as the Journal's editorial features editor.
"It actually published this memo full of raw allegations, raw claims, a lot of unverified gird about Donald Trump. Sort of the equivalent of a raw FBI file in which it just compiles things that people say about somebody and doesn't necessarily make any effort to verify whether they're true or not."
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Taranto noted that this sort of thing has happened before, when someone — perhaps members of the Senate Judiciary Committee — leaked an FBI file about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 before his appointment to the high court was confirmed.
"So what we're seeing here isn't all that new," Taranto said. "What's new I suppose is that you have publications like BuzzFeed that are able to get this into the media environment very quickly."
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