Breaking this morning, early, early, early this morning … popular online news and whimsy site, BuzzFeed (you may know the tattooed John Stanton the best), has let a longtime writer/editor go for the chic white collar crime dispensing with a lot of bad apple bloggers: plagiarism. Benny Johnson had his last byline … there.
Big bowl of wrong.
Benny Johnson's credibility should have been suspect from his resumè of shame, he wrote/edited for both Breitbart and Glenn Beck?!?
There's 'yer sign.
From a slightly and understandably smug piece over at HuffPo, a few juicy yet truly insulting and kinda' disgusting details. Johnson didn't borrow a phrase or two … BuzzFeed had to correct then annotate and re-publish, with the formal Plagiarism Confession, Acknowledgement and Apology article that every 'paper' lives in fear of, more than 40 of his pieces for them.
Ben Smith did the mea culpa.
Smith apologized, adding, "We are deeply embarrassed and sorry to have misled you. Benny’s editors -- I, Katherine Miller, John Stanton, Shani Hilton, and McKay Coppins -- bear real responsibility."
The plagiarism charges first surfaced after a pair of Twitter users began pointing out examples where Johnson appeared to have copied or reworded text from the work of others. Gawker then wrote about the allegations, bringing them to the attention of a much wider audience.
Benny Benny Benny ... honestly? You did 523 posts at BuzzFeed (prolific you have down, but then it goes a lot quicker when you cheat and don't actually write, the graphics go in surprisingly quickly), and had to have 41 of them pulled and whitewashed? That's an average of 1 out of 12, Dude.
You had best hie thee to Fvx Nation toot sweet, before they re-sign La Palin for a new Putin Watch section in their faux global edition.
Each article had to get the Scarlet P. You can go to each article and see what journalists are trained to avoid, the evidence of whole passages lifted, in multiples, in over 40 of Johnson's posts.
Reprehensible.
EDITORS' NOTE
This post has been corrected to properly source quotes and phrasing that was copied from The New Yorker and Reid’s autobiography.
BuzzFeed takes its responsibility to readers very seriously, and plagiarism is a major breach of that responsibility. Please read our apology to readers here. JULY 26, 2014, 1:05 a.m.
The list of links to his 41 plagiarized posts was sickening. Whether it was laziness or stupidity, this fellow deserved the firing.
Let's hope he's slightly more careful at Fvx Noise, we think they only tolerate plagiarism in 25% of their content.