Buzzfeed is an internet and media company whose videos and articles have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years. Amongst their widely-shared quizzes, news stories, and cooking tutorials, the company has built an empire of almost-obsessive fans. However, for a website that delivers so much shared material, Buzzfeed is not necessarily known for being a reliable news source; and they shouldn’t be.

After one of the ugliest elections in U.S. history and social tensions growing quickly in the country, many Americans find themselves consuming more news than ever. According to the American Press Institute, about 30 percent of Americans get their news directly from social media or other web resources. However, many of these people do not believe that what they are reading is accurate. A poll published in the Washington Times found that a staggering 86 percent of Republicans in America feel that they can not trust the media, while 49 percent of Democrats feel the same. This general public mistrust can be attributed to a few things, but what stands out the most in my mind is biased news.

I am a Democrat. I am registered as a Democrat. I campaigned for Hillary and I most certainly protested Trump. However, as a student who wishes to pursue journalism one day, I am honestly bewildered at the blatant left-wing bias that Buzzfeed articles hold. Writers often insert their own opinions into stories about politics and events, even if these stories are in the News tab. Not only that, but Buzzfeed articles rarely contain direct quotes from sources. What they do, instead, is take screenshots from teenagers’ Twitter accounts and publish them with about two or three sentences written in between the photos. This is not news; it is entertainment. The fact that an employee at Buzzfeed actually took the time to publish a story quoting people off of Twitter is lazy, and frankly a slap in the face to journalism.

What Buzzfeed is essentially doing is dumbing-down news to make it easier to both read and write. Adding a meme or gif from Tumblr to an article may make it funnier, but it also degrades the goal that journalists have had for generations: to be taken seriously. When people stop respecting news sources, reporters everywhere take a hit.

Today’s reporters are stretched thinner than ever. No publication wants to be seen as unreliable, so writers and editors need to cover every base in order to publish a good story. However, Buzzfeed will simply cover an event by stalking through a tag on Twitter. They then publish the story sooner than other publications who actually take the time to interview people and take their own photos and videos of the scene. This gives Buzzfeed the advantage of being the first source to publish a story and gain readership, even if the information presented was taken from an unreliable source. This leads to having information generally misrepresented to the public, and also takes attention away from reliable publications.

While I understand that Buzzfeed does not claim to exclusively be a news resource, the company still needs to recognize the problematic effects that the articles they publish have on others. Often, a well-written and important story under Buzzfeed’s news section detailing a topic such as campus sexual assault is pushed down by the hundreds of articles about celebrity Twitter feuds and cats. This degrades the work of even their own writers who are attempting to shed light to crucial issues. As a company, Buzzfeed must understand that clickbait stories and entertainment can not override the efforts of reporters. Publishing work that is ultimately inaccurate, biased, and contemptful warps public view of the field of journalism everywhere.