Requiem for BuzzFeed News: A pioneer in #MeToo reporting that gave voice to survivors of abuse

BuzzFeed News is no more, but it leaves a legacy of serious investigative reporting. That includes some of the first published #MeToo stories, beginning more than two years before the Weinstein case.

BuzzFeed News/ Wikimedia Commons

BuzzFeed News, which in its heyday rivaled the New York Times and other major media in scoops and investigative reporting—often breaking stories the big guys of journalism failed to cover—is no more. The reason is typical, but still no excuse: It was not making enough money.

The outlet’s most notorious scoop, no doubt, was its publication of the so-called Steele dossier, filled with what at the time were mostly unconfirmed allegations concerning Donald Trump’s ties with Russia. The Mueller investigation, and other journalistic investigations, were able to verify some, but certainly not all, of its assertions. (Full disclosure: While some pundits and other journalists criticized the publication of a document most of them already knew about and some had already read, I thought then and think now that BuzzFeed News editor Ben Smith made the right call.)

But one of BuzzFeed News’s most important reporting beats, its pioneering coverage of #MeToo cases, probably went unnoticed by many. There are at least two reasons for that: First, the publication concentrated on #MeToo abuses in the sciences, rather than in flashier areas like Hollywood, the media, or politics. Second, despite its groundbreaking reporting, when the Harvey Weinstein case broke in late 2017 the Pulitzers went to the New York Times and The New Yorker, two legacy publications with whom, ultimately, BuzzFeed News could not compete.

(I have written before about the biases in #MeToo coverage that privilege the abusers over the victims and survivors and treat sexual abuse as some kind of Greek tragedy involving the fall of Mighty Men.)

As far as I am aware, the first #MeToo story BuzzFeed News broke was the case of University of California, Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy, in a series of exposes by reporter Azeen Ghorayshi beginning in early October 2015. Ghorayshi, who is now at the New York Times, reported that Marcy had been found culpable of sexual harassment at the university but only given a slap on the wrist. After she broke the story, pressure from the astronomy community forced him to resign from the university, in one of the first tangible victories for the budding #MeToo movement in academia.

Ghorayshi, and other BuzzFeed News reporters, would go on to do a number of other #MeToo investigations, including a deep dive into accusations against astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson and an investigation of lax attitudes towards sexual harassment in the National Institutes of Health.

(The NIH story was written by my former Science magazine colleague Peter Aldhous, who made important contributions to the #MeToo beat, including exposure of the negative side of the movement as personified by disgraced MeTooSTEM founder BethAnn McLaughlin.)

The Geoff Marcy story, in particular, was a watershed moment for those of us at Science, for which I served as a correspondent from 1991 to 2016. In October 2015, when the first Marcy story went online, my editors and I were debating whether to follow up on leads that the then curator of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History, Brian Richmond, had been under investigation for sexual assault of a colleague. With BuzzFeed News’s scoop, I was able to convince my colleagues that we should go ahead; the resulting story launched my own career as a #MeToo reporter, which continues to this day (both as reporter and commenter; I have since expanded my work into the area of bullying and toxic labs.)

And while BuzzFeed News has done fewer #MeToo stories the past few years, especially since Ghorayshi’s departure, it’s good to see Science continuing this important reporting beat, most often with stories by its excellent reporter Meredith Wadman.

BuzzFeed News may be gone, but its legacy lives on. Proof of that came earlier this month, with the news that the astronomy community was up in arms after finding out that Geoff Marcy was still publishing scientific papers despite being cast out of the community in disgrace for his serious sexual harassment behavior. In some cases, his coauthors were so-called “early career researchers” who might find it difficult to take a moral stand against a major scientific figure.

A key issue in this latest episode, Science reported, was how the scientific contributions of a high-profile abuser like Marcy should be balanced against the needs of younger scientists to do their research free of harassment. In some cases, junior researchers have been driven out of science by such bad behavior. The loss to science as a result has become a major topic of discussion in the scientific community over the past several years.

It’s largely thanks to the late departed BuzzFeed News and its intrepid reporters that we are even having this discussion at all.