The left-wing Daily Beast website fabricated a story about President Donald J. Trump’s 18-year-old son, Barron, after failing to confirm rumors alleged by the site’s new ‘Chief Content Officer’ Joanna Coles, according to a new report about the matter.
New York Magazine‘s Intelligencer reported Tuesday:
On her first week on the job as chief creative and content officer, Joanna Coles carried a tip into the newsroom: A friend told her that Barron Trump would attend NYU for college. She told a group of staff to write it up for a new gossip column she wanted, called “Beast Buzz.” After trying to confirm the story, the team came up empty, but Coles pressed them to publish. The task fell to Tracy Connor, the editor-in-chief who eschews her office for a simple desk among reporters and editors. As she wrote up the blind item without a byline, Coles said in a voice loud enough for all to hear: “We will see how it does. Let’s hope it’s true!”
The incident was not isolated, with the Daily Beast recently peddling a number of other stories without sourcing, nor confirmation, according to a number of employees seeking new jobs in the wake of Coles’s transformation of what they once claim was a “news” site:
By the end of her first week, at least a dozen staff were looking elsewhere for jobs or hoping for buyouts, and by the end of her second, two were on the way out. For those who remain, fear of layoffs is widespread and morale is so low that some have been crying behind closed doors.
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True to form, she recently assigned another un-bylined story about “The Look-Alike Women in Donald Trump’s Orbit” focusing on “head-turning brunettes of a certain stripe.” It’s not always clear which ideas Coles wants to pursue and which she is just throwing out, according to one person. For example, according to another staffer, Coles proposed a list of “the five most obese members of Congress.” The piece wasn’t assigned.
She did assign two other stories that made editors scramble to kill them for fear of embarrassment. One was to follow up on a rumor that Donald Trump passed gas in his criminal trial. She assigned the politics team to reach out to gastroenterologists about whether the emissions were “stress farts or sleep farts.” Another was assigned with the headline “Is Protesting the New Sex for Gen Z?” making the case that the campus protests across the country were largely being done for a thrill rather than true concern for Palestinian or Israeli lives.
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