Reporter Thomas Frank has just joined the ranks of Buzzfeed, even though earlier this summer he was forced to resign from CNN after it retracted an article of his about Anthony Scaramucci and Russia.
Vanity Fair writes that Frank thought his journalism career was over after he was fired and that no news outlet “would want to touch him with a 10-foot pole.” But Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said he had no worries about hiring Frank, whose new job is to cover national security and counterintelligence for Buzzfeed. While he wouldn’t say anything more about CNN’s handling of the story, Smith previously said that “editors need to have reporters’ backs, and to take responsibility for screw-ups.”
Frank, 54, has been a Washington reporter for 16 years and extensively covered Iraq as well. He will be focusing on a story that CNN reporters have reportedly been told to avoid: the multiple probes investigating the Trump team’s role in Russia’s alleged 2016 election interference. Prior to CNN, Frank spent more than a decade at USA Today. He was a 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
According to Vanity Fair, Frank and the other two journalists who resigned over the Scaramucci story, Eric Lichtblau and Lex Harris, cannot talk about the circumstances leading up to their resignations. The New York Times reported that Frank had only a single source for that story, who was hesitant about how the information was being presented, but Frank did “had not relayed that hesitancy to his colleagues.”
BuzzFeed‘s hiring of the former CNN reporter Frank is yet another chapter in a larger feud between the president and the cable network, which Trump has repeatedly criticized as “fake news.”
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