Independent Journalism Review has suspended Chief Content Officer Benny Johnson for assigning a story suggesting a connection between former President Obama’s visit to Hawaii and a judge there blocking President Trump’s travel ban—even though it was baseless.
Publication of the story, which was written by viral editor Kyle Becker, caused a major eruption in the newsroom. The groundless suggestion at the heart of the piece led to the resignation of the site’s congressional reporter, Joe Perticone, and a full retraction of the story.
Now, a Business Insider report alleges IJR also suspended Johnson because he pushed the story despite warnings about it being unfounded. The news organization also suspended two other employees. It released the following statement to Business Insider:
“We are committed to an editorial team that includes voices, perspectives and geographies that span the country but equally committed to quality standards in our newsroom. As we’ve grown we’ve sought to improve on that front and last month we launched our six person editorial operations team along with enforcement and review for all editorial content. Last week we got it wrong and ultimately deserve all the criticism if we want to be taken seriously. As a result of last week’s failure Kyle Becker has been suspended indefinitely as well as his supervisor and Chief Content Officer Benny Johnson and the content editor approving the post Becca Lower. We are reviewing all the details to determine if further action is necessary, this ultimately falls on me to get right and we have to do better in the future.”
It’s not the first time Johnson, a meme star, had had ethics problems. In 2014, BuzzFeed fired him as its viral politics editor after the site found “41 instances of sentences of phrases copied word for word from other sites.” He later served briefly as National Review‘s social media director, a site he previously plagiarized from. IJR hired Johnson in February 2015.
Neither Johnson nor IJR immediately responded to request for comment.
During the 2016 campaign, Johnson was behind a number of viral videos featuring Republican primary candidates:
A man about town, Johnson frequently posts pictures of himself hanging out with prominent politicians like Paul Ryan and Sean Spicer. Some have questioned Johnson’s relationship with the White House, given the site’s positive profiles of President Trump and the special access given to IJR’s reporters.
