18 Things That Buzzfeed Got Really Wrong In A Gallery of Disney Photos
If you want an article about things that Rihanna did at the Grammy Awards or a list of jokes that only “pretty” people will appreciate, then Buzzfeed can deliver with reasonable consistency. But if you want decently accurate coverage of animation history—even the most basic and mundane Disney history—you’d be better off looking elsewhere.
A recent piece called 23 Magical Pictures From The Golden Years Of Disney, compiled by BuzzFeed News photo essay editor Gabriel H. Sanchez, contains a gross amount of errors and displays a total absence of editorial standards.
It’s easy to write off Buzzfeed, and say, ‘Who cares?,’ but the company has remarkably broad reach—as of November 2016, 72 million unique monthly visitors, making it the 35th most-visited destination online. Its sheer size and influence means that much of what they publish will eventually filter its way to the top pages of Google’s search listings, a guarantee that its misinformation will spread to other places.
The piece in question used images from stock photo agency Getty. (Buzzfeed is not clear if Getty paid for the piece as a piece of sponsored content, but that’s beside the point.) Most of the egregious errors come from the author’s careless rewrites or misinterpretation of caption info that was correctly presented on the Getty web site. In at least two cases, however, the errors stem from inaccurate Getty captions, but both errors would have been caught by anyone who had properly researched their topic.
Traditional media publications use a system of writers, researchers, editors, and fact-checkers to ensure accuracy. This piece makes it evident that there is no such system in place at Buzzfeed News, and it should make anyone extremely wary of informational or historical content published on the site, whether related to Disney or anything else.
Here’s a list of some of the errors I’ve caught. I’ve also pointed out some identifications when possible, but I didn’t count those among the 18 errors.
(Note: Toy Time came out in early 1931, so recording session may have taken place in 1930.)
(UPDATE: As pointed out by reader ‘John A,’ Buzzfeed also mislabeled Cliff Edwards as the voice of Timothy Mouse. He was actually the voice of the lead crow.)
