report, record numbers of teachers are quitting the profession entirely. so teachers need our support now more than ever. they have easily one of the most important jobs in the world. where would we be without our teachers? an educated. so i want to thank you to all the teachers out, they re the great american teacher will take us of the year tonight. and on that note, i wish you all a very good and very safe night. from all of our colleagues across the networks of nbc news, thank you for staying up late. i ll see you at the end of tomorrow. tomorrow we are following breaking news out of texas, where authorities believe they have an custody the man accused of killing five of his neighbors with an ar-15 semiautomatic writer. officials will be holding a press conference later this hour and we will bring you any details we learn later this hour. but first, most americans have spent at least some of their life living paycheck to paycheck, not knowing how or even if they would b
gawker, and the huffington post, and buzzfeed, they use their platforms to generate clicks and traffic. they were not necessarily in pursuit of advancing one candidate or ideology. they were there to monetize the attention of an audience. as editor and chief of buzzfeed news from 2011 to 2020, smith helped establish the site s bona fide news department. but even from that perch, he admits he didn t see how right-wing figures would later co-op the blocking and social media structures that some had once believed would further progressive causes. smith writes, i certainly hadn t realize the extent to which right-wing populism always seemed to be sitting just down the white ikea table from this progressive internet scene, looking over its shoulder, learning its lessons. gasoline can create useful energy but it can also simply burn. and by 2023, it seemed clear that the power of this new social energy had been to destroy any institution from the media to the political
media that had gotten the iraq war so wrong. there is a lot of real optimism, i think, for good reason. but, you know, at some point, i think they were really unable to let go of that fantasy. and i think when you look at the trajectory of those businesses now, of those sites now, like, i don t think it was a good business decision among other things. yeah, and now, we have, you know, buzzfeed is shuddering buzzfeed, buzzfeed news is shuddering. vice is may be filing for bankruptcy. it s a very important time to be writing something like this. it s also, i don t know, it s kind of a depressing moment to kind of take stock of what just happened to the country, and what happened to the internet in the last 20, well, 15 years. yeah, and it s a very strange moment. it s just really a trip to go back, and see how we all thought about it then, and how it turned out. and i think how people could ve made different decisions along the way. and we have known each other for quite some of th
on the left. they were most interested in tearing down these institutions that actually at one point, i want to see them in 2016 and trump tower, and i was then the editor of buzzfeed. and he was just totally puzzled at why hadn t buzzfeed gone all in for bernie sanders that he had for trump, you know, not because he loved bernie sanders per se, but just that s where the traffic was, why just not follow the heat wherever it leads. certainly bannon has built a stunning amount of grift on the back of like his intellectual properties, if you will. but your sense is that it was always for the traffic. it was always for the money. it was sort of a part of the market that did not have an adequate response. so, they fill that gap. it wasn t necessarily an ideological drive that led these folks to ultimately found the institutions that they ve created. you know, i think these things are all tied up together. you know, i don t think it s quite that simple. but i do think there were these
trump. donald trump, absolutely. and if you look at the figures who were present at the early sites like gavin mcinnis, who of course later would go on to found the proud boys. he is one of the cofounders of vice, which is anything but a sort of radical right-wing publication. and this came to me as a surprise as i was just reporting out all the characters of this early scene, you know at buzzfeed, where i later worked, the guy who founded 4chan was working out of that office. andrew breitbart, the leader sort of key, part of inventor of these new culture wars, was the cofounder of huffington post as well. gavin mcinnis, as you say, the leading proud boy, was at vice. steve bannon kind of came to check out huffington post and learn from it. and then and in some ways, i think they adopted the lessons more fully than anybody, than most people