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Put away the hatchets, BuzzFeed book reviewers. The Internet's foremost listicle-maker will now be taking its 'No Haters' policy over to its rising books section, as BuzzFeed's new books editor said today that he will only accept warm and cuddly book reviews. It's a sad day for train wreck-loving, Twitter-fight sparring, #spatwatch-following people across the web.
"If you can’t say something nice, don't say nothing at all," BuzzFeed's first books editor Isaac Fitzgerald told Poynter this morning in explaining why the section would eschew negative reviews, citing the "Bambi Rule" from the old Disney movie. "Why waste breath talking smack about something?" he explained. "You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip."
"Why?" he asks, but the answer is pretty clear — they're fun! Even if they're less common than they used to be, a good hatchet job is like a 10-car pileup; readers can't help but watch as a reviewer shreds into a book for its author's weak argument, lazy intellectualism, or shoddy transcribing. Just this week, we watched eagerly as Jeff Bezos' wife took down a book about the rise of Amazon in an Amazon review. Everyone loves a good takedown.