I want to share with you an important op-ed piece written by six Northeastern University professors about the challenges facing higher education. One of those professors is my School of Journalism colleague Rahul Bhargava. Their essay appears in our independent student newspaper, The Huntington News. I urge you to read it in full, but here’s an excerpt:
Many university leaders nationwide believe that we can survive by complying to reduce the impact of cuts or by staying silent to avoid becoming a priority target. This blatantly ignores the immigrant and transgender students who are afraid for their safety, worrying their university will not protect them. This ignores the faculty whose research has already been made impossible merely because it mentions a now-banned phrase. It ignores the irreparable loss of reputation when our universities sacrifice fundamentally American values like freedom of speech. We must work together to ensure this doesn’t happen here at Northeastern.
Northeastern is among several colleges and universities where students and recent graduates have had their visas revoked. And on and on it goes.
What ethical minefields do the leaders of nonprofit news organizations need to watch for? What guidelines should board members and donors be aware of? Where are the bright lines — and where are the gray areas?
Three experts weighed in on those issues last Thursday evening at our What Works webinar on “The Ethics of Nonprofit News: What Board Members and Donors Need to Know.” What Works is part of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism and is affiliated with the Center for Transformative Media.
More than 50 people logged on to the event, which I moderated. Questions from the audience were fielded by Ellen Clegg, a faculty associate and the co-founder of Brookline.News. Ellen and I are the co-leaders of What Works, a project about the future of local news.
Former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant. Photo (cc) 2019 via Wikimedia Commons.
The nonprofit news organization Mississippi Today will not have to turn over confidential internal documents, as a judge has dismissed a libel suit brought by former Gov. Phil Bryant, Grant McLaughlin reports in The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi.
County Judge Bradley Mills’ ruling means that Mississippi’s shield protections for journalists, regarded as among the weakest in the country, will not be put to the test. Mississippi Today said in a message to its readers:
For the past 22 months, we’ve vigorously defended our Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting and our characterizations of Bryant’s role in the Mississippi welfare scandal. We are grateful today that the court, after careful deliberation, dismissed the case.
The reporting speaks for itself. The truth speaks for itself.
Bryant sued after Today, led by reporter Anna Wolfe, reported that he had been involved in a state welfare scandal that also implicated former NFL quarter Brett Favre. Wolfe won a Pulitzer Prize, but Bryant claimed that Today’s publisher, Mary Margaret White, falsely suggested at a speaking event that Bryant had broken the law. White apologized and said she had misspoken. The news outlet itself has not retracted any of its reporting.
Bryant sought access to internal communications in an attempt to show that Wolfe and her colleagues had committed “actual malice” — that is, that they knowingly or recklessly reported untrue facts about Bryant.
Despite last week’s good news, Mississippi Today may not be out of the woods yet. Ashton Pittman reports in the Mississippi Free Press, another nonprofit news organization, that Bryant’s lawyer plans to appeal and that he expects the case will eventually end up before the state supreme court.
“Gov. Bryant remains confident in the legal basis and righteousness of this case,” attorney Billy Quin told Pittman.
Under the First Amendment, reporters do not have a constitutional right to protect their anonymous sources or confidential documents. States are free to enact shield protections, and 49 states have done so; Wyoming is the lone exception.
But Mississippi — and, for that matter, Massachusetts — is on the weak end of those shield protections. Both states’ protections are based on state court precedents rather than a clearly defined shield law. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press regards Mississippi and Massachusetts as being among the eight worst states, following Wyoming, with regard to a journalist’s privilege.
That lack of strong protection came into play in Massachusetts recently when Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone ruled Boston magazine reporter Gretchen Voss would be required to turn over off-the-record notes from an interview she conducted with high-profile murder suspect Karen Read. Cannone later reversed herself.
Thus in both Mississippi and Massachusetts the courts have declined to issue a ruling that would force a definitive decision as to whether reporters in those states have shield protections or not.
Poynter Institute president Neil Brown interviews Robin Roberts, co-anchor of ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” at Poynter’s 2024 Bowtie Ball last November. Roberts received the Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Neil Brown, a longtime journalist who is the president of the Poynter Institute. For listeners who might not know, Poynter is a nonprofit based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that is devoted to teaching best practices in journalism. It is named for Nelson Poynter, the bow-tie-wearing legend who led the St. Petersburg Times to national recognition. The paper is now known as the Tampa Bay Times.
Poynter is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Last September, Poynter issued a report called “OnPoynt,” which attempted to place journalism’s ongoing economic crisis in context and give some hope for optimism. The goal was to offer “a forward-minded look at the state of journalism and the news industry that propels the story by considering trends related to creative product ideas, audience growth strategies and traction around revenue, artificial intelligence and innovation.” We talked with Neil about that report along with other topics.
Later on in the podcast, I’ve got a Quick Take on President Trump’s bouncing tariffs. They’re on, they’re off, they’re on, they’re off. But his gyrations are having real consequences. In central New York State, Trump’s threats have killed a daily newspaper — and not just any paper. The Cortland Standard, one of the oldest family-owned papers in the country, folded in mid-March, as Trump’s proposed 25% tariff on Canadian newsprint proved to be the last straw.
(Since we recorded this podcast, Trump has imposed tariffs that were far deeper and more damaging than many observers had expected. Newsprint, though, remains exempt.)
Ellen’s Quick Take comes from a tip from Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times who is now a distinguished professor of the practice here at Northeastern.
Jeff Morrison, a journalist who is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, has compiled an incredible timeline of the decline of newspapers in Iowa. A highlight: The Storm Lake Times Pilot, a twice-weekly print paper featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” is dropping a print edition and going weekly.
I want to call your attention to this strong, eloquent editorial about free speech on campus that was published by The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper. It is, the piece says, the first time that the News’ editorial board has weighed in on an issue in six years. The editorial says in part:
While the Trump administration has yet to single out Northeastern University as it has Columbia University, Georgetown University or the University of Pennsylvania, we believe it is only a matter of time before our institution is targeted by the administration. The moment will come when the views expressed by one of our professors are denounced as “dangerous” or when the president brands the actions of a protesting student as “illicit,” making no legal effort to justify such an accusation.
In the words of Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun, the university’s mission “does not change with the times.” Neither does a student’s fundamental right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Northeastern’s mission is only as strong as our commitment to defending it. If we waver, hesitate or stall in standing up for our values, then Northeastern’s mission was never as ironclad as our administration would have us believe.
Our university must not preemptively submit to an atmosphere of fear.
The editorial board — reconstituted only within the past few days, according to editor-in-chief Sonel Cutler — also calls on the university administration to do more in speaking out against the current atmosphere of repression and to be more transparent about efforts it is reportedly taking in collaboration with other colleges and universities in Greater Boston.
Overall, the editorial is even-handed, well-written and passionate in its defense of democracy and the First Amendment.
You may have heard that less than 1% of NPR’s budget comes from the federal government. That figure is sometimes bandied about by those who wonder why the news organization doesn’t just cut the cord and end the debate over taxpayer-funded news. The problem is that it’s more complicated than that.
In today’s New York Times morning newsletter, media reporter Benjamin Mullin explains the reality. Public radio stations in general are highly dependent on funding from the quasi-governmental Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and those member stations pay a lot for NPR programming.
In rural areas, in particular, public radio is a primary source of news when there is an emergency such as a tornado or flooding. And many of those stations would not survive a cutoff in government funding. Mullin writes:
NPR can weather the funding cut, … thanks in part to aggrieved listeners: Executives predict a sudden boom in donations if Congress defunds it, as listeners rush to defend their favorite programs. But they will likely give more in big-city markets.
Or as former CPB board member Howard Husock has put it: “NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law.”
Earlier this morning I looked up a review that I wrote for The Boston Phoenix of Robert McChesney’s breakthrough 1999 book, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy.” I had to laugh, because Bob was right and I was wrong, and for a reason I wouldn’t have expected. Over the years I had come to regard myself as more realistic than progressive media reformers like Bob, whose fertile mind produced all sorts of idealistic proposals for improving the media. In this case, though, he was the realistic one.
Bob McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a leading progressive thinker in media-reform circles, died last Tuesday at 72. His friend and longtime collaborator John Nichols has a moving remembrance in The Nation, writing:
As new political and societal challenges arose in an ever more chaotic moment for America and the world, Bob explained how they should be understood as fresh manifestations of an ancient danger: the concentration of power—in this case, the power of the media, in the hands of old-media CEOs and new tech oligarchs, all of whom cared more about commercial and entertainment strategies than democratic and social values.
To get back to that review: In the Oct. 1, 1999, edition of the Phoenix, I wrote about two important books about the media by then-rising scholars. Jay Rosen of New York University had just published “What Are Journalists For?,” an exploration of his involvement in the public journalism movement, which sought to involve citizen as collaborators in how the media cover their communities. McChesney’s book examined the effects of monopolistic corporate control of the news media, building on the earlier work of Ben Bagdikian, author of the oft-updated “The Media Monopoly.”
Every semester I ask my media ethics and diversity students at Northeastern to identify stories in the news that they think haven’t received as much coverage as they should have.
It’s always an enlightening experience — all of these stories have obviously received some coverage, but in my students’ view they weren’t repeated and amplified enough to penetrate the public consciousness. Right now, of course, there’s the Trump factor, as we all ponder what important news is being undercovered because of the way that the White House is dominating the news.
My class comprises nine graduate students and advanced undergrads. Here’s what they came up with.
• O Canada. The Trump administration’s brutal treatment of immigrants is getting plenty of attention, but The Atlantic reports (gift link) that Americans are looking to leave as well: “U.S. citizens now represent the majority of clients looking for an exit, through foreign citizenship, permanent residence, or a visa that allows them to live abroad.” Indeed, three prominent Yale professors, including Timothy Snyder, the author of “On Tyranny,” said this week that they’re decamping for the University of Toronto.
• Tax privacy takes a hit. The IRS may soon reach an agreement with immigration officials to turn over tax data, including the names and addresses of undocumented immigrants, according to The Washington Post, which reports: “The proposed agreement has alarmed career officials at the IRS, … who worry that the arrangement risks abusing a narrow and seldom-used section of privacy law that’s meant to help investigators build criminal cases, not enforce criminal penalties.”
• Journalists killed by Israel. Two more journalists working in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces, Al Jazeera reports. Hossam Shabat, who worked for Al Jazeera, died after his car was targeted. Another, Mohammad Mansour, who worked for Palestine Today, was killed in his house, along with his wife and son, according to reports. “The deliberate and targeted killing of a journalist, of a civilian, is a war crime,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which reports that 173 journalists, mostly Palestinian, have been killed in the Israel-Gaza war. Other reports put the number of killed media workers at more than 230.
• Human trafficking or not? A high-priced brothel that catered to wealthy clients in Cambridge, Watertown and Washington has certainly gotten plenty of coverage, but there’s an important nuance that may have been overlooked. According to Cambridge Day, prosecutors have made “no distinction” between consensual sex work and human trafficking — casting a very different light on the sensational story, which has encompassed issues ranging from victimhood to privacy.
• Exploiting pregnant women. So-called crisis pregnancy centers lure pregnant women who may be considering abortion, and who instead find themselves dealing with anti-abortion activists. “The anti-abortion movement takes advantage of their economic vulnerability,” reports The New York Times (gift link), adding that some clients are required to take parenting or even Bible classes in order to obtain medical care that they need.
• AI and climate change. There’s so much cheerleading going on in the media about artificial intelligence that the environmental cost tends to get overlooked. The reality is that AI uses enormous amounts of energy and water (for cooling), thus contributing to climate change. And though some solutions are coming on line, the Harvard Business Review reports that the “adverse environmental impacts of AI disproportionately burden communities and regions that are particularly vulnerable to the resulting environmental harms.”
• Climate case is quietly dismissed. An under-publicized case came to a quiet end recently as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal brought by 21 young people who sued the federal government on the grounds that their constitutional rights had been violated through policies that encouraged the use of fossil fuels. According to The New York Times (gift link), the Supreme Court’s action in the case of Juliana v. United States came after 10 years of legal maneuvering.
• Is it safe to fly? Plane crashes tend to be well-covered when they occur. But who is looking into the question of whether they are increasing in frequency, or the fears that passengers have about flying at a moment when it seems that safety can’t be ensured? The New York Times (gift link) pulled some of that information together by recounting three recent crashes, in Washington, Philadelphia and Alaska.
• Segregation in the South. This May will mark the 71st anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed school segregation throughout the U.S. Yet ProPublica reported recently that Alabama continues to be the home of numerous “segregation academies” — private schools set up for white families, while Black students attend increasingly segregated public schools. “ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating,” according to the report.
My ethics and diversity class on Wednesday was devoted to a brief overview of First Amendment law. The class comprises nine graduate students and advanced undergrads, and they have shown throughout the semester that they are engaged and compassionate young people.
I began with a video in the news. You’ve probably seen it. It shows black-clad, masked thugs, apparently with ICE, approaching a young woman on a sidewalk at Tufts University, hauling her off to a van and driving her away. Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk, and she’s a Ph.D. student and a Turkish citizen who’s in the U.S. on a student visa.
It’s the latest shocking image in a series of shocking images we’ve been subjected to recently as the Trump administration — my friend Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub has simply taken to calling it “the regime” — tracks down international students who have been involved in some form of pro-Palestinian activism and targets them for deportation.
The only activity I have seen attributed to Ozturk that might have led to her being targeted is an op-ed she helped write calling on the university to recognize Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” and to divest from Israel. You may agree or disagree; I mostly disagree, though I am appalled by the brutal manner in which Israel’s Netanyahu government has pursued its war against the terrorists of Oct. 7, 2023. But the First Amendment gives Ozturk an absolute right to speak and write freely, regardless of whether she’s a citizen.
According to accounts in The Tufts Daily student newspaper and Cambridge Day, thousands of protesters gathered in Somerville Wednesday night to show their support for Ozturk.
Cambridge Day reporter Jodi Hilton quoted Asli Memisoglu, a native of Turkey who graduated from Tufts in 1987, as saying: “One thing I’ve always cherished was the sanctity of free speech, but that’s threatened now.”
In The Tufts Daily, Emily Isaac, a Somerville resident, said: “People are always going to fight back. Everyone likes to say what they would have done during a historical atrocity, or during times of fascism, and I think it’s important to recognize the signs of when it’s happening.”
I wish I could say that Isaac was overstating matters.
Since Trump began his second term on Jan. 21, authoritarianism has descended upon us swiftly and mercilessly. Universities, law firms and public media organizations have all been targeted, and the people who are running them don’t know whether they should fight, surrender or find some sort of middle ground. Immigrants are whisked off to hellish prisons in El Salvador on the flimsiest of pretexes. Our country is quickly becoming unrecognizable.
On Threads last night, I saw a comment from someone who is definitely not a Trumper that, well, this is what people voted for. My response: Democracy without protection for individual rights is just another word for dictatorship.
We are in very bad shape, and the courts can only do so much.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.
We are about to experience the full consequences — or, rather, the lack of consequences — stemming from the Democrats’ electoral wipeout last November.
The texting scandal exposed by The Atlantic earlier this week is serious business. As you have no doubt heard, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a group chat by national security adviser Mike Waltz. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used that chat to share war plans about an upcoming air attack in Yemen. In case you haven’t had a chance to read Goldberg’s story, here’s a gift link.
The scandal raises all sorts of questions. Why were top White House officials using Signal, a commercial app not approved for secure governmental communications? Signal messages automatically expire after a certain amount of time; were steps taken to override that and preserve those messages in accordance with the law? Are Signal chats about sensitive national security issues common within Trump’s inner circle? Are any foreign adversaries listening in? (One of the participants, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, took part while he was in Russia.)
So where do we go from here? Not very far, I’m afraid. A number of observers have compared this to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, which became the cause célèbre of the 2016 presidential campaign. So consider:
• This time there will be no criminal investigation — or, if anyone tries, Donald Trump will quickly shut it down. James Comey is not walking through that door. Barack Obama, a Democrat, was president in 2016, but he was also a person of integrity who did not interfere with the independence of the Justice Department or the FBI. Such is no longer the case.
• There will be no congressional investigation, not with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate. (In 2016, Republicans held both branches.) House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called on Trump to fire Hegseth, but Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has said only that Republicans and Democrats should work together on a “full investigation.” Good luck with that.
• Absent a criminal investigation or meaningful congressional hearings, the media coverage will soon fade away. We all remember The New York Times’ obsession with Clinton’s emails, but we tend to forget that it was largely fed by governmental action, especially by Comey. It was his last-minute intervention over what he described as another round of emails — followed by a “never mind” — that probably cost Clinton the election.
The print edition of today’s Times leads with two stories related to the scandal. I thought I’d point that out given the outrage I saw on social media claiming that Tuesday’s print edition played the story down — a consequence, I’m sure, of early print deadlines and the difficulty of reacting instantly to a huge story broken by another media outlet.
Unless there are more revelations, though, the media wave is likely to crest within the next few days. And then we’ll be on to the next Trump scandal.
Correction: I had a brain cramp regarding Jeffrey Goldberg’s name. Now fixed.
