Media Nation

In Vermont, a mayoral Muzzle for silencing the police and freezing out the press; plus, media notes

Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.

It might be high-handed for a mayor to order her police chief to funnel all public statements through her office, but it isn’t necessarily such an outrage that it warrants a coveted New England Muzzle Award. But to compound that by announcing she would have a press availability to which not all local news organizations were invited — well, come on down and claim your prize, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak.

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Mulvaney-Stanak, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and a leader in that state’s Progressive Party, signed an executive order last Wednesday ordering the Burlington Police Department to route all press releases through her office before distributing them to the public. “People need the basic facts of situations for the sake of public safety and nothing more than that,” the mayor was quoted as saying.

According to Colin Flanders, a reporter for the Burlington-based newspaper Seven Days, Mulvaney-Stanak had “raised concerns” with Police Chief Jon Murad “about the content of his department’s public statements in the past. Murad has used press releases in recent years to criticize the court system and a perceived lack of accountability for repeat offenders.”

Murad was silenced after a defense lawyer asked a judge to impose a gag order on the Burlington police in response to statements by the chief concerning a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Murad had accused the man of “violent, incorrigible, antisocial behavior” — and some of Murad’s comments were repeated on the public radio program “On Point,” produced by WBUR in Boston and distributed nationwide. It’s hard to imagine that the mayor was pleased by that.

Meanwhile, Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, writing in the Vermont Daily Chronicle for Vermont News First, reported on Friday that Mulvaney-Stanak would speak to the press at a media availability that afternoon — but that Vermont News First, which had been dogging the mayor over her acceptance of free donated meals, had not been invited. After Donoghue’s story was posted, he added an update reporting that Seven Days hadn’t been invited, either.

“She doesn’t answer her cellphone and actually has asked VNF to stop calling,” Donoghue wrote.

(Update: Donoghue later explained to me that VNF is his own journalism endeavor and that the Vermont Daily Chronicle is one of his clients.)

Well, if Seven Days and Vermont News First were left off the invitation list, who was invited? The city’s daily, the Burlington Free Press, didn’t report on the mayor’s muzzling of Chief Murad until today, and there are no quotes from her in the article. There’s nothing about any sort of press availability in the statewide news organization VTDigger, whose reporter Corey McDonald wrote about Mulvaney-Stanak’s silencing of Murad last Thursday, on the same day as Seven Days. Nor is there anything from Vermont Public Radio.

Chief Murad, who’s leaving his post this April, may or may not have been out of line in disparaging a notorious frequent flier in the criminal justice system. But holding law enforcement to account is difficult enough without the mayor stepping in and lowering the cone of silence.

For Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak to worsen that situation by creating the impression that she would exclude some news outlets from a media availability (it’s not clear whether that availability ever happened) goes beyond acceptable and pushes this story into the Muzzle Zone.

Media notes

• Donald Trump v. Nancy Barnes. Among the journalism organizations Donald Trump has targeted for libel suits is the Pulitzer Board, which awarded a Pulitzer Prize to The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2018 for their reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia. Trump is claiming the award was somehow libelous — and Ben Smith of Semafor reports that he’s is suing not just the board but individual members of that board, including, locally, Boston Globe executive editor Nancy Barnes.

• A liberal counterpart to The Free Press? Another star opinion journalist has fled the rapidly declining Washington Post. Jennifer Rubin, a conservative-turned-centrist-turned-liberal with a strong social media presence, is moving to Substack, where she’ll be the editor-in-chief of a new publication called The Contrarian — which, she tells CNN’s Brian Stelter, will “combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face.” Stelter’s report and Rubin’s introductory post suggest that The Contrarian could serve as a welcome liberal counterpart to the right-leaning Free Press, founded in 2021 by disgruntled New York Times opinion journalist Bari Weiss.

• New Jersey’s post-print future. This past fall I observed that Advance Local was closing its New Jersey print newspapers, the largest of which is The Star-Ledger of Newark, and doubling down on digital with its statewide NJ.com site. Now Marc Pfeiffer, a policy fellow at Rutgers University, has written a commentary for NJ Spotlight News arguing that print is not essential to maintaining a rich media ecosystem. “The future of New Jersey news is primarily digital — and that’s OK,” Pfeiffer writes. “What matters isn’t the delivery method but the quality and accessibility of local journalism. Our democracy depends on having informed citizens who know what’s happening in their State House, county seats, and town halls.”

• An update on that Colorado assault. A couple of weeks ago I noted that a television journalist in Grand Junction, Colorado, had allegedly been assaulted by a Trump supporter who followed his car to the journalist’s television station, tried to choke him, and shouted “This is Trump’s America now.” In his latest newsletter, Corey Hutchins writes that the 22-year-old journalist, Ja’Ronn Alex, is out on paid leave while Patrick Egan, the taxi driver who’s been charged, is out on bail, with his lawyer claiming that he suffers from mental health issues.

How Bill and Linda Forry plan to expand their Boston publications thanks to a Press Forward grant

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Bill and Linda Forry, co-publishers of the award-winning Reporter newspapers in Boston. Bill serves as editor, and Linda focuses on business development and strategic partnerships.

The Reporter newspapers include the weekly Dorchester Reporter as well as Boston Irish and BostonHaitian.com. The publications and their websites are part of a media business owned and operated by the Forry family since 1973.

The Forrys were recently in the news. The Reporter is one of 205 news organizations in the U.S. to win an inaugural Press Forward grant to expand coverage of Boston’s underserved communities.

I’ve got a Quick Take on public radio. Put bluntly, public radio is in trouble, and not just NPR, which may be our leading source of reliable free news, but also public radio stations across the country. An important recent essay in Nieman Reports argues that the way forward for public radio stations may be to double down on local news.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on the Nieman Lab predictions for the media industry in 2025. Every year, Nieman Lab asks a select group of people what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Sam Mintz, the editor of Brookline.News, a digital outlet Ellen helped launch, is one of the prognosticators.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Plymouth’s town manager earns a Muzzle for giving a local news outlet the silent treatment

Plymouth, Mass. Photo (cc) 2008 by Raime.

When a community has been without a reliable source of local news for some time, government officials can become accustomed to operating without much scrutiny. And when a feisty startup arrives on the scene to report stories that had gone unreported, that can prove to be quite a shock to the powers that be.

Which is as good an explanation as any for what’s unfolding in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The venerable Old Colony Memorial had become virtually a ghost newspaper under the Gannett chain’s ownership, mainly publishing regional coverage from other Gannett papers. Then, in 2023, the Plymouth Independent, a nonprofit digital outlet, arrived on the scene.

The Independent is larger and more ambitious than many such projects; the editor and CEO is Mark Pothier, a former Globe journalist and, before that, editor of the Old Colony Memorial back when it was still covering local news. One of the Independent’s directors is Walter Robinson, a Plymouth resident who’s best known for leading the Globe’s Spotlight Team when it was exposing the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.

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One Plymouth official who is taking particular umbrage at the increased scrutiny being brought by the Independent is the town manager, Derek Brindisi. According to a message to readers that Pothier published today, Brindisi has ordered “all appointed town officials to cease all communication with the PI.” The only exception is that town officials will be permitted to respond to public-records requests from the Independent, which, after all, they are required to do under state law.

For his unwarranted attempts to prevent the Independent from holding local government accountable, Brindisi is receiving a New England Muzzle Award. “In my decades as a journalist, Brindisi’s blanket edict is like nothing I have ever encountered,” writes Pothier, who also says:

Our job as journalists is to hold government officials accountable and to provide readers with the reliable information they need to foster a functioning democracy. In that respect, the relationship between governments and journalists is necessarily adversarial. We’re supposed to be skeptical of people in power.

Officials, paid public professionals, and Town Meeting members make decisions involving policies and spending that inevitably spark debate. They serve in the public’s interest. The Independent reports on them in the public’s interest.

Before the PI arrived, most Plymouth residents — including myself — had a hard time finding out what was going on in town. Perhaps naively, I figured officials would welcome the chance to present the town’s perspective on important issues. Some have — or did until this latest order to stop talking to us. Brindisi, however, has only reached out to express displeasure with our coverage.

Pothier goes into some detail about a couple of routine stories that upset Brindisi. One was written by Andrea Estes, a former investigative reporter for the Globe. (Estes’ career at the Globe came to a bad end for reasons that have never been adequately explained, but there is no question that she’s an experienced and accomplished journalist.) The other was written by Fred Thys, a former reporter for WBUR Radio in Boston and VTDigger, a leading investigative news outlet in Vermont.

Brindisi, for his part, childishly refers to the Independent as the “Plymouth Enquirer” and has complained about the Independent’s “distasteful reporting” and efforts to “humiliate town officials.”

This isn’t the first Muzzle to be awarded to Plymouth officials in recent months. Back in July, I gave one to select board member Kevin Canty for suggesting that an unnamed person was risking prison for recording the audio of a board meeting without informing those present. Canty was referring to Thys, who had made no effort to hide the fact that he was recording the meeting, which was also being live-streamed on YouTube.

Thys may have been in technical violation of the law, but seriously? “Canty and I later spoke about the incident,” Pothier writes. “We both agreed it could have been handled better, perhaps with a simple request that Thys announce he was recording.”

Pothier also credits Canty with working to mend the rift between Brindisi and the Independent, but that those efforts have come to naught.

CNN’s risky decision to defend a libel claim; plus, billionaires bad and good, and media notes

Photo (cc) 2010 by red, white, and black eyes forever

Ordinarily when I write about libel suits, it’s to call your attention to some bad actor whose ridiculous claims threaten to damage freedom of the press. Today, though, I want to tell you about a case involving CNN that has me wondering what on earth executives at the news channel could be thinking.

Media reporter David Folkenflik of NPR explains the case in some detail. In November 2021, CNN’s Alex Marquardt reported that Zachary Young, who runs an outfit called Nemex Enterprises, was taking advantage of desperate Afghans by charging them “exorbitant fees” to extract them from Afghanistan after the U.S. pulled out and the government fell into the hands of the Taliban.

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CNN said there was no evidence that Young had been successful in evacuating anyone. Young claims otherwise. Folkenflik writes:

Young has sued CNN for defamation. In his complaint, his attorneys say CNN gave him just hours to respond to its questions before it first aired that story on “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” They say Young had, in fact, successfully evacuated dozens of people from Afghanistan.

In rebutting those allegations in court, CNN has since cast doubt on Young’s claim of the successful evacuations. Behind the scenes, however, some editors expressed qualms about the reporting, court filings show.

You should read Folkenflik’s full story. What you’ll learn is that:

CNN may or may not have gotten it right, but it is basing its defense, in part, on what it describes as Young’s refusal “to cooperate with CNN’s reporting efforts,” as if he was under any legal obligation to do so. Also, keep in mind that Young argues he was given “just hours to respond.”
Tom Lumley, CNN’s senior national security editor, privately called the story “a mess.” Megan Trimble, a top editor, agreed that “it’s messy.”
There was some sentiment within CNN that it was all right to go ahead with a fleeting television version of the story that wouldn’t attract much notice but that posting a written article was risky.
Marquardt, in an internal message, had written, “We gonna nail this Zachary Young mf*****,” and at least two other CNN journalists had disparaged Young besides, with one saying Young had “a punchable face.”

Continue reading “CNN’s risky decision to defend a libel claim; plus, billionaires bad and good, and media notes”

Mark Zuckerberg’s capitulation to Trump is all about his relentless pursuit of profits

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo (cc) 2019 by Billionaires Success.

On Tuesday I spoke with Jon Keller of Boston’s WBZ-TV (Channel 4) about Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to eliminate independent fact-checking and tone down the moderation on Meta’s social-media various platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

Among other things, Zuckerberg said he’s going to let pretty much anything go on immigration and gender on the grounds that stamping out hate speech is “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He’s also copying the Community Notes feature from Elon Musk, who has turned over fact-checking to users at his Twitter/X platform.

For all the details, I recommend this Wall Street Journal article (gift link) and Zuckerberg’s own video announcement.

Jon and I were only able to hit a few points in our conversation, so I want to say a bit more. What Zuckerberg is doing amounts to unconditional surrender to Donald Trump. Four and five years ago, Facebook struggled to clamp down on dangerous misinformation about COVID and suspended Trump from the platform after he fomented the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Now Zuckerberg is giving in completely.

Essentially we have three billionaire tech moguls who are doing everything they can to enable Trump. Musk, of course, isn’t just enabling Trump; he’s moved in with him, and his bizarre pronouncements about everything from the alleged criminality of the British government to the size of newborns’ heads now carry with them the imprimatur of our authoritarian president-elect.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is systematically destroying The Washington Post, one of our four national newspapers, for no discernible reason other than to curry favor with Trump. And now Zuckerberg has signaled his willingness to surrender unconditionally.

The dispiriting reality is that Zuckerberg has placed profit above all other values for many years, no matter what the human cost. According to Amnesty International, Facebook was complicit in genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. His products have been linked to depression and suicide among teenagers. If Zuckerberg cared about any of this, he would have taken steps to make his platforms safer even at the expense of some of his profit margin. To be clear, Zuckerberg obviously doesn’t support genocide or suicide, and he has taken some steps — but those measures have been inadequate.

We should always keep in mind what the business model is for social media, whether it be Facebook, Threads, Twitter or TikTok. All of them employ opaque algorithms to show users more of the content that keeps them engaged so that they can sell them more stuff. And studies have demonstrated that what keeps users engaged is what makes them angry and upset. This is protected by Section 230, a federal law that holds internet publishers legally harmless for any content posted by third-party users.

As Twitter has continued its descent into the right-wing fever swamps, two platforms have emerged as alternatives — Threads and the much-smaller Bluesky. The latter has received several big bumps since the election, and is likely to get another one now that Zuckerberg has harmed the Threads brand. Bluesky doesn’t use a centralized algorithm — you’re free to use one designed by other users or none at all. (That’s also the case with Mastodon, but Bluesky has zoomed well ahead in the public consciousness.)

Unfortunately, Bluesky also lacks the capacity to engage in the kind of fact-checking and moderation that Meta once used. And with growth comes toxicity.

I’ve seen a number of folks on Threads saying on Tuesday that they’re leaving for Bluesky, just as many others said last year that they were leaving Twitter for Threads. It’s all futile. What we need is less social media and more real human connection. What Zuckerberg did Tuesday didn’t destroy something great. Rather, he made something that was already bad considerably worse.

The Globe’s new Starting Point lead writer was co-writer of the Times’ morning newsletter

In her recent New Year’s message to readers, Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry listed an expanded morning newsletter as one of her goals for 2025. Today the Globe took a step toward accomplishing that goal, hiring Ian Prasad Philbrick, co-writer of The New York Times’ flagship newsletter, The Morning, to serve as chief writer for the Globe’s Starting Point.

According to Philbrick’s LinkedIn page, he’s currently living in Washington, but the Globe’s announcement says that he plans to relocate to the Roslindale area, where he has family.

No word in the announcement whether Starting Point will move from three days a week to five, which strikes me as a necessity, but perhaps that will be the next step. I should note that the Globe has a number of other newsletters, including a weekday-morning offering called The B-Side, which is part of Globe Media’s free Boston.com site and aimed at a younger audience.

What follows is the announcement to the newsroom from Jacqué Palmer, senior editorial director for newsletters; Teresa Hanafin, the editor of Starting Point; and Heather Ciras, deputy managing editor for audience.

We’re thrilled to announce that Ian Prasad Philbrick, a former co-writer of The Morning newsletter from The New York Times, has joined the Globe as our lead Starting Point writer.

Ian not only co-wrote The Morning, but was also a key player in its ongoing development since its inception five years ago. He has the journalistic mindset, skills, and strategic foresight required to successfully helm a flagship newsletter like Starting Point. We are delighted to have him step into this role and help us reach our subscription goals.

Ian’s former colleagues raved about his ability to write big, sweepy, and informative stories, but also dig into data, identify trends, and offer fresh takes on the old, but interesting. His former editor went on at length about how thoughtful, careful, and smart Ian’s work is — and the Starting Point team couldn’t agree more.

Ian grew up in rural Maine, taught in a Boston public school for City Year, and studied politics at Georgetown University. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his fiancée Madeline, his dog Pearl, and his cat Squash. In his free time, you’re likely to find Ian reading a presidential biography, jogging in the park, or trying out a new recipe (this pumpkin maple cornbread is a current favorite).

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Ian. He will soon relocate and is hoping to land near family in the Roslindale area. He reports to Jacqué, is edited by Teresa, and will sit with the audience team when he is in the office.

Thank you to all who have contributed to Starting Point since it launched in September. (And we may still come to you from time to time for guest essays.) Because of your work, we already have close to 30,000 subscribers, with more signing up every week. In fact, we regularly get emails from readers thanking us for this newsletter. If you have any questions about how we can highlight your work, please email the Starting Point team at startingpoint@globe.com.

Memories of the insurrection on a day when Trump is receiving his ultimate reward

Washington, D.C., on Jan. 10, 2021. Photo (cc) 2021 by Mike Maguire.

Four years ago today, Donald Trump staged a violent attempted coup so that he could remain in the White House rather than turn over the presidency to Joe Biden. And today, he’s returning to the office that he disgraced. Here is something I wrote on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. My closing sentence, unfortunately, is even more apt today than it was in 2021.

The media are filled with one-year retrospectives about the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. I can’t say I’m paying much attention to them. We’ve had a firehose of coverage from the moment it happened, and appropriately so. An anniversary doesn’t add anything to what we already know, and to what we still need to know.

Will we remember Jan. 6 the way we remember Sept. 11, 2001, or the way our parents and grandparents remembered Dec. 7, 1941? Probably not, though neither will it soon be forgotten. And one of the acts of remembering is recalling what we were doing on that day.

I was hiking in the Middlesex Fells, as I often do. I took a photo of two signs on a tree because I thought they were funny: one said “Keep Out”; the other urged hikers to maintain social distancing, which seemed like an odd admonition if you weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.

I emerged from the woods around 3 p.m. and turned on the car radio. NPR was carrying audio from the “PBS NewsHour,” and Judy Woodruff was freaking out. At first I figured the Republicans were trying to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes to delay Joe Biden’s being declared the official winner of the presidential election. That, after all, had been predicted.

Within a few moments, though, I learned the truth: that a mob of rioters had descended on the Capitol, had broken inside and were rampaging through the halls of Congress. It was our first attempted coup, aided and abetted by Donald Trump, and it may not be the last.

These are dark times, and I’m not optimistic about what the next few years will bring.

Two outside investors stake a claim in the financially ailing New Hampshire Union Leader

The financially ailing New Hampshire Union Leader has taken on two outside investors, according to an article that the paper published on Friday. The move coincides with the Union Leader’s closing on a $1 million loan to get out from under pension obligations.

The investors are Bob Singer, who lives in Manchester and is the former president of Merchants Auto, and Greg Wendt, a partner at Capital Group Companies in San Francisco. The amount of their investment was not disclosed. But the Union Leader account, by Jonathan Phelps, suggests that it will be enough to cover the $1 million loan — from the quasi-governmental New Hampshire Business Finance Authority, or BFA — and then some.

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“Part of the investment is to match up with the million dollars from the BFA,” president and publisher Brendan McQuaid is quoted as saying. “Then there is some further investment, which is helping to recapitalize the company.”

According to a November report by New Hampshire Public Radio’s Todd Bookman, the loan requires the Union Leader to raise $1 million in private equity as well as $750,000 in cash, which will be held as collateral — which would appear to be where Singer and Wendt come in. The five-year loan comes with a 2% interest rates, which, as Bookman observes, “is far below the market rate.” Bookman’s account continues:

The newspaper will use the funds to pay down decades worth of pension obligations for both existing and now retired employees. Under the terms of the deal, none of the rank and file employees will see a reduction in benefits, while pension payouts for a handful of executives will be slashed by up to 65%.

In a written statement, the New Hampshire News Guild — a union representing approximately 40 of the paper’s journalists, ad sales representatives and circulation customer service employees — praised the approval of the loan.

“This deal appears to ensure that New Hampshire will continue to benefit from the award winning journalism, advertising and customer care that our members create on a daily basis,” the guild said.

The Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications, at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, owns two-thirds of the Union Leader, according to a recent account of the paper’s woes by Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan. Phelps’ account suggested that arrangement will change at least to some extent: “Under this ownership structure, the Loeb School, a nonprofit organization, joins Wendt and Singer as an additional minority shareholder of the Union Leader Corporation by converting some previous debt to equity.”

Singer has long been a presence on the New Hampshire scene. In 2023, he was the recipient of the Davison Award for Philanthropy, administered by the Mary & John Elliot Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit that provides financial support for health-care needs in the southern part of the state and for Elliot Health System.

Singer is an occasional donor to political candidates as well, making small contributions to local politicians, most of them Democrats, according to the website Open Secrets. He’s made a few out-of-state donations as well, including $500 to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2019 and $1,000 to Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno in 2021; Moreno defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2024. Singer also gave $1,250 to Democrat Rufus Gifford in 2018 for his unsuccessful primary campaign against Massachusetts congresswoman Lori Trahan.

Wendt has no obvious ties to New Hampshire. According to his company bio, he’s an equity portfolio manager at Capital Group, where he’s worked for 36 years, and holds a Harvard MBA. He’s been active politically, too, mainly on behalf of mainstream Republican presidential candidates like John Kasich in 2016, giving $250,000, USA Today reported, and Tim Scott and Nikki Haley in 2024. Politico reported that Wendt had supported John McCain as well. According to Open Secrets, Wendt has also donated to a diverse range of political figures that includes Biden; incoming New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican; outgoing Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat-turned-independent; and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

The Union Leader, New Hampshire’s only statewide paper, holds a notorious place in the history of presidential politics, as its late owner and publisher, William Loeb, was infamous for his caustic criticism of any political figure who would dare cross him. In 2022 it was revealed that he had molested both his stepdaughter and his daughter when they were young children. In response to the revelations, the Union Leader removed his name from its masthead.

Under the leadership of his widow, the late Nackey Loeb, the Union Leader became tamer but no less right-wing. My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman’s biography of Nackey Loeb, “Political Godmother,” describes her role in the rise of Ronald Reagan, as the Union Leader’s support in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary was crucial in Reagan’s rise from the fringes.

Now, with the New Hampshire primary’s status no longer a sure thing following the Democrats’ decision to lead with South Carolina in 2024, and with center of right-wing media having long since shifted to Fox News, the Union Leader is struggling.

According to Ryan’s story in the Globe, Sunday print circulation has fallen from about 85,000 in 1999 to 20,000 today; weekday circulation has dropped from 63,000 in 1999 to fewer than 16,000 in 2023. Paid digital circulation is barely a factor, Ryan added, and annual revenue has fallen from $50 million-plus to about $14 million in recent years.

The Washington Post suffers another self-inflicted blow as Ann Telnaes quits over a killed cartoon

The rough draft of the Ann Telnaes cartoon that was killed by her editor. Via Telnaes’ newsletter, Open Windows.

The latest self-inflicted blow to The Washington Post has been rocketing around the internet since Friday. Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose wickedly funny editorial cartoons have graced the Post’s opinion section since 2008, quit after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes writes in her newsletter, Open Windows:

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

She’s wrong about one thing: Her resignation has created an enormous stir. Right now it’s trending at The New York Times and is No. 7 on The Boston Globe‘s most-read list. It’s all over social media as well.

The rough draft of Telnaes’ cartoon (above) shows Bezos and fellow billionaires Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of Open AI and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong kneeling before a giant statue of Trump. Three are holding bags of money in supplication. I’m not sure what Soon-Shiong is doing, though he appears to be wielding a container of lipstick. Mickey Mouse somehow figures into it as well.

Shipley, who was hired in 2022, is trying to do damage control, saying in a statement reported by New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin that he was simply engaged in normal editing and believed that the Post was running too much commentary about Trump’s billionaire courtiers:

Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.

I’m going to take Shipley at his word. Opinion editors should assert themselves from time to time and insist on less repetition. But not in this particular instance. Given the fraught nature of Bezos’ recent Trump-friendly moves, including his decision to kill the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund (which is what Telnaes was mocking in her cartoon), Shipley should have left this one go. By killing Telnaes cartoon, he acted in a deeply irresponsible manner at the worst possible time. And he lost one of his brightest stars.

I’ve enjoyed Telnaes’ work for years. During the Trump presidency, she often drew animated cartoons that were published on the Post’s digital platforms. Under her skillful pen, Trump was a grotesque figure, covered with makeup with his long red tie often reaching the floor.

Sadly, we are at a moment when editorial cartooning in general is on the decline, and it’s not a given that Telnaes will be picked up by another paper. The Times, which has been scooping up disaffected Posties, famously does not run editorial cartoons. Shipley says he hopes Telnaes will reconsider, but that seems unlikely.

No doubt Telnaes won’t come cheap. But several papers distinguished themselves with tough anti-Trump opinionating during the 2024 campaign, including The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I hope one of them sees fit to open up their checkbook and bring her on. The Atlantic, which like the Times has been hiring former Post staffers, is a possible landing spot as well.

At 50 hours, the audio version of Chernow’s Grant biography is scarcely shorter than the Civil War

I gave quite a bit of thought to whether I wanted to spend 50 hours with the audio version of Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant before deciding to take the plunge. I knew I was unlikely to find the time to read all 1,074 pages, and I wanted to know more about Grant and his era.

So I started it in mid-October during a drive to Portland, Maine, and kept at it an hour at a time, mainly on walks. I finished on New Year’s Day, and I’m here to report that it took longer for Grant to die than it did Joan of Arc during her interminable burning at the stake in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a 1928 silent film that we saw a few years ago accompanied by music written and performed brilliantly by a group of Berklee students.

I had previously listened to Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which, at 36 hours, was a romp by comparison. I don’t regret the time I spent getting to know Grant; Chernow is an eloquent writer and a skilled researcher, and, as I had hoped, I came away much more knowledgeable about his life and times.

But the level of detail about every trivial occurrence, and the repetitiveness about topics such as Grant’s alcoholism, military genius and ineptitude when not on the battlefield gets to be enervating after a while. As Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times: “Chernow likes extreme research; if a Civil War luminary had hemorrhoids, you can read about them here.”

I find that I absorb information from an audiobook about as well as I do from print, but since I’m not taking notes, I can’t really go back and offer much in the way of detail. More than anything, though, what stood out was Grant’s dedication to Black equality. In Chernow’s telling, Grant and Abraham Lincoln were the foremost white advocates of civil rights until Lyndon Johnson. Grant eagerly made use of Black troops during the Civil War, pushed for an expansive approach to Reconstruction, and, as president, dispatched the military to the South to break the Ku Klux Klan.

Thus it’s more than a little disconcerting to come to the end of Grant’s presidency in 1877, when Northern support for Reconstruction was waning, and learn that he believed the Civil War — which claimed an estimated 750,000 lives — had all been for naught. It’s hard to disagree, as slavery in the South morphed into Jim Crow and lynchings, a reign of terror that extended into the 1960s and whose legacy has still not been entirely put behind us.

Media notes

• Unpacking New Orleans and Las Vegas. Around this time Thursday, authorities were reportedly investigating whether the terrorist in New Orleans had accomplices and if the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion might somehow be tied in. Then, too, Donald Trump was parroting a false report from Fox News that the New Orleans attacker had driven across the border from Mexico. Today, we know that none of it was true. As the “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” from the public radio program “On the Media” puts it: “In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong” and “There’s almost never a second shooter” — or, in this case, a second attacker.

• A challenge to the AP. Reuters and Gannett are planning to offer some sort of subscription-based service to regional and local news publishers, according to Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, marking the next step in a partnership that began last spring. This is potentially bad news for The Associated Press, which has been losing customers because of its high prices. But it’s not clear how the arrangement will work. Reuters is a high-quality source of national and international news. Gannett, which publishes USA Today and owns some 200 local news outlets, is notorious for slashing its newsrooms and cutting their reporting capacity.

• Why local news matters. The Los Angeles Times has lost some 20,000 subscribers since owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and began embracing various Trump-friendly ideas, according to media reporter Oliver Darcy. Not good — but far fewer than the 250,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions over owner Jeff Bezos’ similar moves. The LA Times was starting from a smaller base, but there’s an additional factor that may be at play.

Under Bezos’ ownership, the Post reinvented itself as a nationally focused digital publication — making it relatively easy to cancel, since there are plenty of other sources of national and international news, starting with the Post’s ancient rival, The New York Times. By contrast, the LA Times is primarily a regional publication, not unlike The Boston Globe. Canceling the LA Times would mean losing access to important local and regional stories that no one else has.