I want to let you know about one of the biggest events that Ellen Clegg and I have had to discuss our book, “What Works in Community News.” We’ll take part in a public conversation on Tuesday, Oct. 15, at 7 p.m. at the Roux Institute in Portland, Maine. The institute is part of Northeastern University. You can register here.
The program is part of the “Newsroom Live” series, sponsored by the Maine Trust for Local News, the nonprofit owner of the Portland Press Herald and a number of other daily and weekly newspapers and digital publications.
The Maine Trust was created several years ago after the media properties were acquired by the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that has also purchased papers in suburban Denver and Georgia to prevent them from falling into the hands of corporate chain owners.
We write about the National Trust and include a conversation with its executive director, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, in our book. In addition, I wrote about the Press Herald’s pre-Trust ownership struggles in his 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls.”
The Boston Herald Traveler plant sometime in the 1950s. Photo (cc) 2013 by City of Boston Archives.
Paid print circulation continues to fall at the city’s second daily newspaper, the Boston Herald, while paid digital subscriptions are essentially unchanged over the past year. That information was gleaned from published statements that the Herald filed with the U.S. Postal Service this past September as well as the previous September.
Last week I reported that the dominant daily, The Boston Globe, is losing print customers more quickly than it’s adding digital subscribers — a departure from previous years, when digital was growing rapidly. The paper is predicting a return to faster growth in 2025.
I’m reporting on the Herald’s numbers with less information than I would like, but I believe I have enough to make some accurate apples-to-apples comparisons.
Unlike the Globe, and unlike virtually every daily newspaper I’ve ever looked at, the Herald’s postal statements include Sunday numbers in its average circulation totals. If I had access to the Alliance for Audited Media’s reports, I could find separate totals for Sundays and weekdays. Last October, for instance, Mark Pickering, writing for Contrarian Boston, found that the Herald’s average paid weekday print circulation was 16,043, a decline of more than 20% over 2022. Sunday circulation, he reported, was 19,799 last year, a drop of more than 16%.
Pickering was relying on numbers that the Herald had reported to AAN. Unfortunately, AAN ended free log-ins for journalists and researchers a couple of years ago. And when I asked for four reports last week regarding the Herald and the Globe, I was told that it would cost me $200. No thank you.
So that brings us to the seven-day print numbers that the Herald reported to the Postal Service. According to reports filed on Sept. 20, 2024, the Herald’s average print circulation during the preceding 12 months was 13,092 — a substantial drop of 2,566, or more than 16% over the previous year.
Now for digital circulation. As I wrote last week, the digital numbers that newspapers report to AAN and the Postal Service involve some double-counting and are actually higher than the internal numbers. Globe spokeswoman Carla Kath told me that the paper’s paid digital circulation is currently 261,000, an increase of 6.5% over the previous year but substantially below what’s on the postal (and AAN) statements.
Given that, I’d like to know what the Herald’s internal count of digital circulation shows. But publisher Kevin Corrado did not respond to an email seeking clarification, so I’m going to go with the postal statement. And according to that statement, the Herald’s average seven-day digital paid circulation is now 27,894, just 655 more than it was a year ago.
For some reason, the 2023 number is slightly lower than what Pickering reported at Contrarian Boston a year ago for both weekdays and Sundays, which suggests an unexplained discrepancy between what the Herald reported to the postal service and to AAN.
All told, the Herald’s average paid circulation as reported to the postal service, print plus digital, is now 40,978, a decline of 1,919, or about 4.5%.
Media notes
• Media critic Margaret Sullivan, whose lengthy résumé includes a stint as The New York Times’ public edtior, weighs in with some thoughts on a bizarro juxtaposition of Times headlines about presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The headlines: “In interviews, Kamala Harris continues to bob and weave” and “In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics,” which is another way of saying that the Orange Authoritarian is a fan of eugenics.
As Sullivan writes, the Harris head is “unnecessarily negative, over a story that probably doesn’t need to exist,” while the Trump head “takes a hate-filled trope and treats it like some sort of lofty intellectual interest.” Liberals and progressives on social media, especially on Threads, have been up in arms at what they see as the Times’ soft treatment of Trump. Though I think much (OK, some) of that criticism is overwrought, there’s no disputing that the paper blew it with the two headlines Sullivan cites.
• Speaking of the Times, executive editor Joseph Kahn was interviewed on NPR in recent days by “Morning Edition” co-host Steve Inskeep. Kahn was asked to address criticism from the left, including the Times’ obsessive coverage of President Biden’s age and its weird both-sidesy treatment of the candidates’ housing plans. (Harris: Build more; Trump: Deport the occupants.)
“In people’s minds, there’s very little neutral middle ground. In our mind, it is the ground that we are determined to occupy,” Kahn said. He added: “It’s not about implying that both sides have absolutely equal policies on all the issues. It’s about providing well-rounded coverage of each of the two political parties and their leading candidates.” Read or listen what Kahn has to say and see if you agree.
• This blog is built on WordPress, open-source software that powers many news websites. Unlike Twitter, Meta or Substack, WordPress has always seemed like a non-evil alternative. You can set up your blog at WordPress.com, a commercial hosting service, or do it yourself using the free WordPress.org software. I’ve done both, and currently Media Nation uses dot-org.
Now all that is being threatened. Longtime digital journalist Mathew Ingram, who’s gone independent, has a terrific post up about the battle between Matt Mullenweg, a wealthy entrepreneur who controls both dot-com and dot-org, and WP Engine, a major third-party hosting service that I don’t use. “In a word, it’s a godawful mess,” Ingram writes. “And every user of WordPress has effectively been dragged into it, whether they wanted to be part of it or not.”
• The PRESS Act, which would create a federal shield law to protect journalists from being forced to identify their anonymous sources except in rare cases, has been endorsed by The New York Times. I’ve written more about it here.
Devastation in Ashville, N.C. Photo (cc) 2024 by Bill McMannis.
Conspiracy theories about the weather have come to Maine. Wendy Lee MacDowell of Augusta, a Republican candidate for the state legislature, has claimed on social media that the government is responsible for “weaponized weather” aimed at whipping up storms in conservative states, reports Dylan Tusinski of the Morning Sentinel, which covers Central Maine.
“Reached for comment,” Tusinski writes, “MacDowell refused to provide information backing up her claims and threatened to sue a reporter for requesting an interview.”
MacDowell, who is running against state Rep. Bill Bridgeo, an incumbent Democrat, is echoing claims made by extreme-right Republicans such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who posted to Twitter recently: “Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
“They,” presumably, is a reference to Democrats, although there is more than a whiff of antisemitism to these lies, too. For instance, MacDowell linked on Facebook without comment to a video on Twitter, which in turn had been reposted from TikTok, claiming that Hurricane Helene was directed by the government to Asheville, North Carolina, as part of an elaborate conspiracy to take control of lithium mines tied to Doug Emhoff, who’s married to Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the comments, another conspiracy theorist claimed that Emhoff’s family owns a pharmaceutical company “that makes/sells…. the puberty blockers they are pushing on children to change genders.”
And, of course, we all know that Emhoff is Jewish.
The extreme right’s conspiracy theories about hurricanes have resulted in meteorologists coming under attack and have impeded relief efforts, reports Ivana Saric of Axios, writing:
Meteorologist James Spann told Axios on Friday he began seeing an influx of threatening messages and conspiracy theories around the onset of Hurricane Helene. The threats include messages like “‘stop lying about the government controlling the weather — or else,'” he said. Spann also noted that the harassment faced by young women in the field is even greater.
The last word goes to Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College, who tells the Morning Sentinel: “Believing in conspiracy theories is kind of like a giant middle finger to all the groups in society that say they know what truth is.”
You may have heard that Liam Morrison, the Middleborough teenager who has sued for the right to wear an anti-transgender T-shirt to school, has appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
I wouldn’t get too excited about it, at least not yet. It strikes me as highly unlikely that the court — even this court — will want to undo precedents holding that public school officials have broad powers to control their students’ communications, whether it be the right to censor the high school newspaper or, in this case, to decide that a T-shirt’s message creates a disciplinary problem.
At the heart of Morrison’s argument is a form of fake both-sides-ism — that is, pro-trans messages have been allowed in school, so why not anti-trans messages? The problem with this is obvious. Anti-trans messages express hatred toward kids who are LGBTQ, while pro-trans messages harm no one.
As Christopher Butler reported Wednesday for The Enterprise of Brockton, Morrison is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), described as a “Christian” law firm. (Scare quotes warranted given that there are many varieties of Christianity, some of which even take seriously Jesus’ admonition to love one another.) Sandy Quadros Bowles of Nemasket Week and Travis Andersen of The Boston Globe reported on the appeal as well.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, the ADF agenda includes “the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S.” The organization also supports sterilizing trans people in other countries, has linked LGBTQ people to pedophilia and has “claimed that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society,” the SPLC says.
Morrison, then a seventh-grader, was sent home from the Nichols Middle School twice in the spring of 2023 — the first time for wearing a T-shirt that read “There Are Only Two Genders” and, the second time, for amending that to “There Are (Censored) Genders.”
Morrison sued and lost in U.S. District Court, and his appeal was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Chief Judge David Barron ruled that school officials did not act “unreasonably in concluding that the shirt would be understood … in this middle school setting … to demean the identity of transgender and gender nonconforming students.”
As for whether Morrison has a chance of riding his T-shirt to glory before the U.S. Supreme Court, as I said, it seems doubtful, but who knows with this group? It only takes four of the nine to agree to hear the case. And as Emily Birnbaum has reported for Bloomberg, the ADF “has won 15 Supreme Court Cases since 2011, and four since 2020, when Justice Amy Coney Barrett tilted the court into a 6-3 conservative supermajority.”
Still, it’s hard to imagine that the court is going to want to empower public school students to promote any message they want, especially if local school officials argue that to do so would be disruptive and create disciplinary problems. We’ll see.
Paid circulation growth at The Boston Globe has leveled off, as a modest increase in digital subscriptions has barely been enough to offset the continued deterioration of its print business. That’s according to publisher’s statements filed with the U.S. Postal Service that were printed in the Globe earlier this week as well as numbers provided by the Globe.
On weekdays, the average paid print circulation between Sept. 1, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024, was 57,450. A year earlier it had been 64,977. That’s a decline of 7,527, or 11.6%.
On Sundays, the average paid print circulation was 102,703, down from 116,456 a year earlier. That represents a drop of 13,753, or 11.8%.
The Globe also reported paid digital circulation to the Postal Service, but those numbers — the same that it provides to the Alliance for Audited Media — are not a good reflection of the paper’s actual digital subscription base. According to Carla Kath, the Globe’s director of communications, paid digital circulation is now 261,000, an increase of about 6.5% compared to last October, when it was around 245,000.
When you combine paid print and digital, the Globe’s average weekday circulation is about 318,000, up by 8,000 over a year ago, for an increase of 2.5%.
On Sundays, average combined circulation now stands at 364,000, a rise of 3,000, or a little more than 0.8%.
Oddly enough, the paid digital numbers that the Globe reports to the Postal Service and AAN are higher than its internal figures because AAN uses a different methodology that allows for some double-counting.
Earlier this year, Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry told employees that her “North Star” goal for paid digital circulation is 400,000, plus another 100,000 for Stat, the company’s health-and-science news site. She did not put a timetable on that, but in May she told Don Seiffert of the Boston Business Journal that she expected 2024 to be a “building year,” with accelerated growth coming in 2025 and beyond.
“Our subscribers can see this investment with our expanded daily news videos, our new weather center, better games, new podcasts, deeper geographic expansion, and more,” Henry told Seiffert. “We do not expect growth to follow a linear pattern — we have a long-term strategy for continuing to serve our community as a strong and sustainable organization.”
Kath’s email message to me struck a similar tone. “Like most publishers in 2024, we have seen moderation in non-subscriber traffic.However, we’ve adjusted our strategy and continue to grow digital subscriptions while focusing on long-term growth and sustainability,” she said.
“Total paid subscriptions are up more than 30% over the last five years, and 2024 is performing as we expected. We continue to innovate and plan for growth in 2025 as we aim for our ongoing goal of 400,000 paid digital subscribers.”
Media notes
• The Tampa Bay Times has dropped its paywall for coverage of Hurricane Milton and its aftermath — just in time for a story on the Times’ own building being damaged by a collapsing crane. Zachary T. Sampson and Chris Urso report:
A crane collapsed in downtown St. Petersburg during Hurricane Milton’s thrashing winds Wednesday night — leaving a gaping hole in an office building that houses several business, including the Tampa Bay Times.
The crane fell from the Residences at 400 Central, the 46-story skyscraper being built across from the Times’ office, as the storm pummeled the region.
The crane remained crumpled across 1st Avenue South early Thursday, completely blocking the street.
The city said in a news release that no injuries have been reported at the site. The building damaged by the crane had closed ahead of Milton’s arrival Wednesday. No one from the Times’ newsroom was working inside when the crane collapsed.
• Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy has a tough item on CNN chair and chief executive Mark Thompson on the first anniversary of his tenure. Darcy, who left CNN a few months ago to start his newsletter, Status, writes:
In conversations that I have had over the last few weeks with employees at all different levels inside the company, it has become clear that morale has fallen considerably since Thompson took the helm. Staffers, who were once wide-eyed and filled with hope that Thompson would stroll into Hudson Yards with a toolbox full of foolproof, executable ideas, are now questioning whether he will ultimately prove to be successful in reversing the outlet’s dimming fortunes.
• Donald L. Barlett, one of the great investigative reporters of the 20th century has died. I remember reading his and James Steele’s “America: What Went Wrong” in the early 1990s, when it was first released. You might call it an early warning signal about the damage that Ronald Reagan’s economic and tax policies favoring the rich were doing to the country — damage that has contributed to the anger and polarization of politics today. The book was a compilation of reporting that Barlett and Steele had previously produced for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Over four decades, Mr. Barlett and Mr. Steele’s investigative prowess, rooted in deep, systematic research and complex analysis of issues and institutions that profoundly affected Americans, resulted in two Pulitzer Prizes for national reporting (they were finalists for the award six times), six George Polk awards and various other honors.
Tim Coco, general manager of WHAV in Haverhill, Mass.
Facebook’s brain-dead algorithm is censoring important public-safety information, reports WHAV in Haverhill, Massachusetts. WHAV is a nonprofit news organization with a low-power/online radio station as well as a website.
In the last week, a local news warning about the sinkhole along the southbound lanes of Interstate 495 near Ward Hill was flagged as spam and removed by one social media site. Another blocked WHAV story was news of possible restoration of Haverhill’s 1845-era (gun) powder house. The tech giant behind these removals piles on with intimidation by writing “Repeatedly breaking our rules can cause more account restrictions.”
Even more mind-boggling, Coco writes, is that when the Haverhill Police Department attempted to share WHAV’s item on the sinkhole, Facebook removed that, too.
This is nothing new for Facebook. In “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, we tell the story of an emergency route during a wildfire that the sheriff’s department had shared with The Mendocino Voice in Northern California. The Voice posted it on its Facebook page, one of its primary distribution channels — and then watched in alarm as it disappeared. In the excerpt below, we talked with Kate Maxwell, then the publisher of the Voice, and Adrian Fernandez Baumann, then the editor:
The sheriff’s department asked the Voice to get the word out that people living in the national forest would run into danger if they tried to evacuate through the nearby community of Covelo. It was potentially lifesaving information, but Facebook took it down. “It had like a thousand shares in an hour,” said Maxwell. “Facebook flagged that post and deleted it.” The article was restored about a half-hour later following an uproar from the community. Maxwell said she never got a good explanation of what happened, even after talking with someone from Facebook at a conference. Maybe it was because the algorithms identified it as fake news. Maybe, as Baumann speculated, it was because the article included a reference to “Indian Dick Road.”
Coco doesn’t identify Facebook as the culprit, but the screenshots that he posted are clearly from that platform. He’s asking his readers and listeners in the Haverhill area to stop relying on social media for WHAV stories and instead to subscribe directly to the news outlet’s daily email newsletter.
Coco, by the way, is in our book and has been a guest on the “What Works” podcast.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is also getting swamped with complaints about entirely harmless posts being removed from its Threads platform because of algorithmic decisions being made with no human involvement. I can speak from personal experience, too. Twice over the past year or so, I’ve responded to questions asking about great song lyrics, and I’ve gone with “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” from Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Both time, my posts were removed from Facebook and Threads, and I was given a warning.
So let me repeat something I’ve said a number of times: News organizations should not rely on social media any more than absolutely necessary. Do what Coco is doing: Push newsletter subscriptions, because that’s a platform that you control and own.
Knox County Courthouse in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Photo (cc) 2014 by Mark Spearman.
Today I’m doing something unusual — reposting a long investigative article that was originally published in ProPublica about ways that Metric Media, the notorious “pink slime” publishing company, is taking advantage of the worsening local news climate on behalf of moneyed interests in Ohio.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
By Miranda Green, Floodlight; Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica; and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism
Word tends to spread fast in rural Knox County, Ohio. But misinformation has spread faster.
The first article in the Mount Vernon News last fall about a planned solar farm simply noted that residents were “expressing their concern.” But soon the county’s only newspaper was packed with stories about solar energy that almost uniformly criticized the project and quoted its opponents.
Then a new “grassroots” organization materialized and invited locals to an elaborate event billed as a town hall, with a keynote speaker who denied that humans cause climate change.
Someone sent text messages to residents urging them to “stop the solar invasion” and elect two county commission candidates who opposed the solar farm. And one day this past March, residents received an unfamiliar newspaper that contained only articles attacking Frasier Solar, a large project that would replace hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans with the equivalent of 630 football fields of solar panels.
To many in the deep-red central Ohio community, it seemed that solar had become the focus of news and politics. They were right. Fossil fuel interests were secretly working to shape the conversation in Knox County.
Each cog in the anti-solar machine — the opposition group, the texts, the newspaper, the energy publication — was linked to the others through finances and overlapping agendas, an investigation by Floodlight, ProPublica and The Tow Center for Digital Journalism found.
Count me among those who are perplexed as to why CBS News morning anchor Tony Dokoupil has been reprimanded by his bosses for the way he conducted himself in an interview with the journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Coates has written a new book called “The Message,” part of which comprises a harsh critique of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In a recent interview with Terry Gross of the public radio program “Fresh Air,” and again on “CBS Mornings,” Coates called Israel an “apartheid” state. He also questioned Israel’s existence on the grounds that he opposes the notion of any state based on ethnicity.
Now, I’m not writing this item to take sides. I’ve long been an admirer of Coates, although I disagree with him strongly on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state within secure borders — and agree with him about the Netanyahu government’s brutal prosecution of the war in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.
My point is that there was nothing wrong with Dokoupil’s interview. It was tough but polite. Probably Dokoupil’s one statement that I’d regard as out of line was this:
I have to say that when I read the book I imagine that if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.
But what of it? Coates parried Dokoupil deftly, and the conversation ended a few minutes later on an almost friendly note. Yet CNN media reporters Brian Stelter and Hadas Gold write that CBS News staff members were told at a meeting that Dokoupil’s manner did not meet the network’s editorial standards, adding:
In wake of the criticism, CBS News and Stations president and CEO Wendy McMahon and her top deputy Adrienne Roark enlisted the network’s standards and practices unit to conduct a review of the discussion, according to sources familiar with the matter. The news division’s race and culture unit was involved as well.
Management concluded that “the problem was Tony’s tone” in the interview, one of the sources said. McMahon and Roark didn’t say so on the Monday morning call, but they emphasized the importance of network standards and the need to have “courageous conversations.”
This is absurd. At the most, maybe Dokoupil should have been taken aside and privately told that the “backpack of an extremist” comment was inappropriate. But why do we expect television audiences to be treated like children, with everyone making nice rather than engaging in some tough talk?
As a sign of how clueless CBS managers are, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullins of The New York Times report, “Executives who discussed the interview on Monday’s call had asked staff members to keep their remarks confidential.” Uh, huh.
Neither Dokoupil nor Coates acted like anything untoward had happened, and that’s because it hadn’t. They had an enlightening though brief exchange. I’d like to see more interviews like it and less happy talk — but that’s not going to happen if journalists fear they’ll get in trouble just for doing their jobs.
Storm damage in Henderson County, North Carolina. Photo (cc) 2024 by NCDOTcommunications.
Here’s some good advice to prepare for a natural disaster: Get yourself a radio, preferably one that you can crank up by hand. I’m looking at a few on Google, and I see a some models that also come with a built-in flashlight and a port for charging your cellphone.
What brings this home is a story by Tony Elkins, a Poynter Institute faculty member who lives in Asheland, North Carolina, and who was stranded along with his wife and their dog after Hurricane Helene hit. He writes:
I spoke to Poynter’s Angela Fu about how important the radio was in getting out information. We had zero cell signal. No phone, no text, no data. In the mornings and afternoons, the radio was set to Blue Ridge Public Media for the 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Buncombe County update. That’s how we learned just how massive this event was.
In the evenings we tuned into 99.9 FM. The station hosts and iHeart support from around the country were running nonstop. People were calling in with updates, where to get supplies, reports on what was still standing and what was gone. People called in to beg for information on family or just hear another person’s voice.
It’s been a terrible week for the victims of Helene. While Donald Trump and his allies are spreading lies about hurricane assistance being diverted to undocumented immigrants, as Heather Cox Richardson writes, news organizations on the ground are doing their best to serve their community.
As Elkins observes, radio is a crucial lifeline given that it’s not dependent on internet or cellphone service. For people who have at least a little cell connectivity, some news organizations have put together text-only websites that will work even with slow and limited connections. Melody Kramer, a longtime journalist who’s interested in democracy and public participation, put together a short list of such outlets on Threads:
The dominant daily paper in the area, Gannett’s Asheville Citizen Times, has been using its Instagram feed to provide survivors with vital information. Elkins says that’s where he learned how to send SOS text messages and where to find nearby gas stations that were open. Reddit has been useful, too, he adds.
Hayley Milloy of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers wrote a newsletter item hailing LION members for the innovative approaches they were taking to keeping their communities connected and safe:
For example, Asheville Watchdog presciently looked at the elevated risk of flooding due to development in the days before the storm struck; Oviedo Community News published a local disaster resource guide; Enlace Latino NC devoted an entire editorial section to storm coverage; The Assembly is putting storm coverage outside its paywall and providing it free for any local or regional outlet to republish; The Charlotte Ledger launched Mountain Updates, a pop-up newsletter featuring important developments on flood recovery; and Carolina Public Press is raising awareness about misinformation around the disaster.
Sadly, one platform that had been a go-to for emergency news and information has become a don’t-go, according to Poynter’s Elkins. “I used to be a heavy Twitter user,” he writes. “When I finally opened X, it was full of horrible artificial intelligence-generated images and conspiracy theories. I’ll probably never go back.”
American hostage Ann Swift shortly after her release in January 1981. Public domain photo by the Department of Defense.
The October Surprise. These days the phrase is often used to describe fears that a political campaign will drop some sort of bombshell in the final weeks before Election Day.
Then-FBI Director James Comey’s reopening of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 would certainly qualify, though there was no evidence that the Trump campaign was behind it — nor, for that matter, any evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton.
So, too, would the Hunter Biden laptop story of 2020, though the Trumpers who were behind it were hampered by the inconvenient fact that they’d targeted the wrong Biden.
But I don’t think anyone used the phrase October Surprise until 1980, when it was used to describe something that Ronald Reagan and his associates feared would happen but ultimately did not: the release of more than 50 American hostages who had been held by Iran for many months. If President Jimmy Carter brought them home just before the election, it could have given him the boost he needed to win a second term. Continue reading “The October Surprise, 44 years on; plus, extremism at home, and more on sponsored content”
