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On the latest episode of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we take a long look at the implosion of “60 Minutes,” the 58-year-old CBS News staple that has been torn apart by Bari Weiss and her choice to run the program, Nick Bilton.
Why did CBS executives fire Scott Pelley? What are we to make of Pelley’s claim in a New York Times interview that Weiss tried to inject bias and at least one falsehood into his report on the killings of Minneapolis protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents? What’s next for “60 Minutes,” which not only continues to be a ratings leader but actually grew over the past year? Does the new Trump-friendly owner, David Ellison, care about any of this?
Also: World Cup watch parties and our panel’s Rants and Raves. With Emily in the moderator’s chair; our host, Scott Van Voorhis of Contrarian Boston; Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe, and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.
The Massachusetts Legislature is poised to expand digital privacy rights following unanimous House passage of a bill whose provisions include banning the sale of precise location data.
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The bill now goes to a conference committee to reconcile differences with a similar, stronger Senate bill that was passed last year. After that, the legislation would be sent to Gov. Maura Healey for her signature.
As Jennifer Smith reports in CommonWealth Beacon, location data can be used to track women who have traveled to Massachusetts from states where abortion is illegal. She writes:
The House completely bans the sale of precise geolocation data but would allow the sale of all other sensitive data if the user gives consent. The location shielding would cover those visiting Massachusetts as well as its residents.
“Protecting location data is paramount if the rights in Massachusetts to reproductive health care equity are to be upheld,” said Rep. Kate Lipper-Garabedian of Melrose. Data brokers have tracked interstate visits to Planned Parenthood locations in Massachusetts, she noted, and then provided that data to an anti-abortion campaign. Now, she said, the Trump administration is purchasing location data for immigration enforcement.
“One’s personal location data should never be monetized by a private for-profit company working in concert with the dystopian government to undermine our constitutional right to due process,” Lipper-Garabedian said.
According to the advocacy group Fight for the Future, the House version “would be one of the strongest data privacy bills in the United States” and includes a provision that would allow individuals to sue large technology companies for abuses of their personal data. Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, said in a statement:
Companies shouldn’t be able to track you everywhere you go and then sell that information on the open market. Today, Massachusetts took a major step toward cracking down on Big Tech’s surveillance abuses. In Trump’s America, we know that privacy protections are a matter of life and death for LGBTQ+ youth, undocumented folks, and other vulnerable communities. We’ll continue to push for the MA legislature to pass the strongest privacy legislation possible.
Smith reports that the House and Senate must also work out their conflicts with regard to another bill, this one banning cellphone use by students while in the classroom. The House version would also ban social media accounts for children who are 13 or younger and would require 14- and 15-year-olds to have a parent or guardian’s permission before signing up.
That provision, which the governor supports, has been widely criticized on the grounds that it could harm LGBTQ youth or teenagers in abusive homes. The Senate version contains no such restriction.
Mike Deehan, reporting for Axios Boston, writes that a coalition of some 90 civil-rights and privacy groups (including Fight for the Future) have come out against the restriction, adding: “Federal judges have blocked similar laws in Florida, Louisiana and Ohio on First Amendment grounds.”
“NJ Spotlight News” anchor Briana Vannozzi, right, interviews U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.
An agreement has been reached that would save NJ PBS. If it’s approved by the state legislature, it could prove to be a lifeline for NJ Spotlight News as well.
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Spotlight, a 16-year-old website covering politics and public policy, merged with NJ PBS in 2019. The television network’s daily half-hour newscast is also branded as “NJ Spotlight News,” and there’s quite a bit of content-sharing between the newscast and the website.
The agreement was reported by Nicolas Fernandes of NJ.com, who writes that Montclair State was one of four organizations that submitted bids to sponsor NJ PBS. Now that the university has been selected by the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority, the legislature will have 15 days to review it.
Bunker Hill Monument. Photo by John S. Moulton, taken between 1860 and 1889, is part of the Boston Public Library Collection.
You could call the Trump regime’s campaign against so-called woke ideology an ongoing effort to muzzle our nation’s history. From the start of his second term, the National Park Service has engaged in a rampage of censorship, targeting historical sites in Philadelphia, Georgia, New York and elsewhere.
Now Trump has come for Boston. On Wednesday, Jake Spring reported in The Washington Post that the park service “has ordered the removal of three quotes” at the Bunker Hill Monument. Thus has the National Park Service earned a New England Muzzle Award. Spring writes:
The site includes panels with quotes from historic figures or writings that reflect on the 200-year-old monument. A visitor at the site complained to park staff about a quote related to women’s suffrage as being “woke” feminist ideology, the people familiar said, and the visitor later sent an email complaint.
The Boston Globe’s Tonya Alanez and Chloe Pisani on Thursday added to (sub. req.) the Post’s reporting, writing that they had confirmed the story with U.S. Sen. Ed Markey’s office. The Globe reported that one of the three quotes to be removed was from an 1846 letter by G.B. Stebbins to The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper:
As we drew near to Boston, there stood Bunker Monument, towering up towards the heavens, as if in silent, bitter mockery of the millions of slaves guarded by the professed lovers of Liberty, who reared its lofty column.
Another, addressed to “Our Irish Societies,” appeared in The Pilot, the newspaper of Boston’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese, in 1875:
Now that a public orator has declared that foreign-born men have no association with the men of the Revolution, it is our duty to show that in love of freedom and loyalty to the republic, the citizens of foreign birth take no second place.
The third quote that was removed was from a letter to the Globe written in 1971 by two members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
It seems significant that the three quotes pertain to the rights of Black people and immigrants as well as an antiwar message — all at odds with Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant, war-mongering administration.
The government’s officially sanctioned vandalism coincides with another act of vandalism at Boston’s Museum of African American History. Malcolm Gay reports (sub. req.) in the Globe that decorations to be used in Juneteenth celebrations had been set on fire.
Ironically, the investigation is being led by the Boston Police Department — and the National Park Service.
An alternative approach to public notices. Photo (cc) 2011 by Selena M.B.H.
Since Colonial times, state and local governments have been required to publish legal advertisements in newspapers about official proclamations, court citations, vital records, and the like. Also known as public notices, these agate-size ads inform the community of important public business — and provide the press with a crucial revenue stream.
Now, though, that system is under threat in Massachusetts. Two bills would allow legal ads to be published on government websites without any mandate that they be placed with news organizations.
Just a month ago, The Minnesota Star Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for “powerful stories marked by thoroughness and compassion” in its coverage of the Annunciation Church shootings last year. Who wasn’t moved by the photo of a mom running barefoot toward the church — a strappy summer pump in each hand?
This year, the newsroom’s coverage of ICE detentions and the ensuing local protests — a neighborly Minnesota Nice rebellion of sorts — was nothing short of stellar.
But what a difference a month can make in the volatile and unforgiving world of what media analyst Ken Doctor calls “newsonomics.” On Tuesday, Steve Grove, publisher, announced that it will cut its staff by 15% through layoffs and buyouts.
Nicholas von Hoffman and James Kilpatrick debate the fate of Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal in 1973.
I’m nearly 70, and I’ve never been a regular viewer of “60 Minutes.” I think of it as a show that my parents watched. Still, the dismantling of the highly rated program at the hands of David Ellison’s designated flunky, Bari Weiss, and her designated flunky, Nick Bilton, has been alarming for anyone who cares about investigative journalism — or, for that matter, democracy.
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I had to laugh at the clueless outrage of conservative commentators over Scott Pelley’s wonderfully hostile confrontation with Bilton. “When a child throws a tantrum, they’re punished,” clucked Isaac Schorr at Mediaite. “When a journalist throws a tantrum, they wait to be called stunning and brave.”
A promising idea to support local news has been dealt a major setback in Maryland, where Gov. Wes Moore has vetoed a bill that would direct state agencies to place at least 50% of their advertising in local news outlets. Even though the bill passed the state Senate unanimously and the House of Delegates by a margin of 129-7, Sean Curtis of WBOC reports that “a veto override is unlikely” because this year’s legislative session is about to expire.
Eight years after my book “The Return of the Moguls” was published, what is the state of newspaper ownership by civic-minded billionaires? Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) put that question to me on his “Keller at Large” program, which was broadcast Sunday morning.
My answer: not what I had hoped. John and Linda Henry have proved to be good stewards of The Boston Globe, and another billionaire sports owner, Glen Taylor, has similarly revived The Minnesota Star Tribune. But Jeff Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post has taken a disastrous turn after 10 good years, and other masters of the universe have failed to step up.
Jon and I talked about some other media-related topics as well, including:
◘ The rise of independent local-news projects, especially in affluent suburbs. News deserts, unfortunately, persist in rural areas and urban communities of color.
◘ A New England Muzzle Award I recently gave Gov. Maura Healey for proposing to prevent public access to birth, death and marriage records for many decades — overturning a tradition of openness that dates back Puritan times.
◘ A crisis at the Internet Archive, as more than 300 local newspapers have blocked access in order to prevent AI companies from scraping their content without compensation.
The closing paragraphs of The New York Times’ report on Graham Platner’s sexting-while-married problem are, uh, interesting.
The Democratic Senate candidate from Maine was speaking at an event in April, shortly after Gov. Janet Mills had dropped out, when he was asked a perfectly logical question: Other than the Nazi tattoo and the offensive social-media posts, is there anything else we should know? Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer write:
Toward the end of a town hall meeting in Sabattus, Maine, in April, the night before Ms. Mills dropped out, a Platner supporter named Carolyn Greeley asked him a blunt question.
“Is there anything you need to share with us?” she asked.
Ms. Greeley was bothered by his past comments about women, she said, and wanted assurances that there would not be more damaging revelations to come.
Mr. Platner was unequivocal in his response. Republicans would certainly “make stuff up” about him, he said. He had dated, had girlfriends, “gone through life.” But everything had already been “dragged up,” he promised the crowd.
“In my past, there is not some big, dark secret,” he said.
Asked in an interview how he could be so certain that there was no other information that would come out about him after the event, Mr. Platner was terse.
“I lived my life,” he said. “That’s how.”
We now know not just about the sexting but that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had warned a campaign official about it just as the campaign was getting under way. In other words, Platner failed to tell Greeley the truth, and it’s pretty hard to imagine that he’d forgotten about the sexting.
Meanwhile, Michael Shepherd reports (sub. req.) in the Bangor Daily News that a Platner adviser “warned a former aide she would be accused of lying and sabotage if she cooperated with news outlets reporting on sexually explicit messages Platner sent to women.”
The former aide, an ex-state legislator named Genevieve McDonald, went to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times anyway.
The blood is really in the water now, and you can be sure that news outlets are scrambling to get ahead of whatever might be coming next. And it is absolutely incredible that Maine’s now-she’s-Trumper-now-she-isn’t Republican senator, Susan Collins, may be on the verge of getting another free ride.
The Boston Globe’s Tonya Alanez and Chloe Pisani on Thursday 
