The New York Times may be rethinking its decision to publish Sen. Tom Cotton’s terrible, offensive op-ed piece endorsing the use of military force to crush the violent protests that have broken out around the country following the brutal, unjustified police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
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It’s probably not a good idea for us to talk about messing around with free speech on the internet at a moment when the reckless authoritarian in the White House is threatening to dismantle safeguards that have been in place for nearly a quarter of a century.
On the other hand, maybe there’s no time like right now.
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I was in Winchester center a little while ago picking up Chinese food when I saw about a half-dozen people with serious-looking cameras. It turned out they were birders. I’m not sure what they told me this guy was, but I think I heard someone say it was a night heron. So here’s my crappy, over-enlarged smartphone picture.
Statement by the Faculty of the Northeastern University School of Journalism Denouncing Police Attacks on Journalists:
The recent attacks on journalists by police in American cities, including on Northeastern University alumni, are unacceptable and do great damage to our democracy. They also jeopardize the ability of citizens to inform themselves about not just the current wave of protests but also our nation’s history of racism, bigotry and police brutality. Our society thrives on the free flow of information and the check on governmental authority provided by a free press. The vital work of the free press must be allowed to go on without the threat of harm and arrest. We stand with all journalists documenting this difficult chapter in American history, especially those from communities of color. We call upon all levels of government to end attacks by police on journalists and the institution of journalism, and to protect the First Amendment rights of protesters.
SIGNED BY:
Prof. Jonathan Kaufman, Director
Aleszu Bajak
Prof. Rahul Bhargava
Prof. Matt Carroll
Prof. Myojung Chung
Prof. Charles Fountain
John Guilfoil
Prof. Meg Heckman
Scott Helman
Prof. Carlene Hempel
Prof. Jeff Howe
Prof. Dan Kennedy
Prof. Laurel Leff
Prof. Dan Lothian
Peter Mancusi
Catherine McGloin
Meredith O’Brien
Prof. James Ross
Jody Santos
Prof. Dan Zedek
We’re living through a historic moment. Following the lead of many others, I’ve decided to start keeping a COVID-19 diary. Don’t expect anything startling — just a few observations from someone stuck at home, lucky to be working and healthy.
This was the week that everything seemed to come apart. The death toll from COVID-19 passed 100,000. And yet, briefly, that terrible milestone has been overshadowed by the latest in a long series of reckonings over what it means to be Black in America.
The day began with Omar Jimenez, a Black Latino journalist for CNN, being arrested by white police officers in Minneapolis even as a white CNN reporter stood not far away, unmolested by cops. The journalists were there to cover the protests that have broken out over the killing of an African American man, George Floyd, at the hands of a white officer. That officer, Derek Chauvin, has been arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. No word yet on the fate of the three officers who stood by and let it happen.
The day ended with televised images across the country, from Minneapolis to Atlanta, from New York to California, as thousands of people protested against racist violence against African Americans. Sadly, some of those protests turned violent. But as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” This week the unheard were intent on being heard — not just on behalf of Floyd, but also many others, including Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and, yes, even Christian Cooper, who was not physically injured but who was humiliated by a privileged white woman when he asked her to leash her dog.
And let’s not forget for a moment that President Trump is pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting out such incendiary calls to violence that Twitter finally had to crack down on him, sparking a confrontation over the First Amendment.
I was struck last night by David Brooks’ demeanor on the PBS NewsHour. I’d never seen him as agitated and upset. I thought he might start crying — and who could blame him? And I was moved deeply by the African American scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. of Princeton University, who was interviewed earlier in the NewsHour by Amna Nawaz. I’ve embedded it above, and you should watch it all. Speaking of Floyd’s killing, Glaude closes with this:
He cried out for his mother. She’s been dead for two years. She’s been dead. He basically told someone to tell my kids that I love them, because I’m going to die. And that man, that moral monster kept his knee on his neck. I didn’t — I couldn’t process it. It broke me.
I’m currently reading John M. Barry’s “The Great Influenza,” his 2004 book about the deadly flu pandemic of 1918. You might think that wouldn’t be the most relaxing thing to curl up with in the midst of the current pandemic. But the 1918 flu eventually ended, which is a good reminder amid what seems like an endless tragedy.
Last week was the worst in our country’s history since 9/11. Before that, you’d have to go back to the war, assassinations and riots of 1968. Back then, our political leadership was not up to the task. Today, the president and his fellow Republicans are actively making things worse.
We have to hope that there will be better days ahead — and, to the extent that we can, work to make those better days happen.
The arrest and brief detention of a CNN crew on live television in Minneapolis early this morning was a stunning blow to the First Amendment. They were literally handcuffed and led away for doing their jobs in reporting on protests over the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer.
As the video reveals, the journalists were respectful, and correspondent Omar Jimenez clearly identified himself as a reporter. He told the state police officers several times that he and his crew would move wherever they were told.
That said, what happened to Jimenez and his colleagues was more common than you might realize — and more common than it should be. Last year, we bestowed a New England Muzzle Award upon Police Chief Armando Perez of Bridgeport, Connecticut for arresting and detaining Tara O’Neill, a reporter for Hearst Connecticut Media, during a Black Lives Matter protest.
“This is a public sidewalk and I’m the press,” O’Neill later recalled telling the officer who arrested her, according to media reports. “He said, ‘OK,’ and cuffed me.”
As with this morning’s Minneapolis arrests, the misconduct by police enabled them to operate without being watched by O’Neill and her pesky smartphone. Nevertheless, she was able to film her own arrest:
In a better-known case, Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly were arrested at a McDonald’s in Ferguson, Missouri, during the demonstrations in 2014 over the killing of Michael Brown, a young African American man, by a white police officer.
Before that, Josh Stearns, now director of the Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund, put together a massive compilation of social-media posts documenting the arrest of journalists at Occupy protests around the country. (Here is a very small slice of what was going on from the Committee to Protect Journalists.) Storify, a tool for aggregating social media, recognized Stearns’ efforts with a “Storify of the Year” award.
Unfortunately, Storify later shut down, taking much of Stearns’ work with it.
Update. Stearns has posted a Twitter thread offering more background.
Update II. Noting that Jimenez is Black and Latino. A white CNN reporter standing nearby was not arrested.
You might think that Twitter would have a financial incentive to cave in to President Trump’s incoherent, unconstitutional threats over the platform’s decision to label some of his false tweets as, you know, false. In fact, Trump’s presence on Twitter is not as big a deal to the company as you might think.
First, we often hear that Trump has 80 million followers. But is that really the case? According to analytics from the Fake Followers Audit, 70.2% of his followers are fake, which is defined as “accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter).”
That’s not especially unusual among high-profile tweeters. For instance, 43% of former President Barack Obama‘s 118 million followers are fake. But it’s important to understand that Trump has about 24 million followers, not 80 million. That’s a big difference.
Even more important, Trump’s presence on Twitter has not had a huge effect on its total audience. According to Statista, the number of worldwide active monthly users hovered between a low of 302 million and a high of 336 million between the first quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of 2019. (Zephoria reports that Twitter hasn’t released similar numbers since then.)
The bottom line is that Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey could probably afford to throw Trump off the platform for repeatedly violating its terms of service. Still, he probably wouldn’t want to risk the outrage that would ensue from MAGA Country if Trump lost his favorite outlet for smearing the memory of a dead woman with his horrendous lies about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
Previously published at WGBHNews.org.
From the moment that former Vice President Joe Biden emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee, political observers have been proceeding on the assumption that this year’s presidential election will be close.
But what if the dynamics are changing? What if President Donald Trump — behind in the polls even before the COVID-19 pandemic and falling further behind now — is written off as a political goner? Can the media handle it? Or will we see a repeat of 2016, when Hillary Clinton was subjected to a disproportionate amount of negative scrutiny on the grounds that Trump, as we all thought we knew, had no chance of winning?
First, let me lay out the evidence that Trump is starting to look unelectable — keeping in mind, of course, that he looked unelectable four years ago, too. Then I’ll loop back to what the media’s role ought to be in a campaign in which one candidate seems like the all-but-certain winner.
From the moment he took the oath of office, Trump has been a historically unpopular president. According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average as of Monday, 42.7% approve of his job performance and 53.5% disapprove. That’s in line with his numbers for most of his presidency, and it represents a dip from the rally-round-the-flag bump he got after he belatedly started to address the pandemic.
Moreover, there were indications even before the pandemic that Trump would lose his re-election bid by a wide margin. For instance, in the very first sentence of his new book, “Downfall: The Demise of a President and His Party,” the political scientist Andrew Hacker of Queens College asserts: “There is not even a long-odds chance that Donald Trump will gain a second term.”
Although Hacker’s argument is backed up with a considerable amount of data, it essentially comes down to this: The blue wave that enabled the Democrats to take back the House in 2018 is almost certain to be followed by an even bigger blue wave in 2020, overwhelming any attempts at voter suppression or Electoral College math that would otherwise favor Trump.
Trump’s prospects have only deteriorated in the face of his cruel and incompetent response to COVID. Oxford Economics, which has a solid track record of calling presidential races dating back to 1948, is currently predicting that Trump will receive only 35% of the popular vote and lose the Electoral College by a margin of 328 to 210. The RealClearPolitics polling average as of Monday showed Biden ahead by more than 5 points and leading in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida.
So, good news for Biden, right? Not necessarily. Because if it looks like a Biden blowout, he may be held to a different, higher standard than Trump.
We all remember what happened in 2016. Clinton’s relatively minor shortcomings over issues like her speech transcripts and, oh yes, her emails were covered as though they were the equivalent of Trump’s stream of racist outbursts, revelations about his corrupt foundation and his boasts, caught on tape, that he had sexually assaulted women.
In his definitive study of how the media performed during the 2016 campaign, the political scientist Thomas E. Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School wrote that “indiscriminate criticism has the effect of blurring important distinctions. Were the allegations surrounding Clinton of the same order of magnitude as those surrounding Trump? It’s a question that journalists made no serious effort to answer during the 2016 campaign. They reported all the ugly stuff they could find, and left it to the voters to decide what to make of it.”
(Incidentally, Patterson has a new book out called “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?” Spoiler alert: He thinks the answer is “yes.”)
Unfortunately, we may be seeing the same thing happen again. Yes, the media showed some restraint in covering Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual assault against Biden, with Politico and the PBS NewsHour doing an especially good job of reporting problems with her credibility. But the smear lingers — despite Biden’s denial, and despite the 25 women who’ve accused Trump of similar and worse misconduct.
The media have risen to the bait regarding Trump’s claims that there was something called an “Obamagate” scandal in 2016. Although Trump hasn’t bothered to flesh it out, it appears to be based on his fury that his campaign’s well-documented ties to Russian interests (see this, this and this) were the subject of an FBI investigation.
“It’s becoming clear that journalists never fully reckoned with the mistakes of 2016 campaign coverage,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan recently. “We know this because they seem poised to repeat them.”
And look at what happened over the weekend. Biden had to apologize for joking with the African American radio host Charlamagne Tha God that “you ain’t black” if he was still trying to decide between him and Trump.
Trump, meanwhile, went off on a sociopathic bender, retweeting attacks on Hillary Clinton (a “skank”), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (a drunk), Democratic vice-presidential hopeful Stacey Abrams (she’s fat) and repeating his nauseating and utterly false innuendo that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered a female staff member when he was a congressman in 2001.
Guess which story got more attention? To be fair, the press did take note that Trump went golfing and made no mention of the COVID pandemic as the U.S. death toll neared 100,000. But by every indication, it seems that Biden is going to be held to a more stringent standard — and his lead in the polls may have something to do with it.
What would better coverage look like?
First, the media should ignore the polls — not all the time, but most of the time. And they certainly shouldn’t decide who deserves the hairy eyeball on the basis of who’s ahead and who’s behind.
Second, the political press should report on what really matters. Gaffes, of which Biden will make plenty, are worth a tweet, maybe. Phony scandals ginned up by an increasingly desperate president and his supporters should get less than that.
Instead, the press should focus on offering an honest, fair-minded appraisal of the candidates’ character, leadership abilities and experience. And that coverage should look the same no matter who’s ahead or by how much.
Because we all know that regardless of what the polls and the models say, either candidate could win.
During the summer and fall of 1975, I was working as a Northeastern co-op student at the United Way, then located on Beacon Hill in a building that is now a Suffolk dorm. That much I remember. What I don’t remember is why I came back from my lunch break one day with a copy of the classical guitarist Christopher Parkening‘s 1971 album “Parkening Plays Bach.” But I’m glad I did.
When it came to my own guitar-playing skills, I was at the peak of what proved to be a very tiny hill, so that might have had something to do with it. I mainly liked rock and blues, and I played bass in a band. But I also had acquired a book on how to play classical guitar, and I did some messing around with that.
I can’t say I made much progress. But I loved listening to Parkening play Bach. The great composer wrote for the harpsichord and ensembles, but Parkening made those pieces sound like they were always meant for the guitar. And he made them sound effortless. For an example, listen to “Sheep May Safely Graze.”
Even today, I don’t listen to a lot of classical music, and my tastes tend to be on the lite side — Bach, Vivaldi (my apologies), a little Mozart. I love Rudolf Serkin’s recording of the Andante in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 so much that I almost chose that for this list instead of Parkening. We’ve seen live performances of Handel’s “Messiah” and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. But, at home, when we choose classical music it’s mainly for background.
Still, I have Parkening to thank for opening up my musical vistas a bit.
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Like many people, I recently took the 10-album challenge on Facebook. It was fun, but I found it too limiting. Only 10? Plus you’re discouraged from offering any commentary, and the albums are supposed to be those that influenced your musical tastes, not necessarily the ones you think are the best.
Given all that, I thought I would write about my top 25. It’s a fluid list — ask me six months from now and it might be different. But these are 25 albums that mean a lot to me, and I’m going to try to rank them in some kind of order. My only self-imposed rule is that I won’t choose more than one album by any particular musician or band.
I’ll start with Mavis Staples’ 2019 album “We Get By,” which will certainly be the most recent entry on the list. A few years ago WUMB Radio (91.9 FM) reintroduced me to Staples. I’m in my 60s, so the Staple Singers were a radio, ah, staple when I was a teenager in the 1970s. Back then, though, I didn’t pay much attention. It turns out that they were great, and that Mavis, at 80, is still going strong. Indeed, we saw her in 2017 at UMass Boston and in 2019 at the Cabot in Beverly, and I swear she had more stamina at the second show.
I like all of Staples’ albums from recent years, but “We Get By” is the strongest. Written and produced by Ben Harper, it features a crack hard-rock trio, as does her terrific live album, also released in 2019, called “Live in London.” The standout track on “We Get By” is “Sometime,” which would have been a Staple Singers hit in 1971.
The Mavis Staples revival has sent me back into the Staple Singers catalog. And there are days when I think “If You’re Ready (Come Go with Me)” is the last song I want to hear before they turn off the lights once and for all.
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