A Red Line train at Charles/MGH. Photo (cc) 2018 by Eric F. James.
There was a time when many major news organizations, including The Boston Globe, had an ombudsman — a reader advocate who would report on the inside workings of the newsroom when problems arose.
Well, I’d really like to know what happened with the Globe’s reporting on MBTA managers who live far from Boston. The story was written by Andrea Estes and led Sunday’s print edition. It told a pretty compelling tale of inequity, with subway operators, bus drivers, maintenance workers and others required to show up to work every day while some of the agency’s top executives checked in from distant locales.
Trouble is, the story has now been appended with this:
Correction: Earlier versions of this story incorrectly reported that three MBTA managers live primarily in homes far from the T’s service area. Dennis Lytton, the deputy safety chief, has an apartment in Brighton and says he has not worked remotely since starting the job in February. Michele Stiehler, the T’s chief of paratransit, lives in Boston and walks to work. Jennifer Tabakin, who oversees the T’s South Coast Rail project, also has a home in Boston within walking distance of T headquarters.
Estes is a fine reporter who’s done a lot of important work, and it does appear that absentee executives really are a problem at the MBTA — but not these three. I think the Globe owes us an explanation. An ombudsman could have told that story.
Lancaster, Pa. Photo (cc) 2016 by Steam Pipe Distribution Venue.
Some very good news on the community journalism front: The family who owns the daily newspaper LNP of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is donating it to the local public broadcasting outlet. WITF will acquire LNP, Lancaster Online and several other media properties, known collectively as LNP Media. LNP reporter Chad Umble writes:
The Steinman family’s 158-year ownership of a daily newspaper in Lancaster will end in June with a gift meant to safeguard the future of its flagship publication.
Steinman Communications leadership on Tuesday announced to staff their plans to give LNP Media Group, publisher of LNP | LancasterOnline, at no cost to WITF, the Harrisburg-based public broadcasting station operator. WITF will oversee the Lancaster media company, which will be converted to a public benefit corporation and become a subsidiary of WITF.
Significantly, the deal will be accompanied by a major donation from the Steinman family, which will provide LNP with five years of runway to achieve long-term sustainability. Now, that’s stepping up. You may also recall that WITF was absolutely fierce in calling out elected officials in Pennsylvania who lied about the 2020 election results.
Not too many parallels come to mind. Probably the closest took place in 2022, when WBEZ acquired the Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid that was traditionally that city’s No. 2 daily. The Sun-Times was converted to a nonprofit, whereas the LNP properties will be run as a public benefit corporation — a for-profit whose governance structure imposes certain requirements for serving the public interest. Both deals, though, show that public broadcasters can help save regional news coverage.
I’ve reported pretty extensively on yet another situation that involved not a major regional newspaper but, rather, a medium-size digital-and-broadcast operation: NJ Spotlight News, created in 2019 by the merger of NJ Spotlight and NJ PBS. The combined operation includes a website that covers politics and public policy in New Jersey as well as a half-hour television newscast. The website and the newscast both incorporate quite a bit of journalism in common. The story of the merger and its aftermath will be told in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I are working on.
Recently my friend and mentor Thomas Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School wrote a paper on how public radio stations could do more to help solve the local news crisis; I wrote a response. The merger taking place in Pennsylvania isn’t quite what Patterson and I have in mind, but it’s adjacent. And it’s a great example of public media filling the gap at a time when traditional for-profit newspapers are fading.
A story in The Boston Globe reports that a caustic online commenter appears to be posting “vicious Internet attacks” against Mayor Michelle Wu and others from a city email address and a shared subscription used by city councilors and staff members. The comments have been published under the handle “Interested Party.”
Globe reporter Emma Platoff writes that “the comments posted by the Interested Party account stand out becausethey appear to be authored by one or more of those public officials’ colleagues — members of the City Council or council employees — according to account details and people with knowledge of the subscription.”
It’s not the first time I’ve seen a news outlet do this. The one that stands out in my mind involved a Haverhill city councilor who was exposed years ago by the local newspaper. I’ll get to that. But, first, more on the Globe’s story.
Although the Globe doesn’t have enough information to identify the person (or persons) behind the comments, Platoff appears to have used internal information provided by every user (“account details”) in order to get as far as she did. If you look at comments on the Globe’s website (or just about any other website), you won’t find any email addresses — that’s information you provide when you sign up, but it doesn’t appear alongside your screen name. Likewise, the Globe almost certainly has access to each commenter’s IP (internet protocol) address, which can help the paper locate where a user is based.
Nor does the Globe warn users that it reserves the right to use information commenters provide in order to track them down. If you try to post a comment, you’ll find guidelines that speak to what’s allowed and what isn’t; but there’s nothing about the possibility of being outed. (The guidelines refer not to the Globe but to its free sister site, Boston.com. I’m not sure whether that means the rules haven’t been updated for years or if it’s simply an indication that the same rules are in effect at both places.) Another message advises you, “This comment may appear on your public profile.” But when you click on the “Public Profile FAQ,” you hit a 404.
The question is whether it’s ethical to use information that the Globe’s subscribers freely give the paper in order to track them down. Users have a right to expect that their information won’t be used to violate their privacy. Platoff wasn’t able to expose “Interested Party,” but she’d clearly like to. Is that fair?
All of that brings me to the Haverhill situation I mentioned up top. In 2008, The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover reported that a Haverhill city councilor named James Donahue had posted comments on the paper’s website under at least 38 different screen names, an accusation that Donahue partly confirmed, though he claimed that some of the comments had actually been posted by someone else. As I wrote at the time, Donahue’s activities included lambasting the mayor and some of his colleagues. The Tribune apparently used the IP address attached to Donahue’s multitudinous screen names in order to locate him and to figure out that all those screen names were coming from the same computer. The Tribune defended its actions in an editorial:
It is not the general practice of this newspaper to seek the identity of those who comment on stories, although there is no explicit guarantee of anonymity. Virtually all the management of the comments section of the online edition is aimed at removing posts that are profane, racist or personal attacks.
However, one of the forum moderators noticed a pattern of posts under dozens of different names, and then discovered that they had all come from the same computer address. When it became clear that they were coming from the computer of an elected public official, it became our obligation to let the public know.
The average citizen does not take an oath to serve the public. An elected official does. An attempt to deceive the public is clearly not serving it, and a public official who does so is not only undeserving of the protection of confidentiality, but deserves public criticism.
I was uncomfortable with the Tribune’s actions, and I said so, writing: “It seems to me that the paper has chosen to humiliate Donahue for doing something the paper itself implicitly invited him to do, and that it used information available to no one else.” But many of my commenters disagreed with me and sided with the Tribune, arguing — as the paper itself had — that Donahue’s status as a public official overrode any expectations of online privacy that he might have had.
Which brings me back to the Globe and “Interested Party.” Arguably, there is a public-interest reason to try to expose the commenter. The comments are being posted by a public official or officials, whether they are members of the city council or employees. It’s a story, and it will be interesting to see whether the Globe is able to take the next step and name names. It makes me a little queasy, as The Eagle-Tribune’s actions did 15 years ago. On balance, though, I think my commenters were right in 2008 and that the Globe is right now.
A final observation: The Globe’s comments are a toxic-waste pit. The paper shouldn’t have them unless it’s willing to screen all of them before they’re posted. If that’s impossible, then get rid of them. Plenty of news organizations have, and no one seems to miss them.
It’s going to be a while — if ever — before we know why the loathsome white nationalist Tucker Carlson and his ratings-obsessed enablers at Fox News parted company.
Carlson was far from the biggest on-air liar in claiming that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. As Josh Marshall puts it, “If you looked at the material Dominion had assembled the most damning stuff was about Bartiromo, Pirro, Dobbs. Very much the B Team. As odious as he may be, Carlson is quite good at the ‘just asking questions’ shtick.”
Carlson’s internal emails, though, were incredibly embarrassing and damaging, proving beyond a doubt that no one inside Fox believed claims by Donald Trump and his hangers-on about voting-machine fraud. My insta-theory is that Rupert Murdoch fired Carlson in a blind rage after Dominion extracted a nearly $800 billion million settlement.
Fox News and Tucker Carlson have agreed to "part ways," according to a Fox News release. This step comes less than a week after a momentous settlement in the Dominion v. Fox News case. 1/
For those of you who are hoping for a kinder, gentler Fox, you may recall that the firings of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly a few years ago led to similar dreams. Instead, Fox took a sharp turn from the right toward the far right. I’m not sure a similar move now is even possible unless Carlson is replaced by, say, Alex Jones or Steve Bannon.
Carlson is the big media news of the day, but let’s not overlook Don Lemon, the hapless CNN host who was fired today. Lemon has been on thin ice since making some cringe-worthy sexist remarks on air, but he deserved better than (as he claims) to be cut loose without any communication from CNN management.
For Carlson, it’s been a long, strange devolution from principled conservative to openly racist hate-monger. In 2019, I wrote a piece for GBH News detailing my own experience with Carlson, including a convivial lunch at The Palm in Washington more than 20 years ago. I’ve occasionally wondered what happened to that guy. Maybe he does, too.
Rooster mural in Montclair, N.J. Photo (cc) 2016 by Rob DiCaterino.
If you felt some distant rumblings coming from the general direction of New Jersey a few days ago, I’m here to tell you why. A pioneering local blog in that state, Baristanet, will merge with a six-year-old community news organization, Montclair Local. Liz George, the editor and publisher of Baristanet, will served as publisher of the combined outlet.
This is a huge development in the world of hyperlocal news. I was especially struck by the news that the Local will drop its print edition, which had been a key part of its business strategy. The Local’s digital content is free, but the print weekly has served as an extra goodie for donors. Last year, when I was in Montclair to report on the media ecosystem in New Jersey, ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg, who serves on the Local’s governing board, joked that the print edition was the Local’s “tote bag.”
Now that will be going away, with the final print edition coming out this Thursday. According to the announcement, published in both the Local and Baristanet: “Putting out a print edition consumed more than 40 percent of the Local’s revenue from donors and advertisers, and trustees concluded it was better to spend the Local’s funds to generate more stories.”
The two outlets will continue separately through the summer while George works on a new website that will bring together both sites, according to the announcement. Baristanet was a for-profit, but the new, expanded Local will continue to be a nonprofit.
The spring of 2022 was actually my second visit to report on local news in Montclair. I also paid a visit in 2009 to meet with Debbie Galant, who founded Baristanet in 2004 and who at that time was regarded as a leader in DIY local journalism. George joined Baristanet several months after the founding. I wrote about Baristanet in my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” and I’m including an excerpt below.
Baristanet, founded in May 2004, was among the first successful hyperlocal sites. It was an inspiration for Paul Bass, who keeps a frisbee from a Baristanet anniversary party on the wall of his office at the New Haven Independent. Centered in the New York City suburb of Montclair, New Jersey, Baristanet in 2011 covered seven communities — six of which had their own Patch sites. AOL reportedly chooses communities based on an algorithm comprising 59 factors, including advertising potential, voter turnout and household income. Clearly the affluent, well-educated suburbs served by Baristanet were exactly what AOL was looking for.
Despite the threat posed by Patch, Baristanet continued to do well, according to Galant. When I interviewed her in 2009, she told me that revenues for the site were between $100,000 and $200,000 per year. Two years later, she said revenues were “a bit higher than $200,000, but our expenses have gone way higher too.” She did not specify what those expenses were. Unlike Howard Owens at The Batavian, Galant and her business partner, Liz George, had always treated Baristanet as a sideline, doing much of the work themselves but hiring part-time editors and designers as needed to accommodate their other projects — which, in Galant’s case, includes having written several published novels.
I met Galant on a rainy day in June 2009 at a Panera — a then new advertiser — just outside Montclair’s downtown. At the time, it was covering only three communities, and had just recently incorporated a parenting site that was renamed Barista Kids. Galant said she got the inspiration for starting Baristanet after losing her freelance position as a local columnist for The New York Times and then meeting Jeff Jarvis, an online-news expert and the author of the blog BuzzMachine. “He was talking a mile a minute about this idea of hyperlocal blogging and hyperlocal journalism. And the idea just really clicked in my head,” Galant said. “I thought it would be a fun thing to do. I’d been freelancing for years and years, and I saw that you could be vulnerable as a freelancer. I’d rather be a publisher.” The name of the site was based on the idea of “a virtual coffee shop,” she said, explaining, “In the old days you used to go to your bartender and talk to your bartender. These days, everybody’s at the coffeeshop, so you talk to your barista.”
The tone of Baristanet is conversational, fun and a bit snarky, and Galant is adept at involving readers. For instance, during an outbreak of swine flu just a few days before our meeting, she quoted from a news release issued by the Montclair public schools promising that students would not be punished if they were absent because of illness. “Does the usual policy for staying home sick from school include reprisals and punishment?” Galant asked. The brief item attracted 37 comments. “A traditional journalist would have taken the same tip, would have gone to the schools, interviewed the superintendent, interviewed the high school principal, and attempted somehow to find a whole bunch of representative parents and students to get their input,” she told me. “But they wouldn’t have actually gotten it nearly as efficiently or with as widespread a response from parents as from just having put it on the website.”
Baristanet is tracked by Quantcast, which found that the site attracted between 27,000 and 35,000 unique visitors a month for the first half of 2011. Galant told me her internal count was about double that, between 50,000 and 70,000 uniques per month.
As with The Batavian and its competition, The Daily News of Batavia, Baristanet could not compete head-to-head with the weekly Montclair Times or other newspapers in its seven communities, even though Galant said she had sometimes beaten the Times on breaking news. Times editor Mark Porter told me he had 12 full-time and one part-time editorial employees working for him, a startlingly high number for a weekly newspaper. Porter was dismissive of his online competition, saying, “Baristanet’s skill is getting press releases and people throughout the community who email or text-message breaking news to people who sit in front of computers.” Despite his rather caustic assessment of the competition, there was no doubting his dedication or sincerity as he described the hours he and his staff put in and the local meetings and events they covered. [Note: The Montclair Times today is part of the Gannett chain. When I visited Montclair last year, the Times appeared to be slightly more robust than the hollowed-out remains of Gannett’s weeklies in Eastern Massachusetts, though it was a shadow of the paper that Porter had presided over.]
When I asked Galant in 2009 how long she wanted to keep doing Baristanet, she replied, “I really don’t know.” She surprised me by saying that she wished The Star-Ledger’s parent company, New Jersey Media, had tried to acquire Baristanet before its own business problems became so acute that they precluded such a move. “I think that’s every startup business’s dream — somebody coming in and offering a whole big pot of money,” she said. “It would have made tremendous sense. Of course, no newspapers have any money anymore, so that’s not going to happen.” Two years later, when I asked about her battle with Patch, she replied, “Competition is no fun, but we’re hanging in there.” (In the summer of 2012 Galant left Baristanet in order to accept a position at Montclair State University, with Liz George continuing as the editor.)
The Maine Sunday Telegram is the name of Sunday’s Portland Press Herald
Last month we learned that Reade Brower was getting ready to sell Maine’s Portland Press Herald and several other newspapers. Today we received good news: a nonprofit organization is hoping to acquire those papers and run them for the benefit of the public.
Retired Press Herald columnist Bill Nemitz, president of the newly formed Maine Journalism Foundation, writes that the nonprofit aims to buy Brower’s five daily and 25 weekly newspapers, known collectively as Masthead Maine, to “sustain and nurture Maine’s reputation as a bastion for independent local news.” Nemitz adds:
We at MaineJF want to be the next to carry the Masthead Maine banner. Our goal initially is to acquire the company and operate the various publications as a nonprofit. Beyond that, we will seek ways to enhance all journalism in Maine through targeted support for and collaboration with our media colleagues. Maine Public, for one, comes to mind.
In recent years, several papers have been acquired by nonprofit foundations, but the papers themselves continue to be for-profits. The most prominent example of that is The Philadelphia Inquirer. By contrast, Nemitz’s description sounds like the Press Herald and its sister papers will themselves be nonprofits, joining the Salt Lake Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, both of which have been reorganized as nonprofits.
Nonprofit status removes the pressure of having to satisfy investors, but it does come with some disadvantages as well: a nonprofit newspaper can’t endorse political candidates or specific pieces of legislation. Last fall the Press Herald published endorsements on ballot questions but not for candidates. As a nonprofit, it wouldn’t be able to do either.
Nemitz said that the new foundation is seeking to raise $15 million from large and small donors to buy all of Brower’s papers.
Brower, by all accounts, has been a good steward of the Press Herald. When he announced last month that he was seeking to offload his papers, he said he wanted to leave them in good hands, and he specifically mentioned a nonprofit organization or a public benefit corporation. Now it looks like he’ll get his wish — provided MaineJF can accomplish its fundraising goals.
It’s the end of the semester at Northeastern, so you’ll have to forgive me for weighing in rather late about the remarkably similar stories that The New York Times (free link) and The Boston Globe published about Barbara Lynch, a celebrity chef whose abusive behavior has finally caught up with her.
Although I’m speculating, what happened seems fairly obvious: Tim Dearing, the former lead chef at Menton, almost certainly contacted both papers after he told Lynch he was going to “drag” her when she fired him at a particularly volatile meeting following the overdose deaths of Dearing’s beloved predecessor, Rye Crofter, and a younger chef Crofter had mentored. No doubt both stories were close to being ready when one paper learned that the other was about to publish. Both stories were published Thursday within about a half-hour of each other.
Still, I’ve never seen anything like the structural similarities in two long stories like this. The Globe’s Janelle Nanos and the Times’ Julia Moskin open the same way, repeat many of the same anecdotes, reproduce the same sorry-not-sorry statement from Lynch (OK, that’s not surprising) and reach the same conclusion: that Lynch is out of control, and her chain of restaurants is in serious trouble. Please understand that I’m not suggesting any ethical violations here — it was just striking to see two good reporters approach the story in exactly the same way.
There was, though, one difference. The Times noted that Lynch is the first cousin of U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, a powerful South Boston Democrat, and has connections to the influential lobbyist Tom O’Neill, a former lieutenant governor. As my old colleague Adam Reilly of GBH News tweeted:
Currently comparing the Globe's Barbara Lynch piece to the NYT's. Lots of common ground, but this particular part of the Times story jumped out pic.twitter.com/1NExWyhDnI
Adam’s implication is that the Globe should have included that fact as well, and I agree with him. Perhaps editors at the Globe decided not to pull Lynch’s connections into the story given that they are not responsible for her behavior. Still, readers may reasonably wonder if that had something to with why she got away with her act for as long as she has.
On the other hand, the Globe’s story, unlike the Times’, observes that the food has gone downhill at Lynch’s restaurants as her behavior has spiraled out of control. Nanos — with contributions from the paper’s food critic, Devra First, as well as reporter Dana Gerber — writes:
What’s more, restaurants have changed, in part reshaped in part by both the #MeToo movement and the pandemic. Long overlooked behavior is no longer being tolerated. Workers are demanding fairer treatment. And Lynch’s world of fine dining is shifting beneath her feet amid staffing shortages and rising food costs, particular challenges for the pricey, labor-intensive model of haute cuisine.
And indeed, on a recent evening, Menton seemed to have lost the luster of its early days, when the food was plated like precious jewels, both delicious and beautiful, and customers were cosseted by multiple servers at once. Menton now serves one $180 six-course chef’s tasting menu each night, but the dishes feel less inventive and refined than they did a decade ago when it first opened. Flavors are less precise, portion sizes are small, and the lag time between courses can be overly long. It was fine dining in the most literal sense of the word.
This is not an insignificant part of the story, and it’s telling that it appears in the local paper rather than in the outlet from out of town. The Globe also has some cringey details missing from the Times about crude T-shirts that Lynch wanted her employees to wear.
I have never eaten at any of Lynch’s restaurants as the prices are well out of my range. The food scene in Boston, though, is a vital part of our local culture, and the Globe has devoted a lot of resources to covering it over the years. It will be interesting to see whether Lynch’s problems are isolated, or if they represent the first cracks in that culture.
On the new episode of the “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I speak with Linda Shapley, the publisher of Colorado Community Media, who describes herself as a longtime denizen of the state’s media ecosystem. Indeed, she was at Colorado Politics and worked for 21 years for The Denver Post. “I’ve been a lieutenant for a lot of really great generals,” she once said. “This is my opportunity to be a general.”
CCM is a group of about two dozen weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. They were saved from chain ownership two years ago when they were purchased through a deal led by the National Trust for Local News. Last August we spoke with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of the trust.
Shapley has talked about the power of representation as a visible Latina leader in an industry that has traditionally been dominated by white men. She says she hopes to use her position to encourage more diversity in journalism. Her mentor at the Post, Greg Moore, was a previous guest on What Works. You can listen to his episode here.
Shapley grew up in northeastern Colorado, in a rural county. Her father had a dairy farm. When I was in Colorado doing research for our book-in-progress, “What Works in Community News,” she told me that dairy farming is a lot like newspapers, because cows don’t know it’s Christmas.
Also this week, we talk with Madison Xagoraris, a graduate student in the Media Advocacy Program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. Xagoraris recently reported on KefiFM, a Boston-based Greek music outlet dedicated to serving the Greek and Greek American communities in the Boston area and throughout New England.
Ellen has a Quick Take about retired journalists who are busy launching startup newsrooms. Nieman Reports has a piece by Jon Marcus that looks at the Asheville Watchdog in North Carolina, and the New Bedford Light in Massachusetts. These journalists say they want to help bolster the profession they gave their lives to by setting up nonprofit community news sites and mentoring younger reporters and editors. They aren’t playing pickleball.
I’m in a Colorado state of mind: My Quick Take is on the fifth anniversary of the Denver Rebellion, when the staff of The Denver Post rose up against further newsroom cuts being imposed by its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. That rebellion sparked a revolution in Denver journalism.
Cambridge City Hall. Photo (cc) 2007 by Thomas Steiner.
Over the course of several months, I’ve talked with a few people in Cambridge about the dearth of local news in that city. Its only newspaper, Gannett’s Cambridge Chronicle, has been without a reporter since last year. The leading news outlet, Cambridge Day, does good work, but it was essentially a one-person operation headed by Marc Levy on a volunteer basis. I encouraged Marc and two members of a group seeking to start a nonprofit, journalists Mary McGrath and Susanne Beck, to try to work together.
Now it looks like that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Cambridge Day, which Levy founded in 2009, has published a story announcing that the nonprofit group is going to head up a fundraising campaign with a goal of raising $75,000. “The fundraising is not only to ‘save’ Cambridge Day, but to help it take a leap forward in quality and comprehensiveness,” according to an article published by the Day on Tuesday. The campaign will be headed up by an organization called Cambridge Local News Matters. It’s not clear what Marc’s role will be moving forward, but it’s surely a good sign that he wrote the article announcing the changes.
You could go back several decades, to when the Chronicle was independently owned and competed with the Cambridge Tab, and even then it was often said that Cambridge was the largest city in the country (population: 118,000) without a daily newspaper. The Day has been indispensable since its founding, and I wish Marc and his new partners all the best.
Rupert Murdoch. Photo (cc) 2015 by the Hudson Institute.
For those of us who had hoped that Fox News would be publicly humiliated in the courtroom, Tuesday’s announcement that a settlement had been reached was disappointing but not surprising. The purpose of lawsuits is to resolve disputes, not to provide justice.
And what a settlement Dominion Voting Systems got: $787.5 million, or about 19% of the cash or “cash equivalents” held by Fox Corp. at the end of 2022, according to The New York Times. No, not even Rupert Murdoch has that kind of money sloshing around in a spare pants pocket. It also amounts to half the $1.6 billion in damages Dominion said it had suffered as a result of on-air lies that the company’s machines had switched votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Still, it would have been lovely to watch the 92-year-old mogul take the stand and be confronted with internal communications that showed he and other Fox executives and talk-show hosts knew Donald Trump and his supporters were lying about the election being stolen by Dominion and other dark forces but promoted those lies anyway. I also wish that Fox were being forced to apologize for its lies, over and over again, but that was probably never in the cards.
On the other hand, Fox News faces more legal troubles, including a $2.7 billion lawsuit brought by yet another voting technology company, Smartmatic. So unless Fox settles that case as well, this saga is a long way from being resolved. Good.
Some media observers were breathing a sigh of relief that the First Amendment protections for libel would not be put to the test. I’m not among them. As I wrote earlier, this was really a textbook example of “actual malice” — that is, publishing or broadcasting false information despite knowing that it’s false, or demonstrating reckless disregard for the truth. It was not a “landmark case.” I talked about that before the settlement was announced with WBZ-TV (Channel 4) political analyst Jon Keller, who provides a good overview of Tuesday’s events and what they mean.
I’ll close with a post on Mastodon by M.S. Bellows Jr., a lawyer and commentator who gets to the heart of it in a way that’s both illuminating and entertaining:
I’m a former trial lawyer, former prosecutor, and current mediator. I have both represented and sued some of the largest companies in the world. I am very experienced, and VERY good, at what I do.
At trial, Dominion would not and could not have received an apology. Period. The vanishingly rare circumstances in which a court could order a retraction do not exist here.
At trial, Dominion would not have received $787.5 million, which is 45x its highest annual earnings. If a jury awarded it that much, the court almost certainly would have reduced it on remittitur.
This is a superb and stunning settlement. Dominion has hurt Fox badly, exposed Fox’s lies, and done the American public a massive service. If you feel otherwise, fine – but that’s all it is: a feeling. Factually, you are incorrect, and to soothe your feelings you should take recourse to bourbon or cannabis, not social media.
Thank you.
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