Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.
On this last day of 2024, I’m taking a look back before we plunge ahead into the new year. Media Nation’s 10 most viewed posts for the year range from my takedown of an intellectually dishonest critique of NPR, to CBS News’ reprimand of an on-air host for being too confrontational with a guest, to news that The Boston Globe is seeking to acquire Boston magazine. So let’s get right to it.
1. Fish in a barrel: Berliner’s case against NPR is based on false and out-of-context facts (April 11). Uri Berliner, a top editor at NPR, created a stir when he accused his employer of liberal bias in a long essay for The Free Press. The problem was that his examples didn’t hold up to scrutiny. To name just one: Berliner wrote that NPR failed to confess its sins after special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia, which isn’t even remotely what Mueller reported. There was a lot more disingenuousness where that came from. Berliner ended up resigning his post at NPR and going to work for — yes, The Free Press.
2. Less news, more happy talk: Why CBS News’ reprimand of Tony Dokoupil is so ridiculous (Oct. 8). Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates popped up on the CBS morning newscast to promote latest book, “The Message,” and faced an unexpectedly tough grilling over his anti-Israeli views from co-host Tony Dokoupil. Among other things, Dokoupil told Coates that his book woudn’t be out of place “in the backpack of an extremist.” Coates gave as good as he got, and he probably sold a few more books than he otherwise would have. Nevertheless, CBS News management called Dokoupil on the carpet — probably because his attempt to commit journalism contradicted the light banter that defines the morning-news format.
3. A riveting Boston Globe story about a medical disaster with ties to the local news crisis (Jan. 29). A Globe report about the death of a new mother at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital had something in common with the same forces that have hollowed out much of the local-news business. The mother’s death may have been caused by the hospital’s lacking a basic piece of equipment that had been repossessed because its corporate owner, Steward Health Care, wasn’t paying its bills. Steward, in turn, had been pillaged by a private-equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which is the same outfit that helped the notorious newsroom-gutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital acquire Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers in 2021.
“This is Trump’s America now.” Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.
This story has been slowly building since Dec. 18 and finally broke through over the weekend. A Colorado television journalist who’s a person of color was reportedly attacked by a taxi driver who attempted to choke him, demanded to know whether he was a U.S. citizen, and taunted him by shouting, “This is Trump’s America now.”
No doubt we can expect to see more of this as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House on Jan. 20. Trump has normalized attacks on the media, and we shouldn’t be surprised that some of his more unhinged supporters would escalate that hatred into actual physical assaults.
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I learned about the incident from Corey Hutchins, who writes Inside the News in Colorado, a weekly newsletter. He wrote about it on Dec. 27 and decided not to name either the alleged assailant or the journalist, though both had been previously identified by CBS Colorado. Hutchins explained:
I haven’t yet seen the victim say anything publicly beyond what he told police, though I’ve reached out, and you can imagine what kind of hate and harassment might come his way these days with his name widely known. As for the accused, I haven’t seen him reached for comment yet, either. A Mesa County Court official said on Thursday he is represented by a public defender; her voicemail stated she is out of the office until after the new year.
That was a smart ethical decision on Hutchins’ part, though it didn’t hold for very long. As he notes, the story was picked up by The Associated Press on Dec. 28 and has since been reported by a number of news outlets including CNN, Axios and The Guardian.
According to the AP account, the taxi driver, 39-year-old Patrick Thomas Egan, was arrested on Dec. 18 in Grand Junction after police say he followed reporter Ja’Ronn Alex for about 40 miles. Egan pulled up next to Alex at a stoplight and, according to police, said something like “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”
Alex is a native of Detroit with a Pacific Islands background, according to news accounts.
Alex drove his news vehicle back to his station, KKCO/KJCT and, after he got out, was reportedly chased by Egan, who demanded to see his ID. Egan is accused of then tackling Alex, putting him in a headlock and attempting “to strangle him,” police said. Coworkers and others came to Alex’s rescue and said he was starting to lose his ability to breathe.
Egan has not yet been formally charged but is being held on $20,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday.
Hutchins also quotes from a recent study finding that 37% of white respondents thought it was acceptable for political leaders to target journalists and news outlets. As the authors of the study, Julie Posetti and Waqas Ejaz, wrote for The Conversation: “It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face…. Trump has effectively licensed attacks on American journalists through anti-press rhetoric and undermined respect for press freedom.”
Media notes
• Through a glass, darkly. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is slow-walking a pledge she made during her 2022 campaign to bring the governor’s office under the purview of the state’s public-records laws, according to Matt Stout of The Boston Globe. Healey says she still supports “transparency,” and would like to extend the law to the legislative and judicial branches as well — but she now says the governor needs to be able to invoke unspecified “exceptions.” The public-records law is one of the most restrictive in the country.
• Battle of the MAGAs. In case you missed it over the holidays, Heather Cox Richardson has a good overview of the battle that broke out online last week between Tech Bro MAGA and White Racist Twitter. The fight is between newly minted Trumpers like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who don’t want immigration restrictions to apply to highly educated tech workers, and classic haters like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon, who really, really want to prevent anyone who doesn’t look like from them entering the country. “Now, with Trump not even in office yet, the two factions of Trump’s MAGA base — which, indeed, have opposing interests — are at war,” Richardson writes.
• Coming attractions. Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry’s year-end message, published as a full-page ad in Sunday’s print edition and emailed to subscribers (you can read it here), lays out a number of goals for 2025. I found two especially worthy of note. The morning newsletter, Starting Point, will be expanded, which I hope means it will be come out every weekday instead of just on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Earlier would be better, too. By 7 a.m., most of us are off and running for the day.
Another smart goal: “Enhancing our high school sports coverage to further local engagement.” The region’s legacy newspapers are barely covering school sports these days, and many of the nonprofit startups don’t see it as part of their mission. More Globe sports coverage would fill a real need.
• Remembering Jimmy Carter. The late, great Jimmy Carter lived so long that several of the journalists who wrote his obituary years ago were no longer with us by the time their work was published. At The New York Times (gift link), Peter Baker shares a byline with Roy Reed, who died in 2017. The Washington Post’s obit (gift link) was written by Kevin Sullivan and Edward Walsh, the latter of whom died in 2014. Carter left office 43 years ago. For perspective, Franklin Roosevelt was in the midst of his second term 43 years before that.
I’m driving in the slow zone this holiday week, but I do want to share a couple of stories and some information on how you can make Elon Musk unhappy as we count down the days until 2025.
First up: Marc Ramirez has written a fascinating story in USA Today about Michelle Johnson’s journey to learn more about her Black ancestors in the South. A lot of us in Boston media know Johnson as a retired journalism professor at Boston University and, before that, as a top editor at Boston.com during its early days in the mid-1990s.
Johnson and her spouse, Myrna Greenfield, traveled to the Carolinas earlier this year to research family members who had been slaves and who had continued to live in the South after the Civil War. At one point, she visited a home in North Carolina, where they were invited in by the white couple who lived there and shown the still-standing slave quarters out back. Johnson recalled:
They had taken the slave cabin and pieced it together with this old kitchen and use it as a guesthouse now. There was a ladder leaning up against it and they told us the enslaved persons working there would have used it to up to the second level. … I wondered if any of my relatives would have been there. Would they have worked in that kitchen? To be in that space where some of them might have been was really moving.
Having learned about her mother’s side of the family, Johnson told Ramirez that she is now hoping to delve into her father’s side.
Oh, deer
This past Saturday we were driving along the Mystic Lakes in Medford shortly before 10 p.m. when two deer suddenly bounded in front of us. My wife, Barbara, who was driving, swerved and missed the first but then hit the second. It crumpled by the side of the road; we drove off, then returned a few minutes later to see that it had evidently gotten up and bounded into the surrounding woods. We hope it wasn’t badly hurt.
It turns out that the deer population in Massachusetts is exploding. Scooty Nickerson reports for The Boston Globe that Massachusetts is home to about 160,000 deer, double the population in the 1990s.
As a result, more and more deer are running afoul of motor vehicles. Westport leads the state with 337 reported collisions between 2018 and 2022; Middleborough, where I grew up, was second, with 272.
Overpopulation is spreading disease and contribution to erosion, as the animals eat plants along shorelines. Sadly, one solution is more hunting, which is unpopular in Massachusetts, especially in the urban and suburban communities inside Route 495.
Avoiding collisions is a challenge. Deer can dart out in front of cars during daylight hours and in settled areas, as you can see from the police photo that accompanies the Globe story. But you might be able to improve your odds by driving slowly and staying alert if you find yourself driving through a wooded area after dark.
Make Elon cry
Elon Musk hates Wikipedia, because of course he does. The serial entrepreneur, destroyer of Twitter and now Donald Trump’s wingman went off on one of his periodic benders a few days ago, denouncing it as “Wokepedia,” questioning its finances and offering to donate $1 billion if it would change its name to “Dickipedia.” Gosh, what a brilliant sense of humor.
Wikipedia may be the last uncorrupted place on the internet, driven solely by its mission to make the world’s knowledge available to everyone. It’s not perfect, but the folks who run it do a much better job of keeping out trolls and vandals than was the case in the early days more than 20 years ago. Better understood as a research tool than a reference source, it is the ideal starting place for all kinds of projects — especially through the linked footnotes and external websites that are listed at the bottom of every article.
I’ve given in the past and decided to dig a little deeper following Musk’s outburst. I hope you will, too.
Adam Gaffin has posted a hilarious find at Universal Hub — an AI-generated X-ray of a wrist published by The Boston Globe that has all kinds of problems, including a third forearm bone and finger bones that don’t actually connect to anything. It’s now been online since Dec. 19, and it persists despite some mockery on Bluesky as well as Adam’s post.
Commuter train heading south on Tuesday from Wedgemere Station in Winchester to West Medford.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Kwanzaa to everyone. May we all enjoy the blessings of the season and resolve to work for a better world in 2025.
Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, at a reception in her honor last month in Washington. Photo via the House Appropriations Committee.
I wasn’t necessarily planning to write today, but I want to call your attention to an odd story that broke out over the weekend, and why I initially thought it was fraudulent.
On Sunday, I saw a post on Bluesky claiming that a Texas congresswoman named Kay Granger had disappeared for six months without anyone in the media taking note:
I started tracing it back, and I saw that the story had seemingly come from WCBM, a right-wing talk station in Baltimore, which is rather far from Texas. The headline: “‘Missing’ GOP Congresswoman Not Seen For Six Months Finally Found Living at Dementia Care Home.”
The WCBM article, in turn, linked to a news outlet called The Dallas Express. I started doing some due diligence and found a 2023 article from the Texas Observer 2023 headlined “The ‘Dallas Express’: Your Go-To Source for Right-Wing, Astroturf News.” That’s where I learned that the Express may or may not be linked to Metric Media, a notorious chain of pink-slime websites — that is, websites that purport to offer local news but that are actually engaged in political propaganda. (The Observer noted that it’s not clear whether the Express is part of Metric Media or not, and that there have been threats of legal action.) I also learned that Carlos Turcios, the reporter who broke the story for the Express, is “a Young Latino Conservative Activist in the Dallas Fort Worth area.” In other words, not a journalist.
Finally, I discovered that there was a tribute to Granger held in Washington in November to mark her pending retirement from Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson was among those on hand. Granger was definitely there, as you can see from the above photo. That would certainly contradict the assertion that Granger had “disappeared” for six months. Game, set, match — right?
Wrong. As news about Granger continued to spread, I went back and read Turcios’ story in The Dallas Express more carefully. It turns out he did not assert that Granger hadn’t been seen in six months — rather, he reported that she hadn’t taken part in any House votes for six months. The “not seen for six months” line was an exaggeration added by WCBM. Everything else has subsequently checked out. Granger is, indeed, in an elder-care facility in Forth Worth, and, in a follow-up, her son told The Dallas Morning News that she has been experiencing “dementia issues.”
So the biggest remaining question is this: Why was it left to The Dallas Express to uncover Granger’s disappearance from Congress? The Texas political scene, after all, is well-covered. Granger’s district is served by two major daily newspapers, the Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The Texas Tribune, one of the largest nonprofit news organizations in the country, has a presence in Washington.
I began this item with a post by journalist and historian Garrett Graff calling this an “incredible testament to the loss of local news coverage.” Not quite. I’d say the coverage was in place, but for some reason it failed. While editors are celebrating the holidays this week, I also hope they take a few moments to ask themselves a time-honored question: Why we no have?
Meanwhile, kudos to Carlos Turcios and The Dallas Express. I hope people start taking them more seriously. I know I will.
I feel like I ought to offer something uplifting this holiday week, but what I’ve got this morning is the opposite of that. Last week The Boston Globe published a two-part story (here and here) on Sandra Birchmore, the young woman who, we were originally told, died by suicide after years of a sexual affair with a Stoughton police officer. She was pregnant, and the officer, Matthew Farwell, may have been the father.
Following an investigation by federal authorities, Farwell has since been charged with murder. The Globe story, by Laura Crimaldi and Yvonne Abraham, unfolds in narrative style, telling a horrendous tale involving allegations that Farwell and Birchmore began having sex when she was just 15 (which would be statutory rape) and that she also had sex with Farwell’s brother, William, and another officer, Robert Devine; Devine denies the allegation. Crimaldi and Abraham write:
The immense power imbalance that Birchmore endured in her life persisted long after she was gone. Time and again, investigators gave the benefit of the doubt to the police officer now accused of killing a young woman who was rarely, if ever, granted the same consideration.
It’s a story that alleges shocking depravity on the part of the officers. It’s hard to come away from it with anything but despair over the human condition. But a Globe editorial accompanying the story does manage to find some heroes: Birchmore’s family and friends, who never gave up their conviction that Sandra had not killed herself.
“If it weren’t for the friends and family of Sandra Birchmore who pushed and prodded for justice after her death, there’s a good chance that Matthew Farwell, the man accused of killing her, would still be walking free,” the editorial says, adding: “The fact that Farwell was a police officer raises disturbing questions about whether police are capable of investigating themselves.”
The story appears in yesterday’s Sunday magazine as well as online. The Sandra Birchmore saga has received an enormous amount of coverage during the past few years, but Crimaldi and Abraham’s account will make you see it in a new light, through Birchmore’s eyes and those who believed in her. Depressing and upsetting though it may be, it is also a triumph of narrative journalism.
Media Nation was down for about eight hours Friday, and my apologies if you were trying to access the site but couldn’t. The explanation is a cliché: I was messing around in places where I shouldn’t have been and our son, Tim, bailed me out.
An idyllic scene in Lancaster, Penn. Photo (cc) 2018 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Reliable and comprehensive local news can help ease the polarization that has infected our national discourse. But it’s not a guarantee — and when MAGA-drenched politics pervades community life, the result can be that the press is attacked in a manner that’s similar to the cries of “fake news” from Trump supporters.
Which is exactly what is happening right now in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In a lengthy article for The Washington Post, Erik Wemple tells the story of Tom Lisi, a reporter for the newspaper LNP who’s become the focus of relentless attacks (gift link) from the Republican chairman of the county commission.
That chairman, Joshua Parsons, has his eye on a state senate seat, and he is evidently using his crusade against Lisi in order to build support for his campaign. Among other things, Parsons has accused Lisi of lying about harassment he’s been subjected to, making up stories “out of whole cloth,” and of having “skulked around waiting to ambush County staff.” As Wemple wryly observes: “‘Reporter’ is an appropriate term for someone who skulks around ‘waiting to ambush County staff.’” Wemple adds:
[T]he events in Lancaster County bear … on a question that has vexed leaders in journalism in recent decades: Just how should they respond to the frequent, strident and often flimsy attacks from Republican politicians? Should they stick to the industry’s default mode of turning the other cheek? Or should they speak up to challenge the gripes?
LNP and its associated website, Lancaster Online, are not part of a corporate chain or owned by a hedge fund. Rather, the media outlet was saved in 2023 by public radio station WITF and has a newsroom of 70 journalists — impressive for a medium-size daily. That transaction, though, has resulted in an enormously complex ownership structure involving three separate nonprofit boards along with all the potential conflicts of interest that entails.
As for Lisi, Wemple writes that he has started to push back publicly on Parson’s falsehoods and exaggerations about his reporting, and that on one occasion he left his tormenter momentarily speechless. The lesson, according to Wemple: “Confront the media bashers wherever they practice their profession.”
Biden’s fitness
The Wall Street Journal today published an investigative report (gift link) on attempts by President Biden’s inner circle to control access not just throughout the past four years but during the campaign that preceded it as well.
There are some harrowing details but also some problems with the reporting, including this, in which an anonymous aide quotes an anonymous official:
If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.
Despite such hazy sourcing, the Journal’s story is a valuable addition to what we are learning about Biden’s age-related problems during the past half-dozen years. In retrospect, a Journal story (gift link) in early June of this year was the big breakthrough, although it was marred by its overreliance on Republican sources. A few weeks later, Biden met Donald Trump on the debate stage, and that was the beginning of the end of his re-election campaign.
A few points are now obvious: First, Biden’s inner circle covered up the president’s fading mental acuity for years — which makes you wonder why they went along with the June debate, which led directly to Kamala Harris’ candidacy and at least gave Democrats a fighting chance of holding on to the White House. Second, Biden should have pledged to serve just one term when he ran in 2020; at the very least, he should have declared victory and pulled out after Democrats did unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterms.
That we still don’t know exactly how impaired Biden was and is speaks to how difficult it is for reporters to pierce the veil. As the Journal’s story makes clear, members of Congress and even Cabinet secretaries were kept in the dark. This was not a failure of journalism so much as it was a failure of the president and the people around him to level with the public.
Everett update
Earlier this week, I noted that neither of Everett’s two remaining weekly newspapers had published anything about the demise of the Everett Leader Herald, which shut down and agree to pay Mayor Carlo DeMaria $1.1 million in order to settle a libel suit. Publisher and editor Joshua Resnek had previously admitted he fabricated stories and quotes aimed at making DeMaria appear to be corrupt.
Well, now both papers, which are owned by small independent chains, have been heard from. The Everett Advocate has an especially tough headline, “A Victory Over Journalistic Dishonesty,” with reporter Mark E. Vogler detailing the Advocate’s own role in exposing the Leader Herald’s fictions about DeMaria.
One aspect of the settlement that I was wondering about is clarified in Vogler’s story. He quotes a lawyer for DeMaria, Jeffrey Robbins, as saying that the demise of the Leader Herald was in fact a stipulation of the settlement rather than simply a side effect of suddenly having to come up with $1.1 million. “All a jury would have decided to do in this case would be to decide whether to award damages and how much in damages,” Robbins told Vogler. “But a jury could not have ordered a newspaper to close down. That was one of the things that made the settlement unusual.”
The Everett Independent has a shorter article, written by reporter Cary Shuman, headlined simply “DeMaria Vindicated.”
Finally, the Leader Herald’s former website now consists of a WordPress page that says, “You need to be logged in as a user who has permission to view this site.”
Almost from the beginning of the social-media age, I’ve been too deeply immersed for my own good. So I appreciated this recent essay (gift link) in The New York Times Magazine by J Worthen, who tells us that Bluesky might look like the better, kinder place at the moment but that it’s probably destined to turn into a vortex of sociopathy like all the rest. Here’s the nut:
We have officially arrived in late-stage social media. The services and platforms that delighted us and reshaped our lives when they began appearing a few decades ago have now reached total saturation and maturation. Call it malaise. Call it Stockholm syndrome. Call it whatever. But each time a new platform debuts, promising something better — to help us connect better, share photos better, manage our lives better — many of us enthusiastically trek on over, only to be disappointed in the end.
As someone who used to get into fights on Usenet back in the 1990s (look it up), long before anyone had ever thought of using algorithms to drive content that engages and enrages, I agree that it’s hopeless. Bluesky might prove to be the exception. Among other things, you get to choose your own algorithm, or none at all. But it really doesn’t matter. The real problem is that, no, you can’t have meaningful conversations with strangers, and social media is inimical to the way we’ve evolved.
The post-Musk social-media landscape has also been defined by the incredibly annoying practice of platform-shaming — a hopeless chase after the least-evil alternative, accompanied by bitter criticism of anyone who would dare keep using those platforms that are deemed insufficiently free of harmful entanglements.
