An update on that other big story about The Washington Post: the paper’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has weighed in with a tough piece about the Post’s decision in January 2021 not to report that an upside-down American flag — a symbol of the pro-Trump insurrection — was flying outside Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito’s home. That story was finally broken in The New York Times last month, and it led to other scoops as well, including the revelation that another insurrectionist flag was flying outside a second Alito home. Wemple’s lead:
It’s one thing to get scooped when your competitors bust their humps. Or when they catch a lucky break one way or another. It’s quite another thing to get scooped when the story has sat in your notebook for 3½ years.
To the extent that I had ever given any thought to The Epoch Times, I considered it a mouthpiece for Falun Gong, a controversial spiritual movement that has been persecuted by the Chinese government. I also knew that it had adopted an extreme pro-Trump orientation in recent years.
Now it turns out that federal prosecutors say it’s a massive grift as well. In what CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy calls an “astonishing indictment,” the Justice Department claims that the nonprofit newspaper raked in $67 million from a money-laundering operation organized by Weidong Guan, its chief financial officer. Guan used cryptocurrency to purchase crime proceeds, according to the indictment, which led to an enormous influx of revenue.
As NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny reported in 2023, before any of the current criminal allegations were known:
Funded through aggressive online and real-world marketing campaigns and big-money conservative donors, The Epoch Times now boasts to be the country’s fourth-largest newspaper by subscriber count. (Unlike most major newspapers, The Epoch Times isn’t audited by the two major independent collectors of circulation data.) The nonprofit has amassed a fortune, growing its revenue by a staggering 685% in two years, to $122 million in 2021, according to the group’s most recent tax records.
The Epoch Times obviously isn’t as influential as Fox News, which fuels Donald Trump’s lie-filled comeback bid on an hourly basis. But it’s certainly more influential than local pink-slime outlets like the North Boston News or the Boston Times, nearly invisible right-wing outlets that at this stage of their development appear to be more inept than they are dangerous.
For instance, according to SimilarWeb, The Epoch Times’ English-language website was visited 89 million times between February and April, more than right-wing sites such as NewsMax, TownHall and the Gateway Pundit, and nearly as many as Breitbart.
Now the future of The Epoch Times is very much in doubt.
I’m reading everything I can find about the still-unfolding story of what’s next at The Washington Post, and I think it makes sense to hold back until the picture comes more clearly into focus. Here, though, are a few bullet points of note:
• It sounds like Sally Buzbee could have stayed as executive editor, at least for a few months, if she’d been willing to accept the reduced role that publisher Will Lewis envisions under his three-newsrooms idea. New York Times reporters Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson report that Buzbee told senior editors in advance of her departure, “I would have preferred to stay to help us get through this period, but it just got to the point where it wasn’t possible.”
• Lewis presided over a staff meeting Monday that devolved into a “shit show,” according to Matt Fuller and Tara Golshan of NOTUS. Particularly outspoken was political reporter Ashley Parker, who pointed out, “Now we have four white men running the newsroom.” Lewis responded, “I’ve got to do better.” Well, this was his chance, and now all the top jobs have been filled. NOTUS, by the way, is part of the Allbritton Journalism Institute, begun recently by Robert Allbritton, the former publisher of Politico, part of a family whose members are ancient rivals of the Post going back to the long-gone Washington Star.
• Check out this squishy-soft Post feature on the new top editors, Matt Murray and Robert Winnett. I don’t want to judge the Post on one article, and in fact this story on Buzbee’s departure is straightforward and reasonably tough. But I’m reminded of some of the brutally candid stories the Post produced after Jeff Bezos announced in August 2013 that he was buying the paper. As I wrote in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls”:
Indeed, within days of the announcement that he would buy the paper, the Post published an in-depth examination of Bezos and Amazon that could fairly be described as warts and all — he was described as “ruthless” and a “bully” in his dealings with competitors and a boss who was known for launching “tirades” that “humiliated colleagues.” An infamous story was repeated about Amazon stationing an ambulance outside one of its Pennsylvania warehouses during a heat wave rather than installing air conditioning…. Shel Kaphlan, Bezos’s first employee, who left Amazon after his role within the company was marginalized, was quoted as saying, “I saw him just completely destroy people on several occasions.” Kaphlan added that he felt “nauseous” at the prospect of Bezos owning the Post and the possibility that he would convert it “into a corporate libertarian mouthpiece.” If there is an example of newspaper reporters’ sucking up to the new boss, well, this was surely its opposite.
As is his custom, Bezos refused to cooperate with the team of reporters who worked on that story. But the national investigative reporter Kimberly Kindy, who was among those journalists, told me there were no repercussions from Bezos after publication. “I don’t think that we have shied away from covering him. And he certainly has invited us to,” she said.
Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
Having tracked the rise of The Washington Post under owner Jeff Bezos, executive editor Marty Baron and chief technologist Shailesh Prakash in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” I’ve watched its dispiriting decline with sadness. On Sunday, that decline was underscored by Sally Buzbee’s departure as executive editor. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy has the story.
Lest we forget, Bezos did not choose Baron and Prakash; rather, he inherited them from Graham family ownership after he bought the paper in 2013 for $250 million. And though Bezos had the good sense to keep them and give them the resources they needed, it was their vision that created a great digital, nationally focused news organization that was positioned perfectly for the rise of Trump. Maybe an early warning sign was that when Bezos did get to make a big hire, he chose Ronald Reagan apparatchik Fred Ryan as publisher. As Baron makes clear in his book “Collision of Power,” Ryan did not prove to be an inspired choice.
Since Donald Trump left office, it’s been nothing but a downhill slide for the Post, which, according to the new publisher, Will Lewis, lost $77 million last year and about half its audience since 2020. Was that entirely the fault of Buzbee, a former Associated Press executive editor who took the Post’s helm after Baron retired in early 2021? Of course not. But it all happened on her watch, so it’s not a surprise that she’s leaving.
As Poynter media reporter Tom Jones points out, it’s not 100% clear that Buzbee was fired. It’s possible that she decided she wanted nothing to do with Lewis’ recently articulated vision, which includes having “AI everywhere in our newsroom,” according to Semafor media reporter Max Tani. Ugh.
The new executive team sets off some alarm bells. Lewis is a former publisher of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal who reportedly was involved in helping Murdoch clean up his tabloids’ phone-hacking scandal in the U.K. a dozen years ago, according to David Folkenflik of NPR. Buzbee will be replaced on a temporary basis by Matt Murray, a former editor-in-chief of the Journal. After the 2024 election, Murray will slide over to a newly created position creating service and social media journalism while the main news product will be under the direction of Robert Winnett, currently deputy editor of The Telegraph Media Group, a right-wing news organization. Media critic Dan Gillmor wrote on Mastodon:
The Washington Post is about to lurch sharply to the right politically as former Murdoch apparatchik solidifies his grip on the organization. Current editor Buzbee is out, and he’s bringing in people from Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph (right-wing UK news org).
I’m willing to wait and see, in part because The Wall Street Journal remains a great newspaper notwithstanding its editorial page, whose right-wing orientation precedes Murdoch’s ownership. I’m deeply concerned about what Lewis has in mind with his artificial intelligence initiative, though.
For the second time since he bought it in 2013, Jeff Bezos is faced with the challenge of reinventing The Washington Post. He succeeded spectacularly the first time, with years of growth, profitability and influence. This time, though, he’s doing it with people he chose himself — and there are caution signs all over the place.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Photo (cc) 2018 by SecretName101.
The state of Illinois has taken a major step forward in trying to ease the local news crisis, with the legislature approving tax credits for publishers to hire and retain journalists; creating a 120-day cooling-off period to slow the sale of independent local news outlets to out-of-state chains; and funding scholarships for students who work at an Illinois news organization for at least two years after graduation.
Mark Caro reports for Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative that the tax credits amount to a modest $25 million over five years, but he quotes state Sen. Steve Stadelman as saying that the measure nevertheless represents a good start. “It was a tight budget year for Illinois, which always makes it difficult to pass legislation,” Stadelman, a Democrat, told Caro. “Was it as much as I wanted? No. But it showed that there’s a commitment by the state of Illinois to local journalism, and that’s significant.”
Gov. J.B. Pritzker is expected to sign the bill.
A couple of points I want to raise.
• The legislation grew out of the state’s Local Journalism Task Force, which was created by Gov. Pritzker in August 2021. Stadelman chaired that bipartisan group. Illinois was the second state to create a commission to study the local news crisis and make some recommendations. The first, you may recall, was Massachusetts; I had a hand in drafting the legislation that created it and would have been a member. But the Massachusetts commission, signed into law by then-Gov. Charlie Baker in January 2021, never got off the ground. There are some favorable rumblings coming out of Beacon Hill, though, and I hope to have better news to report at some point later this year.
• The Illinois tax credits avoid some pitfalls that developed almost immediately after New York State approved $90 million over three years. The New York credits are currently being implemented through an administrative process, and Gothamist reported recently that it’s not clear whether nonprofits and digital-only media outlets would be included, even though some prominent proponents understood that that they would be. The language is also contradictory as to whether out-of-state chains would be able to take advantage of the credits.
By contrast, the language of the Illinois legislation makes it clear that nonprofits and digital-only projects are included and that out-of-state chains are excluded.
The Illinois bill represents just part of a comprehensive package that was unveiled last February. As Caro reports, the Stadelman bill originally called for state agencies to spend half or more of their ad budget on local news outlets, but that provision was dropped.
In addition, a separate bill that would have required Google and Facebook to pay for the news that they repurpose has been put on hold depending on how things go with a similar measure in California. Forcing Big Tech to hand over some of their profits sounds appealing, but it hasn’t been working out very well elsewhere, as Facebook is getting rid of much of its news content and Google is threatening to walk away from the modest assistance it provides to journalism, such as the Google News Initiative.
Any form of government assistance for journalism has to be evaluated for whether it compromises the independence that news outlets need in order to hold public officials to account. Still, the modest action being taken in Illinois seems worth trying, at least on an experimental basis.
We got back a little while ago from the Bike to the Sea Day Ride, a 19-mile round trip from Malden Center to Nahant Beach. About 200 riders raised around $3,000 to improve and expand the Northern Strand Trail. It was a beautiful morning, though pretty crowded on the trail. Police officers or volunteers directed traffic at every intersection and guided us through the streets of Lynn for the last stretch.
