It’s that most wonderful time of the month, when I’ve got a few gift links to The New York Times that I haven’t used and I want to share them with my readers. These links will turn into pumpkins at midnight, which is appropriate on Halloween. (That is, they’d turn into unshareable pumpkins for me. Now that I’ve shared them, you should be able to use them indefinitely.) So please enjoy.
“The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices,”by Jodi Kantor. This is by far the most significant of the three, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Kantor’s major thrust is that Justice Elena Kagan is trying to stick with her longstanding approach of being conciliatory in the hopes of occasionally pulling Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to her side, whereas Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has put the right-wing majority on blast.
Jon Keller, left, and I kicked around some media topics on WBZ-TV back in 2018, when we were both a little less gray.
Old friend Jon Keller was laid off Thursday by WBZ-TV (Channel 4) as part of wide-ranging cuts at Paramount-owned CBS, writes Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan (sub. req). Keller, a political analyst at the station for 20 years, was one of five staff members who lost their jobs, although he was the only on-air journalist.
Earlier this year the station laid off medical reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall, and veteran reporter Beth Germano retired. The departures represent a significant blow to the station given that television news depends on recognizable, trusted journalists.
Larry Bushart under arrest. Photo by the Lexington, Tenn., police department via The Intercept.
Larry Bushart is free, but he didn’t win. It was the forces of oppression that won after Bushart spent a month in jail, held on $2 million bail, for publishing a provocative Facebook post about the late Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump that Tennessee authorities decided to conflate into the felony of recklessly threatening mass violence at a school.
Bushart was released from jail Wednesday after public pressure began to build, reports Rick Rojas in The New York Times. A retired law-enforcement officer who obsessively posts liberal memes, Bushart’s offense was to publish a photo of Trump following Kirk’s murder accompanied by the words “We have to get over it,” which was a statement Trump made in 2024 after a fatal school shooting in Iowa. A line under the photo read “Donald Trump, on the Perry High School mass shooting, one day after,” along with “This seems relevant today …”
Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, there were fears that he would position its editorial pages to boost his various business interests and amplify his quirky political philosophy.
Consider, for example, Shel Kaphan, an engineer who was Amazon’s first employee and later had a falling-out with Bezos. “It makes me feel quite nauseous,” Kaphan told the Post immediately after the purchase was announced. “I’d hate to see the newspaper converted into a corporate libertarian mouthpiece.”
Contrary to Kaphan’s fears, Bezos proved to be an exemplary owner for 10 years. Then, in late 2023 he hired the ethically challenged Fleet Street veteran Will Lewis as his publisher, and it’s been all downhill since then.
Particularly damaging has been Bezos’ assault on the Post’s opinion section, which began with his decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 presidential election. That was followed by the exodus of key employees, Bezos’ pronouncement that the opinion section would be reoriented to emphasize “free markets and personal liberties,” and the hiring of the conservative journalist Adam O’Neal to be opinion editor.
Now comes yet another disturbing development in the Post opinion section’s race to the bottom. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that, on three occasions in recent weeks, the Post has editorialized in favor of Bezos’ business interests without making any disclosure — a violation of basic journalistic ethics. As Folkenflik observes:
For the newspaper’s owner to have outside business holdings or activities that might intersect with coverage or commentary is conventionally seen to present at the least a perception of a conflict of interest. Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency.
The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past, whether the Graham family’s holdings, which included the Stanley Kaplan educational company and Slate magazine, or, since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper’s reporters do so as a matter of routine.
The three undisclosed conflicts, by the way, involved a rousing endorsement of Donald Trump’s hideous ballroom, for which Amazon was a major corporate donor; support for the military’s bid to build nuclear reactors, which could bolster another Amazon investment; and a piece urging local officials in Washington to approve self-driving cars. Amazon’s autonomous car company, Zoox, had just announced that it would be moving into the nation’s capital.
Folkenflik noted that in the case of the ballroom to replace the now-demolished East Wing, the Post added a disclosure after its initial publication — but only after being called on it by Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin.
It’s not at all unusual for media moguls to have a variety of entangling business interests. The solution, without exception, is to disclose those conflicts whenever they are being reported on or editorialized about. The Boston Globe, for instance, rarely fails to disclose John and Linda Henry’s ownership of the Red Sox and their other sports-related interests when reporting on them as business enterprises.
To borrow Shel Kaphan’s description, it is nauseating to watch Bezos destroy his legacy as a first-rate newspaper owner by turning the Post’s opinion section into a pathetic joke. It has cost the Post tens of thousands of readers, and media reporter Natalie Korach of Status reports writes the staff is preparing for a painful round of cuts just before the holidays.
But Bezos doesn’t care. His interests are elsewhere. I just wish the world’s fourth-richest person would donate the Post to a nonprofit foundation so that he can cease being, as he’s put it, “not an ideal owner” of one of our great newspapers.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, I’m flying solo because co-host Ellen Clegg is recovering from knee-replacement surgery. But fear not — she was behind the scenes making sure this episode got recorded properly, and she edited what you are listening to. She’ll be back on the air soon.
Our guest is Rick Goldsmith, a veteran filmmaker who has taken a close look at the state of corporate journalism in America. His documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink” tells the story of Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund that has bought up many of our greatest newspapers and stripped them of their real estate and slashed their newsrooms.
Rick Goldsmith
He focuses on one of Alden’s papers, The Denver Post, and the rise of The Colorado Sun, a digital startup begun by former Post journalists. The story of what happened in Colorado is also one that we tell in our book, “What Works in Community News.”
The reason we’re having Rick on now is that you’ll be able to watch “Stripped for Parts” through Dec. 31 for free on the PBS app, which you can access through Apple TV, Roku, Google Play and most smart TVs. The various options for watching the film are explained here.
I’ve got a Quick Take about Jay Rosen, who retired earlier this year from New York University and is now taking on a new challenge. Jay is probably best known to his younger followers as an incisive media critic. But his true passion, going back to the 1990s, is finding ways to involve members of the public in the production of journalism. Now he’s doing it again with a project called News Creator Corps — and it could have implications for local news.
Camden, Maine, home of the Midcoast Villager. Photo (cc) 2020 by Paul VanDerWerf.
The Midcoast Villager, an innovative weekly newspaper based in Camden, Maine, got The New York Times treatment last week. But though the Times lavished attention on the high-profile journalists who’ve been recruited to work there as well as the café it’s opened to extend public outreach, it missed entirely the Villager’s long history as a tech innovator — a history that extends all the way to the present.
The Times article and visuals, by Steven Kurutz and Cig Harvey, are certainly entertaining enough, starting with their portrayal of deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald, who left a job covering Washington for NBC News to come to Maine. “I did an insane thing,” he tells the Times. “I left one of the last stable jobs in media and took a job in the worst sector of media — and possibly in the economy.”
Donald Trump is wreaking so much havoc and engaging in so much corruption that it’s hard to stay focused. But I urge all of us to keep our eye on this: He is killing civilians from Venezuela and Colombia in the Caribbean and, now, in the Pacific. The number is up to 43 victims.
Charlie Savage, who is one of The New York Times’ most perceptive reporters, has written a news analysis that places Trump’s actions in perspective. With Trump’s apologists perpetually engaging in whatabout-whatabout-whatabout, Savage notes that Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush went out of their way to come up with legal justifications for drone strikes against Al Qaeda (in Obama’s case) and for torturing terrorism suspects (in Bush’s).
You may not like what Obama and Bush did (I certainly don’t), but the point is that they understood the rule of law had to be asserted, even if they were paying it little more than lip service. By contrast, Trump is just killing people who may or may not be drug smugglers and who have the right to be arrested and tried, not “blown apart, burned alive or drowned,” as Savage puts it. He writes:
Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.
Savage adds: “In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime.”
Trump might ponder that one of his favorite former dictators, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, is on trial before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for accusations that he was involved in dozens of killings in an attempt to crack down on illegal drugs.
You don’t have to draw a convoluted analogy. Trump is doing exactly the same thing that Duterte is accused of doing, and he’s reveling in it publicly. It is the worst thing he’s done as president, and that’s saying a lot.
A well-known Boston Globe byline will soon be appearing in The New York Times. Mark Arsenault, who came to the Globe in 2010, has been hired by the Times to report on education. He’ll leave the paper on Oct. 30.
An email to the staff from editor Nancy Barnes and deputy managing editor Francis Storrs, forwarded to me by a trusted source, says in part:
Mark started at the Globe’s DC bureau in 2010, and has been based in the Boston office since 2011. Amazingly prolific and adaptable, he’s covered Congress and politics, teen suicide, the rise of the state casino industry, national parks, and the US-Canada trade war, to name just a few subjects. He worked for years on the Spotlight Team, including on projects about men imprisoned for life, the housing crisis, an ousted MIT professor, and about patients who died amid the Steward Health Care collapse. He reported on the Marathon Bombing, as part of the Globe staff that won a Pulitzer, and was on the Steward team that recently won a Loeb, among many other honors.
Arsenault’s recent Globe stories include a report from the border (sub. req.) between Calais, Maine, and St. Stephen, New Brunswick, on how residents in both communities were faring during Donald Trump’s second term, and a story on the long-running battle (sub. req.) between Trump and the Pritzker family. Penny Pritzker, a senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, has helped lead that university’s fight against Trump’s depredations.
Boston.com, a free service of Boston Globe Media since its launch 30 years ago, is adding a paywall. According to a memo sent to the staff Wednesday afternoon and provided to me by a trusted source, the site is moving to a metered paywall that can be tailored “as we learn more.” I take that to mean Boston.com will offer a certain number of free shares per month that may be moved up or down depending on what the data show.
The cost is $5 a month for a combined subscription to Boston.com and Boston magazine, which Globe Media acquired in January of this year. Strangely enough, the cost is the same even if you only want Boston.com. Those are introductory offers; the site is also offering a non-discounted annual subscription fee of $90 that leaves out BoMag. It’s a little confusing — and don’t get me started on the completely different subscription offers you’ll find at BoMag. I’d say some unsnarling needs to be done.
Map via “The State of Local News 2025.” Click here for the interactive version.
Finding news in the annual State of Local News report from Northwestern University’ Medill School can be a challenge because, frankly, it’s always the same depressing thing: newspapers keep closing; digital startups are rising, but not by enough to fill the gap; and be sure to tune in again next year, when the situation is likely to be even worse.
Still, there are a few interesting nuggets in the latest update, which was released Monday. In particular, I was drawn to some observations in the report about rural areas, which is where news deserts tend to be concentrated. News deserts, as defined by the project’s now-retired founder, Penny Abernathy, are counties without any locally based news organizations.
As newspapers continue to close, independent startups are filling the gap. But it’s uneven at best, with most startups concentrated in urban and suburban areas. The report puts it this way:
Over the past five years, we have tracked more than 300 startups that have emerged across the country. Support for both these new startups, which have opened in almost every state, as well as existing legacy outlets has come from a surge in philanthropic investment as well as public policy initiatives. Over the past year, such efforts have boosted a wide variety of news outlets. Overall, however, philanthropic grants remain highly centralized in urban areas, and state legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.
The report also finds that fewer than 10% of digital-only news organizations are in rural counties, and that the demographics of counties that do support digital projects “tend to be more affluent, with lower rates of poverty and higher rates of educational attainment.” Of course, internet connectivity tends to lag in rural areas as well.
