I was alerted to this by an Arlington Advocate subscriber a few weeks ago, and now it has shown up in the Medford Transcript: Lens, a 36-page “premium” magazine that is apparently intended as an advertising vehicle, published by the weeklies’ parent company, GateHouse Media.
Nothing wrong with developing a new source of ad revenue—although the only two non-house ads I could find were quarter-pagers for a livery company and a liquor store. Even though Lens was included with our Transcript for free—or, rather, for “free”—it carries a cover price of $3.95.
If you look at the fine print on page 3, though, you’ll see that you’re being charged for Lens whether you like it or not in the form of a truncated subscription to your community paper. With 12 premium editions a year, does that mean our subscription to the Transcript will be shortened by 12 weeks?
Has anyone else seen this? Have you tried to do anything about it?
We are already having a lively discussion about this at Facebook, where I learned from commenters that Digital First Media and Gannett have pulled similar stunts. If you’d like to weigh in, I suggest you do so there.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’ve finally decided to implement it. I am taking a tactical step back from requiring real names in the comments section. I will continue to screen every comment before it’s posted, which I’ve come to realize is of much greater value than real names.
Since I first started requiring real names a few years ago, the online conversation has changed quite a bit. Comments at Media Nation and many other websites have dropped precipitously. At the same time, I post links to everything I write on Facebook, which often leads to in-depth, high-quality interactions. As you probably know, Facebook does require real names, and though not everyone goes along, most do. Here is my Facebook profile. We don’t need to be “friends,” since I post blog content to my public feed. In my opinion, the shift to Facebook is far more important than whether I require real names here.
The other reason I’m moving away from real names here is that several of my most regular commenters log in via WordPress under their screen names, forcing me to go in and change it to their real names. It’s a pain in the neck. Then, too, there are the excellent comments from people I don’t know who haven’t used their real names. I’ll often email them and ask them to resubmit under their real names. If I don’t hear from them, their comment goes unpublished.
As with everything in digital media, this is experimental. I may change my mind again or go in a completely different direction. Thank you for reading. If you want to comment here, be my guest, but I strongly recommend looking me up on Facebook.
Donald Trump in 2011. Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore.
Donald Trump represents a challenge on many levels. One of those challenges is to the traditionally independent role of journalists—even opinion journalists like me. Because I’m in a position to express my opinions freely, I am not violating any ethical standard by saying that I think Trump is a racist demagogue who advocates violence and who is, in my view, the greatest threat to American democracy since the Great Depression.
What I always refrain from doing, though, is saying whom I’ll vote for. If you read me (thank you), you can probably guess at least 95 percent of the time. But I don’t take that last step. I have opinions, but I support no one. Nor do I make political donations, or put signs on our lawn or bumper stickers on my car.
Trump, though, is a clear and present danger to our country. NPR recently tied itself up in knots because Cokie Roberts—a commentator who is supposedly free to offer her opinions—wrote an anti-Trump column co-bylined with her husband, Steve Roberts. Like a lot of observers, I found that to be incredible. So let me tell you right now:
I will not vote for Trump. Assuming that Trump wins the Republican nomination and there is no viable independent candidate whom I prefer, I will vote for the Democratic candidate, most likely Hillary Clinton. If Bernie Sanders somehow manages to wrest the nomination from Clinton, I’ll vote for him.
I also hope the Republicans somehow find a way to deny Trump the nomination at their national convention this summer, which could happen if he’s ahead but commands less than a majority of the delegates. Trump has threatened us with riots if he’s spurned in such fashion, but that’s all the more reason to keep him off the ballot, not to retreat.
No, I’m not going to send Clinton a check or put a bumper sticker on my car. But I’m abandoning my independence just this once to make it clear that I will vote against Donald J. Trump.
Just as Congress and the broader electorate are hopelessly divided along partisan and ideological lines, so, too, is the Supreme Court.
Before the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, there were four liberals, four conservatives, and one centrist—Anthony Kennedy. All four liberals were appointed by Democratic presidents and all four conservatives (plus Kennedy) by Republicans.
And now a partisan battle has broken out over Scalia’s replacement. Despite President Obama’s choice of a respected moderate, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has vowed not even to take up the nomination. Instead, McConnell insists the decision should be left to the next president.
It’s a dispiriting scenario—and a historical anomaly. As the retired New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse pointed out Tuesday, we only have to look at fairly recent history to observe a very different dynamic.
After all, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren to the chief justice’s position, and Warren turned out (to Eisenhower’s chagrin) to be one of the most liberal justices in the court’s history. President John F. Kennedy appointed Byron White, who was liberal on civil rights but deeply conservative on social issues. And unlike today, when advocates expend most of their energy trying to persuade just one justice, Anthony Kennedy, years ago there were regularly three, four, or more justices who might vote either way.
“I’m deeply concerned as a citizen and as someone who cares about the court and about the consequences of the politicization of the court,” Greenhouse said. “The Roberts court is allowing the court to be used as a tool of partisan warfare.” As an example, she cited the court’s decision to rule on the legality of Obama’s executive order stopping the deportation of some undocumented immigrants—a decision that she said was accompanied by an overreaching aside questioning whether Obama’s order violated the Constitution.
Greenhouse, who currently teaches at Yale Law School and who still writes online commentaries about the court for the Times, spoke at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School. She offered a range of dyspeptic opinions on the political environment both inside and outside the court. To wit:
• On Justice Scalia’s legacy. “I think he degraded the discourse of the court, frankly,” Greenhouse said. “His snarky dissenting opinions were ill-advised and enabled snarkiness in others. I think his, quote, originalist understanding of constitutional interpretation goes nowhere. That died with him.” She added: “He was a very colorful figure and great at calling attention to himself. He was kind of a cult figure. But I don’t think he’ll have much lasting impact.”
• On McConnell’s refusal to consider Obama’s appointment of Judge Garland to the court. “It’s truly unprecedented. … It’s totally cynical. It’s totally playing to the base,” Greenhouse said. She also disagreed with an observation by Shorenstein Center interim director Tom Patterson that Obama should have chosen a woman or a member of a minority group who would be more appealing to Democratic voters. “The brilliance of this nomination,” she said, is that the Garland choice will make Republicans “squirm” because he is exactly the sort of moderate they had earlier said they would confirm.
• On the Supreme Court’s order that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reconsider the state’s ban on stun guns. By custom, Greenhouse said, the Supreme Court would make such a decision without comment. But Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas added a caustic opinion suggesting the SJC had put a woman’s safety at risk. “Something’s not right here,” she said. “The idea is you don’t wash your dirty linen in public. … They thought they had to enlighten us with this 10-page screed.”
Greenhouse said that one way to make the court less politicized would be to put more (as in any) politicians on it. At one time during the Warren era, she said, not a single member of the court had served as a federal judge. Warren himself had been governor of California. More recently, Sandra Day O’Connor had served as an elected official in Arizona before entering the judiciary.
“I think a diversity of characteristics on the Supreme Court is very helpful,” she said.
Given that many Supreme Court decisions can go either way (after all, Greenhouse added, the reason most cases are before the court in the first place is because federal appeals courts in different jurisdictions reached opposite conclusions), a politician’s willingness to seek compromise might sometimes be superior than the certainty with which judges with legal backgrounds often act.
WGBH News contributor Dan Kennedy is a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Hulk Hogan (or more likely an impersonator) with a fan in 2008. Photo (cc) by Rene Passet.
Based on my layman’s understanding, it seems to me that the $115 million verdict against Gawker in the Hulk Hogan case fits neatly within existing privacy law. I don’t see how it sets any precedent or poses a threat to the First Amendment.
One question that’s worth asking: Will the verdict have a chilling effect on publishers? I don’t see how. In fact, I don’t think any reasonable person would have thought that he or she could publish a video without permission of someone having sex and not risk serious legal action. Gawker is an outlier. Even observers not familiar with Gawker should have understood that there’s something deeply dysfunctional at a news organization whose former editor jokes about child pornography at a deposition.
Our modern understanding of privacy law is rooted in Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy.” It’s not that long, and it’s a good read. The first of Warren and Brandeis’s six principles—newsworthiness—is what Gawker hung its hat on in its defense. “The right to privacy does not prohibit any publication of matter which is of public or general interest,” Warren and Brandeis write.
Gawker sought to stretch the boundaries of “public or general interest” way past the breaking point. Yes, Hulk Hogan is a public figure, which means he has fewer privacy rights than most of us. And yes, he bragged about his sexual prowess. But it doesn’t follow that it’s therefore OK to post a video of him having sex without getting his and his partner’s permission, regardless of whether he knew he was being recorded.
Legal experts are all over the place, of course, but Daniel Solove, a privacy expert and George Washington University Law professor, begins a commentary in The New York Times with this:
Gawker’s posting of the Hulk Hogan sex video is not speech that the First Amendment right to free speech does or should protect. Sex videos, nude photos and revenge porn—even of famous people—are not newsworthy. They are not of legitimate public concern.
Gawker founder Nick Denton will appeal, and it’s possible that he’ll win. If the verdict stands, though, it should serve as nothing more than a common-sense reminder that though the First Amendment’s protections are vast, they are not limitless.
Note: A Media Nation reader writes: “I am 99.9 percent sure that is not Hulk Hogan in the photo.” She may be right, and I’ve edited the caption accordingly.
Earlier today I broke the news that GateHouse Media is closing its office in Somerville and laying off staff, with the Somerville Journal to be run out of the company’s Danvers office and the Cambridge Chronicle out of Lexington.
The Boston Business Journal followed up with additional details, including the fact that Wayne Braverman, a longtime GateHouse employee who’s a group managing editor, would be losing his job.
You need a presence in the community—a place where folks can drop in with an obit, a press release, or to give someone a piece of his or her mind. Local newspaper offices have become a rare species over the past 40 years, though some papers—no longer encumbered by the need to have their printing presses close at hand—have been reversing that trend.
I don’t expect readers of the Somerville and Cambridge papers will notice much difference, and I should note that the Medford Transcript is already run out of Danvers. But I moved from Danvers to Medford a little over a year ago, and let’s just say that the two communities are not close. And Somerville is probably another 10 minutes farther away. The Cambridge-Lexington connection isn’t quite as absurd, but how can a city as large and engaged as Cambridge not have its own newspaper office?
We’ve been having a robust conversation on Facebook about GateHouse’s latest move to squeeze out every last drop of blood from its hardworking employees. Please join in.
As you may have heard, the makers of the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight have reached a settlement with Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn about his claim that the film depicts him in an unfavorable manner regarding the cover-up of the pedophile-priest scandal.
Spotlight tells the story of The Boston Globe‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation that revealed that Cardinal Bernard Law, then the archbishop, was directly involved in reassigning priests who’d been accused of sexual abuse. The Dunn character is seen taking part in a meeting about a pedophile priest at Boston College High School.
The Associated Press reports on the settlement here; The New York Times covers it here; the Globehere; and the Boston Heraldhere.
As part of the settlement, the filmmakers acknowledge that the lines attributed to Dunn were “fabricated,” which is kind of odd when you think about it. Spotlight, of course, is a work of fiction, though based on true events. In that sense, every line in Spotlight is fabricated. The question is whether Dunn was portrayed in a manner that is fundamentally false.
The filmmakers have contended from the time Dunn went public with his complaints in a Globe column by Kevin Cullen that Dunn is not portrayed in a negative light—rather, that he comes across “as an alumnus and public-relations professional from an affiliated institution, was concerned about the reputation of BC High, and acted in concert with his affiliation and professional training,” as the filmmakers put it in a letter reported by the Globe last November. In the settlement, the filmmakers say:
As is the case with most movies based on historical events, ‘Spotlight’ contains fictionalized dialogue that was attributed to Mr. Dunn for dramatic effect. We acknowledge that Mr. Dunn was not part of the Archdiocesan cover-up.
From what I can tell, there’s nothing in the settlement that contradicts what the filmmakers said last November, or that calls into question the recollections of Globe reporters Walter Robinson and Sacha Pfeiffer, who were at the BC High meeting.
At the time that this controversy broke, I wrote a piece for WGBH News about the hazards of true-life movies that freely mix fact and fiction. I certainly don’t question the pain that Dunn says he experienced. From the beginning the dispute has struck me as a genuine disagreement between him and the filmmakers over how he comes across in the movie.
That said, I’ve only seen Spotlight once, and I’d like to see that scene again.
ROSSLYN, Virginia—I am writing this in a Best Western, wondering how I’m going to get to downtown Washington later today given that the Metro—shut down lest it burst into flames yet again—makes the MBTA look like a model of competence and efficiency.
Hunter Thompson used to grab the Gideons Bible at moments like this and try to find something appropriately apocalyptic he could quote from the Book of Revelations. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.
I’ve got Gideons propping up the back of my laptop. A different kind of apocalypse was playing out Tuesday night on television, as racist demagogue Donald Trump all but wrapped up the Republican nomination. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton won big while Bernie Sanders’s increasingly implausible campaign reached the end of the line, though he’ll trudge on.
So how did we get here? And what comes next? A few thoughts.
1. Why Rubio lost. The smart money was with Marco Rubio from the beginning. On Tuesday, as it became clear that Rubio would be crushed in his home state of Florida, a 2013 Time magazine cover proclaiming Rubio “The Republican Savior” started making the rounds on Twitter. So did a tweet by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat from last September: “The entire commentariat is going to feel a little silly when Marco Rubio wins every Republican primary.”
The problem was that Rubio’s sunny optimism (which he abandoned at the first sign of trouble) and credibility with both the establishment and Tea Party wings of his party were out of step with the populist Trump insurgency.
“Rubio was prepared, much like Jeb Bush, for a reasonable dialogue in Washington policy language, offering positions that reflect 40 years of national security and foreign-policy experts,” former House Speaker (and former presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich said in a Washington Post article by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. “All of that disappeared. The market didn’t care.”
But Rubio brought his own problems to the table as well. There was, of course, his robotic debate meltdown in the face of a withering assault from Chris Christie. But there is also evidence that Rubio and the people around him were so smitten with his essential Marco-ness that they became lazy and arrogant.
In National Review, an anti-Trump conservative outlet, Tim Alberta writes of Rubio: “He campaigned on the ground so infrequently for much of the campaign that even some supporters questioned how hard he was willing to work to get elected.” Eli Stokols and Shane Goldmacher pile on at Politico in a piece headlined “Inside Marco’s Hollow Campaign.” The subhead tells the story: “Rubio’s overconfident team refused to invest. Voters returned the favor.”
2. What’s next for Kasich and Sanders? Although Rubio might differ, winning your home state is not a big deal. John Kasich won Ohio, where he is governor, on Tuesday night, just as Bernie Sanders won Vermont a few weeks ago. Yet there is talk in the media today that Kasich and Ted Cruz (remember him?) might be able to stop Trump by denying him an outright majority at the Republican National Convention.
Boston Globe political reporter James Pindell notes that “Trump will need to win 59 percent of all the remaining GOP delegates to win a majority.” And Five Thirty Eight’s Nate Silver writes that Trump is still winning just 37 percent of the Republican vote. “Since primaries became widespread in 1972, only George McGovern won his party’s nomination with a smaller share of the vote—just 25.3 percent,” Silver writes.
At this point, it seems unlikely that Republicans will be any more successful at stopping Trump than Democrats were at stopping McGovern.
The case for Sanders seems considerably more desperate. John Nichols of The Nation, a left-liberal magazine that endorsed Sanders earlier this year, asserts that “Sanders has every reason to keep running a primary and caucus race where most of the delegates have yet to be chosen—and where his ability to influence the character and content of the competition remains one of that race’s most significant dynamics.”
Sanders has performed a real service for Democrats by holding Clinton to account and forcing her to clarify her positions. But his insurgency played out pretty much the way all left-wing insurgencies do.
3. Trump and the media. Earlier this week The Upshot, an analytics project that’s part of The New York Times, showed that Trump has received far more media coverage than Clinton, the runner-up, with everyone else far off the pace. The value of that free media in February: $400 million.
The Trump media dynamic will be fascinating to watch from here on out. A former reporter for the Trump-friendly site Breitbart.com said she was assaulted by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—and Trump gave Lewandowski a nice shout-out Tuesday night, when he also called the press “disgusting.” Certain unfriendly reporters are banned from Trump events, as Politico media reporter Hadas Gold writes.
Then, too, there’s the whole dynamic of what journalists will do given that they’ve been accused of enabling Trump by not pushing him hard enough on the Breitbart matter or at the thuggish violence directed at protesters—violence that began to be returned in kind last weekend.
As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen observes, there is a “purposelessness” to much campaign coverage with its relentless focus on the horse race. “Campaign journalists have a system for determining who gets the most coverage,” Rosen writes. “They have no system for determining who deserves the most coverage.”
There has been plenty of harsh coverage of Trump right from the beginning, as Politico’s Jack Shafer recently observed. So it’s hard to say whether a tougher tone will make any difference.
4. Trump and the Jews. My friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate passed this on—an essay by James Kirchick in Tablet on why Jewish conservatives such as him despise Trump. It’s a long read that defies summary, but this should give you a taste: “To those Jews who contemplate making peace with a President Donald Trump: He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.”
I don’t agree with everything Kirchick writes. In fact, I think the Republicans’ neoconservative wing—which is not exclusively Jewish (ahem: Dick Cheney) despite Kirchick’s attempt to turn the term into an anti-Semitic slur—really does hate Trump in part because of his non-interventionist tendencies on foreign policy.
Still, if you’re going to read one lengthy piece on Trump this week, it should be Kirchick’s.
5. Obama’s continued relevance. Remember him? The president remains enormously popular with the Democratic base. And he’s doing everything he can to help Democrats retain the White House.
His choice of a Supreme Court nominee—which we may know by the time you read this—will almost certainly be a respected moderate, thus casting the Republicans as even more dysfunctional and obstructionist than they already are if they stick to their pledge and refuse to hold confirmation hearings.
And that is something Clinton will be able to exploit this fall.
Looks like John Allen and Inés San Martín have found a way to keep the Catholic news site Cruxalive once it ceases to be a Boston Globe project at the end of the month. Details here and here.
