Author: Dan Kennedy

Newspapers are dropping ‘Dilbert’ after Scott Adams’ racist rant. Will the Globe be next?

Back when “Dilbert” was funny. Photo (cc) 2011 by pchow98.

Scott Adams is apparently trying to get “Dilbert” canceled by as many newspapers as possible. The Boston Globe should accommodate him immediately.

Adams has long been known as a Donald Trump supporter. Last week, though, he went well beyond praising the racist ex-president with a vile racist rant of his own, referring to Black people as a “hate group” and saying, “I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.” There was more. Martha Ross has the gory details at The Mercury News of San Jose.

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Among the newspapers dropping “Dilbert” is The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. “This is not a difficult decision,” wrote editor Chris Quinn. The Plain Dealer is part of the Advance Local chain and, according to Quinn, several other Advance papers have come to the same conclusion — including “newspapers in Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Alabama, Massachusetts and Oregon.” The Massachusetts newspaper is The Republican of Springfield, which also publishes the MassLive website. I haven’t seen an announcement at MassLive yet.

Nor have I seen an announcement from the Globe, an independent paper owned by John and Linda Henry. As Quinn noted, it can take a while for a canceled feature to disappear from the print edition. But it can be canceled immediately on the digital side — yet “Dilbert” is in its usual spot today on the Globe’s website.

This shouldn’t be a hard call. As Quinn notes, the Lee chain dropped “Dilbert” from its 77 papers last year after Adams introduced a Black character whose role was to mock “woke” culture and the LGBTQ community. “Dilbert” has been living on borrowed time, and it has long since ceased to be funny.

Adams is obviously trying to get canceled so he can go on some sort of right-wing grievance tour. This is not a matter of respecting all views — Adams did everything but don a sheet and terrorize his Black neighbors. (Oh, wait. He doesn’t have any. He also said he’s moved to a nearly all-white community in order to get away from Black people.) It’s time for mainstream news outlets to part company with this vicious hatemonger.

Slashing and burning local news outlets proves profitable for Gannett

Photo (cc) 2008 by Patrickneil

Back before GateHouse Media morphed into Gannett in 2019 and assumed its corporate identity, I believed the company was in it for the long haul. Don’t get me wrong — GateHouse was always obsessed with cost-cutting and was a fairly awful steward of the papers it acquired. But its executives seemed to have convinced themselves that ugly was the only way to win, and that winning meant surviving.

No longer. I couldn’t possibly tell you what Gannett is up to anymore other than squeezing its properties for every last drop of revenue. On Thursday, the company released its latest financial results. They were terrible for journalists and the communities they serve. For investors, though, they were pretty good.

Don Seiffert reports in the Boston Business Journal that Gannett slashed the number of journalists at its 200 or so newspapers (including the flagship USA Today) by 20% over the past year — no surprise to those of us who were following those cuts throughout the year. Seiffert paged through the annual report and found that Gannett employed 3,900 journalists at the end of 2022 (3,300 in the U.S. and 600 at a U.K.-based subsidiary), down from 4,846 a year earlier. At the same time, though, the company had achieved profitability, which sent the stock price soaring by 22%

Incredibly, some of those investors think Gannett has been too slow to cut. For instance, Seiffert said on Mastodon that, during Thursday’s earnings call, Leon Cooperman, CEO of the hedge fund Omega Advisors, which is among Gannett’s larger investors, told Gannett chair Michael Reed, the $7.7 million man: “I think it’s fair to say you couldn’t understand the impact of Covid and the recession on the company. Having said that, I think it’s a fair criticism to say we have been too slow in reducing costs.” As Seiffert noted: “This, despite the company reducing total headcount by more than half since 2019.”

So what’s ahead? You will not be surprised to learn that CFO Doug Horne told investors that Gannett’s going big-time into artificial intelligence to perform some of the work that used to be done by journalists. Just feed the audio from the planning board meeting into ChatGPT and see what happens, I suppose.

Over at Poynter Online, Angela Fu reports that Reed is wicked psyched about 2023, writing:

Reed said the company is entering 2023 with “a lot of optimism.” Inflation seems to have peaked, he said, and newsprint and distribution costs have largely stabilized. In response to a shareholder question about a possible recession, Reed said the company had not seen anything in the first quarter to indicate the country was moving in that direction.

Unless it proves otherwise, though, Gannett should be regarded as nothing but a financial play at this point. The best thing it could do is offload its community papers to local owners who actually care about journalism, as it has done with a few weeklies Central Massachusetts as well as the Inquirer and Mirror of Nantucket, which I wrote about recently in an op-ed piece for The Boston Globe. Gannett has sold some of its papers nationally as well.

In many other cases, vibrant startups from The Provincetown Independent to several projects in the Boston suburbs are competing with vestigial Gannett papers, but more are needed. As Steven Waldman, president of the Rebuild Local News Coalition, has proposed, we need tax incentives aimed at persuading Gannett and other chains to get out of town — and to give committed local ownership a chance to revive grassroots news coverage.

The Boston Globe will need creative thinking to find and keep a video audience

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Boston Globe will launch a five-days-a-week local newscast on New England Sports Network sometime this spring.

The half-hour program, “Boston Globe Today,” will comprise a more or less traditional mix of news, sports and entertainment on Monday through Thursday as well as a sports roundtable on Friday. The anchor will be Segun Oduolowu except on Friday, when the sports discussion will be helmed by Globe columnist Chris Gasper. The program will be carried live on NESN, the Globe’s website and mobile app, and the NESN 360 app.

The show marks a significant move into video, something that Globe owners John and Linda Henry have long wanted to do. I suspect, though, that they’re going to have to make some major adjustments along the way. The audience for local TV newscasts is aging at least as rapidly as print newspaper readers, and a 5 p.m. program is going to skew even older. Globe executives need to think about how they’re going to find and keep an audience.

First, NESN makes sense only because the Henrys’ Fenway Sports Group is the majority owner. It’s a sports channel, and you tune in to watch the Red Sox, the Bruins and the Beanpot so you can see the Northeastern men’s and women’s hockey teams triumph over their rivals. It would take a whole lot of rebranding to get anyone to think that NESN is about anything other than sports. At least they’ll be able to promote the newscast on Bruins and Red Sox games, although the Sox may be lucky to draw an audience in the high double digits this year.

And yes, the newscast will also be shown on the Globe’s and NESN’s digital platforms, but that’s really not enough. At a minimum, “Boston Globe Today” should have a robust YouTube presence where viewers can watch live or at a time of their choosing. Maybe they’re already thinking that way.

Second, a comprehensive half-hour newscast is simply not the way that younger audiences consume video journalism anymore. Video stories need to be broken out and run separately so that people can watch them on their phones while they’re on the train, waiting for a cup of coffee or whatever.

Take a look at NJ Spotlight News, a nonprofit digital news organization that provides insider coverage of public policy and politics in New Jersey. Several years ago Spotlight merged with NJ PBS. Now they continue to publish news online and have added a half-hour newscast on television, web and YouTube; stories from the newscast are posted individually.

“Boston Globe Today” sounds like an interesting idea, but it will work only if the Globe regards it as an experiment and is prepared to make changes along the way.

Oh, and I did I mention that both of Northeastern’s hockey teams won the Beanpot?

Below is an email a trusted source passed along that Globe Media CEO Linda Henry sent to the staff earlier today. I’m sorry I don’t have it in text form, but this ought to be readable.

Bret Stephens wants you to misunderstand an easily misunderstood report on masking

A pre-vaccine selfie in the Middlesex Fells, January 2021.

None of us will forget those early, terrifying months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there were no vaccines. No one knew what to do, so we all masked up. I was so careful that if I was hiking in the woods and saw someone approaching, I’d quickly put on my bandana and hope they’d do the same. What did we know? I mean, we had friends who had their groceries delivered to their garage and wouldn’t touch them for several days.

These days, the fear has subsided for those of us who are healthy and fully vaxxed. People are still dying unnecessarily of COVID, but mask mandates are pretty much behind us. I still wear a mask on public transportation but nowhere else.

So I read with great interest recently that a new report shows mask mandates did not work. Yasmin Tayag wrote about it in The Atlantic on Feb. 13. The report — “a rigorous assessment of 78 studies” — showed that there was no difference in the COVID rate when the general population wore masks, whether they were cloth or high-grade N95s.

Yet what the report actually found was complicated and easily misunderstood and/or mis-explained by the media. The paper wasn’t saying that masking doesn’t work — it was saying that mandates don’t work at the community level. In other words, if you are wearing a high-quality mask and making sure that it fits properly, you are doing a decent job of protecting yourself from others. It’s just that too many people weren’t masking, or weren’t wearing a proper mask, for it to make much difference at the population level. Tayag wrote:

The population-level detail is important: It indicates uncertainty about whether requiring everyone to wear a mask makes a difference in viral spread. This is different from the impact of individual masking, which has been better researched. Doctors, after all, routinely mask when they’re around sick patients and do not seem to be infected more often than anyone else. “We have fairly decent evidence that masks can protect the wearer,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University, told me. “Where I think it sort of falls apart is relating that to the population level.”

Naturally, such nuances get obliterated by bad-faith commentators — like Bret Stephens of The New York Times, who writes today that the study shows masking doesn’t work, period, and that those who pushed for mandates should apologize. Stephens does include a to-be-sure paragraph acknowledging that individual mask-wearing may make sense, but he blows right past it, writing:

Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.

No. The “misinformers” claimed that masking itself didn’t work, and that we were killing ourselves by breathing our own carbon dioxide. Stephens knows this, I assume, but he’s more than happy to let us confuse mandates-don’t-work with masking-doesn’t-work, and to elide the reality that universal masking probably would have worked if everyone wore high-quality masks over their mouths and noses rather than their chins.

I’ve never been all-in on masking. As I said, I continue to mask up on public transportation, but nowhere else. And I always enjoy seeing a cyclist wearing a mask but not a helmet, which is truly a cosmically hilarious misunderstanding of risk. But there is good reason to think that if you wear a proper mask properly that you’ll reduce your chances of getting COVID.

Sports Hub host Massarotti suspended for a week

Sports Hub radio host Tony Massarotti has been suspended for a week, and the station’s owner, Beasley Broadcast Group, has ordered sensitivity training for all on-air personalities, according to CBS Boston. And good grief, both the headline and the lead refer to what Massarotti said as a “racially insensitive comment.” It was racist. Period.

Update: The Boston Globe also called Massarotti’s remarks “insensitive.” They were quoting Massarotti, I think, but they didn’t use quotation marks. And they should have forthrightly used “racist” to describe what he said.

Earlier:

 

Sports Hub host apologizes for an incredibly racist remark

It’s been such a long time since a Boston sports radio host got in trouble for making racist remarks on the air. But it’s time to reset the clock, as Tony Massarotti of the Sports Hub (98.5 FM) stepped in it big-time on Friday. According to Chris Novak of Awful Announcing, Massarotti and cohost Mike Felger were broadcasting from different locations, and Massarotti thought it was worthy of note that there were two Black men sitting behind Felger.

“I wanna know now who the two guys behind you are,” Massarotti said. “Because if I were you … They can’t hear us, right? OK, so I would be careful if I were you. Because the last time you were around a couple of guys like that, they stole your car.”

Good Lord. Massarotti was full of apologies on Monday, and, Novak wrote, appeared to be on the verge of tears. “When it comes to apologies, at least he alluded to the fact that no one had to accept his,” Novak continued. “A common refrain following apologies is that everyone is meant to accept it. That isn’t always the case, and being aware of that, in his defense, is at least an acknowledgment.”

Felger wasn’t exactly quick off the draw, which he took responsibility for later. “I knew it was wrong the moment it went out and I could have stopped the show,” Felger said, according to an account by WCVB-TV (Channel 5). “I could have stopped it and corrected it, and I didn’t in real time.”

It remains to be seen what additional fallout there might be, if any. Massarotti was part of NESN’s Red Sox broadcasts last year, but the network had already decided against bringing him back.

More fun with numbers: AAM explains how it counts digital subscribers. I’m still confused.

By Dan Kennedy

As I wrote last week, the matter of how the Alliance for Audited Media counts paid digital subscriptions is something that has confused me for a long time. In September 2021, I sent an email to Erin Boudreau, AAM’s senior marketing manager in which I asked her some of the questions that I asked here. She responded with links to two fact sheets (here and here), neither of which struck me as especially helpful.

Because of that, I wrote last week’s item without checking in with AAM again. I immediately heard from Boudreau, but still without the information I was looking for. Now, I have no reason to believe that Boudreau was being deliberately obtuse, and I’m also aware that AAM is at the mercy of the newspapers that pay them. AAM’s job is to be accurate and rigorous, but they’re dependent on the data that publishers provide.

In any case, I decided to try again with Boudreau, asking her a series of specific questions expanding on what I asked her a year and a half ago.

Read the rest at What Works.

Local Democratic official’s pro-choice remarks veer into the ditch of eugenics

1930s Eugenics Society Exhibit. Photo (cc) from Wellcome Library.

One of the themes I explored in my 2003 book about dwarfism, “Little People,” was that in vitro diagnoses of genetic conditions — barely a glimmer 20 years ago — might one day lead to health-care providers, insurance companies and others pressuring parents to end pregnancies in order to save money and resources. I called my chapter on that topic “The New Eugenics.”

Now comes Michael Hugo, chair of the Democratic Committee in Framingham, who has managed to combine his support for abortion rights with a twisted argument in favor of eugenics. According the Framingham Source, Hugo urged the city council to pass a resolution supporting reproductive rights and to take a stand against so-called crisis pregnancy centers, which have been accused of using deceptive tactics in order to persuade women not to go through with abortions. So far, so good. But then he said this:

Our fear is that if an unqualified sonographer misdiagnoses a heart defect, an organ defect, spina bifida, that becomes a very local issue because our school budget will have to absorb the cost of a child in special education, supplying lots and lots of special services to children, who were born with the defect. So it’s our hope that the Council tonight will pass this ordinance, and by doing so perhaps one of the businesses that might be looking at coming to Framingham, will look at Framingham and decide, well, we better just keep driving and look for a different town or a different city.

The Source quotes several councilors who objected to Hugo’s remarks, using words and phrases like “repulsed,” “profoundly repugnant” and “horrified.” The resolution in favor of abortion rights passed, but the council overwhelmingly made it clear that had nothing to do with Hugo’s offensive remarks. According to a follow-up story in The Boston Globe, Hugo later took to Facebook and apologized.

Hugo’s bizarre reasoning is exactly the sort of thing that anti-abortion-rights forces like to jump on when arguing that abortion ought to be illegal. Hugo’s remarks were not only hurtful, but they were potentially damaging to the cause he allegedly supports. What on earth was he thinking?

Why relevations that Fox stars knew Trump was lying may boost Dominion’s libel suit

Tucker Carlson. Photo (cc) 2018 by Gage Skidmore.

The reason that Sarah Palin lost her libel suit against The New York Times was that the Times’ extraordinarily sloppy editorial page editor, James Bennet, was extraordinarily sloppy. (In an unrelated matter, Bennet left the paper after it was revealed that he hadn’t even bothered to read an op-ed piece by Sen. Tom Cotton suggesting that violent protesters be gunned down in the streets.)

Under the Supreme Court’s 1964 Times v. Sullivan standard, a public figure such as Palin can’t win a libel suit unless she can show that false, defamatory information about her was published with “actual malice” — that is, it was published in the full knowledge that it was false, or that the publication strongly suspected it was false.

That’s what makes the latest revelations in Dominion Voting Systems’ libel suit against Fox News so mind-boggling. As The New York Times reports, internal communications show that Fox stars such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were fully aware that Donald Trump was lying about his claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. Yet they boosted those lies anyway, whose voting machines were a principal target of Trump and his allies. Dominion claims that Fox damaged its reputation and harmed its business.

As the Times story notes, Fox doubled down on the Trump camp’s claims after initially accepting his defeat — a move that resulted in many of its viewers shifting to even farther-right cable outlets like Newsmax and One America News. Fox wanted those viewers back, damn it. In a particularly revealing passage, we learn that Carlson wanted a Fox News journalist fired for tweeting the truth because it might harm Fox’s ratings:

On Nov. 12, in a text chain with Ms. Ingraham and Mr. Hannity, Mr. Carlson pointed to a tweet in which a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked a tweet from Mr. Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion.

“Please get her fired,” Mr. Carlson said. He added: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Ms. Heinrich had deleted her tweet by the next morning.

Ironically, right-wing figures such as Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have all suggested that it might be time to get rid of the actual malice standard, which erects a nearly impossible barrier for public officials and public figures who want to sue media companies.

Under ordinary circumstances, Fox would be a prime beneficiary of that standard. Trouble is, the new revelations show that even Times v. Sullivan may prove insufficient to protect Fox from Dominion’s lawsuit. As Bill Grueskin of the Columbia Journalism School put it on Twitter:

Herman on the MBTA

Public domain illustration

I asked ChatGPT to write a 300-word column about the MBTA in the voice of Herman Melville, and it gave me the single best description of the troubled public transportation system ever:

It is a system that demands both patience and cunning, for one must be quick of foot and mind to catch the right train, or else suffer the indignity of waiting upon a frigid platform for what seems an eternity.

Trolley ahoy! Hast seen the Green Line?

Update: I’ve removed the link to the full column, which I’m told doesn’t work for anyone but me. So here it is below:

Ah, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, what a grand and curious beast it is! A marvel of modernity, with its electric rails and clanging bells, carrying thousands of souls to and fro throughout the bustling metropolis of Boston. But also a beast with many heads, each bearing its own peculiarities and frustrations.

As I, Herman Melville, have had the occasion to travel upon this sprawling system of trains, buses, and subways, I cannot help but be struck by its contradictions. On the one hand, it is a great equalizer, bringing people of all classes and stations together in the common pursuit of transit. On the other, it is a labyrinthine maze, with its schedules and routes so convoluted that one might need a sextant and a compass to navigate them.

It is a system that demands both patience and cunning, for one must be quick of foot and mind to catch the right train, or else suffer the indignity of waiting upon a frigid platform for what seems an eternity. And yet, for all its idiosyncrasies and flaws, there is a certain romance to the MBTA, a sense of adventure that comes with exploring its many routes and stops.

I have traveled upon the Red Line, the Green Line, the Orange Line, and the Blue, each with its own distinct character and challenges. The Red Line, with its sleek trains and sweeping views of the city, is a joy to ride, though it can be overcrowded and prone to delays. The Green Line, with its jangling trolleys and labyrinthine routes, is a source of endless fascination, though it can be slow and unpredictable. The Orange Line, with its long stretches of underground tunnels and bustling stations, is a marvel of engineering, though it can be hot and stuffy in the summer months. And the Blue Line, with its sweeping views of the harbor and its ferries to the islands, is a delight to ride, though it can be crowded and prone to delays.

And yet, for all its charms and frustrations, the MBTA is an essential part of life in Boston, connecting people and places in a way that no other mode of transportation can. It is a beast that we must learn to love, even as we curse its many heads.