We parked the car behind the Northshore Unitarian Universalist Church in Danvers earlier today and took a stroll along the Rail Trail and the Swamp Walk. Even after the recent rain, I have never seen it as dry.
Dry season
Author: Dan Kennedy
More evidence that Woodrow Wilson was among our very worst presidents
I find it astonishing that Woodrow Wilson’s reputation as a great president has been revisited only in recent years. For most of the century since his presidency, he’s been regarded as some of a visionary reformer and a liberal internationalist, his name adorning institutions and publications.
In fact, he was a vicious racist, a warmonger and an authoritarian who crushed civil liberties. We are still living with the consequences of World War I, and though he didn’t start it, he supercharged it by getting the United States involved (after pledging he wouldn’t) and grossly mishandling the peace talks.
Now there’s a new book about the Wilson years by Adam Hochschild called “American Midnight.” According to Thomas Meaney’s review in The New York Times, Hochschild deals mainly with Wilson’s campaign of repression. Meaney writes:
By some measures — and certainly in many quarters of the American left — the years 1917-21 have a special place in infamy. The United States during that time saw a swell of patriotic frenzy and political repression rarely rivaled in its history. President Woodrow Wilson’s terror campaign against American radicals, dissidents, immigrants and workers makes the McCarthyism of the 1950s look almost subtle by comparison.
I recommend “The Great War,” part of the PBS “American Experience” series. The three-part program debuted in 2018. You should be able to watch it if you’re a PBS Passport member, which gives you access to all kinds of great programming. We watched it a couple of years ago through the PBS app on Apple TV.
Even without trying to, the documentary makes the case that Wilson was, in fact, among our very worst presidents.
How Anne Galloway built VTDigger into Vermont’s largest news organization
On this week’s “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Anne Galloway, the founder and editor-at-large of VTDigger in Vermont. Like many journalists, she was laid off in 2009 from her job as Sunday editor of the Rutland Herald and The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.
VTDigger, which is a nonprofit, started with a $16,000 budget with no employees. As Galloway put it in a recent letter to readers, it has grown beyond her wildest dreams. It’s the largest newsroom in Vermont, with dozens of employees and more than 550,000 monthly readers. Galloway not only built the organization, she also wrote notable investigative pieces. Among other issues, she broke open a fraudulent scheme that involve developers at Jay Peak. I visited Galloway and wrote about the newsroom in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”
Earlier this year Galloway stepped aside from her management position in order to concentrate on investigative reporting.
Ellen has a quick take on a study about the state of U.S. democracy from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The study says it’s critical to fight disinformation, and advocates rebuilding trusted local news sources.
I report on a promising merger between public radio station KERA and the Denton Record-Chronicle, a daily newspaper that covers the suburbs north of Dallas. This move was facilitated by the National Trust for Local News, which raises money and connects legacy newspaper owners with possible buyers in order to keep them from either shutting down or falling into the hands of corporate chain owners. Our podcast with Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of the trust, can be found here.
You can listen to our latest podcast here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
A quarter-century after its passage, Section 230 is up for grabs
A quarter-century after Congress decided to hold publishers harmless for third-party content posted on their websites, we are headed for a legal and constitutional showdown over Section 230, part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
Before the law was passed, publishers worried that if they removed some harmful content they might be held liable for failing to take down other content, which gave them a legal incentive to leave libel, obscenity, hate speech and misinformation in place. Section 230 solved that by including a so-called Good Samaritan provision that allowed publishers to pick and choose without incurring liability.
Back in those early days, of course, we weren’t dealing with behemoths like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which use algorithms to boost content that keeps their users engaged — which, in turn, usually means speech that makes them angry or upset. In the mid-1990s, the publishers that were seeking protection were generally newspapers that had opened up online comments and nascent online services like Prodigy and AOL. Publishers are fully liable for any content over which they have direct control, including news stories, advertisements and letters to the editor. Congress understood that the flood of content being posted online raised different issues.
But after Twitter booted Donald Trump off its service and Facebook suspended him for inciting violence during and after the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, Trump-aligned Republicans began agitating against what they called censorship by the tech giants. The idea that private companies are even legally capable of engaging in censorship is something that can be disputed, but it’s gained some traction in legal circles, as we shall see.
Meanwhile, Democrats and liberals argued that the platforms weren’t acting aggressively enough to remove dangerous and harmful posts, especially those promoting disinformation around COVID-19 such as anti-masking and anti-vaccine propaganda.
A lot of this comes down to whether the platforms are common carriers or true publishers. Common carriers are legally forbidden from discriminating against any type of user or traffic. Providers of telephone service would be one example. Another example would be the broader internet of which the platforms are a part. Alex Jones was thoroughly deplatformed in recent years — you can’t find him on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else. But you can find his infamous InfoWars site on the web, and, according to SimilarWeb, it received some 9.4 million visits in July of this year. You can’t kick Jones off the internet; at most, you can pressure his hosting service to drop him. But even if they did, he’d just move on to the next service, which, by the way, needn’t be based in the U.S.
True publishers, by the way, enjoy near-absolute leeway over what they choose to publish or not publish. A landmark case in this regard is Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974), in which the Supreme Court ruled that a Florida law requiring newspapers to publish responses from political figures who’d been criticized was unconstitutional. Should platforms be treated as publishers? Certainly it seems ludicrous to hold them fully responsible for the millions of pieces of content that their users post on their sites. Yet the use of algorithms to promote some content in order to sell more advertising and earn more profits involves editorial discretion, even if those editors are robots. In that regard, they start to look more like publishers.
Maybe it’s time to move past the old categories altogether. In a recent appearance on WBUR Radio’s “On Point,” University of Minnesota law professor Alan Rozenshtein said that platforms have some qualities of common carriers and some qualities of publishers. What we really need, he said, is a new paradigm that recognizes we’re dealing with something unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Which brings me to two legal cases, both of which are hurtling toward a collision.
Recently the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld a Texas law that, among other things, forbids platforms from removing any third-party speech that’s based on viewpoint. Many legal observers had believed the law would be decisively overturned since it interferes with the ability of private companies to conduct their business as they see fit, and to exercise their own First Amendment right to delete content they regard as harmful. But the court didn’t see it that way, with Judge Andrew Oldham writing: “Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.” This is a view of the platforms as common carriers.
As Rozenshtein said, the case is almost certainly headed for the Supreme Court because it clashes with an opinion by the 11th Circuit, which overturned a similar law in Florida, and because it’s unimaginable that any part of the internet can be regulated on a state-by-state basis. Such regulations need to be hashed out by Congress and apply to all 50 states, Rozenshtein said.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case coming from the opposite direction. The case, brought by the family of a 23-year-old student who was killed in an ISIS attack in Paris in 2014, argues that YouTube, owned by Google, should be held liable for using algorithms to boost terrorist videos, thus helping to incite the attack. “Videos that users viewed on YouTube were the central manner in which ISIS enlisted support and recruits from areas outside the portions of Syria and Iraq which it controlled,” according to the lawsuit.
Thus we may be heading toward a constitutionally untenable situation whereby tech companies could be held liable for content that the Texas law has forbidden them to remove.
The ISIS case is especially interesting because it’s the use of algorithms to boost speech that are at issue — again, something that was, at most, in its embryonic stages at the time that Section 230 was enacted. Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, put it this way in an interview with The Washington Post: “The question presented creates a false dichotomy that recommending content is not part of the traditional editorial functions. The question presented goes to the very heart of Section 230 and that makes it a very risky case for the internet.”
I’ve suggested that one way to reform Section 230 might be to remove protections for any algorithmically boosted speech, which might actually be where we’re heading.
All of this comes at a time when the Supreme Court’s turn to the right has called its legitimacy into question. Two of the justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have even suggested that the libel protections afforded the press under the landmark Times v. Sulllivan decision be overturned or scaled back. After 26 years, it may well be time for some changes to Section 230. But can we trust the Supremes to get it right? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Catching up with Isabel Wilkerson’s masterpiece about the Great Migration
At some point I realized I was never going to sit down and read “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson’s monumental history of the Great Migration. I decided to do the next best thing and listen to the audiobook, and I’m glad I did. Told principally, though not exclusively, through the lives of three African Americans who left the South in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, “The Warmth of Other Suns” (2010) is really nothing less than the history of the United States in the 20th century.
During the Great Migration, from around 1916 until the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, about 6 million Black people moved from the South to Northern cities in order to escape the racism of Jim Crow era. Of course, they encountered plenty of racism in the North as well, but it was less deadly and less restrictive than what they had experienced back home. For instance, one of Wilkerson’s protagonists, Ida Mae Gladney, left Mississippi after a family member was beaten to within an inch of his life on a false accusation that he had stolen turkeys. The next day, the turkeys wandered back from wherever they had been — and Ida Mae and her husband, George, soon left for Milwaukee before settling in Chicago.
Also portrayed are George Starling, who escaped to New York just ahead of a lynch mob that aimed to kill him because of his work in organizing Florida’s orange pickers, and Robert Foster, a gifted surgeon who left Louisiana for California rather than settle for a career as a country doctor caring exclusively for poor Black patients.
Wilkerson writes with considerable depth and empathy. The narrator, Robin Miles, never falters during the nearly 23-hour production, sharing Wilkerson’s words with warmth. Of course, I wish had a copy of the book marked up with highlights and notes — that’s the disadvantage of listening rather than reading. But I’m glad I was finally able to experience Wilkerson’s magnificent achievement.
Jack Thomas, 1939-2022
Jack Thomas’ byline was in The Boston Globe for as long as I’d been a reader — an era that stretches back to the 1970s. His death, at 83, did not come as a surprise, not after he wrote an eloquent and moving piece in July 2021 upon learning he had a terminal illness. Still, it marked a sad milestone in Boston’s media history.
In his obituary of Thomas, Bryan Marquard leads not with Thomas’ meditation on death but with a much older story. Thomas, Marquard tells us, “went undercover for a week in 1972 to live in a cell at Boston’s Deer Island House of Correction, where he wrote about the hellish squalor in which convicts were consigned to live.” Marquard also quotes this great line from Thomas’ story: “The inmates had underestimated the situation.”
Thomas had the sort of decades-long Globe career that was common at one time but that has become increasingly rare. By his own telling, he covered the police, the Statehouse and Washington and held jobs as an editorial writer, a television critic a feature writer and as the Globe’s ombudsman — that is, the in-house watchdog and critic, a position that was once common but that few news organizations have anymore.
If you’d like to read more about Thomas but don’t have a Globe subscription, the obituary at Legacy.com is well worth your time. I should also note that Thomas attended Northeastern before leaving to join the Marine Corps Reserve, and that he was a founder of the Tom Winship Scholarship Fund at Northeastern. His voice will be missed.
Boston Globe columnist Jeneé Osterheldt moves up to a masthead position
Boston Globe columnist Jeneé Osterheldt has been promoted to a masthead position, according to a memo to the staff that I obtained a little while ago. Osterheldt is now the Globe’s senior assistant managing editor for culture, talent and development.
Osterheldt has worked as the Globe’s culture columnist since 2019, writing frequently about issues of racial justice. The recipient of several prestigious awards, she is the force behind “A Beautiful Resistance,” a series of multimedia stories on “Black joy, Black lives.”
“She will continue to write and produce in her new role, though perhaps not quite so much,” according to the memo, from editor Brian McGrory and managing editors Jen Peter and Jason Tuohey.
“While she writes passionately about culture, inequality, race, and the many places where they intersect,” they added, “she has also forged an utterly vital role within the newsroom as an advisor to senior editors, a mentor to many staff members, and a key representative in the industry and community.”
Contrarian Boston reports that The Sun is no longer shining in Lowell
So where are the missing MediaNews Group dailies? Last week, I noted that Contrarian Boston couldn’t find any evidence that the Boston Herald had returned to its Braintree offices, two years after Northeastern journalism student Deanna Schwartz and I found that the Herald had decamped for The Sun in Lowell.
Now, in a follow-up, Mark Pickering reports for Contrarian Boston that The Sun is nowhere to be found, either. He writes:
For the city of Lowell, the disappearance of The Sun marks the end of an entire era. For decades, the publishers of such papers were local kings that often built impressive headquarters. And the papers were the prime way for residents to keep up with local news.
Pickering asks: Have the Herald and The Sun joined a number of other newspapers part of MediaNews Group, owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, that no longer have any newsrooms at all? The answer to that question is not entirely clear.
One story I’ve heard is that the Alden papers in Massachusetts have a warehouse in Westford. (Update: Or perhaps in Devens.) Papers are delivered from whatever printing plant they’re using these days before being trucked out. I’ve heard there are a few offices there that Alden journalists can use. But it appears that Alden journalists, for the most part, work at their homes except when they’re out reporting.
And let’s not forget that another MediaNews Group paper, the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg, was deprived of its offices several years before the pandemic. That means that all three of the chain’s Massachusetts papers are operating without a proper newsroom.
Clarification: I’ve now noted in the caption that The Sun left its iconic downtown headquarters years ago.
Keep out, sort of
Strategic ambiguity at its finest: Keep out, but if you’re here anyway, don’t let your dog go swimming. Seen on a 5.9-mile walk on the roads around the Middlesex Fells this afternoon, including the semi-forbidden Middle and South Reservoirs.
City Hall closes out 200-plus public records requests, citing its own lassitude
The state’s weak public-records law, combined with the city of Boston’s lax response to requests for documents, has led to 221 such requests being terminated. Sean Philip Cotter reports in the Boston Herald:
Boston’s records office cited its own inaction in closing 221 public records requests in total, the city now says, going back to March 29, 2021, jumping the total number up significantly from what the office originally offered.
The city is taking the position that because it never responded to previous requests, those seeking them must no longer want them. Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told me by email:
Up until Cotter’s reporting, Boston had a policy of automatically closing out public records requests based on its own inaction. Essentially the city was saying in at least 200 cases, because we’ve taken too long to get back to you, we’re going to assume you no longer want the records you requested. That’s one way to shut up people looking for information.
Needless to say, this is not a good look for Mayor Michelle Wu or Shawn Williams, the city’s records access officer. Nor is it especially new. Back in June, Colman Herman reported for CommonWealth Magazine that 98 public records appeals had been filed with the secretary of state’s office “because the filers were dissatisfied with the city’s responses or lack of a response.” The secretary of state sided with the filers on 90 occasions and with the city just eight times. But don’t expect much to happen — the state’s public records law is among the weakest in the country.
According to Cotter’s article in the Herald, Wu has promised to do better, with her press office saying that the city ended its practice of automatically closing out public records requests earlier this summer. “The city has stressed that transparency, which Wu campaigned on, is a top priority,” Cotter wrote.
Wu will mark her first year as mayor next month. It’s time for her to start making good on her promise.