Along the Minuteman Bikeway in Arlington Center.
Author: Dan Kennedy
Pulitzer notes: A big win for the Globe; plus, ownership matters, and recognizing Darnella Frazier’s courage
Journalism is a field overrun with prizes. But the Pulitzers still matter — and the recognition shown The Boston Globe on Friday was impressive.
As you no doubt have heard, five current and former Globe journalists won in the Investigative Reporting category “for reporting that uncovered a systematic failure by state governments to share information about dangerous truck drivers that could have kept them off the road, prompting immediate reforms.” That’s the first time the Globe has been recognized for its investigative work since it won the Public Service Award in 2003 for its coverage of the pedophile-priest crisis in the Catholic Church.
The Globe was also a finalist in Editorial Writing for its commentary on a zoning battle in Newton, and its sister publication Stat was a finalist in Breaking News for its coverage of COVID-19. One of the three Stat finalists was Sharon Begley, who died of lung cancer earlier this year.
In a video accompanying the Globe’s own coverage, editor Brian McGrory addressed a topic of vital importance — the role of a regional news organization in the powerful to account. Here’s part of what he said.
I was asked last night at a panel I was on about the lack of relevance, and how major metro newspapers are becoming decreasingly relevant in a really tough media age. And I thought about it for a minute, and I came to realize — not for the first time — I’ve been here 30-something years, and the Globe has never felt more relevant to the community than it does now. And all you have to do is look at the work we do day in and day out. The work that’s unfolding right now on the police department, on City Hall, on state government. Name a topic, and it’s every department firing on all cylinders.
Indeed, the Globe is driving the conversation on all of those stories, even amid fine work by other news organizations, including my friends at GBH News, WBUR, CommonWealth Magazine, The Bay State Banner, The Dorchester Reporter, DigBoston, local TV stations and others.
Ownership matters
Unfortunately, the Globe is unusual by the standards of 2021. Take a look at the list of Pulitzer winners. Overwhelmingly, the prizes went to news organizations with solid ownership. The Globe, of course, has been owned for the past seven-plus years by John Henry and Linda Pizzuti Henry, who have steered it to profitability and stability while maintaining the paper’s reporting capacity.
The Star Tribune of Minneapolis is owned by another wealthy business person, Glen Taylor, who has revived a paper that was on the ropes not too many years ago. The Tampa Bay Times is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute — a situation that hasn’t been entirely happy, but that has resulted in more robust coverage than if it were owned by a for-profit chain.
The Marshall Project is a well-funded nonprofit. The New York Times, though a publicly traded company, has been controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896. The Atlantic is largely owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, who inherited the late Steve Jobs’ fortune. BuzzFeed News is run as much for love as for profit.
I could go on, but you get the picture. All across the country, newsrooms at regional and local newspapers are being ravaged by corporate chains and hedge funds. The Pulitzers demonstrate, as I have said over and over, that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Speaking truth to power
There had been some buzz in recent weeks that a Pulitzer ought to be awarded to Darnella Frazier, the then-17-year-old who turned her smartphone camera toward George Floyd as he was being murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin.
The Pulitzer judges were thinking the same thing. Frazier was awarded a Special Citation “for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.”
Rarely has a Pulitzer been more deserved. But it will be for naught if that’s the end of it. Frazier’s work should inspire people everywhere to stand up for what is right. Without her bravery, Chauvin might still be on the beat, terrorizing the citizens of Minneapolis.
Mere months after his suspension, Jeffrey Toobin is back at CNN
Jeffrey Toobin, who was suspended seven months ago after he was caught masturbating on a Zoom call, is back at CNN. Lukas I. Alpert reports for The Wall Street Journal that the legal analyst appeared on TV Thursday afternoon with anchor Alisyn Camerota. He called his behavior “deeply moronic and indefensible” but repeated his longstanding claim that it was accidental. “I didn’t think I was on the call,” he said. “I didn’t think other people could see me.”
Well, now. What are we to make of this? In addition to his CNN perch, Toobin was a high-profile writer for The New Yorker, and it was during a meeting with colleagues at the magazine that he decided to fondle himself. The New Yorker fired him. There have been no public signs that there’s been any thought given to reversing that decision.
Although Toobin’s quotes from his CNN appearance Thursday come across as contrite and sincere, he did say he thought his firing by The New Yorker was “excessive punishment,” which suggests that he still doesn’t get it.
I believe in second chances. The problem with Toobin is that his suspension — for truly appalling behavior — didn’t even last a year, and he’s picking up right where he left off rather than being asked to regain the viewers’ trust in a less visible spot. I will say that his commentary is first-rate.
Writing in today’s CNN “Reliable Sources” newsletter, Brian Stelter says, “There were a wide range of reactions to the news on Thursday afternoon. But by nightfall, I pretty much sensed that the social media conversation had moved on to other subjects.” That may be true, but I don’t think Stelter should take it as an indication that people are OK with it. Many, I’m sure, are disgusted.
Count me with Poynter media analyst Tom Jones, who writes, “Regardless of Toobin’s intentions and past history, this feels like something so egregious that it simply can’t be dismissed. Frankly, I’m stunned CNN brought him back.”
An argument for why the lab-leak theory of COVID’s origin remains unlikely
Last week I wrote an analysis for GBH News on why the media dismissed the Wuhan lab-leak theory as the origin of COVID-19. I argued that the lab explanation got caught up in Donald Trump’s anti-Chinese racism and multifarious lies about the pandemic, compounded by some botched reporting of comments by Sen. Tom Cotton.
So I want to share with you two recent columns by Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, someone whom I really respect. The Times has a tight paywall, but you should be able to access both of them by switching browsers after you read the first.
About a week ago Hiltzik examined the theory itself and concluded that, though it couldn’t be ruled out entirely, the scientific consensus remains that COVID almost certainly jumped from animals to humans outside the lab. He writes:
No one disputes that a lab leak is possible. Viruses have escaped from laboratories in the past, on occasion leading to human infection. But “zoonotic” transfers — that is, from animals to humans — are a much more common and well-documented pathway.
That’s why the virological community believes that it’s vastly more likely that COVID-19 spilled over from an animal host to humans.
Then, earlier this week, he reported that Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore was backing away from a quote he gave to former New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade in which he referred to genetic evidence that had been found as “the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Wade’s May 5 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists helped move the lab-leak theory to the center of the conversation. Hiltzik writes:
Baltimore told me by email that he made the statement to Wade, also by email, and granted him permission to use it in print. But he added that he “should have softened the phrase ‘smoking gun’ because I don’t believe that it proves the origin of the furin cleavage site but it does sound that way. I believe that the question of whether the sequence was put in naturally or by molecular manipulation is very hard to determine but I wouldn’t rule out either origin.” [Pardon me for not explaining “furin cleavage site,” but it’s related to the genetics of COVID.]
I think we have to regard both the lab-leak theory and animal-to-human transmission as possibilities, and we may never know the truth. But Hiltzik makes a powerful case that the animal-to-human explanation remains considerably more likely, and that it would be a mistake to regard the two explanations as equally plausible.
How a group of Denver area newspapers were saved from corporate ownership
Just before Thanksgiving last year, Melissa Milios Davis was contacted by Jerry Healey, the co-owner — along with his wife, Ann Healey — of Colorado Community Media, which publishes 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs.
The Healeys were approaching retirement and looking to sell, and they were hoping to avoid turning over their life’s work to a corporate chain owner or a hedge fund. Milios Davis, vice president for strategic communications and informed communities at the Gates Family Foundation, serves on the executive committee of the Colorado Media Project, which has been seeking ways forward for local news since 2018.
That encounter, Milios Davis said at a recent webinar (you can watch it here; background information here), led to the sale last month of the Healeys’ newspapers to a new entity whose majority owner will be The Colorado Sun, a startup digital news operation that’s run as a public benefit corporation. That means the 24 papers, like the Sun, will not be organized to enrich its owners; any profits they earn will be rolled back into news coverage and other operations.
“These are still profit-making enterprises. It’s a business,” said Milios Davis, adding it would have been a “huge loss” if the papers had fallen into the wrong hands.
Also speaking at the webinar, organized by the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, were Lillian Ruiz, co-founder and managing director of the National Trust for Local News, and Larry Ryckman, editor and co-founder of the Sun. The moderator was Nathan Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at the university.
According a recent article about the deal by Corey Hutchins of Colorado College, the papers will be owned by the newly formed Colorado News Conservancy, which in turn is co-owned by the National Trust for Local News and the Sun. Hutchins reported that the 40 employees who worked for the Healeys, about half of them journalists, would keep their jobs.
The conservancy is currently seeking a publisher, Ruiz said at the webinar, and has invested a considerable amount of attention in the process. “We didn’t want to create just a replication of who have we had some handshakes with over a highball,” she said.
The Sun itself, which was founded after the meltdown of The Denver Post under the ownership of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, is continuing to grow, said Ryckman — from a staff of about 10 when I wrote about the Sun for the Nieman Journalism Lab last fall to 15 today, with more on the way. He described the chance to save the community newspapers as something that was too important to pass up.
“At least on the Sun side, this came together pretty quickly,” he said. “This absolutely was a cause that was near and dear to our hearts…. We know who’s first in line when it comes to buying newspapers these days, and no one wants to see that happen.”
What helped jump-start the deal, said Milios Davis, was a study that the Colorado Media Project conducted several years ago in partnership with the Colorado Press Association. Among the findings: the number of journalists covering local news had been cut in half over the previous decade, in line with what was taking place nationally; and that of 151 newspapers they could identify, 93 were still locally owned.
“We saw on the horizon that a lot of these were … older owners” who lacked a succession plan, she said, explaining that there were 44 in that category. “We were looking at this as a tidal wave that would slowly crash on the shores,” which led to conversations about how to help them transition to new local ownership.
And then the Healeys came along.
One of the most important takeaways from what is happening in Colorado is that local news can still be run on a sustainable basis, and that corporate control and the gutting of newsrooms are not inevitable. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I would love to see the Colorado story replicated across the country. Ruiz said the exact model being used in Colorado might be unique to that area. But she added that her organization is looking at what might work in other parts of the country — especially in communities of color.
So how do we wrest control of local news away from chain owners? Report for America co-founder Steven Waldman, who’s been everywhere lately (it also turns out that he’s a co-founder of Ruiz’s organization), wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times calling for tax breaks for newspaper owners who sell to nonprofits or public benefit corporations.
That would provide an incentive for the likes of Alden and Gannett to take their money and go home. I would add another incentive: tax penalties to be imposed on for-profit owners of newspaper chains of a certain size that are not owned locally.
Communities deserve a chance to take charge of their news and information. Three years after Alden all but destroyed The Denver Post, we’re starting to see a renaissance fueled by a new media venture and an old one that’s been given new life.
Nikole Hannah-Jones and the challenges facing Black women in academia
More fallout from the fiasco at the University of North Carolina over New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure case as The Washington Post reports on the challenges facing Black women in academia. Nick Anderson and Joe Heim write:
In Chapel Hill and beyond, many academics are backing Hannah-Jones in what has become a remarkable tenure showdown pending before the university’s board of trustees. The case has raised questions about the influence of politicians and donors on the faculty hiring process.
For Black female professors, long underrepresented among America’s tenured faculty, the stakes are deeply personal.
It’s time for the feds to stop hassling and spying on the press
Previously published at GBH News.
It was a move reminiscent of the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which allowed federal investigators to spy on the reading habits of library and bookstore customers in the name of fighting terrorism.
Last week we learned that the FBI had subpoenaed USA Today in pursuit of Internet Protocol addresses and other data. The goal was to help the agency figure out the identities of people who had read a story last February about a Florida shootout in which two FBI agents were killed and three were wounded. The subpoena specifically cited a 35-minute time frame on the day that the shootings took place.
Fortunately, USA Today’s corporate owner, Gannett Co., the nation’s largest newspaper chain, took a principled stand and fought the subpoena. On Saturday, the FBI backed down. There’s already little enough privacy on the internet without having to worry about the possibility that government officials will be looking over our shoulders as we’re reading.
We are in the midst of a systematic assault on the media’s role in holding the powerful to account. And it’s long past time for our elected officials to do something about it by passing legislation rather than relying on assurances by President Joe Biden that he’s ending these abuses. After all, Biden’s assurances can be undone by the next president with the flick of a pen. We need something stronger and more stable.
Barely a month ago I wrote about the revelation that the Trump Justice Department had spied on three Washington Post reporters’ phone records. I observed that Trump’s actions were in line with a long string of presidential attacks on the media, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush to Barack Obama.
Since then, the revelations have come at a dizzying pace. In addition to the USA Today subpoena, which strikes me as especially egregious since it targets readers rather than journalists, there have been at least two other noteworthy instances of abuse:
• In late May, CNN reported that the Trump administration had secretly obtained 2017 email and phone records of Barbara Starr, a longtime reporter for the network. The period in question was June 1 to July 31, 2017.
• In a particularly noxious abuse of the government’s power, The New York Times reported several days ago that the Justice Department had subpoenaed Google for the email records of four Times reporters — and that, though the inquiry had begun under former President Donald Trump, it continued under Biden. As recently as March, the Justice Department obtained a gag order prohibiting Google from informing the Times. That order was later amended so that a few top officials at the Times could be told, but not executive editor Dean Baquet.
“It is urgent that we hear from the attorney general about all three Trump-era records seizures, including the purported reasoning behind them and the rationale for not notifying the journalists in advance,” said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, in a statement released last week. “The goal must be to ensure that such abuses never occur again.”
Compounding the problem is the widely misunderstood belief that government officials are violating the First Amendment. For instance, on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” this past Sunday, Adam Goldman, one of the four Times reporters targeted in the Google probe, said, “The U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. has a history of trampling on the First Amendment, so that’s why I wasn’t surprised. They treat the media, they treat newspapers like drug gangs.”
In fact, over the past century the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment in such a way that the protections for news gathering are exceedingly weak.
Protections for publication and broadcast are strong, which is why the press has been able to report on secret stolen documents — from the Pentagon Papers to the Snowden files — with few concerns about facing prosecution.
But the court has ruled that journalists have no constitutional right to protect their anonymous sources. And with regard to the current string of spying revelations, the court has held repeatedly that journalists enjoy no special rights that would not be available to ordinary citizens.
President Biden recently pledged to end the practice of seizing reporters’ records, saying the practice is “simply, simply wrong.” Some observers questioned whether he actually meant it, since he’d be breaking not just with Trump’s abuses but with longstanding practice. That, in turn, led press secretary Jen Psaki to assure journalists that Biden planned to follow through on his pledge.
But what a president does, a future president can undo. To guarantee that the press will be able to perform its watchdog role, we need a federal shield law so that reporters won’t be compelled to reveal their confidential sources. Such protections — either by law or by court decision — are already in place in 49 states, with the sole exception being Wyoming.
We also need legislation that prevents the government from secretly spying on journalists’ online activities — and on readers’ activities as well.
No doubt opponents will insist that the government needs to be able to spy in order to keep us safe. But the Post, CNN and Times cases appear to involve the Trump administration’s politically motivated attempts to learn more about the origins of the Russia probe, including the activities of former FBI Director James Comey. The USA Today case did involve a much more serious matter. But after dropping its demands, the FBI told the BBC that “intervening investigative developments” made the information unnecessary.
Which is nearly always the case. Rarely does the government’s desire to interfere with the press’ role involve a situation that’s literally a matter of life or death. And the law can accommodate those rare instances.
In general, though, the government should go about its business without compromising the independence or freedom of the press.
Local news as infrastructure
Report for America co-founder Steve Waldman is suggesting that a plan he’s been touting to help the beleaguered local news business be included in whatever infrastructure bill comes out of Congress.
Writing recently for Poynter Online, Waldman said that each American should be given a $250 tax credit either to buy a subscription to a local news source or to make a donation to a nonprofit news organization. He notes that Sen. Maria Cantwell, the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, has come out in favor of $2.4 billion to bolster local news. Waldman writes:
Local news is, in fact, the civic infrastructure of democracy.
But let’s get less metaphorical. If the health of democracy wasn’t reason enough, there’s another, practical reason why help for local news should be part of the infrastructure bill. If the government is going to spend a trillion or so dollars on public works projects, we need local watchdog reporters to make sure the money is spent well.
Waldman has been promoting the $250 tax credit for some time, and he says it has some bipartisan support. But the idea of rolling it into the infrastructure bill seems worth exploring as a way of actually making it a reality.
Waldman discussed his Poynter piece with Brian Stelter last weekend on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” He’s also involved in an organization called the Rebuild Local News Coalition, comprising more than 4,000 local newsrooms (up from about 3,000 at the time of the Poynter piece) and journalism advocacy organizations.
The Washington Post blows the whistle on a dubious investigative website
The Washington Post published a story of paramount importance last Friday. According to reporter Elahe Izadi, a website called the Checks and Balances Project is offering the sort of deep investigative reporting that most local news outlets no longer have the resources to carry out.
But there is a huge catch. There have been some prominent instances of pay-to-play, with organzations making donations that are followed by stories that will either make them look good or their enemies or competitors look bad. Izadi writes:
When it investigated the hotel industry, it was after it had received a grant from Airbnb. A high-profile investigation into Arizona utility regulators came after Checks and Balances received money from a solar power company, the company disclosed in 2015.
Now Checks and Balances is investigating a massive hospital system in Virginia named Sentara, publishing regular stories and asking patients and employees to send tips that might reveal how the nonprofit hospital “piled up $6 billion in liquid assets,” among other issues.
These stories started appearing the same month that a medical school in a complex dispute with Sentara hired a public relations firm that happens to share a founder and financial ties with Checks and Balances.
Communities are vulnerable to a site like Checks and Balances, of course, because of the demise of local news over the past generation. If your local newspaper shut down or has been so decimated that it can’t offer more than cursory news coverage, then you’re going to be vulnerable to arrangements like this.
The Checks and Balances website touts itself as an “Investigative Watchdog Blog
Holding Government Officials, Lobbyists and Corporate Management Accountable to the Public.” Izadi is careful to point out that the project has done good work over the years, some of which has been picked up by larger media outlets. Its editor was formerly employed by USA Today. Scott Peterson, the executive director, told the Post that funders do not influence the site’s journalism — but Izadi writes that those sources are not always disclosed to readers, either. Moreover, most of its funding comes from an organization called Renew American Prosperity, which does not reveal its donors. From the organization’s website:
We encourage you to be public about your identity as a donor. We’re proud to have the support of such notable funders as philanthropist Lucy Rockefeller Waletzky, legendary entrepreneur Brad Mattson of Siva Power, Silicon Valley attorney Mike Danaher, and communicator extraordinaire Matthew Lewis.
Should you want to keep your support for Renew American Prosperity private, as do others, we also welcome your donations. Private donor support will remain strictly private, out of respect for 501(c)4 tax law that allows donors who wish to be private to remain so. We will never sell or make available to other organizations our supporter lists.
Peterson pushed back on the notion that Checks and Balances isn’t transparent, arguing that what he’s doing is no different from what mainstream outlets do when they accept advertising or, in the case of nonprofits, grants and donations. And of course these things have to be seen on a continuum. When news executives decline to report an important story because they don’t want to offend an advertiser, that’s a scandal — if the public ever learns about it. Ethical nonprofit news outlets are scrupulous about disclosing the sources of their funding, and in making it clear to funders that they will have no influence over coverage. Checks and Balances, at least as described by the Post, appears to go beyond that.
The Post’s story comes at a time when we’re also dealing with the scourge of “pink slime” journalism — community websites set up in areas that are unserved or underserved by local news outlets and that are actually controlled by partisan political interests. As I wrote last fall, most of these sites are Republican, but some are Democratic as well. What they’re not is independent, which is a key part of ethical journalism.
Coming up with funding for investigative projects, especially at the local and regional level, is incredibly difficult, and the Checks and Balances folks may have believed they could cut ethical corners without it harming the integrity of their work. But it looks like dangerous business to me, and I hope it’s not the start of a trend.
The ACLU at a crossroads
Social justice or free speech? The New York Times offers an in-depth look at the struggles inside the ACLU. My friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate is among those interviewed.