Russian President Vladimir Putin. 2022 photo via President of Russia.
The New York Times is doing some crucially important work on how the far-right media in this country are being influenced by Russian money.
The latest is a report detailing how $10 million from Russia (free link) was funneled to a Canadian couple who set up a company in Tennessee called Tenet Media that paid right-wing influencers to produce pro-Kremlin messages for their site. The story is based on Justice Department documents. The couple, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, have not been charged, and the influencers themselves may be dupes. So far, the only charges that have been filed are against two RT employees accused of violating money-laundering laws.
But the Times’ reporting shows that vast chunks of the right-wing media ecosystem is awash in Russian cash, “trafficking in pointed political commentary as well as conspiracy theories about election fraud, Covid-19, immigrants and Russia’s war with Ukraine.” The influence extended all the way to Tayler Hansen, who filmed the shooting of Ashli Babbitt at the Capitol during the attemped coup of Jan. 6, 2021.
I have to confess that I had not heard of these influences. They are not name brands like, say, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens. But in many respects their messages are similar, and they help spread pro-Russian propaganda across a range of social media platforms.
You can fault Attorney General Merrick Garland for moving too slowly on a number of fronts. But at least this time, unlike 2016, we’re learning about Russian attempts to influence the presidential campaign before Election Day.
The Internet Archive has lost again in its bid to continue offering access to e-books for free and without any compensation to publishers or authors.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York, ruled on Wednesday that U.S. District Court Judge John Koeltl had acted correctly in finding for four major book publishers who sued the Archive for copyright infringement. Emma Roth has the story at The Verge.
The nonprofit Archive is one of the most useful corners of the internet, offering free access to web pages that otherwise would have disappeared and working with copyright holders to keep defunct publications available for viewing — such as, for example, The Boston Phoenix, one of my former haunts.
But the Archive chose a very odd hill to defend by insisting that it had a right to offer e-books without paying for a license from publishers, as libraries typically must do. The Archive claimed that it was in compliance with copyright law because it limited e-book borrowing to correspond with physical books that it had in its collection or that was owned by one of its partner libraries. That’s not the way it works, though.
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As the appeals court’s decision observes, public and academic libraries must purchase licenses for e-books even though they also hold physical copies of those books. “Critically, IA [the Internet Archive] and its users lack permission from copyright holders to engage in any of these activities,” according to the decision. “They do not license these materials from publishers, nor do they otherwise compensate authors in connection with the digitization and distribution of their works.”
The Archive claimed a fair-use exception to copyright law, a four-part test that the courts apply to determine whether copyrighted material can be used without permission. The court ruled in favor of the publishers on all four tests, mainly because the Archive had copied books in their entirety rather than just excerpts and because that practice could harm the potential market for those books. The decision concludes with some fairly harsh language:
IA asks this Court to bless the large scale copying and distribution of copyrighted books without permission from or payment to the Publishers or authors. Such a holding would allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works. This may be what IA and its amici prefer, but it is not an approach that the Copyright Act permits.
The Archive has responded by removing some 500,000 books from its online library, explaining:
We understand that this is a devastating loss for our patrons, and we are fighting back through the courts to restore access to these books. Fortunately, other countries and international library organizations are moving to support controlled digital lending. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we fight this long battle.
I’m not sure what legal steps are available to the Archive other than appealing to the Supreme Court. Given that both Judge Koeltl and the Court of Appeals simply applied existing copyright law in a straightforward manner, it’s hard to imagine that the Supremes would be interested unless they possess some previously undetected enthusiasm for upending the law in its entirety.
My views should not be taken as a value judgment. The folks at the Internet Archive have always been among the good guys of digital culture — one of the last pure outposts from the early days of internet idealism, along with Wikipedia and very few others. The giant book publishers simply want to maximize their profits, and authors are not going to benefit from Wednesday’s decision outside a few bestselling behemoths at the top. Journalist Dan Gillmor put it this way on Mastodon:
Others have said this, but the Internet Archive’s appeals-court loss to Big Publishing is a disaster for everyone but the cartel of companies and a tiny number of A list authors.
The publishers will tolerate libraries only as long as they can control everything about how books can be loaned. If public libraries were being invented today, the cartel would make their core functions illegal.
The problem, though, is that it is the job of judges to apply the law, not offer a critique of capitalism.
There’s nothing in The Verge story or the Court of Appeals’ decision specifying what penalties the Archive will have to pay. I hope there are none. And though it’s probably too much to hope that the publishers will rethink their approach to e-books in their moment of triumph, they really ought to make some changes.
Digital distribution should have led to an increase in the availability of knowledge. Instead, it’s led to a regime of top-down control that is more restrictive than what prevails in the world of physical books. Try lending an e-book to a friend. That may be one of the reasons that e-books are declining in popularity while physical books are on the upswing.
All of this is playing out at a time when artificial intelligence companies are being sued for gobbling up vast quantities of text without permission. As Kate Knibbs writes for Wired:
The new verdict arrives at an especially tumultuous time for copyright law. In the past two years there have been dozens of copyright infringement cases filed against major AI companies that offer generative AI tools, and many of the defendants in these cases argue that the fair use doctrine shields their usage of copyrighted data in AI training. Any major lawsuit in which judges refute fair use claims are thus closely watched.
Needless to say, AI companies like ChatGPT, Meta and their ilk have far more power and resources at their disposal than a struggling nonprofit like the Internet Archive.
I just signed up for Starting Point, The Boston Globe’s new morning newsletter, scheduled to debut on Monday. It sounds like it’s being positioned as a more serious alternative to The B-Side, a breezy take on the day’s events aimed at younger readers that’s part of the Globe’s free Boston.com website.
Here’s the email that I got a little while ago:
Dear Globe reader,
We’re Boston Globe journalists Diamond Naga Siu and Jazmin Aguilera, and on Sep. 9 we’re launching a morning newsletter called Starting Point.
How is it different from every other morning newsletter out there?
First, it’s focused on New England, with a selection of the most consequential stories from our region. But we’ll also survey the national and international scene, picking out the most important and interesting stories. The reporters in our Washington Bureau will provide insights into the presidential election and critical races around the US. We’ll chat with Globe journalists about the stories behind their stories. There will be special guest writers from time to time.
And because we all love a good read and honest recommendations, we’ll share our favorite books and articles, restaurants and cafes, great places to visit, and interesting things to do throughout New England.
Update: As alert reader Greg Reibman notes, the sign-up pages says that Starting Point will only come out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Not much of a daily newsletter, but maybe they’re rolling it out slowly.
Donald Trump’s anti-free press, anti-First Amendment agenda follows a playbook (free link) designed in Hungary, India and Brazil, writes New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger in — uh, The Washington Post. Key excerpt:
As they seek a return to the White House, former president Donald Trump and his allies have declared their intention to increase their attacks on a press he has long derided as “the enemy of the people.” Trump pledged last year: “The LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.” A senior Trump aide, Kash Patel, made the threat even more explicit: “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.” There is already evidence that Trump and his team mean what they say. By the end of his first term, Trump’s anti-press rhetoric — which contributed to a surge in anti-press sentiment in this country and around the world — had quietly shifted into anti-press action.
The Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City, part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The city is served by The Salt Lake Tribune, the first nonprofit legacy newspaper in the U.S. Photo (cc) 2006 by Ken Lund.
Should nonprofit news organizations place their journalism behind a paywall?
There is considerable precedent that suggests they should not. Public television and radio are free, though they depend on grant money and donations from, you know, viewers (and listeners) like you. There’s also an educational mission and significant tax advantages that come with nonprofit status, and you could argue that they should make their journalism free in return for those benefits.
The Institute for Nonprofit News, for instance, begins its mission statement this way:
Nonprofit news is created for, supported by, and committed to the communities it serves. Through reporters who have deep community ties and topical expertise, nonprofit news elevates untold stories, exposes wrongdoing, and provides the facts we need to make informed decisions. And because most of this content is available without paywalls or subscription fees, nonprofit news makes essential information available to everyone — not just those who can afford it.
That falls short of an explicit statement of disapproval when it comes to nonprofits and paywalls, but it comes kind of close.
Yet Ellen Clegg and I found in our reporting for “What Works in Community News” that a few nonprofit news outlets do charge for their journalism, though most do not. Among those with paywalls are two digital-only sites: the Daily Memphian, which is part of our book, and The Baltimore Banner.
Both of these employ large staffs and aim to serve as complete replacements for the shrunken legacy papers they compete against. Such projects are expensive, and their leaders can hardly be faulted for concluding they need to charge for their journalism just as most for-profits do. Both find ways to make their journalism affordable for folks who may not be as well-heeled as their regular subscribers.
Another nonprofit with a paywall is The Salt Lake Tribune, the first legacy daily newspaper to embrace that model. Writing at Nieman Lab, Sarah Scire reports that the Tribune would like to end its dependence on a paywall at some point and is even now making much of its journalism free. She quotes from the Tribune’s annual report:
We’ve raised $340,000 and counting to fully remove the paywall on all of our election coverage ahead of the critical 2024 races. We’re not there yet from an income point of view to make our website free, but we hope to grow our donor base and income to the point that we’ll be able to open everything up to everyone.
Yet she also observes that even though the Tribune is growing, it remains dependent on paid subscriptions. Last year, for instance, subscribers were responsible for $5 million of the Tribune’s $15 million in revenues. Much of the rest comes from donors and advertising.
The bottom line is that even nonprofit news outlets need to bring in enough money to fulfill their mission. In the end, readers don’t really care whether their local news is owned by a nonprofit for a for-profit; Scire reports that only about a third of residents even know that the paper is nonprofit. What they want is a news source that’s comprehensive and reliable.
Brian Stelter. Photo (cc) 2017 by Ståle Grut / NRKbeta.
This is going to be interesting. Last month, CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy announced he was leaving in order to start his own subscription-based newsletter called “Status.” CNN said it would replace Darcy as the lead writer on its “Reliable Sources” newsletter, but it wasn’t clear who that person would be or when it might happen.
On Tuesday, it was announced that Brian Stelter — Darcy’s predecessor at CNN — would be returning as the network’s chief media analyst, and that he’ll be back at the helm of the “Reliable Sources” newsletter next Monday. His old television show, also called “Reliable Sources,” will not be back, but Stelter said he expects to pop up on a number of CNN programs to talk about media topics.
Oliver Darcy
This is very good news for people who care about the media, as Stelter and Darcy are both outstanding. But let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Darcy is charging $14.95 a month — triple what solo newsletter writers normally charge, but no doubt what he calculated he needs to make ends meet. Stelter’s newsletter presumably will be free, although that caveat is important given that CNN chief executive Mark Thompson is reportedly developing some paid products.
All the while I remained an avid reader of “Reliable Sources,” and especially admired Oliver Darcy’s fearless reportage, as well as his decision to launch Status last month. I’m rooting for Oliver and, as I have told him personally, I think we’re going to complement each other wonderfully.
It goes without saying, but I am very much looking forward to Stelter’s second act at CNN. As I’ve said before, he has been a first-class mentor to me. Now, I look forward to him being a first-class competitor!
Darcy’s challenge is that though Stelter’s newsletter may be the most similar to what he does, there are also a number of other media newsletters, and most of them are free. Indeed, the author of one of them, Tom Jones of the Poynter Institute, devoted the top of his morning round-up today to Stelter’s return.
As you may recall, Stelter was one of a handful of high-profile people who were fired by Chris Licht during Licht’s brief stint as CNN’s top executive. Stelter had emerged as an important voice in speaking out against then-President Donald Trump’s war on journalists, who he called “enemies of the people,” and the new owners of CNN apparently believed Stelter was too hot for them.
The ownership hasn’t changed, but fears that CNN was going to turn into Fox Lite proved unfounded, and Stelter — who’s been busy as a freelancer — has popped up frequently on CNN’s air in recent months. Darcy, meanwhile, established a reputation for independence right from the start and wrote a number of newsletter items that must have made Licht extremely unhappy before Licht himself was finally shown the door.
I hope there’s room in the burgeoning media newsletter universe for both Darcy and Stelter. But, as I said, I have to wonder how paid can compete with free if they are both mining essentially the same ore. Best wishes to both of them.
Speaking of free versus paid, Media Nation is a free source of news and commentary — but you can become a paid supporter, and receive a weekly supporters-only newsletter, for $5 a month. Just click here.
Gannett and USA Today headquarters in McLean, Va. Photo (cc) 2008 by Patrickneil.
Gannett is laying off 74 employees in Massachusetts — but, for once, they are not people who were producing local journalism. The layoffs, which take effect Nov. 14, are related to the company’s decision to close Cambridge-based Reviewed, a website that combines consumer advice and commerce in a manner similar to Wirecutter, which is part of The New York Times.
The pending closure and layoffs were reported Aug. 26 by Mia Sato at The Verge and came amid accusations that Reviewed published articles produced by artificial intelligence and attributed to non-existent writers. Sato wrote: “As The Verge reported last fall, the marketing firm behind the Reviewed content is the same company that was responsible for a similar dust-up at Sports Illustrated, in which remarkably similar product reviews were published and attributed to freelancers.”
Gannett denied the allegations and said the decision to shut down Reviewed was based on changes in Google’s algorithms.
Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe quotes NewsGuild of New York president Susan DeCarava in a statement:
We are deeply troubled by Gannett’s decision to shutter Reviewed. We are concerned for the future of dozens of workers represented by The NewsGuild of New York working at Reviewed, and about the broader impact of this announcement on the media industry at large.
The layoffs were announced in advance, reports Ray Schultz of Publishers Daily, because of a Massachusetts law mandating that companies provide 60 days’ notice ahead of a mass layoff.
Lookout Local founder Ken Doctor is about to take the next step in launching his second community news site. Today he’s announcing that Lookout Eugene-Springfield, in Oregon, will debut in early 2025 and that he’s assembled a national team with the aim of moving into “at least five markets” in 2025-’26. I wrote about initial plans for Lookout Eugene-Springfield back in May.
Doctor, a well-known journalist who covers the media business, began Lookout Local in 2020 with a site in Santa Cruz, California. Lookout Santa Cruz won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for its reporting on a January 2023 flood and its aftermath. Santa Cruz is also the home of another high-quality hyperlocal news site, Santa Cruz Local; both Doctor and Santa Cruz Local CEO Kara Meyberg Guzman are featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and have been guests on our podcast.
Lookout Eugene-Springfield will compete with Gannett’s Register-Guard as well as Eugene Weekly, an alternative publication saved by its readers earlier this year after an ex-employee was charged with embezzlement.
One of our most prominent media critics has dissected a particularly looney example of the so-called liberal media twisting itself into knots in order to appear fair. Writing in her newsletter, Margaret Sullivan has identified what she calls “an ugly case of ‘false balance’ in The New York Times.” Her example: a recent story headlined “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.”
Now, on many occasions the Times will publish a headline or social media tease that makes you think they’re engaging in both-sides-ism — then, when you read the story, you see that it’s actually not that bad. In this case, though, reporters Jeanna Smialek and Linda Qiu literally compare Vice President Kamala Harris’ proposal to provide government assistance in order to boost housing with Donald Trump’s threat to deport undocumented immigrants, thus opening up their homes to native-born Americans. Both ideas have problems! Or as Smialek and Qiu write:
Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common, and Ms. Harris’s plan is far more detailed. But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.
Good Lord. Here’s how Sullivan puts it:
Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields tremendous influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.
But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump. There’s so much of this false-balance nonsense in the Times that there’s a Twitter (X) account devoted to mocking it, called New York Times Pitchbot.
Sullivan, as you may know, is a former public editor for the Times and a former media columnist for The Washington Post. She currently writes a media column for The Guardian as well as her newsletter, “American Crisis.” (Disclosure: She also provided a kind blurb for our book, “What Works in Community News,” which graces the front cover.)
Sullivan’s lament about the Times’ very strange comparison of Harris and Trump on housing comes at a moment of rising anger on social media from the left about the paper’s coverage of politics, with a number of people either angrily threatening to cancel their subscriptions or claiming they’ve already done so.
Like Sullivan, I value the Times’ coverage in many areas. Its investigative reporting, including deep dives into Trump’s corruption and worse, has been invaluable. But, too often, its day-to-day political coverage does indeed lapse into both-sides-ism and false equivalence, as I often complained about when I was at The Boston Phoenix in the 1990s and early ’2000s. In 2009, when I was writing a media column for The Guardian, I concluded that the Times and other mainstream media were so cowed by the extreme right that they often pulled their punches:
Major elements of the media, terrified of accusations that they’re in the tank with Democrats and liberals, would rather deny reality than tell the simple truth. This abject spinelessness is a significant factor in how the lies of the right infect public discourse.
I later took my column to GBH News and wrote a piece in 2018 about “the timid Times.” You get the idea. I’m citing all this to assert that my Times-bashing credentials are in order, because all too often I see way too much silly criticism along the lines of Let’s start a boycott because the Times published an op-ed I don’t like. These days I often find myself actually defending the Times. We should reserve our outrage for the truly outrageous.
Still, as Sullivan astutely observes, there’s enough to that criticism that we need to take notice. The Times is our largest and most influential daily newspaper, and much of the press continues to take its cues from them. That includes the Big Three evening newscasts, still the closest thing we have to a mass medium.
No, I’m not going to cancel my subscription, and you shouldn’t, either. But foolishness like pretending to take Trump’s “housing” “plan” seriously serves no one — least of all democracy.
MIT campus. Photo (cc) 2009 by Wagner T. Cassimiro “Aranha”
The Mapping Project, an anti-Israel effort that singles out Jewish organizations, is back in the news — this time for publishing a flier, headlined “Welcome to MIT!,” listing “hundreds of institutions in the Boston area such as synagogues, museums, businesses, and police departments,” according to Janet Lorin of Bloomberg News.
MIT president Sally Kornbluth has denounced the Mapping Project for antisemitism, saying in a statement: “Like every other form of racial and religious prejudice and hate, antisemitism is totally unacceptable in our community. It cannot be justified, and it is antithetical to MIT’s values.” Lorin quotes from the flier: “Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them.”
The Bloomberg article was republished by The Boston Globe, which so far does not appear to have covered the story itself. In case you don’t have a subscription to either Bloomberg or the Globe, here’s a free link to a story in The Jerusalem Post by Michael Starr.
In 2022, I gave the Mapping Project a New England Muzzle Award, then in its final year of being hosted by GBH News. Here is the item in full, published June 29, 2022:
The BDS Mapping Project
An anonymous group created a website to intimidate, harass and silence supporters of Israel.
U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss earlier this month called out a chilling example of intimidation and harassment: the Mapping Project, which identified Jewish and pro-Israel organizations on a map of Massachusetts. The map’s makers have remained anonymous, but the website has been promoted by members of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to name and shame supporters of Israel because of that country’s continued occupation of land claimed by the Palestinians.
The map, Auchincloss tweeted, is “tapping into millennia-old antisemitic tropes. To name names & keep lists, which has a sinister resonance to the targeting of Jews throughout history, is irresponsible. They need to take down the map and apologize.” Auchincloss is a Newton Democrat who is also Jewish.
The Muzzle goes to the BDS Mapping Project, whoever its members may be. Their foul activism is designed to frighten and silence supporters of Israel rather than allow for open discussion and debate.
The existence of the Mapping Project was reported by a website called Jewish Insider, which noted that its organizers explained their hateful project by writing: “Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them.” The map includes colleges and universities, medical institutions, financial groups, police departments and numerous other agencies.
The action comes at a time of skyrocketing incidents of antisemitism, according to the Anti-Defamation League — which, naturally, occupies a prominent place on the map. In 2021, the ADL found that reports of assaults, harassment and vandalism against Jews were up 42% in New England compared to 34% nationally. Moreover, 108 of the 155 incidents in New England occurred in Massachusetts.
As ADL regional director Robert Trestan wrote in The Boston Globe:“Whatever one’s views on Israeli policy and actions — and we recognize that opinions vary widely — this should be an occasion for all to stand up against this kind of intimidation and targeting.”
