Exhale: The Supreme Court turns down a chance to narrow or kill Times v. Sullivan

Wynn’s Encore casino in Everett, Mass. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a chance to narrow or even throw out Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 ruling that provides the press with strong protections against libel suits. The court’s action was not entirely surprising, but it was heartening nevertheless.

The would-be challenge came about after former casino mogul Steve Wynn sued The Associated Press, claiming that its reporting on sexual misconduct he had allegedly engaged in during the 1970s was false and defamatory. Because Wynn is a public figure, he would have had to show the AP acted with “actual malice” — that is, that it knew its reporting was false or that it showed “reckless disregard” as to whether it was true or false. Wynn’s lawyers had sought to weaken the actual-malice standard.

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By declining to take up Wynn’s appeal, the Supreme Court indicated that no more than three of the nine justices are ready to revisit Times v. Sullivan, since it takes four justices to agree to hear a case. Clarence Thomas has previously written that he would overturn Sullivan in its entirety, while Neil Gorsuch would like to pare it back. Just recently, Brett Kavanaugh, though, went out of his way to affirm his support for Sullivan.

Since the court did not release a vote tally, we have no way of knowing whether or not Thomas and Gorsuch were joined by a third justice, or even if Thomas and Gorsuch themselves were willing to take the case. Perhaps they thought it was a poor vehicle for advancing their anti-Sullivan agenda. It would be nice to know, but that’s not how the court works.

Times v. Sullivan imposed the actual-malice burden only on public officials. Later rulings extended that to public figures. New York Times reporter David Enrich, in his new book, “Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful,” warned that the court might be willing to weaken Sullivan. Enrich wrote that “it is not hard to envision the Supreme Court substantially narrowing the scope of who classifies as a public figure or even ruling that the actual malice standard should only apply to government officials.”

Well, not yet, and not now. What will happen if and when a different case comes along is anyone’s guess.

The allegations of sexual misconduct against Wynn were originally reported in 2018 by The Wall Street Journal, which has published an archive of articles. According to the AP, Wynn reached an agreement with Nevada gambling officials in 2023 to exit the casino business and pay a $10 million fine without admitting any wrongdoing.

The Nevada Supreme Court described the AP story that drew Wynn’s ire as “a good-faith effort to inform their readers regarding an issue of clear public interest.”

With trust tanking, local TV news has an advantage over other forms of media

Photo (cc) 2009 by Patrick B

At a time when public trust in every major institution except local public libraries is below 50%, local television news has some advantages that other forms of media lack.

That was the message from Seth Geiger, president and co-founder of SmithGeiger Group, a consulting firm that works with media organizations. Geiger spoke Friday at “Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit” at Northeastern University.

According to survey data that Geiger presented, local television news is trusted by about 41% of the public — lower than in previous years, but far ahead of the 29% who say they trust national television news. Ironically, he added that social media is the most used platform for news even though it is the least trusted.

“Usually if you don’t trust something, you don’t use it. But that’s not how this functions. That may feel like a woe-the-republic moment for you,” he said, observing that social media is the top go-to for news among every age group except those between 55 and 64. (Presumably that would hold true for those older than 64 as well, but that demographic was not included in his charts.)

“The path back to trust is going to happen at the local level,” Geiger said, adding that local television news is “the most important news institution in the country.”

Geiger was joined by Keren Henderson, an associate professor at Syracuse University, who presented some highlights from the latest “State of Local TV News” survey from the Radio Television Digital News Association, better known as RTDNA.

At a time when goals such as diversity in the work force are under fire from the Trump administration, Henderson’s data showed local TV news continues to lag. Currently, she said, about 42% of the U.S. population comprises minorities, which far exceeds the 28% minority percentage working for local television news. Some 77% of stations reported employing staffers who are LGBTQ, but when they were specifically asked about transgender staff, that percentage fell to about 18% — a decline from about 23% in 2024.

Currently there are 1,117 stations across the country airing local TV news, of which 695 are producing original programming with the rest being repeaters. That figure is essentially unchanged from 2024. In addition, she said threats to news workers were up 50%, leading to a decline in the use of solo multimedia journalists being assigned to go out and report stories.

Interestingly, the digital platforms that local TV newscasts have embraced the most are Instagram (91%) and YouTube (85%), with the much-hyped TikTok app lagging at 39%. Bluesky and Threads barely registered.

The average starting salary in local TV news was just a little more than $39,000. Not surprisingly, Henderson said, 80% of those leaving the field reported low pay as the main reason. Another 64% cited work-life balance and 52% cited burnout.

Overall, it was a rather dispiriting presentation, which led graduate student Lisa Thalhamer, who moderated the session, to end by asking Geiger and Henderson what makes them hopeful.

Henderson cited her teenage children, who are engaged and paying attention to the news — what she referred to as “that level of energy of caring about the world.”

Geiger said he’s hopeful that engaging more with the audience and helping them to understand how journalism works could offset the overall decline, with “facts being the building blocks.” He added: “There is a mechanism to do that.”

Trump extorts a major law firm — then lies to make the deal sound even worse

Illustration via Pixabay

To make the humiliation complete, Donald Trump has apparently lied about the agreement he reached with Brad Karp, chair of the law firm Paul Weiss, in order to cast the terms of surrender as being even worse than they actually were.

According to a four-byline article in The New York Times (gift link), Trump’s claim that Paul Weiss had agreed to end its diversity, equity and inclusion program appears to be false. So, too, is Trump’s assertion that the firm had admitted to “wrongdoing” on the part of former Paul Weiss lawyer Mark Pomerantz, who had worked for the prosecution in Trump’s hush-money trial — you know, the one in which Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies, a verdict that still stands.

The Times reports:

The copy of the agreement that Mr. Karp shared with Paul Weiss differed in some ways from Mr. Trump’s characterization of the deal in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Although Mr. Trump said the law firm had specifically agreed to not follow any diversity, equity and inclusion policies in its hiring practices, there is no reference to D.E.I. in the agreement that Mr. Karp shared. Mr. Trump has mounted an aggressive campaign against diversity initiatives in the federal government, labeling it as a form of workplace discrimination.

There also was no mention of Mr. Pomerantz, the former Paul Weiss partner, in the copy of the agreement circulated by Mr. Karp. Five people briefed on the matter said Mr. Karp said he did not criticize Mr. Pomerantz with the president, in spite of Mr. Trump’s assertion to the contrary.

In a statement issued on Thursday evening, Mr. Pomerantz denied he had done anything wrong.

Karp deserves no sympathy. It was bad enough that he was willing to cut a deal with the extortionist-in-chief rather than stand strong. It’s just interesting that Trump would succeed in this corrupt scheme and then decide that it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t resist the urge to pile on false details that made Karp and his firm look even worse.

A libel verdict against Greenpeace may destroy the organization — and weaken the First Amendment

Standing Rock protest in St. Paul, Minn. Photo (cc) 2016 by Fibonacci Blue.

Earlier this week, a North Dakota jury delivered a verdict on behalf of a large energy company that may destroy the environmental organization Greenpeace — and that could inflict significant damage on the First Amendment as well.

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According to reporters Jeff Brady and Alejandra Borunda of NPR, the jury ruled in favor of Energy Transfer, which built the Dakota Access oil pipeline, and which accused Greenpeace in a civil suit of libel, trespassing and other offenses. The jury awarded Energy Transfer $660 million, which Greenpeace officials have said could force the organization to cease operations.

Continue reading “A libel verdict against Greenpeace may destroy the organization — and weaken the First Amendment”

Marta Hill explains what j-schools can do to address harassment directed at student journalists

Marta Hill

On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Marta Hill, an extraordinary young journalist who I got to know during her time at Northeastern.

Marta is currently a graduate student in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program at New York University, where she’s also the editor-in-chief of Scienceline. In that role, she works with her peers at NYU to produce what she describes as “an accessible, down-to-earth science publication.” Marta is originally from Minneapolis, which makes it almost a tragedy that my co-host, Ellen Clegg, a fellow transplant from the Twin Cities, couldn’t be with us. (Ellen will be back for our next podcast).

At Northeastern, Marta served in various capacities at The Huntington News, an independent student newspaper, including a one-year stint as editor-in-chief. She was also in my media ethics and diversity class in the fall of 2023. Whenever I teach ethics, a week gets devoted to talking about the harassment that journalists face both online and in real life. It’s a problem that’s been getting worse in recent years, and it’s something that young reporters in particular really have to think about before deciding whether to go into journalism full-time.

Marta decided she wanted to explore the issue of harassment and student journalism more deeply in the form of an honors project, and I was her adviser. She wrote a wide-ranging reported article, and a shorter version of that article was recently published by Nieman Reports, part of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Her article, titled “J-schools Must Better Prepare Students for Handling Harassment,” lays out some concrete steps that journalism educators can take so that their students are not caught off guard when they encounter harassment at their student news outlet or on the job.

My Quick Take is on a nonprofit initiative to bring more and better news to Tulsa, Oklahoma, a thriving metro area with nearly 700,000 people in the city and surrounding county. The area is currently served by the Tulsa World, a daily paper that’s part of the Lee Enterprises chain, which, like most corporate newspaper owners, has a reputation for aggressive cost-cutting. The new nonprofit, the Tulsa News Initiative, is built around a venerable Black newspaper, but there’s more to it than that.

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Trump whacks the Voice of America; plus, tariffs kill a newspaper, and the Globe Spotlights New Bedford

William Harlan Hale delivering the first Voice of America Broadcast on Jan. 1, 1942. Photo via Wikipedia.

When a coup takes place in other countries, we sometimes learn that news programming is taken off the air and replaced with patriotic music. I don’t know what kind of music has been playing on Voice of America since Saturday morning. What I do know is that dictators like Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping found it pleasing to their ears.

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There is a danger at moments like this to breeze past stories such as the virtual shutdown of Voice of America because we knew it was coming anyway, and because there are more immediate matters with which to grapple, including illegal arrests and deportations. But the Trump White House’s shutdown of Voice of America, though not surprising, is nevertheless a moment worth paying careful attention to as the authoritarian regime headed by Donald Trump tightens its grip.

Continue reading “Trump whacks the Voice of America; plus, tariffs kill a newspaper, and the Globe Spotlights New Bedford”

Combatting link rot; plus, media notes from the Philippines to Arlington National Cemetery to Belmont, Mass.

Photo (cc) 2008 by Matt Mets

Something I stress with my journalism students is the importance of having your own home on the internet, either in the form of a newsletter or a blog, so that you have a repository for your work.

But you’ll notice I didn’t say “permanent” repository. Probably the two most widely used platforms, Medium and Substack, are  owned by corporate entities that could disappear or change their terms in various onerous ways.

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For Media Nation I use WordPress software with a hosting service, GoDaddy, which at least in theory is a safer bet. But something could go wrong with WordPress so that there would no longer be anyone to provide critical security updates. Or GoDaddy could Go Out of Business. The Internet Archive is invaluable, but it doesn’t scrape everything. The bottom line is that you have to stay on top of things if you want to keep the tumbleweeds from blowing into your digital homestead.

Which is why I was interested to read this interview with Brandon Tauszik, a fellow with the Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford, who is involved in designing low-cost ways for journalists to preserve their work.

Continue reading “Combatting link rot; plus, media notes from the Philippines to Arlington National Cemetery to Belmont, Mass.”

The Khalil arrest shows why we must protect ‘freedom for the thought that we hate’

The 1915 International Congress of Women in The Hague. Rosika Schwimmer is fourth from left. Photo via Wikipedia.

What is the First Amendment for? Quite simply, it is for protecting our right to express views that are unpopular or even offensive. There’s more to it than that, of course, and it’s not unlimited. But it surely is there to act as a shield for Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who Donald Trump’s jackbooted thugs have arrested and who the administration is now trying to deport to — well, somewhere.

Khalil was involved pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University last spring. As Philip Marcelo of The Associated Press reports, “The White House … claimed Khalil organized protests where pro-Hamas propaganda was distributed.” But Khalil also holds a green card, making him a permanent resident of the United States. Moreover, the First Amendment extends to anyone in the U.S., citizen or non-citizen, legal resident or undocumented immigrant.

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Nearly a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had a few things to say about another non-U.S. citizen with unpopular views. Rosika Schwimmer was a Hungarian immigrant, feminist and pacifist who sought to become a U.S. citizen. She was turned down because she refused to take the oath of citizenship, believing that it obliged her to take up arms if ordered to do so — notwithstanding the reality that, as a woman, she would have been exempt from military service.

Her case ended up before the Supreme Court, which, in 1929, on a 6-3 vote, overturned an appeals court ruling in her favor. Justice Holmes wrote an eloquent dissent that is still invoked as a defense of the First Amendment’s true meaning. He said in part:

Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but, if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate. I think that we should adhere to that principle with regard to admission into, as well as to life within, this country.

“Freedom for the thought that we hate” is a concise and compelling explanation of why the First Amendment matters, and it’s a phrase that we’ve all heard over and over again. Anthony Lewis even made it the title of one of his books.

And it’s why Trump is acting illegally and unconstitutionally in holding Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. Khalil has not been charged with a crime. He has not been accused of providing material assistance to Hamas. Rather, he is being singled out for his political views. And let’s be honest — Trump is doing this in a deliberate attempt to rekindle left-wing activism on behalf of the Palestinians in order to harm Democrats, universities and anyone else who stands in the way of his authoritarian project.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has called Khalil’s arrest the most significant threat to free speech since the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s. “If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration,” she wrote. And indeed, Trump has boasted that more arrests will follow.

Schwimmer, at least, was allowed to remain in the U.S. as a non-citizen. She eventually moved to New York City and died in 1948. Khalil’s fate has yet to be determined.

(Almost) spring in the Fells

I had a rare light day, so I hiked the Reservoir Trail in the Middlesex Fells. It was unusually dry for early to mid-March. No washed-out sections of the trail and very little mud. A beautiful day for a six-mile walk, but I managed to take a header near the end. I was able to pick myself up hike out, but we’ll see if I can walk tomorrow.

The western part of the loop was much better marked than it’s been in the past. I only had to slow down and look for the next orange blaze a few times. I’m guessing the new blazes were put up by the Friends of the Fells, so I felt like my dues were well spent.

Also interesting to see that there was some slushy ice on all three reservoirs. The Mystic Lakes are completely clear, so I’m not sure what the explanation would be.

From Ruth Marcus’ resignation to Karoline Leavitt’s praise, another embarrassing week for the WashPost

Ruth Marcus. 2017 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

I don’t necessarily feel obliged to chronicle every rung that The Washington Post hits on the way down to wherever it ultimately lands. But there were three developments this week that I thought were worth taking note of as we ponder owner Jeff Bezos’ strange, dispiriting journey into MAGA-land.

1. Another resignation. Ruth Marcus resigned from the opinion section following publisher Will Lewis’ cancellation of a column she wrote criticizing Bezos’ edict that the section will henceforth be devoted to “personal liberties and free markets.”

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Marcus, a moderate who is a former deputy editor of the section, is a lifer, unflashy and unpretentious. In a way, for such a core member of the Post to decide she’d had enough is even more disturbing than it is to lose someone with more of a following who can easily slide over to The New York Times, The Atlantic or Substack.

Writing in The New Yorker, she confirms something I suspected — that she’d already pretty much decided to resign and wrote her column with an eye toward leaving in a blaze of glory. She includes the text of the column, and, as she notes, it is mild and restrained. She knew it would likely be killed, but she says she wrote it with an eye toward having it appear in the Post.

She also tells us that Bezos, despite compiling a stellar record of strength and independence from the time he bought the Post until a little more than a year ago, nevertheless gave off some warning signals along the way. Even as he was publicly standing up to Donald Trump during Trump’s first term, he was also pushing the opinion section to find a few good things to say about him. Not a big deal at the time, but ominous in retrospect.

“I wish we could return to the newspaper of a not so distant past,” Marcus writes. “But that is not to be, and here is the unavoidable truth: The Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not The Washington Post I left.”

2. Titanic, deck chairs, etc. Even as Bezos transforms the Post into a laughingstock (not the news section, I should point out, though few readers draw that distinction), Lewis and executive editor Matt Murray continue to make plans that they hope will connect with readers more effectively than the current product. I wish I could think of a more original metaphor than rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic, but that’s what comes to mind.

Axios media reporter Sara Fischer writes that the paper will divide its national desk in two. One part of it will focus on non-political national reporting, and the other will be devoted exclusively to politics and government. The Post has struggled for years to appeal to readers whose primary interest is something other than politics, and that has a lot to do with its circulation slide and mounting losses following Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.

By contrast, the Times continues to grow and prosper, largely on the strength of its lifestyle brands. The Post is stuck not just with a politics-centric audience, but with an audience that it’s alienated through Bezos’ high-handed moves, starting with his cancellation of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election.

“I want to make sure there are a few areas that are equally staffed and strong to make sure we’re always putting a strong foot forward and that we’re not just the politics paper, even though that’s important to who we are,” Murray told Fischer.

Frankly, I doubt it will work. What might work is an idea that Lewis floated some months back to publish local newsletters for an extra subscription fee that would serve the chronically undercovered metro Washington area. But now you have to wonder how well that would be received with The Washington Post brand on it.

3. Uncomfortable praise. Bezos must have been so proud Tuesday when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went out of her way to praise the Post.

“It appears that the mainstream media, including the Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this president does not help you sell newspapers,” Leavitt was quoted as saying. “It’s not a very good business model.”

As media reporter Oliver Darcy noted, it’s not likely that Leavitt had the newsroom restructing in mind. “Instead,” he wrote, “one imagines she was probably applauding Bezos’ push to shift the opinion section to the right.”

Yes, one imagines. What an embarrassment.