Dan Kennedy

Scott Jennings is the latest partisan hack to embarrass independent opinion journalists

Trump and Jennings on stage in Michigan. Click on image to view the clip.

This morning I want to defend the honor and integrity of opinion journalism, which is the side of the street I’ve worked for most of my career.

Done well, opinion journalism combines reporting, research and, yes, opinion that illuminates issues in a way that goes beyond what straight news reporting can offer. Above all, we honor the same rules of independence as everyone else in the newsroom. We don’t make political donations, put signs on our lawns or (I think you know where I’m going with this) speak at political rallies.

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On Tuesday, CNN’s MAGA talking head, Scott Jennings, leaped up on a Michigan stage at President Trump’s invitation, embraced his idol, and then took the mic. I’ll let media reporter Oliver Darcy describe what happened next:

After Trump asked Jennings to come up on stage, Jennings obliged and then very briefly spoke from the podium. The CNN commentator joked he was looking at perhaps buying a farm in Michigan “because when you own as many libs as I do, you have got to have a place to put them all.”

Mediate has the gruesome video, which you can watch here or by clicking on the image above.

Darcy writes that a CNN spokesperson told him the network was fine with Jennings’ appearance with Trump, even though Fox News once upbraided talk-show host Sean Hannity for doing the same thing. Which leads to where I think the line is being drawn.

The cable networks employ journalists, including straight news reporters and opinionators; talk-show hosts like Hannity; and partisan hacks. (Yes, Hannity is a partisan hack, but his primary allegiance is to Fox, not Trump.) Since we’re talking about CNN, I’ll observe that it’s brought on board MAGA sycophants like Jeffrey Lord, Rick Santorum and Jennings as well as Democratic operatives such as Donna Brazile and David Axelrod. Brazile actually tipped off the Hillary Clinton campaign about a CNN debate question while she was working for the network, according to an email unearthed by WikiLeaks.

This is all sordid stuff, and it stems from cable executives’ desire to have predictable partisan commentators offering predictable partisan talking points rather than honest opinion journalists who might say something contrarian. Scott Jennings is merely a symptom. The disease is that the cable nets have elevated talk over actual news.

On our 100th podcast, Tom Breen tells us what’s next for the New Haven Independent

Tom Breen in downtown New Haven. Photos (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

For our 100th “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Tom Breen, the editor of the New Haven Independent. Tom joined the staff of the Independent in 2018 and then became managing editor. Last November, he stepped up to succeed founding editor Paul Bass, who launched the Independent in 2005 and is still very much involved.

Paul is executive director of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization he set up to oversee the Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel in New Haven’s northwest suburbs and WNHH, a low-power community radio station. He continues to report the news for the Independent and hosts a show on WNHH, and he started another nonprofit, Midbrow, which publishes arts reviews in New Haven and several other cities across the country.

We spoke with Tom about his own vision for the Independent and why he thinks it has been successful enough to still be going strong after 20 years. He also reminisces about a harrowing encounter he once had with a pitbull while he was out knocking on doors for a story on mortgage foreclosures. I interviewed Tom for our book, “What Works in Community News.”

New Haven Independent reporter Maya McFadden interviews Victor Joshua, director of a youth basketball program called RespeCT Hoops.

Listeners will also hear from Alexa Coultoff, a Northeastern student who wrote an in-depth report on the local news ecosystem in Fall River, Massachusetts, a blue-collar community south of Boston that flipped to Donald Trump in the last election after many decades of being a solidly Democratic city. We recently published Alexa’s story, so please give it a read.

Ellen has a Quick Take on two big moves on the local news front. The National Trust for Local News has named a new CEO to replace Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, who resigned earlier this year. The new leader is Tom Wiley, who is now president and publisher of The Buffalo News. And in the heartland, The Minnesota Star Tribune has named a new editor to replace Suki Dardarian, who is retiring. The nod goes to Kathleen Hennessey, the deputy politics editor of the New York Times and a former Associated Press reporter.

My Quick Take examines a recent court decision ruling that Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the way it controls the technology for digital advertising. This was the result of a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and a number of states, but it’s also the subject of lawsuits brought by the news business, which argues that Google has destroyed the value of online ads. It’s potentially good news. It’s also complicated, and its effect may be way off in the future.

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

Lindsey Graham’s bizarre suck-up; plus, the LA Times’ latest woes, and the Trumps’ crypto grift

It’s now being laughed off as a joke, and I suppose that’s right. But social media on Tuesday was going a little nuts over Sen. Lindsey Graham’s ridiculous post on Twitter in which he endorsed Donald Trump’s expressed desire to be the next pope. I thought the always astute Richard Nixon, writing on Bluesky, put it best:

On the bright side, becoming pope would get Trump out of the U.S.

Tough Times in LA

Jeff Bezos isn’t the only billionaire-gone-bad who’s running a major American newspaper. In fact, he may not even be the worst. After all, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris before Bezos did the same at The Washington Post, is actually using AI to label the bias of opinion journalists.

An aside: Opinion journalists are supposed to be biased.

Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy, who’s done yeoman’s work in keeping track of the LA Times’ travails, writes that layoffs are on the way. Darcy also cites reporting by Adweek that the paper lost $50 million in 2024 and that subscribers continue to head for the exits.

You’d like to think that steady, forward-looking ownership would put the Times in a position to thrive as other billionaire-owned papers have done — principally The Boston Globe and The Minnesota Star Tribune.

Maybe Boston and the Twin Cities are just better news towns with a higher level of civic engagement than the notoriously transient Los Angeles area. Still, Soon-Shiong’s feckless and irresponsible management certainly has not helped.

The crypto presidency

I read this in horror Tuesday — an in-depth investigation by The New York Times into the Trump family’s crypto grift, an entirely new way for foreign powers to bribe Trump while skirting federal laws.

As Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ben Protess report, the Trump-controlled crypto company World Liberty Financial also puts the Trump family in close contact with some might unsavory characters. They write:

The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.

Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

Because it’s the last day of the month and I still have some gift links to distribute, you can read it here for free. And here’s a gift link to a sidebar on yet another dubious Trump crypto relationship.

Why you should become a monthly paid supporter of Media Nation

Moon over the Zakim Bridge. Photo (cc) 2025 by Dan Kennedy.

Since 2005, I’ve been writing Media Nation as a free source of news and commentary about the media, politics, the First Amendment and, occasionally, other topics as well. I have never put up a paywall, nor will I.

But I do believe that writers should be paid for their work. And, so, a few years ago I set up a Patreon account for readers who wish to become voluntary supporters of Media Nation. Supporters receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content — additional commentary, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.

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Thank you.

A Muzzle Award for a New Hampshire legislator who wants to make it easier to ban school books

New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2005 by Ken Lund.

New Hampshire state Rep. Glenn Cordelli says he hasn’t read “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” 1999 young-adult novel by Stephen Chbosky that deals with issues such as sexual assault and mental health. But that hasn’t stopped him from having an opinion about it.

“If people think that this crap is culture, then we’re in bad trouble in New Hampshire,” the Republican legislator said at a recent hearing, according to a report by Anthony Brooks of WBUR Radio. “These explicit sexual materials have no place in our schools.”

When pressed by Democratic Sen. Debra Altschiller as to whether Cordelli had actually read the entire book, Cordelli replied that he had not — and that he had “no interest” in completing her homework assignment.

Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped Cordelli from filing a bill that would ease the way for parents to challenge books they don’t want their children to have access to. If the bill becomes law, such books could be “restricted or removed from public school classrooms and libraries,” Brooks writes. “The bill would allow parents to their take complaints to the state Department of Education, and expands state obscenity laws.”

For this assault on the right of kids to be educated, Cordelli has richly earned a New England Muzzle Award.

Cordelli’s proposal, House Bill 324, would ban depictions of “nudity,” “sadomasochistic abuse,” “sexual conduct” and “sexual excitement,” all of which are described in such excruciatingly explicit detail that one suspects the legislation itself might be banned from the classroom should it ever be enacted.

Brooks’ report also quotes Katie DeAngelis, a New Hampshire woman who said that reading Chbosky’s book helped her deal with her own experience of sexual assault. “What it did do is make me feel a lot less alone,” she told WBUR.

By the way, Cordelli appears to be quite a piece of work. According to Ethan DeWitt of the New Hampshire Bulletin, he has also filed a bill that would subject anyone who helps an unemancipated pregnant minor get an abortion to criminal and civil penalties.

The book ban that Cordelli and his fellow Republican legislators are pushing for comes in the midst of a repressive political climate in the Granite State. Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and though Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte has at least some moderate credentials, it’s unclear whether she would sign the bill or not.

No, the arrest of Judge Dugan is not unprecedented. Plus, DOJ targets leaks, and Bezos’ original sin

Judge's gavel — Illustration produced by AI using DALL-E

It’s important at a historical moment like this to keep our heads about us. Social media was filled with dark warnings about authoritarianism on Friday after the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan and charged her with illegally helping an undocumented immigrant avoid being detained by federal agents. I even saw a quote attributed to Hitler.

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We should leave it to the legal system to determine whether Judge Dugan broke the law or not. But, to their credit, a number of news organizations noted that the Dugan case is remarkably similar to that of Massachusetts District Court Judge Shelley Joseph. Joseph was charged by federal authorities in 2019 with obstruction of justice after she helped an undocumented immigrant escape out the back of her courtroom when she learned that the feds were waiting to take him into custody.

Charges against Joseph were dropped in 2022 after she agreed to a state investigation into her conduct. As of late 2024, her case was still wending its way through the disciplinary system.

Continue reading “No, the arrest of Judge Dugan is not unprecedented. Plus, DOJ targets leaks, and Bezos’ original sin”

Wayne Braverman steps down as managing editor of The Bedford Citizen

Some big news today from The Bedford Citizen, one of the first digital nonprofit community news sites in Massachusetts and a project I’ve been tracking for the past dozen years: Wayne Braverman, the Citizen’s managing editor, is stepping down.

This follows the death of reporter Mike Rosenberg in late February, and it leaves the Citizen with vacancies in its two key news positions, at least for the moment. “We have a strong team still in place and a plan for coverage during this transition,” said board president Elizabeth Hacala in an email that was sent to email subscribers earlier today.

Hacala added that the Citizen is in the process of hiring a community reporter to replace Rosenberg, a legendary figure in Bedford who died at 72 while covering a high school basketball game. Mike was one of the people Ellen Clegg and I wrote about in our book, “What Works in Community News.”

Braverman became managing editor in October 2022, replacing co-founder Julie McCay Turner. He and executive director Teri Morrow appeared on our podcast a little over a year ago. Hacala’s full message is as follows:

Thank you for being a part of The Bedford Citizen community. I wanted to let you know about a change in our team that will be announced later today.

Wayne Braverman is wrapping up his time with The Citizen. We are in the process of updating the Managing Editor role and beginning the search for a new editor.

We have had an exciting response to our Community Reporter posting and look forward to having someone on board soon. In the interim, many members of the community have stepped forward to help us keep the presses running so to speak. This takes us back to our roots when volunteer writers created most of our stories.

We have a strong team still in place and a plan for coverage during this transition. Since you are a loyal reader of The Citizen, I wanted to make sure you heard the news directly from me before it is published on the website and social media later today.

Thank you again for being a part of The Citizen. Your support is critical to all we do. We are, as always, committed to being your local, non-profit, independent news source.

Update: Braverman has written a heartfelt farewell, saying, “Leaving The Citizen at this time is a good thing while I am healthy and still have the energy to engage in meaningful opportunities in the remaining time that I have on this planet. I don’t want to leave this world feeling like I didn’t do all I could to help make this a better place, especially in the era we find ourselves today.”

Correction: This post has been revised to eliminate some confusing and incorrect language I had inserted.

Northeastern’s Joseph Aoun adds his voice to a statement condemning Trump’s war on higher education

Northeastern University’s president, Joseph Aoun, has added his voice to a strong statement from college and university leaders opposing the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on their institutions. Madison Evangelist has the details at The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper.

The statement, titled “A Call for Constructive Engagement,” has been signed by 416 education leaders as of 11 a.m. Those signing include Harvard president Alan Garber, whose defiance of Trump has made his university a national symbol of resistance. Other local signers are Melissa Gilliam, president of Boston University; Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT; Jay Bernhardt, president of Emerson College; Marissa Kelly, president of Suffolk University; and Marty Meehan, president of the University of Massachusetts.

The statement, sponsored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, begins:

As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education. We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight. However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses. We will always seek effective and fair financial practices, but we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.

For those of us who are part of the Northeastern community, Aoun’s action is welcome news. My students and I have talked about how quiet the administration has been about Trump’s depredations, and I’ve been hoping we’d hear more at some point. Well, here it is.

And not that Harvard needs any more kudos, but it was really its refusal to go along with Trump’s authoritarian demands that stiffened the backbones of university leaders everywhere.

Earlier:

Fun with the First Amendment: Why Sarah Palin’s lawyers are happy, and why Deborah Lipstadt isn’t

Sarah Palin. Photo (cc) 2021 by Gage Skidmore.

Two quick observations about First Amendment law before I get back to grading.

First, I suspect that lawyers for Sarah Palin are perfectly happy to have lost their libel suit against The New York Times, and that they would have been equally happy if they had won. What they wanted was a clean verdict — not another muddle that might have resulted in yet a third trial.

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Now the case can start making its way toward a possible Supreme Court appeal, where Palin’s lawyers can argue that the “actual malice” standard of Times v. Sullivan (1964) should be overturned or substantially weakened. The standard holds that public officials must prove knowing falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth, a standard that was later extended to public figures.

As New York Times reporter David Enrich makes clear in his new book, “Murder the Truth,” Palin’s attorneys are part of a cabal of right-wing lawyers who have taken aim at the Sullivan standard — never mind that it serves to protect the conservative media just as much as it does the mainstream press.

Fortunately, the court indicated recently that there may be no more than three justices, and possibly just two, who are inclined to revisit Sullivan. Still, every time you open up a path to weakening the First Amendment, you need to hold your breath.

Second, if you haven’t read this train wreck of an interview with Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, I recommend it. Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker spoke with Lipstadt after her recent comments that she at least partly supports Donald Trump’s attempts to deport international students who’ve expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause, including Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University and Rümeysa Öztürk of Tufts University.

I just want to pick up on one exchange:

Chotiner: There were some really terrible instances of antisemitism after the war in Gaza began, but now we are actually in a political environment where an American President is using antisemitism as an excuse to literally pick people up off the street for writing op-eds.

Lipstadt: Freedom of speech is freedom of speech. And I’m a stalwart supporter of freedom of speech. In other countries where they’ve outlawed Holocaust denial, I’ve spoken out against that. Freedom of speech is freedom of speech. Incitement is something else. I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not going to get into what that is.

Now, I’m not a lawyer, either, but I do teach First Amendment law to undergraduates. And the great thing about the Supreme Court is that it often writes with stunning clarity. Incitement is defined in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) in a way that anyone can understand it, ruling that speech was protected even in the case of a Ku Klux Klan leader who stood up in front of a crowd and demanded “revengeance” against Black people and Jews. The reason was that he was not inciting the crowd to commit violence right there and then. Here’s how the court put it:

[T]he constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

Thus the court reached the end of a journey that began with Schenck v. United States (1919), in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ruled that speech may not be banned unless it presented a “clear and present danger.”

Unfortunately for Charles Schenck, the court decided that his anti-draft advocacy during World War I did indeed constitute such a danger, so it was off to prison for him. But the Schenck decision was an improvement over what had come before, and it paved the way for stronger protections in the years to come, culminating with Brandenburg.

As for Lipstadt, she claims to be unqualified to comment on something that every high school graduate ought to know. Then again, she may not have realized she was violating two important rules: (1) Never agree to an interview with Isaac Chotiner unless you’re thoroughly prepared; (2) never agree to an interview with Isaac Chotiner.

How news outlets may benefit from a ruling that Google’s ad tech violates antitrust law

To the extent that news organizations have been able to overcome the collapse of advertising caused by the rise of giant tech platforms, it’s through two imperfect methods.

For-profits, especially larger newspapers, charge for digital subscriptions and try to maintain a baseline level of print advertising, which has maintained at least some of its value.
Nonprofits, many of them digital-only, pursue large gifts and grants while attempting to induce their audience to pay for voluntary memberships, often for goodies like premium newsletters.

At the same time, though, news publishers have continued to look longingly at what might have been. When journalism started moving online 30 years ago, the assumption was that news outlets would continue to control much of that advertising.

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Those hopes were cut short. And in large measure, that’s because Google — according to publishers — established a monopoly over digital advertising that news organizations couldn’t crack. Now we’re getting a glimpse of a possible alternative universe, because last week a federal district-court judge agreed, at least in part.

I’ve read several accounts of Judge Leonie Brinkema’s 115-page ruling on an antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department and eight states (but not Massachusetts). It’s confusing, but I thought this account by David McCabe in The New York Times (gift link) was clearer than some, so I’m relying on it here. I’ll begin with this:

The government argued in its case that Google had a monopoly over three parts of the online advertising market: the tools used by online publishers, like news sites, to host open ad space; the tools advertisers use to buy that ad space; and the software that facilitates those transactions.

In other words, the suit claimed that Google controlled both ends of the market as well as the middleman software that makes it happen. Judge Brinkema agreed with the first two propositions but disagreed with the third, saying, in McCabe’s words, that “the government had failed to prove that it constituted a real and defined market.”

Brinkema put it this way: “In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.”

Lee-Anne Mulholland, a Google vice president, said in response, “We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half.” I’m pretty sure that losing two out of three is two-thirds, but whatever.

Brinkema will now consider the government’s demand that Google’s ad business be broken up. But given that the company has already said it will appeal, it could be a long time — like, on the order of years — before anything comes of this. Same with an earlier ruling in a different courtroom that Google’s search constitutes an illegal monopoly, which is also the subject of hearings this week.

The News/Media Alliance, a lobbying group for the news business, praised Brinkema’s ruling, saying:

The News/Media Alliance has spent years advocating on behalf of news media publishers against Google’s unlawfully anticompetitive actions. We are strongly supportive of a similar lawsuit in Texas that will follow, as well as the Gannett lawsuit currently being litigated on the same issues. Much of this was prompted in the House Report that documented Google’s abuse in the ad tech ecosystem, the scope of which is wide-reaching.

As the organization observes, Google’s ad tech has been the subject of several suits by the newspaper business. One of them names Facebook as a co-defendant, claiming that the Zuckerborg chose to collude with Google rather than compete directly. Gannett’s suit, on the other hand, only names Google.

The News/Media Alliance also continues to push for passage of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, a pet project of Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana.

The proposal, which never gained much traction and is surely all but dead with Donald Trump back in the White House, would force Google and Facebook to pay for the journalism they repurpose. The legislation is problematic for many reasons, not least that Facebook has made it clear it would rather remove news from its various platforms, as it has done in Canada, than pay for it.

Punishing Google for clearly defined legal violations is a much cleaner solution. Let’s hope Judge Brinkema’s ruling survives the appeals process — not to mention whatever idea starts rattling around Trump’s head to reward Google as a favor for CEO Sundar Pichai’s $1 million kiss. Perhaps this can be the start of making advertising great again.