When the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that news organizations need no longer fear ruinous libel judgments over small, inadvertent errors, it sparked an explosion of investigative reporting. A direct line connects the court’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan — inevitably described as a “landmark” — and journalism that exposes government secrecy and corruption at the national, state and local levels.
Under Times v. Sullivan, a public official who sues for libel must show that a defamatory statement was made with “actual malice,” a term of art that means the statement was published “with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.” Later rulings extended actual malice to public figures.
But though Times v. Sullivan freed the press to uncover government lying in the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, the backlash began almost immediately. That backlash is the subject of a new book by New York Times reporter David Enrich called “Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.”
“Murder the Truth” also prompts a look back at two earlier books that examine the historical and legal significance of the Sullivan decision — “Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan” (2023), by Samantha Barbas, and “Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment” (1991), by Anthony Lewis. It is Enrich’s book, though, that speaks to the urgency of this calamitous moment, as well as the fate of the free press during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Illustration based on a photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore
Today I’m using my gift links to share two important stories from The New York Times. Amid the torrent of news about Donald Trump, I think these two articles rise above the din and underscore the menace he represents both to our democracy and to world peace.
People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.
“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”
He [Trump] told Mr. Trudeau [Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada] that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.
The border treaty Mr. Trump referred to was established in 1908 and finalized the international boundary between Canada, then a British dominion, and the United States.
Mr. Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past.
Canadian officials took Mr. Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees. In a news conference on Jan. 7, before being inaugurated, Mr. Trump, responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about whether he was planning to use military force to annex Canada, said he planned to use “economic force.”
On Thursday morning, I posted our latest “What Works” podcast, in which my Northeastern University colleague Mike Beaudet of WCVB-TV (Channel 5) explained to Ellen Clegg and me why the folks running local television news need to transition to a digital-first, mobile-first mentality if they hope to attract a younger generation of viewers.
The pixels were barely dry before I started hearing from The Boston Globe newsroom that the paper was canceling its four-days-a-week 5 p.m. newscast, “Boston Globe Today.” I was able to break that news before anyone else, so thanks as always to my sources. The program, launched in February 2023, appeared Monday through Thursday on New England Sports Network, of which Globe owners John and Linda Henry are part-owners.
I’m getting multiple messages that The Boston Globe is shutting down its TV/digital newscast, “Boston Globe Today.” There’s also a bit of an uproar from the newsroom that a message from a staff member who’s been laid off was removed from the Globe’s Slack channel. More later, I’m sure.
Here is the somewhat skeptical post I wrote when the newscast made its debut a little more than two years ago. As I said at the time, the producers needed to find ways of breaking the newscast down into stories that could be consumed by younger viewers on their phones.
And here’s what I wrote last fall when newscast host Segun Oduolowu popped up on a Kamala Harris fundraising call and explicitly endorsed her presidential campaign, creating an ethical dilemma for Globe management.
Mike Beaudet on a student reporting trip to Peru that he helped lead in 2024.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Mike Beaudet, longtime investigative reporter for WCVB-TV (Channel 5) in Boston and a multimedia professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.
Mike has won many awards for his hard-hitting investigations and runs a project aimed at reinventing television news. On March 21-22, he’ll lead a conference at Northeastern called “Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit.” Mike’s students are producing content for everything from Instagram and YouTube to TikTok. As he explains, local television news, still among the most trusted and popular forms of journalism, must transition from linear TV in order to reach younger audiences who’d prefer to watch video on their phones.
I’ve got a Quick Take about the National Trust for Local News. Co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro exited the nonprofit suddenly last month. That came amid reports that the Portland Press Herald and other papers that the Trust owns in the state of Maine might soon announce budget cuts.
(Cuts were announced at the Maine papers after this podcast was recorded. Although the newsrooms were spared, Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe reports that 49 employees will lose their jobs and that print will be pared back significantly in favor of digital.)
Now comes more bad news. Colorado Community Media, a group of 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs, is closing two papers and is losing money, writes Corey Hutchins in his newsletter, Inside the News in Colorado. Those papers were the National Trust’s first acquisitions in 2021. The Trust’s mission is to buy papers that are in danger of falling into the clutches of corporate chain ownership. It’s a worthy goal, but the Trust has obviously hit some significant obstacles.
Ellen has a Quick Take noting that Harvard University is shutting down Harvard Public Health, the digital home to stellar longform journalism about public health. At a time when the very facts of science are challenged on social media every day, this is disheartening news.
My evening began at church with a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. From there, it was all downhill.
The early moments of Donald Trump’s endless address to Congress (is he still talking?) made me think about Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address last March. It was, perhaps, Biden’s last really good public moment. Seated behind him, Kamala Harris was thoroughly enjoying herself while Mike Johnson looked glum.
Now we are in the midst of chaos, all of it self-inflicted by Trump and his prime minister, Elon Musk. Authoritarianism, Three Stooges-style (who is the third Stooge?), is on the rise.
I don’t really have a coherent take on Tuesday night’s ugly proceedings, but here are a few thoughts. I’m curious to know what you thought, too.
Former Washington Post (and Boston Globe) top editor Marty Baron, left, with his old Globe colleague Matt Carroll, now a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
It’s been nearly a week since Jeff Bezos issued his edict that The Washington Post’s opinion section would henceforth be devoted exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets,” and it’s still not clear what that is going to mean in practice.
Many observers, including me, have assumed that Bezos was using coded language — that, in fact, what he meant was that the Post would go all-in on Trumpism. That would seem logical given his earlier order to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris and his overall sucking up to Donald Trump.
So far, though, not much has happened other than the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley. Liberal opinion journalists like Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus and Perry Bacon Jr. are still there. Another liberal, Dana Milbank, responded to Bezos’ edict by tweaking the owner (gift link), writing:
If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend Bezos’s twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to “personal liberties and free markets” in the United States today: President Donald Trump.
Given that Bezos’ agenda has yet to be clearly articulated, let me suggest another possibility: rather than Trumpism, he intends to embrace libertarianism, which was thought to be his guiding political philosophy before he bought the Post in 2013.
The Boston Globe is losing one of its top editors, Mark Morrow, who’s retiring after nearly 30 years at the paper. Before that, he worked for 12 years as a reporter and editor at The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, giving him a career trajectory that would be difficult to replicate these days.
Morrow, 71, the Globe’s editor-at-large, has been involved in some of the paper’s most noteworthy journalism over the years, including the pedophile-priest story that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and was the subject of the movie “Spotlight.” According to a memo to the staff from executive editor Nancy Barnes, which was shared with me by a trusted source, Morrow “played a significant editing role garnered the Globe three Pulitzers and seven Pulitzers finalists among myriad other recognitions.”
Barnes’ full memo to the staff follows.
When I first arrived at the Globe, more than two years ago now, I looked across the long conference table where the morning news meeting is held every day, and saw a rare editor. He carried no laptop. His arms were folded across his chest. He was just listening and thinking — at least until it came around to his turn to share his deep thoughts. And share, he did in the manner of a grand poobah.
You all know who I am talking about, the inimitable, and yes, irreplaceable, Mark Morrow, our editor-at-large and editor extraordinaire. And yet, somehow, after nearly 30 years, this newsroom will have to learn to do without him. Mark is retiring, at 71, after a lifetime of dedication to journalism and other journalists. God knows he deserves it, but we will all miss him, and me especially, as he has served as a thought partner in editing when I most needed one here. Mark will leave at the end of the month, exact date to be determined.
Mark once told me that it was initially hard to get a foothold at the Globe, but he was determined, and he finally got his chance in the summer of 1995 when then metro editor, Walter V. Robinson, and Editor Matt Storin, took a chance on him. Since then, he has served in myriad roles, as political editor, overseeing the state house and city hall teams, and as national editor during the Clinton impeachment years, the first wave of mass shootings, and the 2000 national election that brought us all hanging chads. The national operation, in those days, included a DC bureau of about a dozen or so people, a roving national reporter, and correspondents in three national bureaus: New York, LA, and New Orleans.
After the Bush-Gore election, Mark moved on to something completely different. He took over the Living/Arts department for 18 months before Marty Baron promoted him to AME [assistant managing editor] for projects in the summer of 2002, when the Globe’s investigation into the Catholic Church clergy scandal was roaring along. He succeeded Ben Bradlee Jr. as the senior editor overseeing the Spotlight Team for the balance of that singular investigation, shared in the Public Service Pulitzer it earned, and has guided and served as final editor on all Spotlight Team work in the 22 years since.
He has also been instrumental in most of the Globe’s other noteworthy and impactful projects and enterprise, in his other role as Sunday editor, for the past 12 years. Projects in which he played a significant editing role garnered the Globe three Pulitzers and seven Pulitzers finalists among myriad other recognitions. But most importantly, it was work that made a difference in the life of our community, our state, and the journalists who worked with Mark.
Be kind to him today, as it’s sure to be a difficult one. We will share details of how to celebrate him before too long.
I share the shock and revulsion of every decent person over Donald Trump and JD Vance’s shameful attack Friday on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. We are sliding into authoritarianism, and Trump has made it eminently clear that his role model is Russia’s homicidal dictator, Vladimir Putin.
There are any number of places you can go for analysis that’s sharper and better-informed than mine, but I do what to share a few tidbits I’ve gleaned in my reading over the past day.
Among the more interesting questions is whether this happened spontaneously or if Trump and Vance ambushed Zelenskyy. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic argues for the latter (gift link). His evidence: the very fact that Vance spoke up, which was not something he would normally be expected to do and was almost certainly scripted in advance. Nichols writes:
Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio — in theory, America’s top diplomat — was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.
Also of note is that New York Times political reporter Peter Baker is speaking truth to power. Baker often gets criticized for showing Trump too much deference and normalizing his sociopathic behavior. On Wednesday, though, Baker compared Trump’s treatment of the media to Putin’s during his early days of establishing his authority. Baker was covering Moscow at that time, and he said Trump’s banishment of The Associated Press over the news agency’s refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” was reminiscent of Putin’s efforts to mold “a collection of compliant reporters who knew to toe the line or else they would pay a price.”
Baker added we’re still a long way from Trump ordering that anti-regime journalists be poisoned. But it was a harsh characterization of Trump from someone who usually likes to keep his options open. I’d say there’s no going back.
And indeed, Baker brought the truth with him again on Friday, writing this as a riposte to Trump’s invocation of “the Russia hoax” in his meeting with Zelenskyy. Baker says:
In fact, the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was no hoax and concluded definitively that Mr. Putin ordered an intelligence operation to tilt the election eight years ago to Mr. Trump. Although Mr. Mueller said in his final report in 2019 that “the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges,” he made clear that Mr. Trump’s campaign benefited from Russian assistance.
Baker could have gone one step further and pointed out that Mueller may well have charged Trump with criminal acts were it not for guidance from the Justice Department that a sitting president is exempt. Still, good for Baker for reminding everyone that the 2016 Trump campaign was awash in Russian influence.
Finally, Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen, an enthusiastic Trumper, wrote an embarrassing column (gift link if you’re interested) on Thursday headlined “Trump just dealt Russia a devastating blow,” with the subhead “A deal for Ukraine’s minerals could effectively end the war.” That deal, of course, was what Zelenskyy had supposedly come to the White House to sign, only to be sandbagged by Trump and Vance.
So how did Thiessen react? Naturally, he took to Twitter and blasted Zelenskyy, writing:
There was no ambush. Z was set up for success. All he had to do was not get into a public fight and sign the minerals deal. Not hard. A lot of work went into making a successful moment possible and he blew it and then refused to apologize.
Thiessen has been at the Post for years, so you can’t blame this on Jeff Bezos’ edict that the Post’s opinion section is going full MAGA. But this is the sort of garbage you can expect will be rewarded, while the future of liberal columnists like Dana Milbank, Ruth Marcus and Jonathan Capehart is left very much in doubt.
The Mississippi judge who ordered a newspaper to remove an editorial from its website has reversed herself. But this is hardly a victory for freedom of the press.
Judge Crystal Wise Martin rescinded her temporary restraining order after the owner of The Clarksdale Press Register and the board of commissioners in that city agreed to settle a dispute that had resulted in a libel suit being filed. The commissioners agreed to drop the suit while Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, said the paper will publish a less incendiary version of the editorial, according to Michael Levenson of The New York Times (gift link).
That does not change the reality that Judge Martin leaped in to help city officials by censoring the newspaper, even though the First Amendment protects libelous materials from being subjected to prior restraint. Libel can, of course, be punished after the fact through a civil suit, although government agencies cannot sue for libel.
The editorial, headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” took city officials to task “for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.”
