By Dan Kennedy • Tracking the future of local news and other passions since 2005
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In 2020, Massachusetts took what was billed as a major step forward in holding police officers accountable. Following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the state created the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission “to improve policing and enhance public confidence in law enforcement by implementing a fair process for mandatory certification, discipline, and training for all peace officers in the Commonwealth.”
But according to an investigation by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, the POST Commission has not collected the employment data it needs to do its job. The story, by BINJ editorial director Chris Faraone and Sam Stecklow, an investigative journalist currently on a fellowship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute of Chicago, found that Mass. POST and its director, Enrique Zuniga, made a series of decisions that experts say undermine the agency’s mission. Faraone and Stecklow write:
Despite passing regulations that instruct it otherwise, POST’s database does not include the full employment history of all of the officers that are going through the state’s recertification process — only for officers who have had discipline sustained against them. This prevents the press and public from analyzing data about what are often known as “wandering cops,” who transfer between departments after committing misconduct.
Employment history data are basic information that 27 other states around the country, including Vermont, have released to a national reporting project.
“It doesn’t make any sense that the previous employment of these officers wouldn’t be tracked and recorded if the ultimate goal was to prevent police misconduct from occurring,” Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition,” is quoted as saying. “We’re only getting half the story without this information.”
Over the course of 3,500 words, Faraone and Stecklow go into great detail in explaining what data are missing and what the implications might be. As for the POST Commission, it has earned a New England Muzzle Award for only partially lifting the veil of secrecy that protects police officers who’ve been accused of misconduct.
The story, by the way, is the product of a partnership between BINJ and the Invisible Institute that Faraone explains here. Their investigation is being published not just by BINJ’s HorizonMass affiliate but also by The Shoestring in Western Massachusetts, Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World newsletter, and about a half-dozen hyperlocal weeklies and other publications.
And lest we overlook the mutual backscratching opportunities here, I’ve interviewed BINJ and HorizonMass co-founder Jason Pramas on “What Works,” our podcast about the future of local news, while Faraone and Stecklow give a shoutout to the Muzzle Awards in their article.
In the weeks after President Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 presidential debate, there were several crucial data points. His interviews with George Stephanopoulos and Lester Holt, which did little to restore confidence in his abilities to think and communicate clearly. A Wall Street Journal story on how his staff was stage-managing his decline. A New York Times op-ed by the actor George Clooney, a longtime Biden friend and supporter, urging the president to step aside.
So I don’t want to make too much of a story by Olivia Nuzzi, published in early July by New York magazine, which described Biden as increasingly out of it and obviously unfit to stay in the campaign. But I will tell you that it made an impression on me at the time, combining first-hand observation and quotes from people close to Biden. Yes, the quotes were anonymous, a fact that is now being added to the bill of particulars against Nuzzi. But haven’t we all gotten accustomed to that? Did anyone seriously expect Biden’s friends to step forward and attach their names to what they were saying — other than Clooney?
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Here’s an excerpt from Nuzzi’s story that describes — rather compellingly, I think — the rising fears among Biden’s friends and supporters:
When they discussed what they knew, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.
Now we know that Nuzzi’s entire article was corrupt. That is, it’s suffused with a kind of wrongdoing that’s separate from fabulism or plagiarism, two species of journalistic ethics violations that we’re all familiar with. Nuzzi’s piece might be entirely accurate as well as truthful in its judgments and conclusions. But we don’t know. We’ll never know.
You probably have heard that Nuzzi was involved in some sort of sex scandal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was, by turns, a Democratic and then an independent candidate for president before ending his ridiculous campaign and endorsing Trump. The details of the scandal aren’t important; they reportedly involve nude photos, maybe sexting. What matters is Nuzzi was writing that Biden was too infirm to stand for re-election while she was sexually involved with one of his rivals.
The story about Nuzzi and Kennedy was broken last Thursday by independent media reporter Oliver Darcy in his newsletter, Status. Darcy reported that Nuzzi had been placed on leave, and he published this statement from New York magazine:
Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.
Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.
No evidence of bias? I just pointed out massive evidence of bias. You can’t report on one candidate when you’re sexually involved with another. Or as the late New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal once memorably put it: “I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.” Much of what Nuzzi wrote about Biden was obvious to anyone who had watched Biden fumbling and stumbling on TV. But did she lay it on a little thick to help Kennedy? Did she make Biden seem more infirm than he really was? Or was she truly able to separate the personal from the professional? Who knows?
The last Nuzzi story I encountered was just a couple of weeks ago. It was a long interview with Trump that struck me as interesting, offering some insights into Trump’s thinking following the first assassination attempt, but weirdly soft and sympathetic. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now we know that she was involved, or had been involved, with someone who was angling for a high position in a possible Trump administration. Again — no bias? Seriously? By the way, I listened to her Trump profile on The New York Times’ audio app, and I’m sure Times editors are thrilled to have learned that they provided Nuzzi with an additional platform she didn’t deserve.
Unlike some observers who’ve been piling on Nuzzi, I knew nothing about her until last week except that was young (31) and employed by a magazine that I thought had high standards. I remember with relish a story she wrote several years ago about traipsing through New York City with a clearly inebriated Rudy Giuliani. I knew she had a reputation for being extraordinarily talented.
One story of hers I have not read is her profile of Kennedy from last November, which is reportedly what led to whatever it was that came next.
On a personal level, what a mess. The oft-married Kennedy has been caught cheating (I guess?) on his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, while Nuzzi was until recently engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza, who lost a previous job at The New Yorker over some MeToo allegations.
But you can get caught up on all the tabloid details elsewhere. What matters is that Nuzzi, one of our highest-profile political writers, wrote two long profiles this year that were so enmeshed in her undisclosed (at the time) conflict of interest that we now have no way of knowing whether they were on the level — or were instead hopelessly compromised.
Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe has an interesting story exploring why many startup local news organizations are taking a different approach to how they cover police news. Rather than running the police log verbatim, including the names of people charged with minor offenses, they’re taking care to focus only on crime stories that have a real impact on people’s lives. He writes:
As longtime newspapers in Massachusetts and across the country continue to disappear, a new crop of online news sites are looking to win over audiences and reimagine how they share police log information. Some have continued the news industries’ tradition of publishing police logs to give people information about public safety, but limit what details they share. Others have decided not to post the logs in an attempt to move away from a reliance on unchallenged police accounts and avoid potentially contributing to a misperception about crime in their communities.
This is an issue I’ve been following intermittently since the 1980s, when I worked for a small paper whose editor-owner would not publish the names of people who’d been arrested for minor offenses. All of us younger reporters in the newsroom thought he was wrong, but I later came to see the wisdom of his approach. After all, “minimize harm” is one of the four principles contained within the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.
Here are three pieces I’ve written over the years that expand on Ryan’s reporting. I hope you find them of some interest.
I freely confess to paying more attention to polls than I should. Multiple times a day I check in with FiveThirtyEight, still going strong under the auspices of ABC News despite founder Nate Silver’s departure, to see what the odds are that Kamala Harris will prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House. (I’m writing this Thursday evening, and the site gives Harris a 61% chance of winning and Trump 39%. Oh, no! Harris was at 64% earlier in the day!)
Silver himself is still at it, and though I don’t pay the subscription fee I’d need to see what his odds are, his analysis of the polls shows that Harris has a 2.7% lead nationally and — more important — small leads in the crucial swing states of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well as a basket of bluer swing states.
What I want to call your attention to here, though, is a fascinating analysis in The Washington Post showing that Harris does much better when voters are asked not who they’re voting for but who they think is going to win. Aaron Blake writes (free link) that academic studies show such a finding can be a good predictor of who is going to win — maybe even better than the direct-question approach:
[S]ome research suggests that this is actually a good measure of where things might end up — possibly even a better measure than merely asking people whom they intend to vote for.
The reason is that it involves people accounting for the preferences of the people around them — turning them into “mini-anthropologists,” in the words of longtime Gallup editor in chief Frank Newport — and possibly even hinting at their own hidden or subconscious preferences.
How pronounced is the effect? The who-do-you-think-will-win question has Harris prevailing by double digits in some recent polls, and similar questions in previous races helped predict President Barack Obama’s re-election victory over Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden’s narrower-than-expected defeat of Trump in 2020.
None of this matters, of course. But for those of us looking for a sign — any sign — that Trump’s existential threat to the country will finally be brought to an end, it’s worth pondering, and savoring.
A great bookstore is one that introduces you to books that you didn’t know you wanted to read. Amazon doesn’t do that. Most physical bookstores succeed only partially.
Over the summer, though, our travels took us through Manchester, Vermont, where we visited the Northshire Bookstore, an independent outlet that has the advantage of being both enormous and lovingly curated and thus well-stocked with books I might not have heard of. That’s where I discovered Caleb Carr’s “My Beloved Monster,” a memoir about his life with a Siberian cat named Masha.
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When you page through the national and international news, it can sometimes seem like there is nothing going on except the presidential election campaign and the wars in Gaza (as well as the broader region) and Ukraine.
These are, in fact, news developments of monumental importance. But what would we be talking about if these issues were suddenly taken off the table? Once a semester, I ask my media ethics students to identify an undercovered story and explain why it should have gotten more attention.
It’s a big class — 30 students. And they are all smart and idealistic. I could easily highlight every story they found, but here is a representative sample of 11.
• Voting rights for Native Americans. Despite being recognized as U.S. citizens more than 100 years ago, Indigenous Americans in some places still face barriers to voting. Worse, some states are winding the clock backwards by making it more difficult for Native Americans to vote. This important reporting was produced by Carnegie-Knight News21, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available free of charge to other news organizations — including USA Today.
• The dangers of vaccine hesitancy. As I write this, I’m dealing with the after-effects of my Moderna COVID booster, which I got Monday along with a flu shot. Even now, though, I’d much rather put up with a little discomfort than get COVID. Here is a CBS News story that traces the history of vaccines from Benjamin Franklin to Jonas Salk to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s taken his anti-science views mainstream as a presidential candidate and, now, as a Donald Trump surrogate.
• Lost in space. The fate of two astronauts who are stuck on the International Space Station has gotten more attention lately, but it seems like we heard very little for months. I hesitate to call it a crisis, since it doesn’t seem that the two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are in any danger. But according to The New York Times, they will have wait until next year to come home on a SpaceX capsule rather than a Boeing vehicle, as originally planned.
• Let there be (too much) light. The pervasiveness of artificial light harms animals, including those of the human variety, since it’s a major contributor to overwork and maladjusted body clocks. Light pollution makes it more difficult for astronomers to do their jobs and wreaks havoc with the navigation systems of marine animals such as sea turtles. A story in National Geographic lays out the problem and suggests some steps that can be taken to ease it.
• Black women and breast cancer. In the modern media environment, it’s not just news organizations that are producing useful journalism. For instance, a blog post at the Mayo Clinic website informs us that Black women are “41% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women,” even though they are a lower risk. The reason: breast cancer is more likely to be detected in Black women at a later stage, making it more difficult to treat.
• A horrifying protest goes unnoticed. You would think that when someone who demonstrates in favor of Palestinian rights lights himself on fire and dies of his burns, that story would get a great deal of attention. Yet the tragic story of Matt Nelson, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli consulate in Boston on Sept. 11, has attracted little notice. The left-leaning news site Common Dreams covered it, as did the Cape Cod Times, which noted that Nelson had ties to the Cape. Nothing in The Boston Globe, though; NBC Boston ran a brief story, and there was very little else, at least not in the local media.
• A recognition of public service. At a time when working for the government is disparaged, as it has been pretty much since the Reagan era, it’s useful to be reminded of the good work that many public servants perform. The Federal News Network reported last week on the 2024 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, known as the “Sammies,” which recognizes federal employees who have achieved excellence. How did a student find this story? She told me that she was reading The Washington Post and came across a link. The Post, of course, is the hometown paper for the federal government.
• Threatening the right to read. Book-banning doesn’t quite fall into the category of an undercovered story, but we don’t know as much about it as we ought to — especially on the state level and exactly what books are being banned. Word In Black, which describes itself as a “groundbreaking collaboration of 10 legendary Black news publishers,” reports that Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Utah and Tennessee are among the states that have restricted the books that public school students can access related to sex and Black history.
• Trump’s blood lust. This story from Rolling Stone is more than a year and a half old — but that’s what makes it important. As Trump was in the final months of his term in 2020 and early 2021, he embarked on an unprecedented spree of federal executions. As the story puts it, “Before 2020, there had been three federal executions in 60 years. Then Trump put 13 people to death in six months.” The article is behind a paywall (I accessed it through a library database), but for anyone who is horrified by the continued use of the death penalty, it would make sense to be reminded of Trump’s record during the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign.
• A deadly storm in Vietnam. It’s not unusual for our news feeds to be filled with weather-related stories, from the mundane (will it rain this weekend?) to serious coverage of floods and wildfires. Overseas, though, is another matter. Did you know, for instance, that Typhoon Yagi has claimed 143 lives in Vietnam, and many more people are missing? According to The New York Times, Yagi is just the latest example of a storm that was made more extreme because of climate change.
• The war on terror’s awful legacy. As a country, we have moved on from our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without ever coming to terms with the legacy of those conflicts. The New Yorker, with support from the Pulitzer Center, has gone back and reported on war crimes committed by U.S. forces, putting together a database of “the largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 — nearly eight hundred incidents in all.” These incidents include murder, sexual assault and other forms of abuse. It is interesting, to say the least, that Vice President Kamala Harris has gratefully accepted the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of the so-called war on terror. We should not forget what happened during those years.
The Boston Globe has an ethical dilemma on its hands. Segun Oduolowu, who is the host of the Globe’s daily television newscast, “Boston Globe Today,” recently took part in a fundraising call for Vice President Kamala Harris and spoke enthusiastically on behalf of her presidential campaign.
But according to Jennifer Smith of CommonWealth Beacon, the newscast came under the control of the newsroom only recently, after the fundraiser, making it unclear whether Oduolowu violated the paper’s ethical guidelines.
Smith wrote that “the repercussions of his remarks are messy. The call was just two weeks before an internal email announced that the ‘Boston Globe Today’ show would be moving under newsroom control — likely subjecting it to a typical set of journalistic ethics rules.” (Disclosure: I’m a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s editorial advisory board.)
Oduolowu spoke for about seven minutes as part of an “African Diaspora for Harris-Walz” video event. Oduolowu’s remarks start here. Among other things, he said:
November 5, when you go to those polls, make the right decision for not just you, but the people who fought so hard for you to have that opportunity, to be in a call like this, to be in this country, to make that choice and put this woman in office…. I think the choice is simple.
Smith quoted a statement from the Globe that seems carefully worded to distance itself from Oduolowu’s actions without saying explicitly that he’d deviated from any ethical policy:
Boston Globe Media employees are expected to adhere to our company guidelines, standards, and policies which align with their role. In this case, the personal political comments made by an employee were their own and were not endorsed by or reflective of Boston Globe Media, nor were the comments shared via one of our products, platforms, or events.
Frankly, I’m confused. By all appearances, “Boston Globe Today” is an extension of the Globe’s journalism, presented as a newscast and frequently featuring interviews with Globe reporters.
But it does sound like any ambiguities are about to be eliminated, as Smith reports that editor Nancy Barnes sent an email to the staff on Sept. 10 announcing that “Boston Globe Today” would be moved “under the auspices of the newsroom.” The Harris-Walz call on which Oduolowu appeared took place on Aug. 26.
The Dorchester Reporter has published an impassioned editorial about Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s racist, fact-free attacks on the Haitian community. The Reporter is one of Boston’s most vibrant neighborhood weeklies; the editorial is signed by publisher and executive editor Bill Forry, who’s Irish American, and his wife, co-publisher Linda Dorcena Forry, who’s Haitian American. They begin:
Once again, and very likely not for the last time, Haitians find themselves in the crosshairs of the Republican propaganda machinery. This time the slurs pivot on a malicious and utterly racist falsehood involving debunked allegations of migrants making meals of stolen pets in Ohio.
And it’s not just the deranged Donald Trump who is advancing the lies. Republican leaders nationally are engaged in a coordinated assault targeting Haitians specifically.
It’s a disgusting display.
The Dorchester Reporter was founded in 1983 by Bill Forry’s parents, Ed and Mary Forry. The Forrys also publish Boston Irish and the Boston Haitian Reporter.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I fall into our third season with an interview with Mark Henderson, an old friend of the pod and a pioneer in online media. Mark is a journalist and technologist with decades of experience in news. He is the founder and CEO of The 016, a first-of-its-kind news publisher and distributor focused on Worcester, Massachusetts.
Mark worked at the Telegram & Gazette, Worcester’s daily newspaper, from 1990 to 2014. He spent 19 years in the newsroom, rising to the position of assistant sports editor before being named deputy managing editor for technology in 2005. In 2009, he was named digital director, where he launched the first paywall at a New York Times Co. newspaper. He founded the Worcester Sun, a subscription news site that launched in August 2015 and suspended publication in February 2018.
Mark was also one of the very first people we interviewed for our book, “What Works in Community News.” Although Mark is not in the book, I wrote up our conversation for Nieman Lab.
I’ve also got a Quick Take on a report from the Poynter Institute, a leading journalism education organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that offers a clear-eyed assessment of why there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism despite the very real challenges that we still face.
Ellen recounts a Knight Science Journalism Program panel and awards ceremony last week at MIT. The program honored Cicero Independiente, a nonprofit newsroom in the Chicago area. The staff won for an innovative project that examined toxic air.
You can listen to our conversation here and access an AI-generated transcript. You can also subscribe through your favorite podcast app.