Author: Dan Kennedy

Hur lied

Special counsel Robert Hur. Photo (cc) 2021 by Maryland GovPics.

I’m not sure how else we can characterize what happened. Special counsel Robert Hur all but called President Biden senile recently in describing him as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur declined to recommend charges against Biden for keeping classified information in his possession, essentially arguing that it would be cruel to do that to an 81-year-old man in the early stages of dementia. And, of course, the media fell for it.

Now we know that Hur’s report grossly mischaracterized the reality, revealed in the transcripts of Biden’s deposition with prosectors. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy has a good roundup of the media mea culpas, writing:

The acknowledgement from some, but not all, news outlets on Tuesday about the true nature of Biden’s deposition marked another embarrassing moment for the national press, which has floundered at pivotal moments in the lead up to the crucial 2024 presidential election.

The deposition transcripts not only indicated that Biden appeared fairly sharp during his testimony, joking with investigators and retelling stories with granular detail, but that Hur was misleading in how he presented some of the information included in his report.

It’s like a rerun in reverse from 2019, when then-Attorney General Bill Barr put out a summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties that falsely declared Donald Trump had not obstructed justice. It became clear that’s not what Mueller was saying once his full report came out, but truth, boots, etc.

I especially enjoyed this account of Biden’s deposition, from Charlie Savage’s report Tuesday in The New York Times:

“I don’t remember how a beat-up box got in the garage,” he [Biden] said, speculating that someone packing up must have just tossed stuff into it. He added that he had “no goddamn idea” what was in a tranche of files shipped to his house and “didn’t even bother to go through them.”

Who among us?

Now, it has to be said that it was Attorney General Merrick Garland who named Hur, a one-time Trump appointee, as the special counsel. Given Hur’s predictably mendacious performance, I’d say that chances of Garland’s serving in a second Biden administration, should there be one, are nil. And they should be.

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A chain of radio stations is launching online newspapers in 18 (or more?) markets

Photo (cc) 2014 by Robert Ashworth

This one comes in via former WBZ Radio (AM 1030) news director Peter Casey, who’s now a communications consultant and part of the team at the local startup Winchester News. Saga Communications, a Michigan-based company that owns radio stations in 27 secondary markets, is launching digital newspapers in 18 markets by the end of the second quarter, according to the website Inside Radio. Another story says that the outlets will be unveiled “across its entire footprint.” Despite the lack of clarity, it sounds like Saga’s eventual goal is to have an online newspaper anywhere it has radio stations.

Those stations include a number of New England markets: Brattleboro, Vermont; Greenfield, Northampton and Springfield, Massachusetts; Keene and Manchester, New Hampshire; and Portland, Maine. A quick scan of the stations shows that they mostly broadcast music, with formats including country, oldies and adult contemporary. I found a few news-and-talk stations in the mix as well, but they appear to be focused on local issues.

The stations will be based on a pilot that Saga is already publishing in Tennessee called Clarksville Now. A quick glance shows the site is newsy and community-oriented. Katie Gambill, who developed the site and who will be in charge of the rollout, is quoted as saying:

I am excited for the opportunity to spearhead this local online news and community connection site launch in other Saga markets. I honestly believe these local online news sites will help us to better serve and connect with our communities, especially when partnered with the power of radio. I am passionate about this endeavor and dedicated to the success of these sites, in fact, the Brand message for these sites is, “your community connection.”

Saga is a publicly traded company with annual revenues of about $114 million. Although there’s no substitute for local ownership, I think its Clarksville Now-modeled sites will be welcome in most communities. It’s also a great example of how a company that’s successful in one type of media can leverage that success and use it connect with its audience via news and information.

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COVID at 4

It was four years ago today, a Wednesday, that COVID-19 became the central reality of our lives. I had spent the previous week on a reporting trip in Mendocino County, California. Nationally, the news was getting more ominous by the day. We attended a college assembly in a packed, windowless hall, with the usual buffet replaced with boxed lunches as some sort of appeasement to the Gods of Disease.

Word finally came down during our faculty meeting that classes would be canceled starting the next day. That evening, in my graduate ethics seminar, came the triple-header: the NBA suspended its season and sent everyone home from a game in Oklahoma City; Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, announced they’d caught COVID while in Australia; and Donald Trump delivered a speech from the Oval Office that was so unnerving the stock market crashed.

We watched Trump in class. I remember telling my students we’d probably be back in few weeks. Little did we know.

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Talking about ‘What Works in Community News’ with Mike Blinder of ‘E&P Reports’

Ellen Clegg and I are thrilled to be the guests on the new episode of “E&P Reports,” a vodcast hosted by Mike Blinder, the publisher of Editor & Publisher, a venerable magazine and website that covers the news business. We’ve had Mike on our “What Works” podcast, and he is a hoot — witty, engaging and passionate about the future of journalism. You’ll hear those qualities in the questions he asks us about our book, “What Works in Community News.” You can subscribe to the audio-only version of “E&P Reports” on any of the major podcast platforms.

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Public radio cutbacks hit Colorado as 15 people lose their jobs

Colorado Public Radio executive editor Kevin Dale. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.

No sooner had I written last week that Colorado Public Radio may be the largest news organization in that state than deep cuts were announced. Fifteen jobs were eliminated, which, according to CPR’s Ben Markus, make up “the largest cut to the public broadcaster’s payroll in at least a quarter of a century.”

“I hate to see talented colleagues lose their positions for financial reasons,” Kevin Dale, CPR News’ executive editor, was quoted as saying. “CPR News has been growing into a powerful news source for the past six years. Our mission has been to become an urgent newsroom that also has time to devote to enterprise reporting and accountability reporting, and we remain dedicated to that.”

According to Markus, the cuts follow years of growth, from 48 employees in 2006 to 214 in 2022. When I interviewed Dale in 2021, he told me that about 65 of those employees were journalists. CPR had acquired a city-based digital site in 2019 called Denverite, and its staff members were part of that total. Unlike WAMU in Washington, which is shutting down its DCist site following a similar acquisition, CPR will keep Denverite going.

Although CPR’s woes are reportedly due to changes in audience behavior as podcasts from the likes of The New York Times and Spotify have cut into listenership, Markus’ story also suggests that the operation had been hiring beyond its means and noted that it had saddled itself with a new, yet-to-be-finished downtown headquarters last year costing more than $8 million.

The cuts also come amid austerity measures at several other public radio operations including WAMU, WBUR in Boston and NPR itself. Public radio is our leading free source of high-quality news and for years seemed to be immune from the headwinds that were devastating legacy newspapers. Corey Hutchins, who produces the newsletter “Inside the News in Colorado,” wrote that CPR “stood out as a bright spot amid a weakened local news landscape.” Hutchins is a journalism professor at Colorado College in Colorado Springs and works out of space refurbished by CPR as part of its earlier acquisition of KRCC.

I interviewed Dale in 2021 for Ellen Clegg’s and my book, “What Works in Community News.” Dale, who had previously worked at The Denver Post, described his mission as transforming CPR into a leading news organization by concentrating on in-depth journalism.

“Our goal was to become a primary news source,” Dale said, explaining that his operation tried to offer important contextual stories rather than breaking news. “I’ve been very careful all along to use the article ‘a’ instead of ‘the,’ because I think ‘the’ has connotations that end up in practices that we’re not interested in,” he said. “We’re not going to be out covering a major house fire or a major traffic jam unless it has implications beyond that.”

CPR is an anchor of the Denver and Colorado media ecosystem. I hope this proves to be a temporary setback and that the operation can soon begin growing once again.

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Joe Fitzgerald dies at 79

Joe Fitzgerald, a Boston Herald sports columnist who later took up conservative opinionating, has died at the age of 79. He was pretty controversial back in the day, but people who knew him always said he was a nice guy. Best wishes to his family and friends. Joe Dwinell has an appreciation at the Herald. If you’re blocked by the paywall, here is the death notice at Legacy.com.

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Emily Rooney talks about local TV news, ‘Beat the Press’ and holding the media to account

Emily Rooney. Photo via the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

On our latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Emily Rooney, the longtime host of “Beat the Press,” an award-winning program on WGBH-TV (Channel 2). I was a panelist on the show, a weekly roundtable that offered local and national media criticism. It had a 22-year run but was canceled in 2021. You can watch the 20th-anniversary episode here. The show, which is much missed by many former viewers, had a brief second life as a podcast.

Emily has got serious television news cred. She arrived at WGBH from the Fox Network in New York, where she oversaw political coverage, including the 1996 presidential primaries, national conventions, and presidential election. Before that, she was executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight” with Peter Jennings. She also worked at WCVB-TV in Boston for 15 years, from 1979–’93, as news director and as assistant news director — a time when WCVB was regularly hailed as the home of the best local newscast in the U.S.

“Beat the Press” may be no more, but there’s a revival of interest in responsible media criticism from inside the newsroom. Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr recently wrote an op-ed calling for the restoration of a public editor position at The New York Times, The Boston Globe and other news outlets.

In our Quick Takes, I’ve got an update on one of our favorite topics — pink slime. Wired has a wild story out of rural Iowa involving a Linux server in Germany, a Polish website and a Chinese operation called “the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”

Ellen recounts a legal saga in Southeastern Minnesota involving the sale of a newspaper group and allegations of intellectual property theft. It’s all about a single used computer and its role in creating a media startup.”

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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A passionate President Biden delivers the best SOTU address I can remember

Via the White House YouTube channel

President Biden delivered what I thought was the best State of the Union address I can remember. He was energized, passionate, funny and focused. He mixed it up with Republicans on issues ranging from Ukraine to reproductive rights and, aside from unfortunately adopting Marjorie Taylor Greene’s slur while answering back at her (he referred to undocumented immigrants as “illegals”), he escaped unscathed.

For those of us who look back to Barack Obama as the gold standard, well, the SOTU doesn’t often produce a memorable speech. Obama’s two for the ages are his address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and his eulogy at Mother Emanuel AME Church in 2015. No one remembers his SOTU speeches.

We were also treated an an exceedingly weird performance by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who sat there looking miserable, trying to be impassive, but reflexively nodding from time to time as though he agreed with Biden. I don’t know how to describe Vice President Kamala Harris except to say that she was resplendent and may have improved her political standing through body language alone.

I caught a little bit of the commentary by the “PBS NewsHour” folks afterwards, and the theme they seemed to be settling into was that Biden’s speech was overly political. Good grief. These are the times we live in. Jonathan Capehart put it well, though, calling it “an epic speech” and that Democrats “will be energized by the cranky grandpa.”

Yes, they will. The polling for Biden has been awful lately as the media, and especially The New York Times, have obsessed over the president’s age. Maybe the SOTU will be a turning point.

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