I’m heading out for a family wedding in a little while, but the media news keeps coming. Here are three stories you should be aware of.
📰 Trump backs down. “The federal government says it will drop its subpoenas compelling New York Times reporters to testify about anonymous sources in a case that involved President Donald Trump’s claims about a Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet” (CNN). My earlier coverage.
📰 Mass. Senate to boost public records. “Top Senate Democrats signaled Thursday they will seek a vote next week on legislation that would, like a bill passed last month in the House, subject both the governor’s office and the Legislature to some kind of public records framework, taking aim at the same topic already targeted by a question on the November ballot” (CommonWealth Beacon).
📰 Journalism cuts at UMass Dartmouth. “Student journalists at UMass Dartmouth are speaking out about what they say may be unfair treatment, or even retribution, after the university’s only journalism professor was let go — two months after a university dean wrote that the professor’s contract extension was already ‘approved’” (New Bedford Light).
One of several planes that have been used as Air Force One. Photo (cc) 2015 by Gage Skidmore.
In the waning days of the last Congress in December 2024, a Republican senator killed efforts to pass a federal shield law that would have protected journalists from being forced to identify their anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents.
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The so-called PRESS Act, which had passed the House unanimously, died when Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas — acting at the behest of Donald Trump, who’d just been re-elected — objected to an attempt to pass it by unanimous consent. Cotton said that passage would turn senators “into the active accomplice of deep-state leakers, traitors and criminals, along with the America-hating and fame-hungry journalists who help them out.”
Now we see the consequences of Cotton’s recklessness. Michael M. Grynbaum reports in The New York Times that three of the five Times journalists who exposed security problems on the new Air Force One — a corrupt gift to Trump from the Qatari government — received subpoenas ordering them to reveal their sources.
New Jersey Superior Court Judge Thomas McCloskey. Official photo via the New Jersey Globe.
It’s not a good day for the First Amendment, as four New York Times journalists have been subpoenaed in connection with their report (sub. req.) that Donald Trump’s new Air Force One plane — a gift that he corruptly accepted from the Qatari government — lacks important security features.
The journalists have been called to testify before a federal grand jury on Wednesday. Although the exact nature of the inquiry hasn’t been revealed, it’s probably an attempt by the Trump regime to determine who leaked the information to the Times.
This morning, though, I want to call your attention to a more blatant violation of the First Amendment: a judge’s demand that a New Jersey newspaper remove school security footage from its YouTube channel and refrain even from writing about it. On Thursday, the judge softened his order slightly but then extended it to all news outlets.
Federal agents looking for David Streever at his home in Rochester, N.Y. Photo via Syracuse.com.
Here we go again. Last week Michelle Breidenbach of Syracuse.com reported that a poll worker in Syracuse, New York, had been handed a threatening letter by two federal agents.
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The letter, which claimed she had endangered ICE personnel, was almost certainly the result of her having written an Instagram post calling on Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Minneapolis protester Renee Good, to be indicted. Ross had already been publicly identified in the press. (The Syracuse incident was the subject of my newsletter last week for paid supporters, which I’m now offering for free.)
Now we learn that two federal agents showed up at a home in Rochester, New York, last Tuesday to deliver a warning about an email that David Streever had sent to Todd Lyons last February. At that time Lyons was the interim director of ICE; he’s since left that post. Breidenbach reports that Streever was on vacation in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter, so the letter was left with his wife, Hilary Brandt Streever, an Episcopal priest.
Prairieland Detention Facility. Photo via the Texas Immigration Law Council.
Draconian sentences handed down against protesters at an ICE facility in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are being characterized as an abridgment of their First Amendment rights. The reason: Among the bill of particulars used against them in court were anarchist zines in their possession that they tried to hide from authorities.
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But though the case raises serious questions about the proportionality of their sentences, it’s also a lot more complicated than that given that a police officer who responded to the scene was shot in the neck by one of the protesters. Benjamin Song, who was convicted of attempted murder, was sentenced to 100 years in prison. The officer recovered.
I want to call your attention to a bill in the U.S. House that would severely restrict the books that are available to students in public schools, either in the classroom or in school libraries. I don’t know whether there’s a serious chance of its being enacted into law, but it’s bad news, and it needs to be quashed at the earliest opportunity.
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The proposal, H.R. 7661, is called the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act. It would “prohibit the use of funds provided … to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.” It’s cosponsored by 22 House members, all Republicans.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Photo (cc) 2023 by BruceSchaff.
Donald Trump and his acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, are targeting The Wall Street Journal in an effort to learn the identity of sources who leaked information to its journalists about internal dissent over the war in Iran, according to CNN reporters Hannah Rabinowitz and Kaitlan Collins. Trump himself has reportedly told Blanche that reporters for the Journal and other news organizations committed “treason.” More about that below, but first: How did we get here?
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In October 2022, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland issued guidelines that severely restricted the conditions under which the Justice Department could seek to force journalists to identify anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents.
Garland’s action was intended as a response to the discovery that Justice had secretly obtained phone records of three Washington Post reporters during Trump’s first term. In fact, though, presidents had been pursuing reporters over leaks for years. Journalists were threatened with jail under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Garland’s order reversed actions taken during the early months of Joe Biden’s administration as well.
Despite the Trump regime’s ongoing attempts to dismantle the First Amendment, there are important checks that remain in place. Libel protections against frivolous lawsuits remain strong — as long as news organizations use them rather than caving in to Donald Trump’s threats. Prior restraint is almost unheard of.
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One aspect of press freedom that has been left outside the walls of the First Amendment, though, is a recognition that journalists need to protect their anonymous sources and confidential documents. Forty-nine states, including Massachusetts, provide some protection. But the federal government does not. And one of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first actions after Trump returned to the White House was to weaken Justice Department guidelines put in place by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, to make it easier for the government to demand access to that information.
FBI Director Kash Patel’s $250 million libel suit against The Atlantic may prove to be nothing more than bluster. Nevertheless, it’s already raised some interesting issues about ethics and defamation law, and I thought it would be useful to walk through some of them here.
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Patel sued after Sarah Fitzpatrick reported Friday that Patel’s tenure at the FBI has been marred by excessive drinking, lapses in judgment and a shocking lack of discipline. The story, she writes, was based on “more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.” There are no named sources who say they’ve had first-hand knowledge of Patel’s alleged misbehavior. Still, that’s a lot of sources.
Ruins of the Library of Pantainos in Athens, Greece. Photo (cc) 2018 by Michael Kogan.
Has the Internet Archive reached the end of the line? The 30-year-old nonprofit, which has saved and made searchable more than a trillion webpages, has proved itself to be of enormous value over the years.
I’ve used it to track changes in reporting, including this blog post about The New York Times’ shifting coverage of an explosion at Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in the days after Hamas’ October 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. The Times and other news organizations initially reported that Israeli forces had bombed the hospital, but they later had to walk back that unverified claim.
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The Internet Archive is also home to The Boston Phoenix’s online digital and print archives thanks to an agreement that it made with Northeastern University, which acquired the Phoenix’s intellectual property after the legendary alt-weekly went out of business in 2013. (Note: I was a longtime staff columnist for the Phoenix, and I helped arrange the donation to Northeastern.)
Now, though, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, which reproduces web content from years past, are facing an existential threat. News organizations ranging from the Times to USA Today are inserting code into their sites that blocks the Archive from crawling their content, mainly to prevent AI companies from accessing their journalism without permission.
As Katie Knibbs reports for Wired, the irony is that USA Today recently published an important piece of investigative journalism documenting ICE detention statistics that wouldn’t have been possible without the Archive. Knibbs writes:
According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is helping to lead a signature drive in support of the Archive, compares the publishers’ actions to “a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper,” according to a recent EFF article by Joe Mullin, who writes:
For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive’s crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.
This is not the first time the Archive has run into legal problems. One major challenge was of its own making: a project begun during the COVID pandemic to make books available for free without permission and without any compensation to publishers or authors. Not surprisingly, the Archive lost that case in a federal appeals court in 2024. As I wrote in describing that decision: “The Archive claimed that it was in compliance with copyright law because it limited e-book borrowing to correspond with physical books that it had in its collection or that was owned by one of its partner libraries. That’s not the way it works, though.”
The current threat involves the right of publishers’ to make the content available as they see fit, which they have a legal right to do. They are under no obligation to let the Internet Archive repurpose it. Ideally, they will come to understand the incalculable damage they are doing.
As EFF’s Mullin puts it: “There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.”
