Judge Crystal Wise Martin is sworn in by her mother, retired Judge Patricia Wise, in 2019. Photo via the Mississippi Office of the Courts.
In 1971, after a federal court stopped The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court was so alarmed at that naked act of censorship that it took up the case in a matter of weeks. On a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that the Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and others could resume publishing, though they might face prosecution for revealing classified information. (They didn’t.)
In 1979, after a small magazine in Wisconsin called The Progressive said it intended to publish an article revealing some details about how to manufacture an atomic bomb, a federal judge stepped in and said no — but so agonized over his censorious act that he all but begged the magazine and the government to reach a compromise.
Then there’s Judge Crystal Wise Martin of Mississippi. On Wednesday, Martin issued a temporary restraining order requiring The Clarksdale Press Register to take down an editorial from its website. According to Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press, 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.”
The city had sued the Press Register, claiming that the editorial was libelous and that it “chilled and hindered” the council’s work. Mayor Chuck Espy was quoted in the AP story as saying the editorial had unfairly implied that officials had violated the law. He cited a section of the editorial that asked, “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kick-back [see update below] from the community?”
Less than two weeks after state Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone reversed herself and ruled that Boston magazine reporter Gretchen Voss did not have to turn over notes she took during an off-the-record interview with murder suspect Karen Read, another judge is demanding that a journalist assist prosecutors in a different murder case.
On Monday, Superior Court Judge William Sullivan ordered that The New Yorker produce audio recordings of interviews with the husband of Lindsay Clancy, who’s been charged in the killing of her three children at their Duxbury home.
And there’s more, according to Boston Globe reporter Travis Andersen, who writes that the magazine will be required to produce “all audio recordings of Patrick Clancy, two of his relatives, and two friends who spoke to the magazine for a story that ran in October” as well as “relevant interview notes, text messages, voicemails, and emails in possession of the publisher or reporter Eren Orbey.” Orbey’s story on the Clancy case was published last October.
I would assume that The New Yorker and its corporate owner, Condé Nast, will appeal, although the Globe story doesn’t address that issue. Last Friday, Charlie McKenna of MassLive reported that Judge Sullivan had allowed the prosecution’s motion for The New Yorker’s reporting materials and that Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, did not object. The magazine had not responded to the demand, a prosecutor told Sullivan.
There is no First Amendment right for reporters to protect their confidential sources or, as in this case, their reporting materials. Massachusetts does not have a shield law, and protections based on state court precedent are regarded as weak.
The problem is that forcing reporters to turn over their notes, recordings and other materials transforms them into an arm of the prosecution and interferes with their ability to do serve as an independent monitor of power. Sullivan made the wrong call, and I hope he — like Judge Cannone — has second thoughts.
Media notes
• That didn’t take long. After Google Maps changed “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America,” opponents of Donald Trump took to social media to announce that they were moving to other platforms. Well, on Tuesday evening Microsoft and Apple began to follow suit. Honestly, no one should have been surprised.
• The fracturing continues. BuzzFeed may become the latest company to unveil an alternative to Twitter/X, according to Max Tani of Semafor, as it seeks to offer “an alternative to the rightward, masculine drift of American public culture.” Well, good luck with that. After shutting down its news division, BuzzFeed is now cutting its HuffPost subsidiary. I have to say that Bluesky is working pretty well for me as my main short-form social-media outlet.
• Back to his roots. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is demanding answers from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about ads running on Instagram for a program that uses artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of real people. The ads violate Meta’s terms of service, reports Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media. But let’s not forget that Zuckerberg created a predecessor site to Facebook as a way to rate the hotness of Harvard women.
Justice Clarence Thomas. Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Donald Trump may find that there are limits to how far he can go in tearing down the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. Adam Liptak reports in The New York Times (gift link) that the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t seem inclined to revisit the libel protections of New York Times v. Sullivan, writing:
[I]t was notable that just five days before President Trump took office last month, the Supreme Court seemed to go out of its way to signal that it is not ready to embrace one of his most dearly held goals: to “open up our libel laws” and overrule the Sullivan decision.
That signal came in the form of an approving aside in a routine decision by Justice Brett Kavanaugh for Sullivan’s requirement that public officials must offer “clear and convincing evidence” in order to win a libel case — a higher barrier than a “preponderance of the evidence,” that standard that applies in most civil cases.
The heart of Times v. Sullivan, a unanimous decision handed down in 1964, is that public officials must prove “actual malice” in order to win a libel case. That is, they most show knowing falsehood or “reckless disregard” for the truth. Subsequent decisions extended the Sullivan standard to public figures and narrowed the definition of “reckless disregard.”
The decision was intended to shut down a wave of libel suits brought by racist Southern officials aimed at silencing coverage of the Civil Rights Movement. The Sullivan standard also enabled investigative reporting on matters such as the Watergate scandal, since publishers no longer had to worry that small, inadvertent errors would bring about financial ruin.
Press-freedom advocates have been holding their breath since Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that he would, if given the chance, overturn the Sullivan decision and Justice Neil Gorsuch said he favored severely curtailing it. As I wrote for GBH News in 2021:
What seems impossible today may become reality in the not-too-distant future. Changes to libel protections that we had long taken for granted are starting to look inevitable, especially in the hands of a Supreme Court built by Trump and Mitch McConnell.
But maybe Sullivan is secure, at least for now. “All of this suggests that there remain only two votes to overturn the Sullivan decision,” Liptak writes, “well short of the four it takes to add a case to the court’s docket, much less the five required to prevail on the merits.”
Still, threats remain. Liptak observes that numerous challenges to Sullivan, citing Thomas and Gorsuch, have been filed in the past few years. Just last week, casino mogul Steve Wynn filed an appeal in his ongoing libel suit against The Associated Press and asked that Times v. Sullivan be overturned. Howard Stutz of The Nevada Independent quotes David Orentlicher, a law professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who says:
This would be a dangerous time to revisit the protection of the free press. Unfortunately, we have an administration that has decided to target the press and others who write critical commentary. There is a blurring of lines between government officials and private persons who have power. This is exactly the wrong time to weaken the protection of the press.
Moreover, none of this does anything to stop deep-pocketed libel defendants such as ABC and possibly CBS from giving in to bogus suits filed by Trump in order to advance their business interests. So far, at least, the Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett, are holding firm in the face of Trump’s most ridiculous lawsuit — that they somehow engaged in “consumer fraud” by publishing the results of a poll that turned out to be way off the mark. The pollster, J. Ann Selzer, is being sued as well. Trump has been joined by a right-wing organization called the Center for American Rights, as Robin Opsahl reports for the Iowa Capital Dispatch.
Perhaps a signal from the Supreme Court that the protections of Times v. Sullivan remain secure will serve to stiffen the backbone of news organizations and their parent companies. If they’re not willing to fight for press freedoms that they already have, then the Sullivan decision is worth very little.
FCC chair Brendan Carr. Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore.
Donald Trump is unleashing so much chaos in service to his authoritarian agenda that it is literally impossible to keep up. So today let’s just look at how Trump is threatening the broadcast news media.
Trump’s tool in this battle is Brendan Carr, whom he appointed to the Federal Communications Commission in 2017 and then recently elevated to the chairmanship. There are currently four members of the FCC — two Republicans, two Democrats and one vacancy, which Trump will presumably fill in the near future.
Not that the current tie matters. Carr helped author Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term that Trump said he knew nothing about during the campaign. Among other things, Carr wrote that the FCC chair has extra special powers that the other members of the commission lack. Thus Carr is large and in charge, at least until someone with power challenges him.
I want to share with you just three actions that Carr has taken during his brief time as chair, all of which represent a threat to the media’s ability to provide us with the news and information we need in a democratic society.
◘ First, he is helping Trump with his bogus $10 billion lawsuit against CBS. Trump is suing the network over an interview that “60 Minutes” conducted last fall with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, claiming that the program was edited to make Harris sound more coherent than she really was.
CBS responded that it edits all of its recorded interviews, and that there was nothing unusual about the way it handled its conversation with Harris. (And really? If you watched her debate Trump or listened to her long, unedited conversations with Howard Stern and Alexandra Cooper, you know she has no problem speaking extemporaneously.) Nevertheless, the network may be on the verge of settling the lawsuit, perhaps to ease the regulatory path for CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to merge with Skydance, as Alena Botros writes for Fortune.
Carr, for his part, placed the FCC’s heavy thumb on the scale by ordering CBS to turn over the raw footage and transcripts of the Harris interview, thus making use of a public agency’s regulatory authority to help Trump do his dirty work, as David Folkenflik reports for NPR. To be clear: Trump would likely have gotten those materials anyway in the course of pre-trial discovery. Carr’s actions serve the purpose of amplifying Trump’s fact-free claim that there was something corrupt about how the interview was edited.
“60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens has said he will not apologize as part of any settlement, according to Michael Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times. Which raises a question: Will he resign? And if he does, will others follow him out the door?
◘ Second, and speaking of NPR, Carr has announced that he’s investigating NPR and PBS to see whether the public broadcasters’ underwriting practices violate their noncommercial mandate.
According to Liam Reilly of CNN, Carr is “concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” adding: “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
Well, guess what? A lot of underwriting announcements on NPR and PBS do seem like commercials. They’re more restrained than what’s on commercial television and radio, and tbut when a cruise line pops up before or after the “PBS NewsHour,” or when a rug company’s sponsorship is heard on WBUR Radio, it’s because they want you to take a cruise or buy a rug.
Public broadcasters have to get their money from somebody, and it can’t all come from viewers (and listeners) like you. Very little in the way of tax revenues support PBS and NPR. The rest of it has to come from foundation grants and corporate underwriting. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the BNSF Railway notice that sometimes appears on the “NewsHour,” but that’s because I like trains.
What Carr’s doing is pure harassment.
◘ Third, Carr said last week that the FCC is investigating a San Francisco radio station for the offense of committing journalism. Garrett Leahy reports in The San Francisco Standard that KCBS revealed the location of agents from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) and identified their unmarked vehicles in a place “known for violent gang activity.”
“We have sent a letter of inquiry, a formal investigation into that matter, and they have just a matter of days left to respond to that inquiry and explain how this could possibly be consistent with their public-interest obligations,” said Carr, who made his remarks during an appearance on — where else? — Fox News.
According to Leahy, KCBS declined to comment. But Juan Carlos Lara of public radio station KQED interviewed David Loy, legal director of the California-based First Amendment Coalition, who said:
Law enforcement operations, immigration or otherwise, are matters of public interest. People generally have the right to report this on social media and in print and so on. So it’s very troubling because it’s possible the FCC is potentially being weaponized to crack down on reporting that the administration simply just doesn’t like.
No doubt there will be much more to say about Carr in the months ahead. For now, it’s enough to observe that he is off to a predictably ominous start.
Some very good news for freedom of the press in Massachusetts: Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone has ruled that Boston magazine reporter Gretchen Voss will not be compelled to produce notes she took from an off-the-record interview with murder suspect Karen Read (earlier coverage).
The ruling was first reported by Lance Reynolds of the Boston Herald.
Cannone’s decision reverses an order she had issued in December that would have required Voss to turn over her notes. In so doing, the judge found that those notes “are of a different character than the unredacted recordings of the ‘on the record’ interviews produced pursuant to the Court’s previous order.” Cannone continues:
Voss has articulated a compelling argument that requiring disclosure of the notes poses a greater risk to the free flow of information than the other materials produced. Conversely, the Commonwealth [that is, the prosecution] has not demonstrated to the Court that its need for the handwritten notes, separate from the audio recordings, outweighs the danger posed to the public interest in the free flow of information.
What Cannone is referring to is her earlier decision to allow the prosecution access to recordings Voss had made in the course of interviewing Read. The judge’s new decision, handed down on Friday, pertains to handwritten notes that Voss had taken while conducting an off-the-record interview with Read in June 2023. In an affidavit, Voss said:
The entire meeting was off the record; I agreed in advance with Ms. Read and her lawyers that if there were any quotes I wanted to attribute to her during this meeting, I would need her and their express permission. As I did not actually use any of Ms. Read’s statements from that meeting in the article, such permission did not end up being necessary.
Moreover, Voss said, being forced to turn over her notes would open herself up to a campaign of villification that began after her article about the case was published in September 2023 and had only recently begun to abate:
[T]he notes, standing alone, will likely require further explanation on my part to make sense of them. I have already suffered an enormous emotional toll from publishing this story: I have been routinely harassed, both online and in person; have received text messages from strangers to my private cell phone containing photographs of my children and indirect threats against them; have had my photograph posted without my consent on Facebook, with hordes of strangers accusing me of unethical behavior and other defamatory accusations; have been approached, verbally assaulted and photographed without my consent in public, including in the courthouse, among many, many other acts and incidents against my person, my family, my character and my career. While the level of harassment has subsided somewhat over time, I have no doubt it will pick up again if my interview with Ms. Read becomes an issue for debate at trial.
A separate affidavit was submitted by BoMag editor Chris Vogel, who said that allowing Cannone’s earlier order to stand would impede investigative reporting because it would increase the costs and resources necessary to produce such work. “Magazines like ours will not be able to risk becoming enmeshed in situations such as this one, with the result that the flow of vigorous reporting will suffer,” Vogel said. “We will feel we have no choice but to select tamer, less controversial topics for our coverage.” Continue reading “Boston magazine ruling advances press freedom; plus, a tale of two obits, and the late Ted Rowse”
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. Public domain photo by the National Park Service.
On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day (I hear something else is going on today, too), it’s worth remembering that strong libel protections the press are grounded in the Civil Rights Movement and, specifically, in Dr. King’s activism in the South.
It began with a full-page ad taken out in The New York Times in 1960 titled “Heed Their Rising Voices.” Sponsored by supporters of Dr. King, the ad was aimed at calling attention to King’s campaign and raising support. It also contained a few inconsequential errors: it claimed that King had been arrested seven times on bogus charges (it was actually four), and it stated that Black student protesters at Alabama State College in Montgomery had been padlocked inside their dining hall “in an attempt to starve them into submission” (not literally true).
The city’s public safety commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, who was not even named in the ad, sued the Times for libel and won a $500,000 judgment in Alabama’s deeply racist court system. Other Southern officials were also suing the Times and other news outlets, which raised fears that the white power structure’s brutal crackdown on the Civil Rights Movement would go uncovered by the Northern press. As Samantha Barbas writes in her 2023 book “Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan”:
[L]ibel suits brought by segregationist officials against Northern news media were emerging as a potent weapon. They were so worrisome that they prompted a lawyer writing in one of journalism’s revered trade publications to comment that such lawsuits were giving the South an opportunity “to reverse the verdict at Appomattox.”
Libel law had always been considered a matter for the states, with no obvious way for the federal courts to intervene. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court of that era decided that it had to get involved. And in the landmark 1964 Times v. Sullivan decision, the court ruled that the First Amendment prohibited public officials from winning a libel case unless they could prove that defamatory falsehoods published about them were deliberate, or close to it. As Justice William Brennan explained in his unanimous decision:
[W]e consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
Brennan wrote that the standard public officials would have to prove was “actual malice,” defining that as “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Later decisions extended the actual malice standard to public figures; defined “reckless disregard” as harboring serious doubts about the truth of what was being published; and ruling that even private figures would at least have to prove negligence.
The Times v. Sullivan decision was crucial to the rise of modern investigative reporting. As Anthony Lewis wrote in his 1991 book about the decision, “Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment,” “The allowance of room for honest mistakes of fact encouraged the press, in particular, to challenge official truth on two subjects so hidden by government secrecy, Vietnam and Watergate, that no unauthorized story could ever have been ‘absolutely confirmable.’”
With the dawn of the second Trump era, though, there are doubts as to whether Times v. Sullivan will survive. Several years ago, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch suggested that the case ought to be revisited. More recently, ABC News’ parent company, Disney, settled what should have been a winnable libel suit brought by Donald Trump for $16 million. And last week, CNN settled a libel suit with a Navy veteran who had set up an operation to evacuate people from Afghanistan after a jury found against the network and awarded $5 million. (As I wrote Jan. 9, there appeared to be some serious problems with CNN’s story, so the decision to settle seems wise.)
In a few hours, we will mark the re-inauguration of Trump, who threatened years ago to “open up libel laws” and make it easier for plaintiffs to win lawsuits against the media. An empowered press that can hold the powerful to account was a vital part of Dr. King’s legacy. It would be sad if we begin rolling back that freedom on a day when we celebrate his life and achievements.
Newsday account of Murdoch becoming a U.S. citizen, Sept. 5, 1985
We shouldn’t have been especially surprised that the Supreme Court voted unanimously to uphold the TikTok ban. After all, we have a long legal tradition when it comes to banning the foreign ownership of media companies.
Lest we forget, Rupert Murdoch was able to take his first steps in launching the Fox News Channel only by becoming an American citizen. The Australian media mogul took the oath in 1985 so he could purchase seven local television stations owned by Metromedia. FCC rules barred non-citizens from owning more than 20% of a U.S. broadcast entity.
Murdoch’s acquisition of Metromedia meant that he briefly owned WCVB-TV (Channel 5). Since Murdoch also owned the Boston Herald and the FCC forbade cross-ownership of a TV station and newspaper in the same market, Murdoch flipped WCVB to Hearst, which has owned it ever since. (This is unrelated to Murdoch’s failed attempt a few years later to hold on to Boston’s WFXT-Channel 25 while keeping the Herald. In that case, he ended up selling Channel 25 and retaining the Herald, though he later sold that, too.)
FCC jurisdiction applies almost exclusively to the dying universe of broadcast television and radio. The TikTok ban was approved by an act of Congress, passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities and signed into law by President Biden. Donald Trump has indicated that he wants to work out a deal so TikTok can remain up and running in the U.S., and perhaps he will. So this entire episode may turn out to be a footnote.
What’s notable about the Supreme Court decision is that the justices were not impressed with the government’s contention that TikTok could be used to distributed propaganda at the behest of the Chinese government. That’s as it should be. According to Amy Howe’s account of the decision, republished by SCOTUSblog, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence underscored that the issue was foreign ownership, not free speech.
Gorsuch, Howe notes, “emphasized that the court was correct in not ‘endorsing the government’s asserted interest in preventing “the covert manipulation of content”’ to justify the TikTok ban. ‘One man’s “covert content manipulation,”’ he observed, ‘is another’s “editorial discretion.”’”
The real problem with foreign ownership is that the Chinese government could demand that TikTok (I’m not going to get into the complex arrangement between TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance) turn over the massive amounts of user data that it hoovers up in order to fine-tune its algorithm and to sell you stuff. Of course, American-owned platforms do the same thing, and you might think there’s not a great deal of moral difference between Xi Jinping or Mark Zuckerberg (or Co-President-Elect Elon Musk) having access to your data. And you might even be right. But the legal distinction strikes me as fairly obvious.
Is there hypocrisy at work here? You bet, because the U.S. government has long claimed the right to access user data from American-based platforms in the name of national security. As Andrew K. Woods writes for Lawfare:
The Court noted: “TikTok Ltd. is subject to Chinese laws that require it to ‘assist or cooperate’ with the Chinese Government’s ‘intelligence work’ and to ensure that the Chinese Government has ‘the power to access and control private data’ the company holds.”
The Court could have written a nearly identical sentence about Meta or Google, vis-à-vis American law, like this: “Meta is subject to American law that requires it to assist or cooperate with the American government’s intelligence work and to ensure that the American government has the power to access and control private data the company holds.”
American firms are subject to American laws — like the Stored Communications Act, especially as modified by the CLOUD Act, and intelligence laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — that give the U.S. government legal means to access customer data, especially foreign customer data, for national security and intelligence purposes.
The ban takes effect Sunday, and the Biden White House has said it’s not going to make any efforts to enforce it with Trump taking office the next day. Trump was originally all in favor of the ban; then one of his billionaire donors urged him to change his mind. It didn’t hurt that Trump’s TikTok account turned out to be popular with his supporters.
So it seems like the most likely outcome is that Trump announces an extension while trying to work out some sort of settlement.
This has become a perennial. Every semester, I ask students in my journalism ethics class to come up with a fifth principle that could be added to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. The code identifies four broad principles: Seek Truth and Report It; Minimize Harm; Act Independently; and Be Accountable. Each of them is fleshed out in some detail.
On Wednesday evening, I asked my current class, a small seminar comprising graduate students and advanced undergrads, to think of a fifth principle in three teams of three students apiece. Here’s what they came up with. I’ve done some minor editing in the interests of parallel construction, but otherwise this is entirely their work.
Ensure accessibility for your audience
Use plain language whenever possible.
Use multiple formats and multimedia as resources permit.
Reporters and sources should reflect the diversity of the community.
Neighborhoods and areas within the coverage area should be covered equitably.
A news organization’s website and social media should be ADA accessible.*️⃣
Place news coverage in context
Provide the full picture of all aspects of a story.
Give credit where it is due, especially to other news organizations.
Acknowledge relevant communities, perspectives and historical background.
Provide needed follow-up for the audience.
Balance empathy and professionalism
Show respect for sources and subjects of coverage.
Create a relationship that enables your source to trust your intentions.
Clarify to your source the scope of the article and how they might be affected after publication.
If you maintain relationships with sources, limit that to professional contacts rather than personal friendships.
*️⃣ There are, in fact, resources for ensuring that a website is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. As for social media, users are often encouraged to add text to images so that people with visual impairments can understand what an image represents. Hashtags should use upper- and lower-case in instances where confusion might result — for instance, screen-readers might trip up on the hashtag #firstamendment, so use #FirstAmendment instead.
Media notes
• Post journos petition Bezos. Since Jeff Bezos has clearly lost interest in The Washington Post, you have to wonder if he might disentangle himself from a property that he has clumsily described as a “complexifier” for him. The latest, according to NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, is that some 400 Post journalists have signed a letter asking that Bezos meet with them. The letter says in part: “We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave.”
• Muzzle Award follow-up. An order to the police chief in Burlington, Vermont, that he route all communications through the mayor’s office came at the instigation of Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, reports Colin Flanders of Seven Days. I gave Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak a New England Muzzle Award for silencing Police Chief Jon Murad and, more seriously, for following up by scheduling a press availability but failing to invite all of the city’s news organizations. George was concerned about Murad’s public statements disparaging a notorious repeat offender, calling one statement “unnecessary and performative” and saying that he “really needs to knock it off.”
• Judge gets access to BoMag notes. Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone has received off-the-record notes from Boston magazine reporter Gretchen Voss’ July 2023 interview with murder suspect Karen Read, who will soon return to court following a mistrial last year, reports Travis Andersen in The Boston Globe. Judge Cannone will privately review the notes before ruling on whether to grant the prosecution’s request for access to Voss’ reporting materials. BoMag has fought that effort on freedom-of-the-press grounds; more background here.
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.
It might be high-handed for a mayor to order her police chief to funnel all public statements through her office, but it isn’t necessarily such an outrage that it warrants a coveted New England Muzzle Award. But to compound that by announcing she would have a press availability to which not all local news organizations were invited — well, come on down and claim your prize, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak.
Mulvaney-Stanak, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and a leader in that state’s Progressive Party, signed an executive order last Wednesday ordering the Burlington Police Department to route all press releases through her office before distributing them to the public. “People need the basic facts of situations for the sake of public safety and nothing more than that,” the mayor was quoted as saying.
According to Colin Flanders, a reporter for the Burlington-based newspaper Seven Days, Mulvaney-Stanak had “raised concerns” with Police Chief Jon Murad “about the content of his department’s public statements in the past. Murad has used press releases in recent years to criticize the court system and a perceived lack of accountability for repeat offenders.”
Murad was silenced after a defense lawyer asked a judge to impose a gag order on the Burlington police in response to statements by the chief concerning a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Murad had accused the man of “violent, incorrigible, antisocial behavior” — and some of Murad’s comments were repeated on the public radio program “On Point,” produced by WBUR in Boston and distributed nationwide. It’s hard to imagine that the mayor was pleased by that.
Meanwhile, Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, writing in the Vermont Daily Chronicle for Vermont News First, reported on Friday that Mulvaney-Stanak would speak to the press at a media availability that afternoon — but that Vermont News First, which had been dogging the mayor over her acceptance of free donated meals, had not been invited. After Donoghue’s story was posted, he added an update reporting that Seven Days hadn’t been invited, either.
“She doesn’t answer her cellphone and actually has asked VNF to stop calling,” Donoghue wrote.
(Update: Donoghue later explained to me that VNF is his own journalism endeavor and that the Vermont Daily Chronicle is one of his clients.)
Well, if Seven Days and Vermont News First were left off the invitation list, who was invited? The city’s daily, the Burlington Free Press, didn’t report on the mayor’s muzzling of Chief Murad until today, and there are no quotes from her in the article. There’s nothing about any sort of press availability in the statewide news organization VTDigger, whose reporter Corey McDonald wrote about Mulvaney-Stanak’s silencing of Murad last Thursday, on the same day as Seven Days. Nor is there anything from Vermont Public Radio.
Chief Murad, who’s leaving his post this April, may or may not have been out of line in disparaging a notorious frequent flier in the criminal justice system. But holding law enforcement to account is difficult enough without the mayor stepping in and lowering the cone of silence.
For Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak to worsen that situation by creating the impression that she would exclude some news outlets from a media availability (it’s not clear whether that availability ever happened) goes beyond acceptable and pushes this story into the Muzzle Zone.
Media notes
• Donald Trump v. Nancy Barnes. Among the journalism organizations Donald Trump has targeted for libel suits is the Pulitzer Board, which awarded a Pulitzer Prize to The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2018 for their reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia. Trump is claiming the award was somehow libelous — and Ben Smith of Semafor reports that he’s is suing not just the board but individual members of that board, including, locally, Boston Globe executive editor Nancy Barnes.
• A liberal counterpart to The Free Press? Another star opinion journalist has fled the rapidly declining Washington Post. Jennifer Rubin, a conservative-turned-centrist-turned-liberal with a strong social media presence, is moving to Substack, where she’ll be the editor-in-chief of a new publication called The Contrarian — which, she tells CNN’s Brian Stelter, will “combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face.” Stelter’s report and Rubin’s introductory post suggest that The Contrarian could serve as a welcome liberal counterpart to the right-leaning Free Press, founded in 2021 by disgruntled New York Times opinion journalist Bari Weiss.
• New Jersey’s post-print future. This past fall I observed that Advance Local was closing its New Jersey print newspapers, the largest of which is The Star-Ledger of Newark, and doubling down on digital with its statewide NJ.com site. Now Marc Pfeiffer, a policy fellow at Rutgers University, has written a commentary for NJ Spotlight News arguing that print is not essential to maintaining a rich media ecosystem. “The future of New Jersey news is primarily digital — and that’s OK,” Pfeiffer writes. “What matters isn’t the delivery method but the quality and accessibility of local journalism. Our democracy depends on having informed citizens who know what’s happening in their State House, county seats, and town halls.”
• An update on that Colorado assault. A couple of weeks ago I noted that a television journalist in Grand Junction, Colorado, had allegedly been assaulted by a Trump supporter who followed his car to the journalist’s television station, tried to choke him, and shouted “This is Trump’s America now.” In his latest newsletter, Corey Hutchins writes that the 22-year-old journalist, Ja’Ronn Alex, is out on paid leave while Patrick Egan, the taxi driver who’s been charged, is out on bail, with his lawyer claiming that he suffers from mental health issues.
When a community has been without a reliable source of local news for some time, government officials can become accustomed to operating without much scrutiny. And when a feisty startup arrives on the scene to report stories that had gone unreported, that can prove to be quite a shock to the powers that be.
Which is as good an explanation as any for what’s unfolding in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The venerable Old Colony Memorial had become virtually a ghost newspaper under the Gannett chain’s ownership, mainly publishing regional coverage from other Gannett papers. Then, in 2023, the Plymouth Independent, a nonprofit digital outlet, arrived on the scene.
The Independent is larger and more ambitious than many such projects; the editor and CEO is Mark Pothier, a former Globe journalist and, before that, editor of the Old Colony Memorial back when it was still covering local news. One of the Independent’s directors is Walter Robinson, a Plymouth resident who’s best known for leading the Globe’s Spotlight Team when it was exposing the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
One Plymouth official who is taking particular umbrage at the increased scrutiny being brought by the Independent is the town manager, Derek Brindisi. According to a message to readers that Pothier published today, Brindisi has ordered “all appointed town officials to cease all communication with the PI.” The only exception is that town officials will be permitted to respond to public-records requests from the Independent, which, after all, they are required to do under state law.
For his unwarranted attempts to prevent the Independent from holding local government accountable, Brindisi is receiving a New England Muzzle Award. “In my decades as a journalist, Brindisi’s blanket edict is like nothing I have ever encountered,” writes Pothier, who also says:
Our job as journalists is to hold government officials accountable and to provide readers with the reliable information they need to foster a functioning democracy. In that respect, the relationship between governments and journalists is necessarily adversarial. We’re supposed to be skeptical of people in power.
Officials, paid public professionals, and Town Meeting members make decisions involving policies and spending that inevitably spark debate. They serve in the public’s interest. The Independent reports on them in the public’s interest.
Before the PI arrived, most Plymouth residents — including myself — had a hard time finding out what was going on in town. Perhaps naively, I figured officials would welcome the chance to present the town’s perspective on important issues. Some have — or did until this latest order to stop talking to us. Brindisi, however, has only reached out to express displeasure with our coverage.
Pothier goes into some detail about a couple of routine stories that upset Brindisi. One was written by Andrea Estes, a former investigative reporter for the Globe. (Estes’ career at the Globe came to a bad end for reasons that have never been adequately explained, but there is no question that she’s an experienced and accomplished journalist.) The other was written by Fred Thys, a former reporter for WBUR Radio in Boston and VTDigger, a leading investigative news outlet in Vermont.
Brindisi, for his part, childishly refers to the Independent as the “Plymouth Enquirer” and has complained about the Independent’s “distasteful reporting” and efforts to “humiliate town officials.”
This isn’t the first Muzzle to be awarded to Plymouth officials in recent months. Back in July, I gave one to select board member Kevin Canty for suggesting that an unnamed person was risking prison for recording the audio of a board meeting without informing those present. Canty was referring to Thys, who had made no effort to hide the fact that he was recording the meeting, which was also being live-streamed on YouTube.
Thys may have been in technical violation of the law, but seriously? “Canty and I later spoke about the incident,” Pothier writes. “We both agreed it could have been handled better, perhaps with a simple request that Thys announce he was recording.”
Pothier also credits Canty with working to mend the rift between Brindisi and the Independent, but that those efforts have come to naught.
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