Media – Media Nation

There’s a lot less to the Globe’s two missing panels from ‘Doonesbury’ than meets the eye

*The first two panels of this past Sunday’s “Doonesbury.”*

I got a tip on Monday that The Boston Globe had lopped off the first two panels of the “Doonesbury” comic that appeared in this past Sunday’s paper. A quick check revealed that, indeed, the original comic consisted of eight panels, and the Globe ran just the last six. Given that the first panel depicted Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller letting loose with a Nazi salute and proclaiming “Heil!,” it seemed that maybe someone got it in their head to err on the side of inoffensiveness. Here is the complete eight-panel “Doonesbury” from this past Sunday.

But it turns out there’s a lot less to this than meets the eye.

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In an attempt to find out what was going on, I posted a question on social media asking if this had happened anywhere else. I immediately heard from journalist Joshua J. Friedman, who wrote on Bluesky:

You'll also have to do a survey of whether the given paper always omits the first two (optional) panels! (But you very likely know this.)

— Joshua J. Friedman (@joshuajfriedman.com) 2026-01-06T22:18:13.774Z

I did not! Somehow I had made it to the age of 69 without realizing that many Sunday comic strips, including “Doonesbury,” make the first two panels optional so that newspapers can omit them in order to save space and, thus, money. So no, the Globe did not engage in any censorious editing. It did what it always does, and what many other papers also do. I went back in the archives for both “Doonesbury” and the Globe for several weeks, and in every instance the original consisted of eight panels and the Globe ran just the last six.

Those first two panels invariably consist of a quick and dispensable gag before moving on to the main part of the strip. In the case of last Sunday’s “Doonesbury,” it’s unfortunate that the two-panel gag was a particularly caustic jab at the loathsome Miller. That’s one that shouldn’t have ended up on the cutting-room floor.

My social media respondents told me that The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Portland Press Herald of Maine (which runs “Doonesbury” in its opinion section) were among the dailies that deleted the first two panels from their print editions. Don’t @ me about the Post. One of my correspondents found that the Post had eliminated the first two panels of “Doonesbury” the previous week as well, and presumably does so every week. And by the way, my understanding is that Sunday comic sections are generally not put together by the papers themselves but by syndication services they subscribe to.

Friedman also shared a 2016 blog post about the phenomenon as well as a Wikipedia article.

Comics have always been regarded as an indispensable part of the Sunday paper, but they have succumbed to cost-cutting just like every other part of the newspaper business. It’s not censorship, but it’s a shame nevertheless.

Why the Times’ and Post’s decision not to publish calls to mind the Bay of Pigs myth of 1961

*Front and center: The New York Times reports on the imminent invasion of Cuba on April 7, 1961.*

The New York Times and The Washington Post learned about U.S. plans to attack Venezuela shortly before the raid began, according to Max Tani and Shelby Talcott of Semafor. But they declined to run with the story “to avoid endangering US troops, two people familiar with the communications between the administration and the news organizations said.”

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The decision was reminiscent of the legend over how the Times reported on an imminent U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba in 1962, which I’ll get to in a few moments.

But first, regarding the Venezuela decision: Right call or wrong call? As the Semafor story notes, the decision was “in keeping with longstanding American journalistic traditions.” Independent media commentator Margaret Sullivan writes that she’s torn and asks her readers to weigh in. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Jem Bartholomew leans toward yes they should have on the grounds that the Times and the Post knew the raid would violate international law.

Continue reading “Why the Times’ and Post’s decision not to publish calls to mind the Bay of Pigs myth of 1961”

Disney’s role in fueling middle-class resentment was Media Nation’s top post of 2025

1. How two-tier Disney is helping to fuel the rise of middle-class anger and resentment (Sept. 2). Taking your family to a Disney resort has always been an expensive proposition — but at least you had the sense that everyone was in it together. Not anymore. As The New York Times reported, Disney in recent years has embraced a two-tier system that shuts out middle-class and working-class families. You have to pay massive fees to avoid standing in line for top attractions. You have to stay at an expensive Disney hotel or other Disney-owned accommodations even to get access to the best deals. Our once-common culture has split in two, one for the shrinking middle class, the other for the rich.

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2. The Associated Press tells its book critics that it’s ending weekly reviews (Aug. 8). It’s always humbling when I republish a memo and attract more traffic than my own deathless prose is able to generate. Anyway, a Media Nation correspondent passed along a depressing note from Anthony McCartney, the AP’s global entertainment and lifestyle editor, that began:

I am writing to share that the AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1. This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews. AP will continue covering books as stories, but at the moment those will handled exclusively by staffers.

3. Renée Graham quits Globe editorial board over Charlie Kirk editorial but will remain as a columnist (Sept. 18). The shocking public murder of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk prompted some disingenuous commentary from observers who should have known better — including The Boston Globe’s editorial board, which ran a piece whose headline initially read “We need more Charlie Kirks.” The editorial intoned that “his weapon of choice was always words,” making no reference to his doxxing of left-wing academics, leading to harassment and death threats. That prompted Renée Graham to quit the editorial board in protest. Fortunately for those of us who value her voice, she has continued writing her column and her newsletter.

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Presenting this fall’s final projects by my Northeastern opinion journalism students

For a larger view, please click here.

This past semester I had a small but mighty class of students who took my course POV: The Art and Craft of Opinion Journalism. They wrote personal essays, reviews, op-ed-style pieces and, as their final project, an enterprise story encompassing research, interviews and a strong point of view. Here is a presentation of their work. They did a great job.

Linda Henry aims to deepen the Globe’s neighborhood coverage and expand in New England

You can count on one hand the number of independently owned large metro newspapers that are doing reasonably well and continuing to grow. Among them is The Boston Globe. Today’s print edition features a full-page ad consisting of a year-end message from Linda Henry, the CEO of Boston Globe Media, in which she lays out a few intriguing hints about what’s to come in 2026. (I have not seen it online or in an email, at least not yet.)

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Among the goals she lays out for the coming year: “Deepening coverage of Boston’s neighborhoods and expanding our presence across New England.” More city coverage would certainly be welcome. But I’m especially interested in her focus on New England.

The Globe’s Rhode Island and New Hampshire coverage have been valuable additions to the paper’s mission. Its reporting on the recent mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was not only comprehensive and well-executed, but it also helped inform its coverage of what turned out to be a related killing in Brookline. So what’s next?

Continue reading “Linda Henry aims to deepen the Globe’s neighborhood coverage and expand in New England”

Watch it while you can: Yashar Ali has posted a broadcast-quality version of that ‘60 Minutes’ report

Click on the image to watch “Inside CECOT.”

We have reached the let’s-hope-Canada-beams-in-news-that’s-being-censored-in-our-own-country stage of authoritarianism.

On Monday afternoon, the “60 Minutes” story on mostly Venezuelan detainees being sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador — canceled by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss — popped up on Canada’s Global TV app. It was taken down a short time later because of copyright issues, but it’s been showing up here and there on social media ever since. I’m hoping this broadcast-quality version, on Yashar Ali’s newsletter, The Reset, will stick around for a while.

As you’ll see, detainees, many of whom have not been accused of any crime other than being in the U.S. illegally, say there were subjected to beatings, torture and sexual abuse during their time in the CECOT prison. As for Weiss’ complaint that the story did not include any comment from the Trump regime, here’s what we hear toward the end of Sharyn Alfonsi’s report:

The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request.

We’ve been having a debate on Facebook over whether it’s fair to say that Weiss “canceled” the story given that she has said she wants to run it after it’s re-edited. I contend that it was canceled, not delayed, because it was scheduled to run on Sunday evening and it wasn’t. Also, Weiss has made it clear that if the story does run, it won’t be what you see here.

As Alfonsi said, to cancel the story for lack of White House comment even though they were given an opportunity to weigh in is to hand a “veto” to the very officials that “60 Minutes” was trying to hold to account. As I tell my students, you need to give people you’re reporting on a fair chance to respond — but you can’t let it drag on for so long that their silence is used to kill the story.

Two weeks after a hopeful sign from ‘60 Minutes,’ Bari Weiss cancels a story and trashes the brand

Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” interviews Marjorie Taylor Greene. Photo via Paramount.

A Dec. 7 “60 Minutes” interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene by veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl raised hopes that new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and her corporate overlords, Larry and David Ellison, wouldn’t destroy the legendary news program. Greene criticized Donald Trump, and Trump in turn complained that “60 Minutes” “has actually gotten WORSE!” since the Ellisons acquired CBS earlier this year, as CNN media reporter Brian Stelter writes.

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Well, hope springs eternal — or, in this case, two weeks. Because now the worst has happened. On Sunday, “60 Minutes” postponed a heavily promoted story about the Trump regime’s cruel practice of sending Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, where they have reportedly been mistreated and even tortured.

Liam Scott and Scott Nover report for The Washington Post that Weiss decreed that the story be postponed in order to give the White House another opportunity to respond, even though “60 Minutes” had already contacted administration officials in an unsuccessful effort to obtain comment.

CBS News said in a statement that the story “needed additional reporting.” But “60 Minutes” reporter Sharyn Alfonsi said in an internal email that Weiss was giving the White House a “kill switch,” explaining, “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.” The Post story continues:

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote in the note, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Weiss said in a statement late Sunday: “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”

Weiss, lest you have forgotten, is a right-leaning opinion journalist with no experience in straight-news reporting or in television journalism.

Times reporter Michael M. Grynbaum writes that CBS News announced the story would be pulled just three hours before airtime. Grynbaum also reminds us that the Ellisons’ path toward purchasing CBS was greased by the previous owner’s decision to settle a bogus lawsuit brought by Trump over the entirely routine manner in which “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Kamala Harris just before the 2024 election. Trump got $16 million from that corrupt transaction. And how’s this for condescension? Grynbaum writes:

One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff.

Now the Ellisons are seeking White House assistance in derailing Netflix’ pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. There are lots of reasons having to do with antitrust law that WBD shouldn’t end up in the hands of either Netflix or Paramount Skydance, as the Ellisons’ company is known. But Netflix, at least, plans to spin off CNN from WBD, giving the news outlet a fighting chance of remaining an independent voice.

An Ellison acquisition, on the other hand, would most likely put Weiss in charge of CNN.

David Brooks tells the ‘PBS NewsHour’ that he didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein was in the room

The last thing I want to be doing on the Saturday morning before Christmas is writing about David Brooks’ undisclosed (by him) encounter with the notorious pedophile and sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. But it’s in the news, and there are plenty of people, especially on social media, who are demanding that the New York Times columnist and “PBS NewsHour” commentator be held accountable.

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So let’s review the facts that have come out. As Jeremy Barr reported in The Guardian, photos released on Thursday by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reveal that Brooks attended a lunch or dinner where Epstein was present in 2011. Unlike photos of many other powerful men that have been released recently, there are no photos of Brooks actually with Epstein.

Continue reading “David Brooks tells the ‘PBS NewsHour’ that he didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein was in the room”

Looking back at how once-and-future editor Brian McGrory recruited John Henry to buy The Boston Globe

John Henry on the Jumbotron after the Red Sox won the 2007 World Series. Photo (cc) 2007 by Patrick Mannion.

Brian McGrory’s return to The Boston Globe represents just the latest chapter in his relationship with the paper’s owners, John and Linda Henry. The once-and-future editor actually recruited John Henry, the principal owner of the Red Sox, to purchase the Globe after it was put on the market by the New York Times Co. in 2013. I reported on that in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.” GBH News published an excerpt, and I’m bringing it back for an encore this morning.

How John Henry Overcame His Doubts And Decided To Buy The Boston Globe

GBH News | May 18, 2018

Rumors that The Boston Globe might be for sale began circulating as far back as 2006, when a group headed by retired General Electric chief executive Jack Welch, who was a Boston-area native, and local advertising executive Jack Connors was reported to be nosing around. At the time, the Globe was said to be valued at somewhere between $550 million and $600 million, vastly more than the price John Henry paid seven years later.

But the New York Times Co. wasn’t selling — at least not yet. The following year, Ben Taylor, a former publisher of the Globe and a member of the family that had owned it from 1873 until selling it to the Times Co. 80 years later, told me in an interview for CommonWealth magazine that he might be interested in returning to ownership in some capacity if the Globe were put on the market. But he added that he thought such a development was unlikely. “I can’t imagine a scenario where that would be an opportunity,” he said, “but you never know, I guess. Stranger things have happened.”

Ben Taylor and his cousin Stephen Taylor, also a former Globe executive, became involved in a bid to buy the paper in 2009 when the Times Co. finally put the paper on the market. So did a Beverly Hills, California-based outfit known as Platinum Equity. With the Taylors thought to be undercapitalized and with Platinum having gutted the first newspaper it bought, the San Diego Union-Tribune, Globe employees were understandably nervous about their future.

Although it was not a matter of public knowledge at the time, there was also a third possibility. After the Times Co. put up the Globe for sale, Brian McGrory, a popular columnist who was then serving a stint as the paper’s metro editor, decided to call around town to see if any public-spirited business executives might be interested. Among those he contacted was John Henry.

“I asked him at that time why he wouldn’t flip the paradigm,” McGrory told me. “It used to be that newspapers would own sports franchises. Why not have a sports franchise owner own a newspaper? Because without a healthy Boston Globe, which causes community discussion about a sports team — I made the argument, right or wrong; I have no idea if it was right — the value of a sports team might be diminished. And I did it because I thought he would be a very thoughtful, steady owner.”

Read the rest at GBH News.

In ‘The Wired City,’ I wrote about a murder and the ethics of naming a ‘person of interest’

I was appalled earlier this week when multiple news organizations, citing anonymous sources, named the “person of interest” who had been taken into custody in connection with the mass shootings at Brown University. That person was later released, and which led to a scramble by some of those media outlets to memory-hole their earlier coverage.

My 2013 book “The Wired City” opens with a story about why the New Haven Independent took a different approach in response to a high-profile murder. The Independent, a digital nonprofit founded in 2005, is still going strong. Here’s an excerpt from that book.

A murder, a media frenzy and the rise of a new form of local news

Nieman Lab | June 5, 2013

Paul Bass felt uneasy. It was a Friday — Sept. 11, 2009. He was getting ready to leave the office for Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath. And he was beginning to wonder if he had blown a big story.

Two days before, Bass had received an email from someone at Yale University telling him that a 24-year-old graduate student named Annie Le was missing. Could Bass post something on his community website, the New Haven Independent? Sure thing, Bass replied. So he wrote a one-sentence item with a link to a Yale Daily News account. As he recalled later, he didn’t think much about it after that.

Now Bass was facing a dilemma. Annie Le was still missing, and the media were starting to swarm. He was off until Saturday night; as an observant Jew, he does not work on Saturdays until after sundown. On top of this, his managing editor, Melissa Bailey, was leaving town for a few days. Bass remembered reading somewhere that Le had once written a story about students and crime for a magazine affiliated with Yale. He found it, linked to it, and wrote an article beginning: “A graduate pharmacology student asked Yale’s police chief a question: ‘What can one do to avoid becoming another unnamed victim?’ Seven months after she printed the answer in a campus publication, the student may have become a crime victim herself.” It was a start — nothing special, but enough to get the Independent into the chase. Then Bass went home.

As it turned out, the Annie Le saga — soon to become a murder story — developed into one of the most heavily publicized news events to hit New Haven in many years. Her body was discovered inside a laboratory wall at Yale Medical School on Sunday, Sept. 13, the day she was to be married. The grisly fate of the beautiful young Yale student proved irresistible to the national media. From The New York Times to the New York Post, from the “Today” show to Nancy Grace, reporters, producers and photographers besieged city and university officials.

Read the rest at Nieman Lab.