On the brand-new “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we take a look at the Trump regime’s thuggish attempts to control coverage of the war in Iran.
Our other topics: the possibility of a merger between Boston’s two public radio stations, GBH, which is gung-ho, and WBUR, which isn’t; and why The Washington Post is refusing the Pentagon’s demands that it take down its confidential tip line. Plus our Rants & Raves.
Our panel is helmed by Emily and hosted by Scott Van Voorhis of Contrarian Boston, joined by Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.
Four and a half months after being laid off, the state’s most prominent political journalist is returning to the airwaves. Jon Keller, whose job was claimed in a nationwide purge at CBS News after its parent network was acquired by Paramount, will be back on the 5 p.m. news later today on WBZ-TV (Channel 4), where he had worked for many years. The news comes in the form of an Editor’s Note at the bottom of today’s column for MASSter List:
Some good news for those who appreciate Jon Keller’s commentaries: after a hiatus of several months, he will be returning to WBZ-TV as a Special contributor starting tonight (Monday, March 16) on the early-evening WBZ news. Keller will be providing analysis of important political developments on WBZ’s newscasts and moderating major political debates on the station. His Sunday morning “Keller At Large” interview program, a staple of the city’s public affairs TV scene since 1991, resumes this Sunday at 8:30 a.m. with guest Gov. Maura Healey. Keller will continue his weekly column and event hosting for MASSterList as well as occasional articles for Boston Magazine.
In a funny coincidence, Channel 4 ran an old “Keller at Large” Sunday morning on which I appeared as a guest. I heard from a number of people, and I was puzzled. I later learned that the station has been broadcasting reruns of “Keller at Large” since his layoff.
For the rest of this item, I’m going to recycle part of what I wrote last October:
Jon and I go way back. He was the political columnist at The Boston Phoenix when I arrived there in 1991. He also worked as the producer for the late David Brudnoy’s outstanding talk show on WBZ Radio (AM 1030) and as a reporter for WLVI-TV (Channel 56) before moving to WBZ-TV. He did a stint as an op-ed-page columnist for the Globe. Both of us were also panelists on the now-defunct “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” on GBH-TV (Channel 2). (Note: Emily has revived “Beat the Press” on Scott Van Voorhis’ political newsletter, Contrarian Boston.)
Jon is known for dogged reporting and incisive, often caustic political commentary. He’s also a skilled debate moderator and has presided over some of the state’s highest-profile encounters, including Senate debates between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha Coakley in 2010 as well as Democratic primary foes Ed Markey and Joe Kennedy in 2020.
This isn’t the first time Keller has been caught up in corporate machinations. He lost his gig doing commentary for WBZ Radio some years ago when the station was sold to iHeartMedia; the TV operation remained part of CBS.
Back to the present: Jon’s return to the airwaves is good news for those of us who value his analysis, and a sign that someone at CBS recognizes that they made a mistake last fall.
Perhaps the most fraught topic during the first week of the war in Iran was the bombing of an elementary girls’ school, a horrendous event that killed about 165 people.
Some of the first reports, including one in Al Jazeera, claimed that Israel was responsible. That was followed by a social media campaign claiming that the Iranian government itself had admitted that the bombing was caused by one of its missiles that had gone astray. That was debunked by PolitiFact. Finally, investigations by media outlets like The New York Times and Bellingcat found that it was almost certain that the United States was responsible. The most likely explanation is that U.S. forces had targeted a Revolutionary Guard facility that was adjacent to the school.
I’m going to discuss with my graduate ethics students this evening how the story unfolded, and I’ve put together the slideshow you see here to go with it. You can also click here for a larger view.
Public domain Illustration of Jeffrey Epstein, left, and Donald Trump by Michael Gode.
The Jeffrey Epstein story is getting weirder, more disturbing and is moving ever closer to Donald Trump. The latest details come from Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who has done more to expose Epstein’s depravity than any other journalist.
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
Brown’s latest comes in the form of two articles. The first, published on Friday, advances earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and NPR that the Justice Department had withheld some of the Epstein files regarding a woman who told the FBI that Trump sexually assaulted her around 1983, when she was about 13 years old. Those files have now been produced. Brown writes that in one of the interviews:
She said he unzipped his pants and forced her head to his penis. She said she immediately bit him and Trump struck her, the report said. She told the FBI agents that she bit him because he “disgusted” her.
In a follow-up interview, she said that after she rebuffed him, he “pulled her hair and punched her on the side of the head.”
On the brand-new edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze media coverage of the war against Iran.
In other topics, we examine the implications of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly executives Larry and David Ellison, and the failure of Bari Weiss — who may soon be running CNN in addition to CBS News — to hang on to a Jeffrey Epstein associate. We also give the hairy eyeball to AI’s ongoing encroachment into journalism and weigh in with our Rants and Raves.
Fox News anchor Will Caine, left, with retired Lt. Col. Allen West.
With Donald Trump plunging us into a new war in the Middle East, I was curious about how it was being covered on MAGA-TV, also known as Fox News. I decided to watch the 8 p.m. hour on Sunday.
Overall, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The real problems weren’t what was said so much as what wasn’t. But since I spent the weekend keeping up on developments primarily with The New York Times, I’m not sure whether other television news outlets were doing a better job.
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
If I’d tuned in Fox at 8 p.m. on a weekday, I’d have encountered the loathsome Jesse Watters, a racist misogynist who once “joked” about killing Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead, the hour was hosted by Dallas-based Will Caine, about whom I know nothing, but who came across as a fairly conventional anchor. Apparently that was a last-minute switch; the hour is normally given over to “Life, Liberty & Levin,” helmed by right-wing zealot Mark Levin.
The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper, is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The paper — now mostly digital — began life in 1926 as The Northeastern News, a university-supported outlet formed by the merger of two other campus newspapers.
The News went independent in 2008, changing its name and ending its dependence on funding from the administration. Yet its mission has remained the same: comprehensive coverage of Northeastern, supplemented with reporting from the surrounding community.
The Huntington News is a vital resource on campus. The News today is better than the News I was part of in the 1970s — more professional and serious-minded, with more measured judgment. Plus there’s just much more journalism than we were able to offer in our weekly print paper 50 years ago. Congratulations to all!
The Boston Globe calls its decision not to print a paper today “unprecedented.” But as Aidan Ryan reports (sub. req.), it depends on your definition of unprecedented: “Even during the historic Blizzard of ’78, the Globe printed a few thousand copies of the Feb. 7, 1978, edition, though its delivery trucks couldn’t get through the piles of snow around its old offices on Morrissey Boulevard.”
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
Moreover, Ryan notes that today’s edition will be printed and delivered with Wednesday’s paper. It strikes me as an odd move given that the Globe’s website is up and running, including the daily e-paper. But maybe there are a few print customers who really don’t want to read the paper online and who will appreciate having today’s paper — perhaps to commemorate the Blizzard of ’26.
This past November I wrote about how a Boston Globe subscriber could share a gift link with a non-subscriber via email. It was strictly a one-to-one feature — there was no authorized way of sending a gift link to a social-media platform. (There are unauthorized ways, which I’ll let you figure out.)
Within the past day or so, though, a new item suddenly popped up on the Globe’s sharing options called “Gift an Article.” My hope was that the Globe had joined multiple other papers and was now offering a few free gift shares a month that would work anywhere, not just through email.
With great anticipation, I clicked. And I was greeted with a text-entry box that said “Gift This Article Through Email.” The rest of the sharing features — Facebook, Bluesky, etc. — give you a link that lead to a paywall when a non-subscriber clicks on them.
Oh, well. I’ll be optimistic and hope that this is the first step toward a real sharing feature.
The Massachusetts Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
Politico’s Massachusetts Playbook, a morning email newsletter about state politics, is coming to an end. Kelly Garrity made the announcement earlier today and said she’ll be writing a political newsletter for The Boston Globe that will debut later this year. She writes:
Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who ever read, emailed, sent a tip, answered a late-night call/email/text or submitted a birthday. This newsletter is what first put POLITICO on my radar and I feel so lucky to have had the chance to be a part of making something I was a fan of for so long.
The Playbook was launched in September 2015 with Lauren Dezenski at the helm. Dezenski, a Dorchester Reporter alum, is now at Bloomberg. The Playbook has served as an important stepping stone for a number of journalists who have held that position, but now it’s coming to an end.
Although Boston has a number of morning newsletters, I think it’s fair to say that Politico’s only direct competitor in terms of tracking the Massachusetts political scene was MASSter List, from State House News Service, produced by veteran journalist Gintautas Dumcius. Also deserving mention is CommonWealth Beacon, a nonprofit that covers politics and public policy, which has a mid-morning newsletter that’s a little bit different — less insidery and more focused on pulling readers onto its website. (Note: I’m on CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)
The move is part of broader cutbacks at Politico as a whole. Corbin Bolies recently reported for The Wrap that Politico was eliminating 3% of its staff. Meanwhile, Axios, founded by two of Politico’s three co-founders, is expanding its local news coverage — although, unfortunately, AI is playing a significant role. (Boston is among the cities with a morning Axios newsletter, but it’s not strictly about politics.)
This also strikes me as a smart move by the Globe, since it’s a way to bring in a reporter who’s already respected by folks who follow state politics closely.
