Media – Media Nation

A perceptive analysis of why The New York Times struggles with the rise of MAGA authoritarianism

What is wrong with The New York Times? It’s a question that conservatives ask frequently, of course. But, over the years, it’s also become an obsession with liberals and the progressive left, whose more strident voices — frequently heard on Bluesky — claim that the Times is in thrall to Donald Trump in order to sell newspapers, advance a corporate agenda or whatever. You often hear the term “sanewashing” in these circles, referring to a practice of quoting Trump in a way that plays down his hateful rhetoric and deteriorating mental acuity.

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I’ve often been among those critics. In 2018, I wrote a commentary for GBH News referring to “the Timid Times” and comparing it unfavorably to the then-ascendant Washington Post, which was firing on all cylinders under executive editor Marty Baron. As I wrote: “The picture that emerges is of a news organization often out of sync with its mostly liberal audience and that is way too concerned about what conservatives might say.”

Continue reading “A perceptive analysis of why The New York Times struggles with the rise of MAGA authoritarianism”

On the new ‘Beat the Press,’ we dissect Trump’s media ban and marvel over the Globe’s lesbian-bar story

Click here or on image to watch on Contrarian Boston.

We’re back with another edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” hosted by Contrarian Boston. Our lead topic this week is Donald Trump’s illegal ban on three news organizations, which seems to keep popping up even though it’s been knocked down in court.

Our other topics: the debut of Trump TV, which at one point was drawing an unimaginably minuscule audience of about 500 viewers; and why The Boston Globe’s story about a lesbian bar (sub. req.) that’s struggling with its longtime masking requirement went viral — and brought several thousand new subscribers to the Globe. Our guess is that it’s all about the revolutionary praxis.

We round out the show with our panel’s Rants and Raves. Mine is for California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who folded on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery lawsuit when Paramount major domo David Ellison threatened to move his operations out of the state. Their cowardice delivers CNN into the same MAGA-friendly hands that are wreaking havoc with CBS News.

Our host, as always, is Emily, joined by Contrarian Boston‘s Scott Van Voorhis and Jon Keller of WBZ-TV and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.

And that’s the way it isn’t: An embarrassing anecdote about Walter Cronkite’s years in Moscow

Walter Cronkite in 1976. Photo in the public domain.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend M. Gessen’s essay in The New York Times opinion section about their grandmother’s work as a censor for the Stalin regime. Among other things, she had the task of bowdlerizing Harrison Salisbury’s Times dispatches, a source of endless frustration for Salisbury.

One detail that caught my eye was this slam of Walter Cronkite, the saint of broadcast news, who was the Moscow bureau chief for United Press in the late 1940s.

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My Northeastern ethics students identify news stories that should get more attention

Sudanese refugees seeking food aid in neighboring Chad. Photo (cc) 2025 by the U.K. Foreign Office.

If you’ve been reading Media Nation for a while, you know that I like to ask my journalism ethics students to find stories that they think have been underreported. The definition is elastic. Even a prominently played story in The New York Times can be underreported if it isn’t repeated enough to enter the public discourse.

This semester I’ve got 29 advanced undergraduates, and I’ve boiled down their responses to 10 stories. What I looked for in presenting here was a range of topics and a diversity of media outlets, including stories published by non-mainstream outlets. I could have shared all of them, but I think this is a good sample.

UN Agencies Warn Humanitarian System in Sudan “Could Collapse,” UN News, Sept. 14. “Sudan has been embroiled in a brutal civil conflict since 2023 between rival militaries and their backers. Some 8.6 million people remain internally displaced and 19.5 million people currently face crisis levels of food insecurity, which has been compounded by maritime disruptions and drought caused by the El Niño weather pattern.”

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Bringing CBS News and CNN under one Trump-friendly roof is a disaster for freedom of the press

David Ellison, right, and his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, are now calling the shots at two major news organizations — CBS News and CNN. Photo in the public domain.

My students and I were talking this morning about press freedoms in the U.S. and in other Western democracies. How, I asked, could countries like Britain, Canada, Germany and France ensure such freedoms in the absence of something like the First Amendment?

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The answer is that they can’t, at least not as comprehensively as we do. Libel protections and the right to publish information about criminal trials, government secrets and the like are in fact more robust here than they are in other countries. Yet according to the Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders, the U.S. ranks just 64th, behind Botswana but ahead of Panama. Norway is No. 1.

How can this be? A large part of the explanation came Monday, when the last remaining legal opposition to Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery melted away, transforming two behemoths into one super-behemoth. Nearly all of this corrupt (as in the sense of rotting flesh, not whether it’s legal) transaction involves entertainment properties, which is where the money is. But what many of us really care about is that CNN is moving under the same corporate umbrella as CBS News.

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In the midst of a national freakout over AI, here’s the latest on what it’s doing to journalism

It’s time for a check-in on how digital outlets that rely partly or entirely on artificial intelligence are hollowing out the already-beleaguered news business. What better time than now, while we’re in the midst of a national freakout over AI? (The latest: Karen Weise and Mike Isaac report in The New York Times on concerns within Microsoft and OpenAI that AI scraping amounts to “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”)

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I’ll begin with what strikes me as the most well-intentioned of the projects that have caught my eye recently: Nanopress, which produces morning newsletters for more than 70 communities and neighborhoods in the Boston area by scraping information from local government, civic groups and news organizations.

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‘60 Minutes’ is back — and so is ‘Beat the Press.’ We were watching, and here’s what we thought.

*Click here or on image to watch “Beat the Press” on Contrarian Boston.*

“60 Minutes” made its fall debut on Sunday, and so did “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney.” We watched to see what clues we could discern over how executive producer Nick Bilton and CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss would remake the venerable newsmagazine program, which first slipped into view 58 years ago.

I don’t want to speak for my fellow panelists, but I thought it was solid if unspectacular. The first segment, on the secretive rescue of an American pilot from Iran, couldn’t have happened without the active cooperation of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. But since when have the networks not engaged in access journalism? The story, hosted by Norah O’Donnell, was harrowing, even if my friend Danny Schechter would have derided it as “militainment” if he were still with us.

Continue reading “‘60 Minutes’ is back — and so is ‘Beat the Press.’ We were watching, and here’s what we thought.”

USA Today Co. responds to my post on its relationship with AI surveillance company Palantir

I’m passing along this email I received from PR and corporate communications at USA Today Co. in response to my post about the newspaper chain’s deal with AI surveillance company Palantir, which has drawn protests from union employees.

Hi Dan –

I saw your piece published yesterday regarding USA TODAY Co.’s relationship with Palantir and wanted to reach out. Was there a reason you chose not to contact us for comment before publication?

In particular, I noticed the line: “From perusing the coverage, I’m not entirely sure exactly what Palantir will be doing for USAT.” Given that uncertainty, I was surprised that no effort was made to seek clarification from the company directly.

This initiative supports our broader strategy to strengthen audience relationships and create greater value across our business. In this work with Palantir, we’re leveraging AI to create a unified intelligence layer to serve our expansive audience better, deepen engagement, and drive growth across subscriptions, advertising, and e-commerce.

Our editorial decisions remain independent and are guided by our longstanding journalistic standards and ethics policies.

Please note, USA TODAY Co. complies with applicable data protection and privacy laws and maintains strong standards for data security and governance. We require this of our vendors and partners as well, reflecting our belief that safeguarding protected personal information is essential to our business and the audiences we serve.

Sharing a quote below addressing the open letter from the Guild/unionized employees which you can attribute to Amy Garrard, Vice President of Labor Relations, USA TODAY Co.:

“We respect that employees have a range of perspectives. Our agreement with Palantir is a business decision focused on strengthening how we connect and better serve audiences, advertisers, and subscribers. Our data remains protected under our existing privacy commitments, contractual safeguards, and applicable laws. As always, our journalism remains fully independent.”

25 years later, looking back at the horror of 9/11 — and my unfulfilled hopes for a better media

*Firefighters at Ground Zero on Sept. 19, 2001. Photo (cc) by Loco Steve.*

Twenty-five years ago today, I stayed up most of the night writing a long essay for The Boston Phoenix called “The End of Decadence,” a first reaction to the terrorist attacks that had just taken place. I recalled what that was like for GBH News on the 20th anniversary. Below is my original Phoenix piece, brought to you by the Northeastern University Library, which now holds the copyright.

Sadly, what stands out in rereading this is that the media did not fulfill our hopes that they would hold the powerful to account. It was Chris Matthews, of all people, who was the most prescient in the moment, telling his viewers, “The problem with retaliation is that you play into your enemy’s hands. You radicalize your enemies. Retaliation is part of the terrorism.” Within a year, news organizations were cheering on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as they built their recklessly flawed case for going to war in Iraq, a foreign-policy disaster we are living with to this day.

The end of decadence

Can the media — and the rest of us — adjust to a frightening new world?

By Dan Kennedy | The Boston Phoenix | Sept. 13, 2001

It’s over. The easiest, sleaziest, richest, most meaningless decade we’ve yet known has come to an end, buried beneath the rubble and ashes and dust of the World Trade Center.

Officially, the 1990s died at 8:45 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower — thereby setting off a day of horror unlike anything we have seen before. In truth, though, the patient had been sick for some time.

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Globe editor Brian McGrory makes it official: He won’t be returning to Boston University

*BU’s College of Communication. Photo (cc) 2012 by mikebtrinh.*

Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory will not be returning to Boston University. McGrory, who took a two-year leave of absence as chair of BU’s journalism department in December 2025, told the Globe’s staff earlier this morning that he has resigned from academia.

McGrory was the Globe’s editor from 2012 to 2023 and was replaced by Nancy Barnes, a veteran news executive who’d worked in high-level jobs at NPR, the Houston Chronicle and other stops. Barnes left abruptly in late 2025, paving the way for McGrory’s return. Although McGrory’s second stint as editor was initially described as temporary, it soon became apparent that he was back for an extended stay.

Here’s the text of his note to the newsroom, forwarded to me by people I trust.

Hey all,

In the spirit of transparency, I’m sharing with you that I resigned this week from the faculty of Boston University, which obviously ends my leave of absence there. BU administrators had kindly granted me a two-year leave, with one very reasonable requirement. They asked that I let them know this September whether I planned to return in January, 2028.

I truly valued my time at BU, so much that I don’t want to commit to a return date that I may not be able to keep. I also don’t want to continue our work at the Globe with an immovable deadline hanging over my head. After discussions with Dhiraj [Nayar, president of Boston Globe Media], Linda [Henry, Globe Media’s CEO], and Mariette DiChristina, the dean at BU, this seemed to be the right thing to do.

It feels to me, and I hope to many of you, that we are making tremendous progress, consistently, sometimes relentlessly, putting out truly interesting and important journalism. I couldn’t be more delighted to be a part of it all.

None of this should signal that I’m looking to overstay my welcome. In terms of how long I’ll be in this role, I’m aiming for the day before you start wondering why I’m still here.

I’m happy to answer any questions that you have. Just drop by.