William Harlan Hale delivering the first Voice of America Broadcast on Jan. 1, 1942. Photo via Wikipedia.
When a coup takes place in other countries, we sometimes learn that news programming is taken off the air and replaced with patriotic music. I don’t know what kind of music has been playing on Voice of America since Saturday morning. What I do know is that dictators like Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping found it pleasing to their ears.
There is a danger at moments like this to breeze past stories such as the virtual shutdown of Voice of America because we knew it was coming anyway, and because there are more immediate matters with which to grapple, including illegal arrests and deportations. But the Trump White House’s shutdown of Voice of America, though not surprising, is nevertheless a moment worth paying careful attention to as the authoritarian regime headed by Donald Trump tightens its grip.
Something I stress with my journalism students is the importance of having your own home on the internet, either in the form of a newsletter or a blog, so that you have a repository for your work.
But you’ll notice I didn’t say “permanent” repository. Probably the two most widely used platforms, Medium and Substack, are owned by corporate entities that could disappear or change their terms in various onerous ways.
For Media Nation I use WordPress software with a hosting service, GoDaddy, which at least in theory is a safer bet. But something could go wrong with WordPress so that there would no longer be anyone to provide critical security updates. Or GoDaddy could Go Out of Business. The Internet Archive is invaluable, but it doesn’t scrape everything. The bottom line is that you have to stay on top of things if you want to keep the tumbleweeds from blowing into your digital homestead.
Which is why I was interested to read this interview with Brandon Tauszik, a fellow with the Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford, who is involved in designing low-cost ways for journalists to preserve their work.
Ruth Marcus. 2017 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I don’t necessarily feel obliged to chronicle every rung that The Washington Post hits on the way down to wherever it ultimately lands. But there were three developments this week that I thought were worth taking note of as we ponder owner Jeff Bezos’ strange, dispiriting journey into MAGA-land.
1. Another resignation. Ruth Marcus resigned from the opinion section following publisher Will Lewis’ cancellation of a column she wrote criticizing Bezos’ edict that the section will henceforth be devoted to “personal liberties and free markets.”
Marcus, a moderate who is a former deputy editor of the section, is a lifer, unflashy and unpretentious. In a way, for such a core member of the Post to decide she’d had enough is even more disturbing than it is to lose someone with more of a following who can easily slide over to The New York Times, The Atlantic or Substack.
Writing in The New Yorker, she confirms something I suspected — that she’d already pretty much decided to resign and wrote her column with an eye toward leaving in a blaze of glory. She includes the text of the column, and, as she notes, it is mild and restrained. She knew it would likely be killed, but she says she wrote it with an eye toward having it appear in the Post.
She also tells us that Bezos, despite compiling a stellar record of strength and independence from the time he bought the Post until a little more than a year ago, nevertheless gave off some warning signals along the way. Even as he was publicly standing up to Donald Trump during Trump’s first term, he was also pushing the opinion section to find a few good things to say about him. Not a big deal at the time, but ominous in retrospect.
“I wish we could return to the newspaper of a not so distant past,” Marcus writes. “But that is not to be, and here is the unavoidable truth: The Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not The Washington Post I left.”
2. Titanic, deck chairs, etc. Even as Bezos transforms the Post into a laughingstock (not the news section, I should point out, though few readers draw that distinction), Lewis and executive editor Matt Murray continue to make plans that they hope will connect with readers more effectively than the current product. I wish I could think of a more original metaphor than rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic, but that’s what comes to mind.
Axios media reporter Sara Fischer writes that the paper will divide its national desk in two. One part of it will focus on non-political national reporting, and the other will be devoted exclusively to politics and government. The Post has struggled for years to appeal to readers whose primary interest is something other than politics, and that has a lot to do with its circulation slide and mounting losses following Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
By contrast, the Times continues to grow and prosper, largely on the strength of its lifestyle brands. The Post is stuck not just with a politics-centric audience, but with an audience that it’s alienated through Bezos’ high-handed moves, starting with his cancellation of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election.
“I want to make sure there are a few areas that are equally staffed and strong to make sure we’re always putting a strong foot forward and that we’re not just the politics paper, even though that’s important to who we are,” Murray told Fischer.
Frankly, I doubt it will work. What might work is an idea that Lewis floated some months back to publish local newsletters for an extra subscription fee that would serve the chronically undercovered metro Washington area. But now you have to wonder how well that would be received with The Washington Post brand on it.
3. Uncomfortable praise. Bezos must have been so proud Tuesday when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went out of her way to praise the Post.
“It appears that the mainstream media, including the Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this president does not help you sell newspapers,” Leavitt was quoted as saying. “It’s not a very good business model.”
As media reporter Oliver Darcy noted, it’s not likely that Leavitt had the newsroom restructing in mind. “Instead,” he wrote, “one imagines she was probably applauding Bezos’ push to shift the opinion section to the right.”
On Thursday morning, I posted our latest “What Works” podcast, in which my Northeastern University colleague Mike Beaudet of WCVB-TV (Channel 5) explained to Ellen Clegg and me why the folks running local television news need to transition to a digital-first, mobile-first mentality if they hope to attract a younger generation of viewers.
The pixels were barely dry before I started hearing from The Boston Globe newsroom that the paper was canceling its four-days-a-week 5 p.m. newscast, “Boston Globe Today.” I was able to break that news before anyone else, so thanks as always to my sources. The program, launched in February 2023, appeared Monday through Thursday on New England Sports Network, of which Globe owners John and Linda Henry are part-owners.
Former Washington Post (and Boston Globe) top editor Marty Baron, left, with his old Globe colleague Matt Carroll, now a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
It’s been nearly a week since Jeff Bezos issued his edict that The Washington Post’s opinion section would henceforth be devoted exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets,” and it’s still not clear what that is going to mean in practice.
Many observers, including me, have assumed that Bezos was using coded language — that, in fact, what he meant was that the Post would go all-in on Trumpism. That would seem logical given his earlier order to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris and his overall sucking up to Donald Trump.
So far, though, not much has happened other than the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley. Liberal opinion journalists like Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus and Perry Bacon Jr. are still there. Another liberal, Dana Milbank, responded to Bezos’ edict by tweaking the owner (gift link), writing:
If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend Bezos’s twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to “personal liberties and free markets” in the United States today: President Donald Trump.
Given that Bezos’ agenda has yet to be clearly articulated, let me suggest another possibility: rather than Trumpism, he intends to embrace libertarianism, which was thought to be his guiding political philosophy before he bought the Post in 2013.
The Boston Globe is losing one of its top editors, Mark Morrow, who’s retiring after nearly 30 years at the paper. Before that, he worked for 12 years as a reporter and editor at The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, giving him a career trajectory that would be difficult to replicate these days.
Morrow, 71, the Globe’s editor-at-large, has been involved in some of the paper’s most noteworthy journalism over the years, including the pedophile-priest story that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and was the subject of the movie “Spotlight.” According to a memo to the staff from executive editor Nancy Barnes, which was shared with me by a trusted source, Morrow “played a significant editing role garnered the Globe three Pulitzers and seven Pulitzers finalists among myriad other recognitions.”
Barnes’ full memo to the staff follows.
When I first arrived at the Globe, more than two years ago now, I looked across the long conference table where the morning news meeting is held every day, and saw a rare editor. He carried no laptop. His arms were folded across his chest. He was just listening and thinking — at least until it came around to his turn to share his deep thoughts. And share, he did in the manner of a grand poobah.
You all know who I am talking about, the inimitable, and yes, irreplaceable, Mark Morrow, our editor-at-large and editor extraordinaire. And yet, somehow, after nearly 30 years, this newsroom will have to learn to do without him. Mark is retiring, at 71, after a lifetime of dedication to journalism and other journalists. God knows he deserves it, but we will all miss him, and me especially, as he has served as a thought partner in editing when I most needed one here. Mark will leave at the end of the month, exact date to be determined.
Mark once told me that it was initially hard to get a foothold at the Globe, but he was determined, and he finally got his chance in the summer of 1995 when then metro editor, Walter V. Robinson, and Editor Matt Storin, took a chance on him. Since then, he has served in myriad roles, as political editor, overseeing the state house and city hall teams, and as national editor during the Clinton impeachment years, the first wave of mass shootings, and the 2000 national election that brought us all hanging chads. The national operation, in those days, included a DC bureau of about a dozen or so people, a roving national reporter, and correspondents in three national bureaus: New York, LA, and New Orleans.
After the Bush-Gore election, Mark moved on to something completely different. He took over the Living/Arts department for 18 months before Marty Baron promoted him to AME [assistant managing editor] for projects in the summer of 2002, when the Globe’s investigation into the Catholic Church clergy scandal was roaring along. He succeeded Ben Bradlee Jr. as the senior editor overseeing the Spotlight Team for the balance of that singular investigation, shared in the Public Service Pulitzer it earned, and has guided and served as final editor on all Spotlight Team work in the 22 years since.
He has also been instrumental in most of the Globe’s other noteworthy and impactful projects and enterprise, in his other role as Sunday editor, for the past 12 years. Projects in which he played a significant editing role garnered the Globe three Pulitzers and seven Pulitzers finalists among myriad other recognitions. But most importantly, it was work that made a difference in the life of our community, our state, and the journalists who worked with Mark.
Be kind to him today, as it’s sure to be a difficult one. We will share details of how to celebrate him before too long.
I share the shock and revulsion of every decent person over Donald Trump and JD Vance’s shameful attack Friday on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. We are sliding into authoritarianism, and Trump has made it eminently clear that his role model is Russia’s homicidal dictator, Vladimir Putin.
There are any number of places you can go for analysis that’s sharper and better-informed than mine, but I do what to share a few tidbits I’ve gleaned in my reading over the past day.
Among the more interesting questions is whether this happened spontaneously or if Trump and Vance ambushed Zelenskyy. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic argues for the latter (gift link). His evidence: the very fact that Vance spoke up, which was not something he would normally be expected to do and was almost certainly scripted in advance. Nichols writes:
Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio — in theory, America’s top diplomat — was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.
Also of note is that New York Times political reporter Peter Baker is speaking truth to power. Baker often gets criticized for showing Trump too much deference and normalizing his sociopathic behavior. On Wednesday, though, Baker compared Trump’s treatment of the media to Putin’s during his early days of establishing his authority. Baker was covering Moscow at that time, and he said Trump’s banishment of The Associated Press over the news agency’s refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” was reminiscent of Putin’s efforts to mold “a collection of compliant reporters who knew to toe the line or else they would pay a price.”
Baker added we’re still a long way from Trump ordering that anti-regime journalists be poisoned. But it was a harsh characterization of Trump from someone who usually likes to keep his options open. I’d say there’s no going back.
And indeed, Baker brought the truth with him again on Friday, writing this as a riposte to Trump’s invocation of “the Russia hoax” in his meeting with Zelenskyy. Baker says:
In fact, the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was no hoax and concluded definitively that Mr. Putin ordered an intelligence operation to tilt the election eight years ago to Mr. Trump. Although Mr. Mueller said in his final report in 2019 that “the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges,” he made clear that Mr. Trump’s campaign benefited from Russian assistance.
Baker could have gone one step further and pointed out that Mueller may well have charged Trump with criminal acts were it not for guidance from the Justice Department that a sitting president is exempt. Still, good for Baker for reminding everyone that the 2016 Trump campaign was awash in Russian influence.
Finally, Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen, an enthusiastic Trumper, wrote an embarrassing column (gift link if you’re interested) on Thursday headlined “Trump just dealt Russia a devastating blow,” with the subhead “A deal for Ukraine’s minerals could effectively end the war.” That deal, of course, was what Zelenskyy had supposedly come to the White House to sign, only to be sandbagged by Trump and Vance.
So how did Thiessen react? Naturally, he took to Twitter and blasted Zelenskyy, writing:
There was no ambush. Z was set up for success. All he had to do was not get into a public fight and sign the minerals deal. Not hard. A lot of work went into making a successful moment possible and he blew it and then refused to apologize.
Thiessen has been at the Post for years, so you can’t blame this on Jeff Bezos’ edict that the Post’s opinion section is going full MAGA. But this is the sort of garbage you can expect will be rewarded, while the future of liberal columnists like Dana Milbank, Ruth Marcus and Jonathan Capehart is left very much in doubt.
The Mississippi judge who ordered a newspaper to remove an editorial from its website has reversed herself. But this is hardly a victory for freedom of the press.
Judge Crystal Wise Martin rescinded her temporary restraining order after the owner of The Clarksdale Press Register and the board of commissioners in that city agreed to settle a dispute that had resulted in a libel suit being filed. The commissioners agreed to drop the suit while Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, said the paper will publish a less incendiary version of the editorial, according to Michael Levenson of The New York Times (gift link).
That does not change the reality that Judge Martin leaped in to help city officials by censoring the newspaper, even though the First Amendment protects libelous materials from being subjected to prior restraint. Libel can, of course, be punished after the fact through a civil suit, although government agencies cannot sue for libel.
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.”
Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
I was hoping that Jeff Bezos had gotten it out of his system. After his disastrous decision to cancel The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, which cost the paper some 250,000 subscriptions, and his subsequent sucking up to Donald Trump, the billionaire had been quiet recently.
The news section’s coverage of the calamitous Trump White House has been excellent, and the Post’sdeputy managing editor, Mike Semel, has said that subscriber conversions “are strong and growing at a near-record pace,” according to media reporter Oliver Darcy.
But it was too good to be true. New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin reports (gift link) that opinion editor David Shipley is quitting after Bezos issued an edict calling for the section to go full MAGA. No longer will the Post offer a heterodox opinion section of liberals, moderates and conservatives. Rather, it will be more like The Wall Street Journal’s ultraconservative opinion section, only (I’ll predict) not as smart. Mullin writes:
“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said, in an email to The Post’s employees on Wednesday. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”
In his note, Mr. Bezos said that he asked Mr. Shipley whether he wanted to stay at The Post, and Mr. Shipley declined.
“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Mr. Bezos wrote.
You can read the full text of Bezos’ message on Mullin’s Bluesky feed.
Shipley had to endure the embarrassment of the Harris non-endorsement and then took one for the team when he killed an Ann Telnaes cartoon mocking Bezos and other corporate titans as they groveled at Trump’s feet. Shipley’s reasoning at the time — that there had already been enough of such opinionating — was disingenuous, and Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner, quit. But Shipley is standing tall today.
I have to assume this will set off a mass exodus from the Post’s opinion section. Good thing that Jonathan Capehart survived the purge at MSNBC that claimed Joy Reid.
A few random observations:
• Bezos says, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Hmmm … personal liberties and free markets? If Bezos is serious, then that would mean the new Post opinion section will be deeply anti-Trump: opposed to tariffs and in favor of reproductive and LGBTQ rights. But of course that’s not what he means. He’s adopting the up-is-down rhetoric of the MAGA movement.
• Bezos explicitly rejects the idea of a heterodox opinion section, arguing that it’s not necessary because “the internet does that job.” For years, the Post’s opinion section has been center-right, with a few liberals and a few Trumpers. Now The New York Times stands alone of the three major national papers in offering something close to the full spectrum. It’s kind of the mirror image of what the Post had been up until now — that is, the Times has been center-left, with a few conservatives but no Trump supporters.
• Does Bezos want the Post’s news pages to continue as tough, fair, independent truth-seekers with no interference from the owner? That’s how it works at the Journal, whose news pages continue to kick butt despite the right-wing opinion section and despite Murdoch ownership. Bezos was a very good steward of the Post from the time he bought it in 2013 until about a year ago, when he hired Fleet Street veteran and former Murdoch executive Will Lewis as publisher and kept him on even as questions about Lewis’ ethics mounted. I’m hoping for the best from the Post’s news section, but I’m bracing for the worst.
The Associated Press has been in the news a lot lately, both because of its feud with the White House over Donald Trump’s insistence that it refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and for some cuts it’s had to implement (see Gintautus Dumcius’ story in CommonWealth Beacon and Aidan Ryan’s in The Boston Globe).
But here’s some good news: The AP announced on Thursday that it’s creating a Local Investigative Reporting Program to support efforts at the community level. According to an annoucement by executive editor Julie Pace, the initiative will be headed by veteran AP editor Ron Nixon, who “will work with state and local outlets to cultivate stories and support their investigative reporting needs.”
The program will encompass training, resources and access to AP services, and will build on the agency’s Local News Success Team “to localize national stories for member audiences and provide services and support to newsrooms across the U.S.”
