Digital news pioneer Rob Curley is out as editor of the Orange County Register, whose acquisition by Digital First Media was completed earlier today. The story was broken by the Orange County Business Journal.
Gustavo Arellano, the editor of OC Weekly, adds that some 50 to 70 employees are losing their jobs at the Register and its sister paper, the Riverside Press-Enterprise. These are “mostly on the sales, circulation, and marketing side,” Arellano writes, a sign that Digital First—which also owns several other papers in Southern California—is consolidating its business operations.
A little more than a year ago I spent a good chunk of a day at the Register as part of my book project. Curley, who made his bones as an early digital guy at the Lawrence Journal-World a dozen years ago, followed by stops at the Washington Post and the Las Vegas Sun (among other places), allowed me to spend a considerable amount of time with him and answered all questions. However, it was completely off the record, so I can’t share with you anything I learned. I can tell you it wasn’t all that eventful.
The next day, Kushner—who had tried to purchase the Boston Globe and Maine’s Portland Press Herald before leading a group that bought the Register in 2012—stepped down a day before I was to interview him. Kushner’s emphasis on print, and his head-turning moves to hire staff and buy and launch newspapers (including a short-lived daily in Los Angeles), earned him national recognition. Unfortunately, a shortage of funds led him to dismantle what he had built in very short order.
Digital First bought the Register and the Press-Enterprise for $49.8 million after the US Department of Justice convinced a federal judge that a higher bid by Tribune Publishing, which owns the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union Tribune, should be rejected because it would reduce competition.
It struck a number of observers, including me, that the government was engaged in outdated thinking that no longer applied to the shrinking, money-losing newspaper business. Tribune has gone through numerous gyrations over the years, but the LA Times has remained an excellent newspaper. It almost certainly would have been a better steward of the Register and the Press-Enterprise than Digital First.
At a time when it seems like the entire political world has gone mad, I offer some welcome perspective this morning from E.J. Dionne:
President Obama’s approval rate is currently 53 percent. At a similar point in George W. Bush’s presidency, his standing had fallen to 32 percent.
Donald Trump’s favorability rating is a minuscule 33 percent, and just 34 percent among independents. The vast majority of his support comes from Republicans, 64 percent of whom view him favorably.
Dionne writes:
Trumpism is not sweeping the nation. It has a strong foothold only in the Republican Party, and not even all of it….
We are allowing a wildly and destructively inaccurate portrait of us as a people to dominate our imaginations and debase our thinking.
We’ve got a long way to go between now and November. As Dionne notes, the successes of Trump and Bernie Sanders “reveal the discontent of Americans who have been left out in our return to prosperity.” (Needless to say, even though both Trump and Sanders have embraced economic populism, only Sanders has managed to do so without couching it in the language of racism and violence.)
But it’s wrong to think that the entire country has gone nuts. Just part of it. And I agree with Dionne that the media could do a far better job of making that clear.
Donald Trump said on CNN last night that—OMG!—he’s revoking his pledge to support the Republican nominee for president and not run as an independent.
To which I ask: What pledge? Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Trump has always added the caveat that he wouldn’t bolt the party as long as he’s treated “fairly.”
For instance, last November 22, he said on national television that he was rethinking an independent run in light of reports that Republican leaders were going to launch a concerted effort to defeat him. “Well, I’m going to have to see what happens,” he said. “I will see what happens. I have to be treated fairly. You know, when I did this, I said I have to be treated fairly. If I’m treated fairly, I’m fine. All I want to do is a level playing field.”
Then, in February, he did it again, claiming unfair treatment and saying, “I signed a pledge but it’s a double-edge pledge, and as far as I’m concerned they’re in default of the pledge.”
For that matter, if you go back to last September, when he signed the pledge, you could interpret one of his statements as leaving himself wiggle room: “I see no circumstances under which I would tear up that pledge.” In other words, he could not foresee at the time that he’d be treated “unfairly.”
To be sure, this is probably the least noteworthy bit of Trump news you’ll see today given that he’s defending his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, against charges—captured on video—that he manhandled a female reporter who was trying to ask Trump a question. (This being Trumpworld, one of Lewandowski’s lawyers is a former US attorney who was once accused of biting a stripper in Florida. Of course.)
No doubt Bernie Sanders spoke for many last October when he said he was sick of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s “damn emails.” But if Clinton wins the Democratic presidential nomination, you can be sure we’re going to hear more—much more. Indeed, the ongoing saga of why Clinton used a private email server for official government business when she was secretary of state is likely to emerge as her biggest obstacle in the general election campaign this fall.
With an eye toward settling in my own mind whether or not the email story—I hesitate to call it a scandal—could derail her candidacy (or worse), I spent some time on Monday reading two in-depth accounts of exactly what occurred and whether it could lead to legal trouble. The whodunit, a 5,000-word piece that was published in TheWashington Post on Sunday, was reported and written by Robert O’Harrow Jr., an investigative journalist. The only-slightly-shorter legal analysis was written by former Department of Homeland Security lawyer Richard O. Lempert and appears in TheAmerican Prospect.
I wish I could tell you that I now understand what happened. In fact, I don’t, although I know more than I did before. According to the Post, it all began when Clinton, as the new secretary of state, made it clear that she wanted to keep using her BlackBerry. The State Department was against it because of security concerns, but technology officials helped her do it anyway—apparently without realizing she was routing all her email through a private server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, New York.
Clinton’s goal appears to have been convenience rather than anything nefarious. At the same time, though, she ignored warnings that what she was doing could prove dangerous even after “a note went out over Clinton’s name urging department employees to ‘avoid conducting official Department business from your personal email accounts.’” And no, her Republican predecessors, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, did not engage in similar practices despite many reports to the contrary. O’Harrow writes:
From the earliest days, Clinton aides and senior officials focused intently on accommodating the secretary’s desire to use her private email account, documents and interviews show.
Throughout, they paid insufficient attention to laws and regulations governing the handling of classified material and the preservation of government records, interviews and documents show. They also neglected repeated warnings about the security of the BlackBerry while Clinton and her closest aides took obvious security risks in using the basement server.
By contrast, Lempert focuses on the narrower, simpler issue of whether Clinton broke the law. On that matter, we are able to come to something approaching a definitive answer: No. (Well, OK. Probably not.) The reason Clinton is almost certainly in the clear is that, under most circumstances, mishandling classified information is not a crime unless it’s done “knowingly and willfully.” Lempert explains:
To violate this statute, Secretary Clinton would have had to know that she was dealing with classified information, and either that she was disclosing it to people who could not be trusted to protect the interests of the United States or that she was handling it in a way (e.g. by not keeping it adequately secure) that was at least arguably prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States.
In other words, her apparent ignorance of technology should serve as an adequate—if not impressive—defense.
Lempert also goes deep on what kind of information is classified, what should be classified, and how information becomes classified. A lot of it is eye-glazing, but here’s a fact that made me sit up and take notice: as secretary of state, Clinton had the ultimate power to classify and declassify information produced by her agency. That wouldn’t be the case with information originating with the president, of course, or with other agencies. That’s why her handling of CIA documents has come under scrutiny. But the question of whether classified State Department documents passed through the basement of her home may prove to be the ultimate non-issue.
In addition, Lempert raises the possibility that Clinton’s private server may actually have been more secure than the government’s, since hackers presumably would not have known about her unusual arrangement.
Into the midst of this uncertainty comes Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New YorkTimes, who, in a commentary for The Guardian, writes that she considers Clinton to be “fundamentally honest and trustworthy”—two qualities not normally associated with her, or at least not with the caricature of her that now stands in as a substitute for whoever the real Hillary Clinton might be.
So where does that leave us regarding the emails? The story, broken by the Times, has been with us for more than a year now, and we don’t seem to be any closer to the whole truth now than we were then. It’s like Benghazi—casting shadows on Clinton’s judgment, but no more than that.
Finally, a caution for the media. Merely passing along the pronouncements of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump that Clinton “shouldn’t be allowed to run” because of the way she handled her email is a disservice to the public. (Then again, taking anything Trump says at face value is a disservice to the public.)
The Washington Post and The American Prospect articles demonstrate that the truth is elusive, nuanced, and not all that exciting. Unfortunately, the chances that this story won’t be boiled down to a soundbite—simple, understandable, and wrong—are virtually nil.
I received this on Saturday from a friend who lives on the North Shore. Read the whole thing, but I think he’s put his finger on exactly what GateHouse is up to: most customers pay for their local GateHouse paper by credit card, and it renews automatically. Unless they are unusually sharp observers, they don’t notice when their subscription is renewed earlier than it ought to be because they are receiving unsolicited “premium” content such as Lens.
Note: As I wrote in my previous post, I’ve learned from commenters on Facebook that GateHouse is not alone. Digital First Media and Gannett are among the other newspaper chains alleged to have done this. The full text of my friend’s email follows.
I noticed your post this morning about GateHouse and its Lens magazine, and wanted to let you know what I’ve picked up. But since I’m not a Facebook member and never will be, I don’t appear to be able to post there. Hence this email.
Coincidentally, I’ve been going back and forth with GateHouse over the last month and a half about this. I got a renewal notice for the Tri-Town Transcript back at about the end of January. It said my subscription would expire on Feb. 19. I’ve subscribed ever since we moved to Topsfield more than 20 years ago (of course the paper has gone through several owners in that time) and I was certainly willing to resubscribe—I’d even written the check out.
As I was about to put it in the envelope, I couldn’t shake the feeling that February was awfully early for my sub to expire. So I went back through my records and found that last year I wrote the check to GateHouse in April, and the year before in May. (Prior to that the calendar date on the checks was stable from year to year.)
So I called GateHouse and was told my subscription renewal date had creeped back to February (from April) in the past year because I had received two issues of something called Lens magazine. I was docked three weeks of Tri-Town each for two issues of Lens—six weeks. I looked it up on the Internet and found a couple of past covers, neither of which I recalled every receiving. I can’t say that I didn’t, but if I did it went right into recycling; it’s nothing I’m interested in and certainly nothing I would pay for. GateHouse directed me to the “fine print” on the back of my bill, which is similar to what is in the image you posted. There are differences—much of the language on the back of my Tri-Town bill refers to “TV Times,” which I assume is in the daily GateHouse papers. There’s no mention of Lens. The key passage is “Due to the size and value of premium editions thee will be up to a $2.00 surcharge on each date of premium. However, rather than assess an extra charge for premium editions we will adjust the length of your subscription, which accelerates the expiration of your subscription, when you receive these premium editions. There will be no more than 12 premium editions per calendar year.”
So I suppose I should feel lucky that I was only docked 6 weeks, as according to GateHouse it could have been 36 (out of 52).
I pointed out to the GateHouse customer service person I was talking to that none of this is on the front of the subscription renewal form, where it specifically says I’m paying $35.58 for 52 weeks of the Tri-Town Transcript, and even specifies the calendar dates of the subscription term. This made no impression on the customer service person.
They finally said they would allow me to opt out of future “premium editions.” It took a few more calls over the next few weeks to get to a manager, who said they could restore the lost 6 weeks to my subscription. Flushed with success on that point, I pressed ahead as I’d evidently lost 6 weeks in the previous year’s subscription as well. When they wouldn’t give on that, I canceled my subscription (I’m sure I’ll still get some bill for a cancellation fee or whatever papers they have sent since February—we’ll see how that goes, as they’re not getting another cent out of me).
The poor customer service rep said she had to have a reason for my cancellation. I told her it was because of the company’s business practices.
GateHouse will allow you to opt out if you call them, but why should the onus be on the subscriber? And why is that not stated up front with the annual subscription rate? And why is that option not on the renewal form itself? And if the magazines are so “premium” and so desirable, why isn’t there an option to subscribe to them rather than having them forced on subscribers until they opt out?
Over the weeks I’ve raised all these questions and others with several consumer advocacy agencies. So far the only response I’ve received is to the complaint I filed with the attorney general, which was a form letter saying they have limited resources and would not investigate because there is no “widespread and significant harm to multiple consumers” and there is no “pattern of complaints involving multiple consumers.”
I’ve written a follow-up letter pointing out that there is indeed widespread harm because this is affecting thousands of subscribers, many of who are on automatic renewal because of the company’s policy of collecting credit card numbers (as oppose to those of us who still pay by check) and renewing them year to year without ever sending out a notice. And I suggested the reason there is no “pattern of complaints” is because it is a deception—they’re ripping people off without most people knowing it. I think this is exactly the type of thing the attorney general’s office should protect people against, but apparently Maura Healey and I differ.
I’ve also got complaints on file with the Better Business Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission, and Call for Action. Haven’t heard back yet. But I’m not expecting much. I’m mostly venting. All I can do is cancel.
I was alerted to this by an Arlington Advocate subscriber a few weeks ago, and now it has shown up in the Medford Transcript: Lens, a 36-page “premium” magazine that is apparently intended as an advertising vehicle, published by the weeklies’ parent company, GateHouse Media.
Nothing wrong with developing a new source of ad revenue—although the only two non-house ads I could find were quarter-pagers for a livery company and a liquor store. Even though Lens was included with our Transcript for free—or, rather, for “free”—it carries a cover price of $3.95.
If you look at the fine print on page 3, though, you’ll see that you’re being charged for Lens whether you like it or not in the form of a truncated subscription to your community paper. With 12 premium editions a year, does that mean our subscription to the Transcript will be shortened by 12 weeks?
Has anyone else seen this? Have you tried to do anything about it?
We are already having a lively discussion about this at Facebook, where I learned from commenters that Digital First Media and Gannett have pulled similar stunts. If you’d like to weigh in, I suggest you do so there.
Donald Trump in 2011. Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore.
Donald Trump represents a challenge on many levels. One of those challenges is to the traditionally independent role of journalists—even opinion journalists like me. Because I’m in a position to express my opinions freely, I am not violating any ethical standard by saying that I think Trump is a racist demagogue who advocates violence and who is, in my view, the greatest threat to American democracy since the Great Depression.
What I always refrain from doing, though, is saying whom I’ll vote for. If you read me (thank you), you can probably guess at least 95 percent of the time. But I don’t take that last step. I have opinions, but I support no one. Nor do I make political donations, or put signs on our lawn or bumper stickers on my car.
Trump, though, is a clear and present danger to our country. NPR recently tied itself up in knots because Cokie Roberts—a commentator who is supposedly free to offer her opinions—wrote an anti-Trump column co-bylined with her husband, Steve Roberts. Like a lot of observers, I found that to be incredible. So let me tell you right now:
I will not vote for Trump. Assuming that Trump wins the Republican nomination and there is no viable independent candidate whom I prefer, I will vote for the Democratic candidate, most likely Hillary Clinton. If Bernie Sanders somehow manages to wrest the nomination from Clinton, I’ll vote for him.
I also hope the Republicans somehow find a way to deny Trump the nomination at their national convention this summer, which could happen if he’s ahead but commands less than a majority of the delegates. Trump has threatened us with riots if he’s spurned in such fashion, but that’s all the more reason to keep him off the ballot, not to retreat.
No, I’m not going to send Clinton a check or put a bumper sticker on my car. But I’m abandoning my independence just this once to make it clear that I will vote against Donald J. Trump.
Just as Congress and the broader electorate are hopelessly divided along partisan and ideological lines, so, too, is the Supreme Court.
Before the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, there were four liberals, four conservatives, and one centrist—Anthony Kennedy. All four liberals were appointed by Democratic presidents and all four conservatives (plus Kennedy) by Republicans.
And now a partisan battle has broken out over Scalia’s replacement. Despite President Obama’s choice of a respected moderate, federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has vowed not even to take up the nomination. Instead, McConnell insists the decision should be left to the next president.
It’s a dispiriting scenario—and a historical anomaly. As the retired New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse pointed out Tuesday, we only have to look at fairly recent history to observe a very different dynamic.
After all, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren to the chief justice’s position, and Warren turned out (to Eisenhower’s chagrin) to be one of the most liberal justices in the court’s history. President John F. Kennedy appointed Byron White, who was liberal on civil rights but deeply conservative on social issues. And unlike today, when advocates expend most of their energy trying to persuade just one justice, Anthony Kennedy, years ago there were regularly three, four, or more justices who might vote either way.
“I’m deeply concerned as a citizen and as someone who cares about the court and about the consequences of the politicization of the court,” Greenhouse said. “The Roberts court is allowing the court to be used as a tool of partisan warfare.” As an example, she cited the court’s decision to rule on the legality of Obama’s executive order stopping the deportation of some undocumented immigrants—a decision that she said was accompanied by an overreaching aside questioning whether Obama’s order violated the Constitution.
Greenhouse, who currently teaches at Yale Law School and who still writes online commentaries about the court for the Times, spoke at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School. She offered a range of dyspeptic opinions on the political environment both inside and outside the court. To wit:
• On Justice Scalia’s legacy. “I think he degraded the discourse of the court, frankly,” Greenhouse said. “His snarky dissenting opinions were ill-advised and enabled snarkiness in others. I think his, quote, originalist understanding of constitutional interpretation goes nowhere. That died with him.” She added: “He was a very colorful figure and great at calling attention to himself. He was kind of a cult figure. But I don’t think he’ll have much lasting impact.”
• On McConnell’s refusal to consider Obama’s appointment of Judge Garland to the court. “It’s truly unprecedented. … It’s totally cynical. It’s totally playing to the base,” Greenhouse said. She also disagreed with an observation by Shorenstein Center interim director Tom Patterson that Obama should have chosen a woman or a member of a minority group who would be more appealing to Democratic voters. “The brilliance of this nomination,” she said, is that the Garland choice will make Republicans “squirm” because he is exactly the sort of moderate they had earlier said they would confirm.
• On the Supreme Court’s order that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reconsider the state’s ban on stun guns. By custom, Greenhouse said, the Supreme Court would make such a decision without comment. But Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas added a caustic opinion suggesting the SJC had put a woman’s safety at risk. “Something’s not right here,” she said. “The idea is you don’t wash your dirty linen in public. … They thought they had to enlighten us with this 10-page screed.”
Greenhouse said that one way to make the court less politicized would be to put more (as in any) politicians on it. At one time during the Warren era, she said, not a single member of the court had served as a federal judge. Warren himself had been governor of California. More recently, Sandra Day O’Connor had served as an elected official in Arizona before entering the judiciary.
“I think a diversity of characteristics on the Supreme Court is very helpful,” she said.
Given that many Supreme Court decisions can go either way (after all, Greenhouse added, the reason most cases are before the court in the first place is because federal appeals courts in different jurisdictions reached opposite conclusions), a politician’s willingness to seek compromise might sometimes be superior than the certainty with which judges with legal backgrounds often act.
WGBH News contributor Dan Kennedy is a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Hulk Hogan (or more likely an impersonator) with a fan in 2008. Photo (cc) by Rene Passet.
Based on my layman’s understanding, it seems to me that the $115 million verdict against Gawker in the Hulk Hogan case fits neatly within existing privacy law. I don’t see how it sets any precedent or poses a threat to the First Amendment.
One question that’s worth asking: Will the verdict have a chilling effect on publishers? I don’t see how. In fact, I don’t think any reasonable person would have thought that he or she could publish a video without permission of someone having sex and not risk serious legal action. Gawker is an outlier. Even observers not familiar with Gawker should have understood that there’s something deeply dysfunctional at a news organization whose former editor jokes about child pornography at a deposition.
Our modern understanding of privacy law is rooted in Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy.” It’s not that long, and it’s a good read. The first of Warren and Brandeis’s six principles—newsworthiness—is what Gawker hung its hat on in its defense. “The right to privacy does not prohibit any publication of matter which is of public or general interest,” Warren and Brandeis write.
Gawker sought to stretch the boundaries of “public or general interest” way past the breaking point. Yes, Hulk Hogan is a public figure, which means he has fewer privacy rights than most of us. And yes, he bragged about his sexual prowess. But it doesn’t follow that it’s therefore OK to post a video of him having sex without getting his and his partner’s permission, regardless of whether he knew he was being recorded.
Legal experts are all over the place, of course, but Daniel Solove, a privacy expert and George Washington University Law professor, begins a commentary in The New York Times with this:
Gawker’s posting of the Hulk Hogan sex video is not speech that the First Amendment right to free speech does or should protect. Sex videos, nude photos and revenge porn—even of famous people—are not newsworthy. They are not of legitimate public concern.
Gawker founder Nick Denton will appeal, and it’s possible that he’ll win. If the verdict stands, though, it should serve as nothing more than a common-sense reminder that though the First Amendment’s protections are vast, they are not limitless.
Note: A Media Nation reader writes: “I am 99.9 percent sure that is not Hulk Hogan in the photo.” She may be right, and I’ve edited the caption accordingly.
