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.
Earlier today I broke the news that GateHouse Media is closing its office in Somerville and laying off staff, with the Somerville Journal to be run out of the company’s Danvers office and the Cambridge Chronicle out of Lexington.
The Boston Business Journal followed up with additional details, including the fact that Wayne Braverman, a longtime GateHouse employee who’s a group managing editor, would be losing his job.
You need a presence in the community—a place where folks can drop in with an obit, a press release, or to give someone a piece of his or her mind. Local newspaper offices have become a rare species over the past 40 years, though some papers—no longer encumbered by the need to have their printing presses close at hand—have been reversing that trend.
I don’t expect readers of the Somerville and Cambridge papers will notice much difference, and I should note that the Medford Transcript is already run out of Danvers. But I moved from Danvers to Medford a little over a year ago, and let’s just say that the two communities are not close. And Somerville is probably another 10 minutes farther away. The Cambridge-Lexington connection isn’t quite as absurd, but how can a city as large and engaged as Cambridge not have its own newspaper office?
We’ve been having a robust conversation on Facebook about GateHouse’s latest move to squeeze out every last drop of blood from its hardworking employees. Please join in.
As you may have heard, the makers of the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight have reached a settlement with Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn about his claim that the film depicts him in an unfavorable manner regarding the cover-up of the pedophile-priest scandal.
Spotlight tells the story of The Boston Globe‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation that revealed that Cardinal Bernard Law, then the archbishop, was directly involved in reassigning priests who’d been accused of sexual abuse. The Dunn character is seen taking part in a meeting about a pedophile priest at Boston College High School.
The Associated Press reports on the settlement here; The New York Times covers it here; the Globehere; and the Boston Heraldhere.
As part of the settlement, the filmmakers acknowledge that the lines attributed to Dunn were “fabricated,” which is kind of odd when you think about it. Spotlight, of course, is a work of fiction, though based on true events. In that sense, every line in Spotlight is fabricated. The question is whether Dunn was portrayed in a manner that is fundamentally false.
The filmmakers have contended from the time Dunn went public with his complaints in a Globe column by Kevin Cullen that Dunn is not portrayed in a negative light—rather, that he comes across “as an alumnus and public-relations professional from an affiliated institution, was concerned about the reputation of BC High, and acted in concert with his affiliation and professional training,” as the filmmakers put it in a letter reported by the Globe last November. In the settlement, the filmmakers say:
As is the case with most movies based on historical events, ‘Spotlight’ contains fictionalized dialogue that was attributed to Mr. Dunn for dramatic effect. We acknowledge that Mr. Dunn was not part of the Archdiocesan cover-up.
From what I can tell, there’s nothing in the settlement that contradicts what the filmmakers said last November, or that calls into question the recollections of Globe reporters Walter Robinson and Sacha Pfeiffer, who were at the BC High meeting.
At the time that this controversy broke, I wrote a piece for WGBH News about the hazards of true-life movies that freely mix fact and fiction. I certainly don’t question the pain that Dunn says he experienced. From the beginning the dispute has struck me as a genuine disagreement between him and the filmmakers over how he comes across in the movie.
That said, I’ve only seen Spotlight once, and I’d like to see that scene again.
ROSSLYN, Virginia—I am writing this in a Best Western, wondering how I’m going to get to downtown Washington later today given that the Metro—shut down lest it burst into flames yet again—makes the MBTA look like a model of competence and efficiency.
Hunter Thompson used to grab the Gideons Bible at moments like this and try to find something appropriately apocalyptic he could quote from the Book of Revelations. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.
I’ve got Gideons propping up the back of my laptop. A different kind of apocalypse was playing out Tuesday night on television, as racist demagogue Donald Trump all but wrapped up the Republican nomination. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton won big while Bernie Sanders’s increasingly implausible campaign reached the end of the line, though he’ll trudge on.
So how did we get here? And what comes next? A few thoughts.
1. Why Rubio lost. The smart money was with Marco Rubio from the beginning. On Tuesday, as it became clear that Rubio would be crushed in his home state of Florida, a 2013 Time magazine cover proclaiming Rubio “The Republican Savior” started making the rounds on Twitter. So did a tweet by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat from last September: “The entire commentariat is going to feel a little silly when Marco Rubio wins every Republican primary.”
The problem was that Rubio’s sunny optimism (which he abandoned at the first sign of trouble) and credibility with both the establishment and Tea Party wings of his party were out of step with the populist Trump insurgency.
“Rubio was prepared, much like Jeb Bush, for a reasonable dialogue in Washington policy language, offering positions that reflect 40 years of national security and foreign-policy experts,” former House Speaker (and former presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich said in a Washington Post article by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. “All of that disappeared. The market didn’t care.”
But Rubio brought his own problems to the table as well. There was, of course, his robotic debate meltdown in the face of a withering assault from Chris Christie. But there is also evidence that Rubio and the people around him were so smitten with his essential Marco-ness that they became lazy and arrogant.
In National Review, an anti-Trump conservative outlet, Tim Alberta writes of Rubio: “He campaigned on the ground so infrequently for much of the campaign that even some supporters questioned how hard he was willing to work to get elected.” Eli Stokols and Shane Goldmacher pile on at Politico in a piece headlined “Inside Marco’s Hollow Campaign.” The subhead tells the story: “Rubio’s overconfident team refused to invest. Voters returned the favor.”
2. What’s next for Kasich and Sanders? Although Rubio might differ, winning your home state is not a big deal. John Kasich won Ohio, where he is governor, on Tuesday night, just as Bernie Sanders won Vermont a few weeks ago. Yet there is talk in the media today that Kasich and Ted Cruz (remember him?) might be able to stop Trump by denying him an outright majority at the Republican National Convention.
Boston Globe political reporter James Pindell notes that “Trump will need to win 59 percent of all the remaining GOP delegates to win a majority.” And Five Thirty Eight’s Nate Silver writes that Trump is still winning just 37 percent of the Republican vote. “Since primaries became widespread in 1972, only George McGovern won his party’s nomination with a smaller share of the vote—just 25.3 percent,” Silver writes.
At this point, it seems unlikely that Republicans will be any more successful at stopping Trump than Democrats were at stopping McGovern.
The case for Sanders seems considerably more desperate. John Nichols of The Nation, a left-liberal magazine that endorsed Sanders earlier this year, asserts that “Sanders has every reason to keep running a primary and caucus race where most of the delegates have yet to be chosen—and where his ability to influence the character and content of the competition remains one of that race’s most significant dynamics.”
Sanders has performed a real service for Democrats by holding Clinton to account and forcing her to clarify her positions. But his insurgency played out pretty much the way all left-wing insurgencies do.
3. Trump and the media. Earlier this week The Upshot, an analytics project that’s part of The New York Times, showed that Trump has received far more media coverage than Clinton, the runner-up, with everyone else far off the pace. The value of that free media in February: $400 million.
The Trump media dynamic will be fascinating to watch from here on out. A former reporter for the Trump-friendly site Breitbart.com said she was assaulted by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—and Trump gave Lewandowski a nice shout-out Tuesday night, when he also called the press “disgusting.” Certain unfriendly reporters are banned from Trump events, as Politico media reporter Hadas Gold writes.
Then, too, there’s the whole dynamic of what journalists will do given that they’ve been accused of enabling Trump by not pushing him hard enough on the Breitbart matter or at the thuggish violence directed at protesters—violence that began to be returned in kind last weekend.
As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen observes, there is a “purposelessness” to much campaign coverage with its relentless focus on the horse race. “Campaign journalists have a system for determining who gets the most coverage,” Rosen writes. “They have no system for determining who deserves the most coverage.”
There has been plenty of harsh coverage of Trump right from the beginning, as Politico’s Jack Shafer recently observed. So it’s hard to say whether a tougher tone will make any difference.
4. Trump and the Jews. My friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate passed this on—an essay by James Kirchick in Tablet on why Jewish conservatives such as him despise Trump. It’s a long read that defies summary, but this should give you a taste: “To those Jews who contemplate making peace with a President Donald Trump: He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.”
I don’t agree with everything Kirchick writes. In fact, I think the Republicans’ neoconservative wing—which is not exclusively Jewish (ahem: Dick Cheney) despite Kirchick’s attempt to turn the term into an anti-Semitic slur—really does hate Trump in part because of his non-interventionist tendencies on foreign policy.
Still, if you’re going to read one lengthy piece on Trump this week, it should be Kirchick’s.
5. Obama’s continued relevance. Remember him? The president remains enormously popular with the Democratic base. And he’s doing everything he can to help Democrats retain the White House.
His choice of a Supreme Court nominee—which we may know by the time you read this—will almost certainly be a respected moderate, thus casting the Republicans as even more dysfunctional and obstructionist than they already are if they stick to their pledge and refuse to hold confirmation hearings.
And that is something Clinton will be able to exploit this fall.
Looks like John Allen and Inés San Martín have found a way to keep the Catholic news site Cruxalive once it ceases to be a Boston Globe project at the end of the month. Details here and here.
Crux, a standalone website “Covering all things Catholic” that was launched by the Boston Globe in the fall of 2014 (see my WGBHNews.org piece from that time), is shutting down, according to a memo I obtained a little while ago that was written by Globe editor Brian McGrory and managing editor/vice president for digital David Skok. BetaBoston, a vertical that covers the local innovation economy, will be incorporated into the Globe‘s regular offerings and will no longer be a free, standalone site.
I can’t say I’ve been a regular reader of Crux, but as a lifelong non-Catholic I’ve found it to offer interesting insights into the Catholic Church—especially John Allen’s column. (Allen will acquire the site, as McGrory and Skok explain below.) My WGBH News colleague Margery Eagan recently won an award for her spirituality column. Overall, the quality—under the direction of editor Teresa Hanafin, who’ll return to theGlobe newsroom—has struck me as consistently excellent.
Although you might think the problem was a lack of readers, I’ve been told that Globe executives were not unhappy with the size of the audience. (You could look up the numbers on Compete.com, but they’re probably not very accurate.) Rather, as McGrory and Skok note, the real problem has been finding advertisers.
In any case, it’s a shame that the Globe couldn’t find a way to make Crux work. It was a noble effort. I hope Stat, a far more ambitious Globe-affiliated vertical covering life sciences, is able to avoid a similar fate.
We’ll be talking about this tonight on Beat the Press. And below is the full text of McGrory and Skok’s memo.
We want to bring everyone up to date on a couple of digital fronts.
First, Crux. We’ve made the deeply difficult decision to shut it down as of April 1—difficult because we’re beyond proud of the journalism and the journalists who have produced it, day after day, month over month, for the past year and a half. At any given moment on the site, you’ll find textured analysis by John Allen, the foremost reporter of Catholicism in the world. You’ll find an entertaining advice column, near Margery Eagan’s provocative insights on spirituality. You’ll find Ines San Martin’s dispatches from the Vatican, alongside Michael O’Loughlin’s sophisticated coverage of theology across America, as well as the intelligent work of ace freelancer Kathleen Hirsch. All of it is overseen, morning to night, by editor Teresa Hanafin, who poured herself into the site, developed and edited consistently fascinating stories, and created a mix of journalism that was at once enlightening and enjoyable. Readers and industry colleagues have certainly taken note with strong traffic and awards.
The problem is the business. We simply haven’t been able to develop the financial model of big-ticket, Catholic-based advertisers that was envisioned when we launched Crux back in September 2014.
Let’s be clear that this absolutely can’t and won’t inhibit any future innovations. We in this newsroom and all around the building need to be ever more creative and willing to take risks. We also need to be able to cut our losses when we’ve reached the conclusion that specific projects won’t pay off.
There will be several layoffs involved in the closing of Crux, which is our biggest regret. To the good, we plan to turn the site over to John Allen, who is exploring the possibility of continuing it in some modified form, absent any contribution from the Globe. Teresa will be redeployed in the newsroom, most likely in an exciting new position as an early morning writer for Bostonglobe.com, setting up the day with a look at what’s going on around the region and the web.
The second front is BetaBoston. We’re planning to bring it behind the Globe paywall, making it part of bostonglobe.com, in what amounts to the next logical step in the natural evolution of the site. It began as a standalone destination, and with this move, it will become a fully integrated part of the Globe’s business coverage in practice and presentation.
Beta’s been a key part of our vastly more comprehensive business report. It has allowed us to dramatically expand our reporting on the region’s burgeoning tech scene, with a fresh team of reporters devoted to the news and culture of Kendall Square, the Seaport, and elsewhere. None of that will change. The only thing that will be different is their material will appear on the Globe site, with clicks working against the meter. And we’ll save more than a few dollars on the maintenance of the external URL. We’ll set a date soon.
The reality is, we can’t merely be accepting of change in this environment, we have to seek it out. As always, we’re available for questions, insights, and ideas.
If only the delivery folks at The Boston Globe could turn the clock back to December 27, 2015. That’s the last day that Publishers Circulation Fulfillment delivered the print edition. It’s also the last day that Globe customers could be reasonably sure the paper would show up on their doorstep as promised.
Well, the Globe is going to try to do just that. After a disastrous debut by a new vendor, ACI Media, followed by an emergency move to bring back PCF to handle many of the routes, the Globe is ditching ACI and going back to PCF exclusively, according to this report by Mark Arsenault.
In the early weeks, the region was in an uproar. Improvement appeared to be around the corner on the weekend of January 2 and 3, when hundreds of Globe staffers helped assemble and deliver the Sunday paper. But then the Globe itself ran a devastating story by Arsenault and Dan Adams reporting that delivery would not return to normal for four to six months. That, in turn, led to the partial restoration of PCF and an apology by publisher and owner John Henry.
Even though the delivery situation had partly recovered from the initial disaster, I’ve continued to hear complaints from readers right up through last week. It is mind-boggling that ACI was never able to get it right. You have to wonder what kind of promises they made that convinced Globe executives they could handle the job, and why those executives believed them.
No word on how much pain was inflicted on the Globe in terms of lost circulation or financial setbacks.
I want to call your attention to two terrific pieces about Trump University—both published by Politico, both by people I know. As you are no doubt aware, Trump University, a dubious venture that dispensed real-estate tips and that is under investigation by the New York attorney general’s office, has become a major issue in Trump’s presidential campaign.
The first article, “I Survived Trump University,” is by my old Boston Phoenix friend Seth Gitell. Seth describes attending a 2008 session of what was then known as Trump Wealth Institute in Boston while he was working for the New York Sun. The nation’s financial system was collapsing. Seth writes:
I’d read Trump’s The Art of the Deal in college, so when I spotted an internet ad for the Trump “way to wealth” seminar, I thought it might be an interesting vantage point from which to capture the feelings of regular people at a terrible time. I was also intrigued by the idea of what strategies a figure as rich and famous as Trump could bring to the public, in the midst of a crisis to which few had any solutions.
The second piece is by Marilyn Thompson, an editor at Politico who’s currently a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as am I. Marilyn reports on an online advice column for students of Trump U that was published under his name. “How much of ‘Ask Mr. Trump’ was written by Trump himself is, of course, open to further examination,” she writes.
Marilyn proceeds to recount what Trump told a 13-year-old boy (“Sounds like you’re a hard-working young person!”), what drives him (“I don’t have to work, I don’t have to make deals, but it’s what I enjoy”), and how he coped with the stress of being $1 billion in debt (“I started describing to everyone all of my plans for future projects and developments, and how fantastic they were going to be”).
These days, no doubt, he relieves the stress by telling his campaign officials how great that wall is going to be once he’s been elected president.
Top investigative journalists used databases, graphics, video, and good old-fashioned shoe leather to reveal slave labor, expose unfair arbitration practices, and detail police shootings and school funding flaws.
Winners and finalists discussed their reporting challenges during last week’s Goldsmith Awards ceremonies at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The awards are administered by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
The Associated Press series uncovering the use of slave labor in the Thai seafood industry won the top $25,000 award. Robin McDowell, a member of the four-member team that spent 18 months exposing abusive practices in the AP’s “Seafood from Slaves,” faced the problem of getting victims to talk on the record. “We had to honor them but not to use their names, or they’d be killed,” she said. “How do we hold on to the power of the story with anonymous sources?”
The Post’s Kimberly Kindy called the job “ugly and messy”—and unprecedented. “Nobody had done it before,” she said. “There was no model. Going into this, we had no notion of how hard it was going to be to cover every fatal shooting in real time.… The information didn’t rush out. We had to keep going back to get more details.”
She said The Guardian’s competitive efforts helped the Post because “it made it harder for authorities to look the other way.”
Jon Swaine, part of the five-member Guardian team whose findings—along with the Post’s—led the FBI and the Department of Justice to revise their system for counting killings by police, said his biggest challenge was the small staff. Like the Post reporters, they worked nights and weekends keeping up with the constant flow of reports. The Guardian will combine reporting and verified crowd-sourced information to continue building a database of the killings.
Lisa Song, one of the four-member InsideClimate News team that disclosed that Exxon documented but buried climate change research in “Exxon: The Road Not Taken,” said they initially thought it would be impossible to prove the cover-up.
“The main challenge was finding people willing to talk,” she said, but with a lot of “shoe leather reporting,” including door-to-door visits, they induced ex-employees to tell their stories. And finally, they unearthed thousands of internal memos that revealed what and when Exxon knew.
Michael LaForgia said the three-person Tampa Bay Times team that produced “Failure Factories” had to overcome editors’ and educators’ mindset that student underachievement was “inevitable, ignoring the basic question—why does this condition exist?”
The Times’s 18-month investigation used an extensive database along with graphics and video—as well as traditional storytelling methods—to show how resegregation transformed five once-average schools into the state’s worst.
For “Beware the Fine Print,” Jessica Silver-Greenberg and her two New York Times colleagues faced the challenge of knowing the arcane subject of arbitration clauses as well as the high-priced lawyers who used them to prevent people from suing credit card companies and retailers.
“A huge challenge was [detailing] ‘How did they do it?’” she said. To gain corporate lawyers’ trust, she added, the reporters needed to know the law. Then, she said, they could flatter attorneys by saying, “‘I understand the genius of what you did.’ That helped us gain their respect One lawyer was thrilled to talk about it.
“It wasn’t drama on the high seas or the battlefield, but in Park Avenue boardrooms.”
Bill Kirtz is a retired Northeastern University journalism professor and a Media Nation contributor.
Jack Shafer of Politico puts into words what I’ve been inchoately thinking: Though the media surely have not covered themselves in glory by showering so much attention upon the candidacy of racist demagogue Donald Trump, it’s really not their fault that he’s leading the Republican field. Taking note of the epic negative coverage Trump has received, Shafer concludes:
If you were a conventional media observer, you might say that the Trump candidacy demonstrates not the power of the press, but—overwhelmingly, and to our chagrin—its relative powerlessness. But maybe that’s just what we want you to think.
Trump is a creation of the media, of course—but not of the news media. As Shafer observes, he’s been a fixture in the entertainment media for years on the strength of The Apprentice and his bestselling books.
I’d dial Shafer’s take back a bit. I do think the media are to blame for giving Trump way too many column inches (look it up, kids) and too much air time at the expense of the other candidates, and I don’t think the coverage has been as tough as it should have been until recently. But neither do I think the media had it within their power to derail the Trump Express.
