The Boston Globe has published an unusual multimedia, interactive editorial calling for a ban on assault weapons that includes data, animated graphics, and thumbnail bios of six recalcitrant senators—including information on how much money they’ve received from the gun lobby as well as tools to email or tweet at them.
Front of the print edition.
The Globe is using the hashtag #makeitstop via its main Twitter account and its @GlobeOpinion account. Among other things, it’s been tweeting out the names of the Orlando mass-shooting victims.
The print edition comes with a four-page wraparound comprising the editorial and accompanying material.
Overall, it’s a well-executed effort, and I applaud editorial-page editor Ellen Clegg and her staff. I like it more than the fake front page the Globe devoted to Donald Trump earlier this year, which some people confused with the paper’s actual page one.
Unfortunately, the problem with such campaigns is that even when they’re effective at making their case, they’re ineffective in changing anyone’s minds. Still, we have to try. So kudos.
David Arkin, a top official with GateHouse Media, is leaving the company for a position in Texas. The following is a memo to employees from GateHouse chief executive Kirk Davis.
Dear Colleagues,
It is with very mixed feelings that I write to tell you that David Arkin, our Senior Vice President for Content and Product Development will be leaving GateHouse to become Chief Content Officer for Community Impact, a group of 21 award winning, hyper-local newspapers serving communities in the Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston markets. The free newspapers have a total circulation of 1.6 million.
I have worked with David for nearly 10 years and watched him develop from a lot of raw talent, to a truly great leader of our news and digital operations. I’m sad to lose that. However, for David, this new role means getting back into community journalism and a lot less travel (and more time with his family, including his three young children). I know he’s excited about that and I’m excited for him.
David has accomplished an enormous amount over the last several years. He launched our Center for News & Design in May of 2014 which today provides editing and design services for 220 GateHouse newspapers and is also home to More Content Now, our niche content business, and Community Content, which processes briefs and events for our papers. Reflecting the quality of its work, the Center has recently begun to take on significant commercial clients.
David used our centralized content services platform to develop innovative programs focused on quality journalism. For example, Pinnacle, our national enterprise reporting mentorship program, continues to produce great work like the recent piece examining the impact of substitute teachers in America.
Finally, David has led the transition of our newsroom culture from print to digital to mobile first. He initiated large-scale programs like reporter-produced video, social media engagement and digital journalism training, and focused our newsrooms on new, organizational structures and the use of digital analytics. And, most recently,
David led the development of the new, Garcia-designed responsive sites that we are currently rolling out.
David has accomplished all this with the support of a terrific team, including Tom Clifford, recently hired as VP of the Center for News and Design. We are confident that this team will continue to do a great job supporting our GateHouse operations. We will begin the process of identifying David’s replacement immediately.
In our discussions about what was a difficult decision, David shared how proud he is of his team and the digital transformation work happening across GateHouse newsrooms today. David also spoke to how much he values the relationships he has developed over the past decade with hundreds of GateHouse journalists.
David’s last day will be July 7th. Please join me in wishing David all the best!
Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron (left) interviews Post owner Jeff Bezos at a recent event.
Donald Trump, who earlier today suggested that President Obama might somehow be linked to the Orlando shooting, has revoked the credentials of Washington Post reporters because of a headline stating that Trump had suggested Obama might somehow be linked to the Orlando shooting. Trump:
Post executive editor Marty Baron:
Donald Trump’s decision to revoke The Washington Post’s press credentials is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press. When coverage doesn’t correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished. The Post will continue to cover Donald Trump as it has all along — honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly. We’re proud of our coverage, and we’re going to keep at it.
It was just a few weeks ago that Trump launched a Nixonesque attack on the Post and its owner, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos.
A few random thoughts.
• Shouldn’t we be suspicious of any news organization that hasn’t had its credentials revoked by the Trump campaign?
• This won’t hurt the Post a bit. Access is hugely overrated.
• I’m sorry that this is the first time I’ve written about Trump’s banishment of journalists. Previously he’s gone after Politico, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast. Yes, the Washington Post is one of our great newspapers. But Trump’s attacks on other news organizations are no less despicable.
• I’d like to see every news organization covering Trump burn their credentials and refuse to report on his events until open access is guaranteed for all.
A year ago this month, authorities say, Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot nine people to death during a prayer service. It was soon discovered that Roof—who faces the death penalty if he’s convicted—had espoused hateful views of African-Americans and had posed with the Confederate flag and white-supremacist memorabilia.
Early Sunday morning, Omar Mateen walked into a gay nightclub in Orlando andmurdered 50 people. While he was inside, he called 911 and pledged his allegiance to ISIS.
I don’t have to tell you where I’m going with this. Whenever there is a mass shooting in the United States, the first question the media ask is whether it was tied to Muslim extremists. Never mind that mass shootings are as American as apple pie; the Orlando massacre was the 133rd mass shooting this year, Vox reports.
Invariably, whenever there’s an Islamist angle to a multiple murder, the tragedy is portrayed as more frightening, with the government held somehow more culpable for not doing something about the foreign menace within our midst. (Note: Mateen was born in New York.)
But mass shootings are mass shootings, and terror is terror. Dylann Roof was inspired by hateful ideology just as thoroughly as Omar Mateen. Robert Lewis Dear Jr., accused of killing three people and wounding nine others in November 2015 at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, was said to be motivated by extreme anti-abortion views. A short time later, the San Bernardino shootings claimed 14 lives, and the ISIS link espoused by the perpetrators, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, is a principal reason why that incident is far better remembered.
Needless to say, we should never forget the day in December 2012 when Adam Lanza, suffering from severe mental illness, murdered 20 young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
All of which is to say that we have a problem with mass shootings in this country that goes well beyond any particular explanation for those shootings, be it Islamist extremism, racial hatred, or schizophrenia. Gun advocates claim that tougher restrictions would make no difference. But countries with strict guns laws don’t have this problem on anywhere near the same scale, the occasional horrors of Paris andNorway notwithstanding. It certainly seems like we ought to be able to do something.
With that, a few media notes.
• The Orlando Sentinel’s front page today goes not with news of the shootings but with an elegiac editorial headlined “Our Community Will Heal.” It begins: “Words cannot adequately convey the depth of the horror and grief in Central Florida in the wake of what now ranks as the worst mass shooting in American history.” An accompanying story explains the reasoning behind the unusual treatment:
We decided the front page of the Orlando Sentinel needed to reflect what we were hearing throughout Sunday about the shooting at the Pulse nightclub.
Many talked of the sadness that we were now the leaders on an infamous list of mass shootings in the United States. But also we heard a growing chorus throughout the day that this horror would not be how we are remembered.
The decision makes sense given that a print newspaper is now the last place people turn to learn about breaking news. The shootings were the biggest story in the country Sunday. Not only were Orlando residents keeping up to date via theSentinel’s website and the local TV stations, but the events got heavy attention from national media, with the cable networks broadcasting live from the scene.
Given that, the role of print is to provide some perspective and to do it in a way that holds up for more than a few hours.
• Were the shootings aimed at the LGBT community? As late as 8:17 a.m. today, theWashington Postwas still emphasizing that we can’t know for certain if Mateen was motivated by hatred for lesbians and gay men. “FBI Special Agent Ron Hopper said the bureau was still working to determine whether sexual orientation was a motive in the Orlando attack,” the Post reported.
It certainly seems more than likely that Mateen deliberately chose the Pulse, a gay nightclub. His father said so, though anything he has to say seems unreliable given his own bizarre activities and statements. It’s LGBT Pride month. ISIS’s homicidal homophobia has been well-documented. Politicians like Hillary Clinton are saying so, and the refusal of many Republicans to acknowledge the sexual orientation of the victims is conspicuous.
Still, it was only a week ago that the media were subjected to a vigorous finger-wagging for pointing out that Hillary Clinton had clinched the Democratic nomination for president. The LBGT community—and all of us—have suffered a terrible loss in Orlando. But it strikes me as reasonable to acknowledge that loss while at the same time admitting that we can’t be entirely certain what motivated the shooter.
• Donald Trump is still a terrible person. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s first instinct after the Orlando shootings was to pat himself on the back so vigorously that he risked dislocating his shoulders—and to do everything he could to whip up hatred against Muslim Americans.
Jonathan Martin of the New York Timeswrote that “if the Orlando massacre was a test of how willing candidates and their supporters are to pursue partisan attacks in the aftermath of horrific violence, Mr. Trump left little doubt about his willingness to push the boundaries of the country’s public discourse.”
As befits someone who has conducted much of his campaign on Twitter, Trump’s most nauseating act Sunday was to send out a self-congratulatory tweet: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”
Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don't want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!
Trump also called on President Obama to resign for failing to use the words “radical Islam” in his address Sunday. As New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in a brief commentary whose every word is worth pondering:
It feels indecent on such a day to engage these comments of Trump’s at all. But their velocity, vapidity, and sheer ugliness reflect his character, his emptiness, and, most of all, the shape of the election campaign to come. Since Trump has ascended, it’s been clear that his demagogic instincts could be tested precisely by the sort of tragedy suffered in Orlando. And, when faced with the path of modesty and the path of dark opportunism, he has chosen the latter. That’s what he is about. It’s who he is.
• How much attention should the media give to the shooter? This is always a dilemma for the media following a mass shooting. We are talking about a major news story, and it’s important to find out as much as we can about Omar Mateen. From his ex-wife we’ve learned that he was a disturbed individual and an abusive husband, but that he had never showed much interest in religion. That matters.
But as Zeynep Tufekci wrote in the New York Times in 2015 after two television journalists were murdered by a killer who recorded the act on video, there really is a copycat effect. She urged news organizations to think about the way they cover such events. “This doesn’t mean censoring the news or not reporting important events of obvious news value,” she wrote. “It means not providing the killers with the infamy they seek. It means somber, instead of lurid and graphic, coverage, and a focus on victims.”
We already know that Mateen mentioned the Boston Massacre bombings in his 911 call. It seems more than likely that he had studied the terrorist acts carried out by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev very closely.
I’m not sure how to handle these questions. When something like the Orlando shootings takes place, I want to know everything I can—including the life story and motivations of the shooter.
Maybe the best solution is to let the story play out for a few days. After that, if there’s nothing new to say, let Mateen’s name be forgotten.
I’m excited to let you see what I worked on during the spring semester at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy: a paper on the reinvention of the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos titled “The Bezos Effect.” It’s long, but I also wrote a summary version for my friends at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
My time as a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School was incredibly rewarding. An expanded version of my paper will appear in my book-in-progress, which has a working title of The Return of the Moguls and which will be published by ForeEdge, the trade imprint of University Press of New England, in 2017.
Hillary Clinton had seemed like the inevitable Democratic nominee for so long—not just in the current campaign, but eight years ago as well—that she tends not to get the credit she’s due for what is by any measure a remarkable accomplishment.
And it’s not just that she’s the first woman to become the presumptive nominee of a major party, though that is legitimately a big deal. She also staged a comeback unlike any in recent political history. Since her enemies like to compare her to Richard Nixon, she ought to get the benefit of that comparison as well—as she does in a piece by Peter Beinart at the Atlantic, who writes:
In purely political terms, Clinton’s victory—after losing the Democratic nomination in 2008—constitutes the greatest comeback by a presidential candidate since Richard Nixon won the Republican nomination in 1968, after losing the presidential election of 1960.
Clinton’s fall from grace eight years ago was more devastating than we might remember, Beinart argues, noting that major party figures such as Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, and Chuck Schumer were so appalled at the prospect of a Clinton campaign that they urged Barack Obama (some openly, some privately) to run against her. Civil-rights leader John Lewis even unendorsed her and switched to Obama.
“Over the past 30 years, no American political figure has absorbed as many blows as Clinton,” Beinart writes. “And none has responded with more tenacity and grit.”
That theme is also reflected in Amy Chozick’s “how she won” story in the New York Times: “She may not be the orator President Obama is, or the retail politician her husband was. But Mrs. Clinton’s steely fortitude in this campaign has plainly inspired older women, black voters and many others who see in her perseverance a kind of mirror to their own struggles.”
Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, Karen Tumulty reminds us of Clinton’s shortcomings as a politician: “Not one for mega-rallies, she prefers small, scripted settings where she can discuss the policy intricacies of heroin addiction, mental health treatment, college debt or gun control—all the while keeping her campaign press corps at arm’s length. There have also been times when her tone-deafness could be spectacular.”
Thanks to the Associated Press’s questionable decision to proclaim Clinton the presumptive nominee on Monday evening (see this Facebook post by Bill Mitchell of Poynter), today’s headlines are anticlimactic. The print edition of the Times leads with “Clinton Claims the Democratic Nomination,” which feels like an update of Tuesday’s awkward banner: “Clinton Reaches Historic Mark, A.P. Says.” Today’s Post offers “Clinton celebrates victory,” and it’s less than a full page across. On Monday the Post went six columns with “Clinton reaches magic number for historic nomination.”
As of Wednesday morning, Bernie Sanders is vowing to stay in the race even though Clinton has now won a majority of pledged delegates as well as superdelegates, and has received nearly 3.7 million more votes. Media and political voices are strongly suggesting Sanders’s refusal to concede might change over the next few days as reality sinks in for him and his supporters.
But after reading this piece in Politico by Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti, I’m not so sure. According to their reporting, Sanders is the chief hothead in his own campaign, continually overruling his advisers in favor of more aggression. “More than any of them,” they write, “Sanders is himself filled with resentment, on edge, feeling like he gets no respect—all while holding on in his head to the enticing but remote chance that Clinton may be indicted before the convention.”
So much for party unity. Then again, the self-styled democratic socialist has only been a Democrat for a few months.
Finally, Tuesday may have been Hillary Clinton’s day, but the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, came close to dominating it, as he does in practically every news cycle.
This time it wasn’t a matter of the cable networks giving him more attention than he deserved. Instead, there was actual news, as Republicans staged a collective freakout over Trump’s racist statements about Judge Gonzalo Curiel, as Matt Viser reports in the Boston Globe; House Speaker Paul Ryan denounced Trump’s comments as “racist” while sticking by his endorsement (“Everywhere Paul Ryan turns, there’s the smell of Trump” is the headline on Dana Milbank’s Washington Post column); and Trump himself issued a nonapology in the afternoon while delivering a rare prepared speech at night in which he viciously attacked Clinton but avoided his usual excesses.
At this point, conservatives are hopelessly divided over how they should respond to the demagogue at the top of the GOP ticket. A Wall Street Journal editorial criticizes conservatives for pressuring Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to abandon Trump, while Jonah Goldberg of National Review, a leading anti-Trump conservative journal, blasts Ryan for not being tough enough: “Because Trump did nothing to earn Ryan’s endorsement, the presumptive nominee may conclude that he needn’t negotiate with the GOP establishment; he can just count on its eventual submission.”
Meanwhile, at the Weekly Standard—whose editor, Bill Kristol, has been unsuccessfully trying to convince a conservative to mount an independent campaign—Jay Cost pens an open letter to Mitt Romney begging the former Massachusetts governor to run. Cost begins:
I write to you not as a fellow conservative, not as a fellow partisan, but as a citizen of our republic. You have served your nation admirably for many years and by any ordinary standard are entitled to a happy retirement. But these are extraordinary times, and your nation still has need of your service. I respectfully implore you to run for president as an independent candidate in 2016.
It’s not likely to happen. Even if a significant number of voters could be persuaded to support an independent, it may be too late for such a candidate to get on the ballot in enough states for it to matter. (I should note that the Libertarian ticket of former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld is in fact on the ballot in all 50 states.)
Still, Cost’s desperate plea is a sign of the straits in which the Republicans find themselves with Trump at the top of the ticket.
Someone pointed out the other day that the Iowa caucuses were just four months ago, whereas we still have five months to go before the November election. If you’re sick of this campaign, you’re far from alone. Unfortunately, we’ve just gotten started.
Does Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy suit against the news-and-gossip site Gawker threaten the First Amendment? No. But the way his case is being paid for might.
Last week we learned that Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire, had provided about $10 million to help fund Hogan’s case. Such third-party financing is legal, and it proved to be a sound investment: in March, a Florida jury found that Gawker had invaded Hogan’s privacy by publishing a video of him and a friend’s wife without permission and awarded him $140 million.
Now, first things first. If you care to immerse yourself in the details of the case, you will find all kinds of contradictory statements as to whether Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) and his paramour, Heather Clem (wife of Bubba the Love Sponge Clem; and yes, that’s his real name), knew or didn’t know they were being recorded and did or didn’t expect that the video would somehow become public.
But the law involving invasion of privacy is reasonably clear. It can be traced back to an article that future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis and his law partner, Samuel Warren, wrote for the Harvard Law Review in 1890. The principle is explained succinctly in this warning to journalists published by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press:
One who gives publicity to a matter concerning the private life of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of privacy, if the matter publicized is of a kind that (a) would be highly offensive to a reasonable person; and (b) is not of legitimate concern to the public.
Hogan’s status as a public figure makes (b) a little iffy, and Gawker tried to argue that Hogan’s boasts about his sexual prowess made the sex tape newsworthy. That strikes me as the sort of issue that a jury could legitimately decide either way. As First Amendment expert Erwin Chemerinsky told the New York Times when the verdict was handed down, “I think this case establishes a very limited proposition: It is an invasion of privacy to make publicly available a tape of a person having sex without that person’s consent. I don’t think it goes any further than that and I do not see a First Amendment basis for claiming that there is a right to do this.”
There matters stood until May 24, when Ryan Mac of Forbesrevealed that Thiel, a PayPal cofounder and “an eccentric figure in Silicon Valley who has advocated for teenagers to skip college and openly supported Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump,” was the money behind the Hogan suit. Thiel, Mac wrote, had been harboring a grudge against Gawker Media and its publisher, Nick Denton, since 2007, when Denton’s Valleywag site outed Thiel as gay.
The next day Thiel came clean in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, saying, “I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations. I think much more highly of journalists than that. It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker.”
As I’ve argued, Hogan’s case against Gawker was well within the bounds of existing privacy law. Moreover, it’s perfectly legal to finance someone else’s lawsuit. Yet numerous free-speech advocates have expressed horror at the Thiel revelation.
Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan compared Thiel’s actions to the Edward Snowden affair and to Senator John Thune’s thuggish (my word, not hers) demand that Facebook account for perceived liberal bias in its Trending Topics feature.
Technology pundit Mathew Ingram of Fortuneadded that the Hogan case has now “become more about an attempt to bankrupt a publication that a billionaire investor dislikes for personal reasons. And that has disturbing implications for freedom of the press.”
Nick Denton himself, in an open letter to Thiel oozing with self-justifying obnoxiousness, wrote, “The best regulation for speech, in a free society, is more speech. We each claim to respect independent journalism, and liberty. We each have criticisms of the other’s methods and objectives. Now you have revealed yourself, let us have an open and public debate.”
Ingram and other defenders of Gawker point to some troubling aspects of Thiel’s involvement that do, in fact, have some important First Amendment implications. For instance: Hogan’s lawyer apparently insisted on a provision that Gawker Media’s insurance company not be allowed to pay the award, which strongly suggests that the motive behind the suit was to put Denton out of business rather than receive just compensation for the site’s transgressions.
In addition, Ingram notes, Thiel has said he’s backing several other lawsuits against Gawker. Although he hasn’t identified those suits, that may include one brought by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who’s going after Gawker for calling his claim to have invented email fraudulent. Really?
The $140 million awarded to Hulk Hogan seems absurdly high, and the case is under appeal. Meanwhile, numerous reports suggest that Gawker Media is in serious financial trouble as a result of the case.
So we are faced with the prospect that a billionaire may secretly use his money to drive a news organization out of business. Gawker Media may be a singularly unsympathetic defendant, but that strikes me as the sort of money-fueled power imbalance that the First Amendment ought to expose, not enable. Is there anything we can do about it?
As Timothy B. Lee points out at Vox, “the law used to bar unrelated third parties from paying someone else to engage in litigation and financing a lawsuit in exchange for a share of the damages.” Unfortunately, it’s not likely in the current political climate that such a ban would be reimposed.
At the very least, though, efforts such as Thiel’s should not be secret. Denton’s lawyer should have been allowed to present information about how the lawsuit against Gawker was being financed, and to have an opportunity to question Thiel in front of the jury about his activities and motives.
What Warren and Brandeis wrote 126 years ago seems, if anything, even more applicable today:
The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery.
But Brandeis may yet come to Denton’s rescue. Whether Denton knew it or not, it was Brandeis he was channeling in his call for more speech. As Brandeis wrote in the 1927 case of Whitney v. California: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
So let Hulk Hogan sue. Let Peter Thiel finance that suit. But let it play out in the light of day so that all of us, including jurors, can weigh and assess everyone’s motives—not just Hogan’s, or Mrs. The Love Sponge’s, or Nick Denton’s, but Thiel’s as well. It’s not a perfect solution, but surely openness would help alleviate any free-speech concerns raised by Thiel’s surreptitious activities.
Chris Sweeney has written a sharp piece for Boston magazine on the state of the Boston Herald, the city’s number-two daily. As is generally the case with stories about the Herald, the overarching theme is: How much longer can the struggling tabloid cling to life?
And yet I wonder if that’s the right question. For a decade starting in the mid-1990s, I covered the Herald‘s ups and downs as the media columnist for the Boston Phoenix. If I had a dime for every person who told me the Herald had six months to live, I’d be a very rich man. Sadly, it was the Phoenix that didn’t survive.
As Sweeney notes, the Herald these days seems more like an extension of its online radio station than a standalone newspaper. Nearly two years ago editor Joe Sciacca gave me a tour of the paper’s new headquarters in South Boston, and I was impressed with what I saw—especially the amount of space devoted to multimedia and to the modern radio facilities.
My WGBH colleague Jim Braude tells Sweeney that not many people may be listening to Boston Herald Radio (OK, Braude’s actual quote is “I don’t think anyone listens”). But Braude also points out that it’s given the Herald a jolt of relevance in terms of high-profile guests like Mayor Marty Walsh, Governor Charlie Baker, and Donald Trump, whose appearances can then be written up and tweeted out.
Unfortunately, none of the top three executives at the Herald would speak with Sweeney, a group that comprises publisher Pat Purcell, Sciacca, and executive editor John Strahinich. It would have been useful to get some insights from them regarding the Herald‘s current business model. Not that I’m faulting Sweeney—I’ve been there. And his description of trying to get Strahinich to talk is pretty amusing.
But even though print circulation has shrunk precipitously and print advertising revenue is presumably scarce, the Herald does have some strengths. Sweeney does not report the size of the staff, but it’s small and therefore affordable. The sports section is very good. The website is slow and frustrating, but the third-party mobile app is excellent—and includes one-click access to Herald Radio. Purcell made a lot of money selling off the old headquarters in the South End; the Herald is now printed by the Boston Globe, which means that its larger competitor has every reason to keep its rival breathing.
So how long can the Herald survive? Keep those dimes rolling in.
The following is a press release from the ACLU of Massachusetts.
BOSTON—In a pair of unanimous, bipartisan votes, the state House of Representatives and Senate today passed the first major reform of Massachusetts public records law in four decades, sending it to Governor Charlie Baker, who has 10 days to sign, veto, or let it become law without his signature. If signed into law by Governor Baker, the legislation would address widely criticized weaknesses in Massachusetts public records law, which make it hard for citizens to get information about how their government functions.
“This is a great day for open government,” said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. “We thank the House and the Senate for making public records reform a priority and for getting the job done. We also call on Governor Baker to do the right thing and sign the bill as soon as it reaches his desk.”
The bill would:
Set clear limits on how much money government agencies can charge for public records;
Set reasonable time frames for responses to public records requests;
Allow municipalities to request additional time for compliance and the ability to charge higher fees to cover reasonable costs;
Strengthen enforcement of the law by giving courts the ability to award attorney fees to those wrongly denied access to public records.
The Massachusetts Freedom of Information Alliance—a coalition of open-government groups—praised the House and its leadership for making transparency a significant legislative priority. The coalition urged Governor Charlie Baker to sign the legislation without delay and usher in a new era of openness in Massachusetts state government.
“A strong public records law is critical to democracy and our ability as citizens to hold government accountable,” said Pam Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts. “With today’s vote, the House and the Senate made a significant commitment to transparency and freedom of information, improving open government, and moving our state a huge step forward from near last in the nation. This reform is long overdue and we hope the Governor will sign it without delay.”
In November, the Center for Public Integrity released a report that gave the Commonwealth an “F” grade on public access to government information for the second time in a row. Dozens of organizations have advocated for comprehensive public records law reform, arguing that the law is among the weakest in the country and needs updating for the digital age. State lawmakers made their last substantive amendment to the law in 1973.
“This bill represents a significant step forward for transparency in Massachusetts,” said Bob Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association. “It will do a lot to improve access to public records. We hope and expect Governor Baker will prove himself to be a transparency-minded Governor by signing it into law.”
“Massachusetts residents deserve a stronger public records law, and this bill offers many improvements. We look forward to the governor signing it into law and providing more opportunity to hold government officials accountable,” said Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition.
The pending legislation advanced earlier in the week when a conference committee of six legislators reconciled earlier versions passed by the House and Senate. The bill passed by the House and Senate today includes provisions designed to reduce the cost of obtaining public records and ensure timely responses to information requests. In addition, by allowing courts to award attorney fees to those wrongly denied access to public information, the bill would bring Massachusetts into line with 47 other states. The new law would not make such fee awards mandatory, but would establish a presumption in favor of covering requesters’ legal costs when courts find the law has been violated. The bill also includes safety-valve mechanisms to enable municipalities to get extensions on compliance deadlines and to receive reasonable compensation when dealing with particularly complex, time-consuming requests.
One of the last great newspaper rivalries got a boost on Monday with the debut of Margaret Sullivan’s media column in the Washington Post. Sullivan’s first piece was more a preview of coming attractions than an attempt to dig deep. But with Jim Rutenberg having replaced the late, great David Carr at the New York Times earlier this year, our two leading general-interest newspapers now have dueling media critics for the first time in ages.
Sullivan, a former editor of the Buffalo News, joins a team of experienced media observers at the Post, including reporter Paul Farhi and blogger Erik Wemple. She is the Post’s first media columnist since Howard Kurtz, who left in 2010 for the Daily Beast. (Kurtz was also the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources. He moved to Fox News in 2013 following some well-publicized problems at both the Beast and CNN.)
The Post’s hiring of Sullivan shows just how small the world of elite media can be, given that she was recruited while serving as the Times’s public editor, as the paper calls its ombudsman. Sullivan was the fifth and, to my eyes, the best. As Michael Calderone of the Huffington Post put it, Sullivan “radically updated the role for the digital age by quickly addressing Times-related controversies and debates in real time and actively engaging on social media.” Sullivan will be replaced by Elizabeth Spayd, currently the editor-in-chief and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review and previously (yes, you guessed it) an editor at the Washington Post.
Needless to say, it will be interesting to see whether and how Sullivan chooses to write about the Times. In a recent interview with public radio’s On the Media, she praised her former employer—but also expressed frustration over an institutional attitude of “when the Times decides to cover it, then it becomes news” as well as bemusement over its oft-mocked trend stories. Indeed, Sullivan started something she called the “Monocle Meter” after the Times ran a story about the supposed resurgence of monocles in Brooklyn—a resurgence that apparently came and went without anyone actually ever having been spotted wearing a monocle.
Rutenberg, a veteran political reporter, got into a spat recently when he wrote that not only did journalists in general miss the rise of Donald Trump, but so did data journalists like Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, whose empirically based methodology should in theory produce more accurate results. In a two-fer of Times-Post incestuousness, Rutenberg invoked an observation by the Post’s Farhi that “nothing exceeds the value of shoe-leather reporting” in criticizing Silver, who moved his site from the Times to ESPN after the 2012 presidential election.
Silver, never one to suffer in silence, ripped into Rutenberg on a FiveThirtyEight podcast. As Bill Wyman wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review, Silver called Rutenberg’s column “dishonest” and “unethical,” and rehashed some old grievances over the way he was treated at the Times by Rutenberg and others, saying they were “incredibly hostile and incredibly unhelpful.” Silver later subtweeted Rutenberg with a lengthy article in which he argued that he got Trump wrong not because of an overreliance on data but because his predictions that Trump would fade weren’t based on any data at all. “In other words,” Silver wrote, “we were basically acting like pundits.”
The rivalry between the Times and the Post has a long, colorful history As recounted in Chalmers Roberts’s 1977 book The Washington Post: The First 100 Years, when the Times published a condescending item in 1900 about longing for “the rudeness of New York” after spending some time in “amiable and inefficient Washington,” the Post replied: “No doubt. The pig returns to his wallow.”
After years of striving, the Post emerged on an equal footing with the Times over the constitutional crisis sparked by the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The Post captured the public’s imagination in a way the Times never had during and after the Watergate scandal. How could the Gray Lady possibly compete with a newspaper whose journalists were portrayed by movie stars like Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, and Jason Robards?
But the technological and cultural forces that have brought the newspaper business to its knees did considerably more damage to the Post than to the Times—that is, until Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013 and added about 100 journalists to its newsroom in a bid to transform the Post into a national digital newspaper.
Now, once again, the Post and the Times are genuine rivals. The Post’s executive editor, Marty Baron, and the Times’s, Dean Baquet, are longtime friends and competitors. Bezos said in a television interview that his goal was for the Post to become “the new paper of record,” a clear reference to the Times—and the Post took it a step further than even Bezos had by putting together an ad proclaiming itself already to be “America’s New Publication of Record.” The Post also moved ahead of the Timesin online readership, despite having a newsroom staff about half the size.
It is into this ancient conflict—once heated, then dormant, and now heating up again—that Margaret Sullivan and Jim Rutenberg have now been enlisted. This is going to be fun.
The Boston Globe has published an unusual multimedia, interactive editorial calling for a ban on assault weapons that includes data, animated graphics, and thumbnail bios of six recalcitrant senators—including information on how much money they’ve received from the gun lobby as well as tools to email or tweet at them.
