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After the ambush of Zelenskyy, some smart commentary — and an exceedingly dumb take

I share the shock and revulsion of every decent person over Donald Trump and JD Vance’s shameful attack Friday on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. We are sliding into authoritarianism, and Trump has made it eminently clear that his role model is Russia’s homicidal dictator, Vladimir Putin.

There are any number of places you can go for analysis that’s sharper and better-informed than mine, but I do what to share a few tidbits I’ve gleaned in my reading over the past day.

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Among the more interesting questions is whether this happened spontaneously or if Trump and Vance ambushed Zelenskyy. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic argues for the latter (gift link). His evidence: the very fact that Vance spoke up, which was not something he would normally be expected to do and was almost certainly scripted in advance. Nichols writes:

Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio — in theory, America’s top diplomat — was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.

Also of note is that New York Times political reporter Peter Baker is speaking truth to power. Baker often gets criticized for showing Trump too much deference and normalizing his sociopathic behavior. On Wednesday, though, Baker compared Trump’s treatment of the media to Putin’s during his early days of establishing his authority. Baker was covering Moscow at that time, and he said Trump’s banishment of The Associated Press over the news agency’s refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” was reminiscent of Putin’s efforts to mold “a collection of compliant reporters who knew to toe the line or else they would pay a price.”

Baker added we’re still a long way from Trump ordering that anti-regime journalists be poisoned. But it was a harsh characterization of Trump from someone who usually likes to keep his options open. I’d say there’s no going back.

And indeed, Baker brought the truth with him again on Friday, writing this as a riposte to Trump’s invocation of “the Russia hoax” in his meeting with Zelenskyy. Baker says:

In fact, the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was no hoax and concluded definitively that Mr. Putin ordered an intelligence operation to tilt the election eight years ago to Mr. Trump. Although Mr. Mueller said in his final report in 2019 that “the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges,” he made clear that Mr. Trump’s campaign benefited from Russian assistance.

Baker could have gone one step further and pointed out that Mueller may well have charged Trump with criminal acts were it not for guidance from the Justice Department that a sitting president is exempt. Still, good for Baker for reminding everyone that the 2016 Trump campaign was awash in Russian influence.

Finally, Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen, an enthusiastic Trumper, wrote an embarrassing column (gift link if you’re interested) on Thursday headlined “Trump just dealt Russia a devastating blow,” with the subhead “A deal for Ukraine’s minerals could effectively end the war.” That deal, of course, was what Zelenskyy had supposedly come to the White House to sign, only to be sandbagged by Trump and Vance.

So how did Thiessen react? Naturally, he took to Twitter and blasted Zelenskyy, writing:

There was no ambush. Z was set up for success. All he had to do was not get into a public fight and sign the minerals deal. Not hard. A lot of work went into making a successful moment possible and he blew it and then refused to apologize.

Thiessen has been at the Post for years, so you can’t blame this on Jeff Bezos’ edict that the Post’s opinion section is going full MAGA. But this is the sort of garbage you can expect will be rewarded, while the future of liberal columnists like Dana Milbank, Ruth Marcus and Jonathan Capehart is left very much in doubt.

In Mississippi, a censorious order is lifted, but questions remain; plus, press solidarity, and good news from GBH

The Mississippi judge who ordered a newspaper to remove an editorial from its website has reversed herself. But this is hardly a victory for freedom of the press.

Judge Crystal Wise Martin rescinded her temporary restraining order after the owner of The Clarksdale Press Register and the board of commissioners in that city agreed to settle a dispute that had resulted in a libel suit being filed. The commissioners agreed to drop the suit while Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers, said the paper will publish a less incendiary version of the editorial, according to Michael Levenson of The New York Times (gift link).

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That does not change the reality that Judge Martin leaped in to help city officials by censoring the newspaper, even though the First Amendment protects libelous materials from being subjected to prior restraint. Libel can, of course, be punished after the fact through a civil suit, although government agencies cannot sue for libel.

The editorial, headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” took city officials to task “for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.”

Continue reading “In Mississippi, a censorious order is lifted, but questions remain; plus, press solidarity, and good news from GBH”

Jeff Bezos blows up The Washington Post’s opinion section, embracing all MAGA, all the time

Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.

I was hoping that Jeff Bezos had gotten it out of his system. After his disastrous decision to cancel The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, which cost the paper some 250,000 subscriptions, and his subsequent sucking up to Donald Trump, the billionaire had been quiet recently.

The news section’s coverage of the calamitous Trump White House has been excellent, and the Post’s deputy managing editor, Mike Semel, has said that subscriber conversions “are strong and growing at a near-record pace,” according to media reporter Oliver Darcy.

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But it was too good to be true. New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin reports (gift link) that opinion editor David Shipley is quitting after Bezos issued an edict calling for the section to go full MAGA. No longer will the Post offer a heterodox opinion section of liberals, moderates and conservatives. Rather, it will be more like The Wall Street Journal’s ultraconservative opinion section, only (I’ll predict) not as smart. Mullin writes:

“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said, in an email to The Post’s employees on Wednesday. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”

In his note, Mr. Bezos said that he asked Mr. Shipley whether he wanted to stay at The Post, and Mr. Shipley declined.

“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Mr. Bezos wrote.

You can read the full text of Bezos’ message on Mullin’s Bluesky feed.

Shipley had to endure the embarrassment of the Harris non-endorsement and then took one for the team when he killed an Ann Telnaes cartoon mocking Bezos and other corporate titans as they groveled at Trump’s feet. Shipley’s reasoning at the time — that there had already been enough of such opinionating — was disingenuous, and Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner, quit. But Shipley is standing tall today.

I have to assume this will set off a mass exodus from the Post’s opinion section. Good thing that Jonathan Capehart survived the purge at MSNBC that claimed Joy Reid.

A few random observations:

• Bezos says, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Hmmm … personal liberties and free markets? If Bezos is serious, then that would mean the new Post opinion section will be deeply anti-Trump: opposed to tariffs and in favor of reproductive and LGBTQ rights. But of course that’s not what he means. He’s adopting the up-is-down rhetoric of the MAGA movement.

• Bezos explicitly rejects the idea of a heterodox opinion section, arguing that it’s not necessary because “the internet does that job.” For years, the Post’s opinion section has been center-right, with a few liberals and a few Trumpers. Now The New York Times stands alone of the three major national papers in offering something close to the full spectrum. It’s kind of the mirror image of what the Post had been up until now — that is, the Times has been center-left, with a few conservatives but no Trump supporters.

• Does Bezos want the Post’s news pages to continue as tough, fair, independent truth-seekers with no interference from the owner? That’s how it works at the Journal, whose news pages continue to kick butt despite the right-wing opinion section and despite Murdoch ownership. Bezos was a very good steward of the Post from the time he bought it in 2013 until about a year ago, when he hired Fleet Street veteran and former Murdoch executive Will Lewis as publisher and kept him on even as questions about Lewis’ ethics mounted. I’m hoping for the best from the Post’s news section, but I’m bracing for the worst.

The AP goes local; plus, the National Trust runs into trouble in Colorado, and a call for de-Foxification

The Associated Press has been in the news a lot lately, both because of its feud with the White House over Donald Trump’s insistence that it refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and for some cuts it’s had to implement (see Gintautus Dumcius’ story in CommonWealth Beacon and Aidan Ryan’s in The Boston Globe).

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But here’s some good news: The AP announced on Thursday that it’s creating a Local Investigative Reporting Program to support efforts at the community level. According to an annoucement by executive editor Julie Pace, the initiative will be headed by veteran AP editor Ron Nixon, who “will work with state and local outlets to cultivate stories and support their investigative reporting needs.”

The program will encompass training, resources and access to AP services, and will build on the agency’s Local News Success Team “to localize national stories for member audiences and provide services and support to newsrooms across the U.S.”

Continue reading “The AP goes local; plus, the National Trust runs into trouble in Colorado, and a call for de-Foxification”

In Mississippi, a shocking case of censorship. Plus, the AP ponders a lawsuit, and good news in Texas

Judge Crystal Wise Martin is sworn in by her mother, retired Judge Patricia Wise, in 2019. Photo via the Mississippi Office of the Courts.

In 1971, after a federal court stopped The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court was so alarmed at that naked act of censorship that it took up the case in a matter of weeks. On a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that the Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and others could resume publishing, though they might face prosecution for revealing classified information. (They didn’t.)

In 1979, after a small magazine in Wisconsin called The Progressive said it intended to publish an article revealing some details about how to manufacture an atomic bomb, a federal judge stepped in and said no — but so agonized over his censorious act that he all but begged the magazine and the government to reach a compromise.

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Then there’s Judge Crystal Wise Martin of Mississippi. On Wednesday, Martin issued a temporary restraining order requiring The Clarksdale Press Register to take down an editorial from its website. According to Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press, the editorial, headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” took city officials to task “for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.”

The city had sued the Press Register, claiming that the editorial was libelous and that it “chilled and hindered” the council’s work. Mayor Chuck Espy was quoted in the AP story as saying the editorial had unfairly implied that officials had violated the law. He cited a section of the editorial that asked, “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kick-back [see update below] from the community?”

Continue reading “In Mississippi, a shocking case of censorship. Plus, the AP ponders a lawsuit, and good news in Texas”

SEO in the age of paywalls: A new study examines best practices in driving subscriptions; plus, media notes

The Huffington Post’s “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” headline has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.” 2016 photo via the Voice of America.

Recently a source in The Boston Globe newsroom forwarded to me a memo sent to the staff about the paper’s performance in Google search during 2024. “We get 25%-27% of our traffic from Google; it’s a significant way we reach people who don’t come to the Globe on their own,” wrote Ronke Idowu Reeves, the paper’s SEO editor. (SEO stands for search-engine optimization.)

As you might imagine, the big SEO winners in 2024 were the Karen Read trial, the phrase “who won the debate” (perhaps a reference to both presidential debates), the Celtics victory parade and Steward Health Care.

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The memo, though, prompted another thought: What is the purpose of SEO in the age of paywalls? As you probably know, the Globe has an especially strict paywall, with no quota of gift links for the month. I emailed Reeves and asked her whether SEO was successful in getting casual visitors to sign up for a digital subscription given that they couldn’t read even the one story they’d searched for. She forwarded my email to spokeswoman Carla Kath, who told me by email: “Yes, a good number of people do read and subscribe to our stories that they encounter on search. But, because the scope of search is constantly changing, we are always adjusting how we approach it.”

It’s something I’d like to dig into more deeply at some point since it’s fundamental to the economics of digital news. Twenty years ago, paywalls were rare, and the idea behind SEO was to drive massive audiences to your stories so that they’d see the ads that accompanied them. The first iteration of The Huffington Post stressed SEO heavily, and its infamous 2011 headline “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.”

Continue reading “SEO in the age of paywalls: A new study examines best practices in driving subscriptions; plus, media notes”

The Washington Post reportedly rejected a wraparound ad that said ‘Fire Elon Musk.’ Here it is.

I’m running a free ad today after learning that The Washington Post refused to take money from Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund to run a wraparound “Fire Elon Musk” ad that would have taken up the front and back pages. The Post turned down $115,000, according to Alexander Bolton of The Hill.

“We submitted the artwork back on Tuesday of last week. I’m assuming it went through a legal department or other kind of review. They said, ‘You can have something inside the paper but you can’t do the wrap.’ We said thanks, no thanks because we had a lot of questions,” said Common Cause president Virginia Kase Solomón.

The ad was supposed to appear in papers delivered to the White House, Congress and the Pentagon.

Solomón observed that the Post recently accepted a wrap ad from the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers that enthused over Donald Trump’s pledge to “end the electric vehicle mandate on Day 1.”

“Is it because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk?” asked Solomón. “Is it only OK to run things in the Post now that won’t anger the president or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?”

Inquiring minds want to know.

Another Mass. judge orders a magazine to turn over its reporting materials; plus, media notes

Illustration produced by AI using DALL-E

One step forward, one step back.

Less than two weeks after state Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone reversed herself and ruled that Boston magazine reporter Gretchen Voss did not have to turn over notes she took during an off-the-record interview with murder suspect Karen Read, another judge is demanding that a journalist assist prosecutors in a different murder case.

On Monday, Superior Court Judge William Sullivan ordered that The New Yorker produce audio recordings of interviews with the husband of Lindsay Clancy, who’s been charged in the killing of her three children at their Duxbury home.

And there’s more, according to Boston Globe reporter Travis Andersen, who writes that the magazine will be required to produce “all audio recordings of Patrick Clancy, two of his relatives, and two friends who spoke to the magazine for a story that ran in October” as well as “relevant interview notes, text messages, voicemails, and emails in possession of the publisher or reporter Eren Orbey.” Orbey’s story on the Clancy case was published last October.

I would assume that The New Yorker and its corporate owner, Condé Nast, will appeal, although the Globe story doesn’t address that issue. Last Friday, Charlie McKenna of MassLive reported that Judge Sullivan had allowed the prosecution’s motion for The New Yorker’s reporting materials and that Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, did not object. The magazine had not responded to the demand, a prosecutor told Sullivan.

There is no First Amendment right for reporters to protect their confidential sources or, as in this case, their reporting materials. Massachusetts does not have a shield law, and protections based on state court precedent are regarded as weak.

The problem is that forcing reporters to turn over their notes, recordings and other materials transforms them into an arm of the prosecution and interferes with their ability to do serve as an independent monitor of power. Sullivan made the wrong call, and I hope he — like Judge Cannone — has second thoughts.

Media notes

• That didn’t take long. After Google Maps changed “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America,” opponents of Donald Trump took to social media to announce that they were moving to other platforms. Well, on Tuesday evening Microsoft and Apple began to follow suit. Honestly, no one should have been surprised.

• The fracturing continues. BuzzFeed may become the latest company to unveil an alternative to Twitter/X, according to Max Tani of Semafor, as it seeks to offer “an alternative to the rightward, masculine drift of American public culture.” Well, good luck with that. After shutting down its news division, BuzzFeed is now cutting its HuffPost subsidiary. I have to say that Bluesky is working pretty well for me as my main short-form social-media outlet.

• Back to his roots. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is demanding answers from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about ads running on Instagram for a program that uses artificial intelligence to create fake nude photos of real people. The ads violate Meta’s terms of service, reports Emanuel Maiberg of 404 Media. But let’s not forget that Zuckerberg created a predecessor site to Facebook as a way to rate the hotness of Harvard women.

Trump punishes the AP for sticking with the Gulf of Mexico name

The power to rename things and to demand that others recognize that power is something that is right out of the authoritarian’s playbook. So if you think Donald Trump’s insistence that we refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America isn’t a big deal, think again. By getting us to go along, he makes us complicit.

Earlier today I wrote that Google Maps is now using the Gulf of America name despite 400 years of custom and a complete lack of international support. Now comes more ominous news: The Associated Press, which issued style guidance that keeps it as the Gulf of Mexico, says the Trump administration denied AP journalists access to a White House event. Here is what AP executive editor Julie Pace said:

Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing.

It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.

The AP Stylebook is the industry standard, used not just by the agency’s own journalists but by many other news organizations besides. I hope the AP stands firm.

And shame on Google. Throughout the day, I saw anti-Trump folks on social media announce they would switch to Apple Maps or Microsoft’s Bing Maps. It’s futile. They’re standing fast for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or both of them give in a few days from now.

The Globe reports on Maine’s troubled papers; plus, the Gulf of What?, and some recovery in DC and LA

Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan has written an interesting examination of what’s gone wrong at the Portland Press Herald and other papers that are part of the Maine Trust for Local News.

On the one hand, the story feels provisional — we still don’t know why two top executives left suddenly, and severe cuts that observers had told me were coming are, well, still coming. The executives who left recently were Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of the National Trust for Local News, which acquired the papers in 2023, and Lisa DeSisto, CEO of the Maine Trust — and, before that, publisher of the Press Herald. Other top people have departed as well.

On the other hand, Ryan has some details I hadn’t seen before. For one thing, the Trust reported that it lost $500,000 in 2024 as the decline of advertising outpaced gains in digital subscription revenue.

More shocking is that former owner Reade Brower apparently considered David Smith as a potential buyer before selling to the National Trust. Smith, the head of the right-wing television network Sinclair Broadcasting, is currently turning The Baltimore Sun into an embarrassment. Sinclair owns WGME-TV (Channel 13) in Portland, so who knows what sort of synergistic hell Smith had in mind.

Brower instead sold the papers to the National Trust for $15 million (a figure that’s being reported for the first time from documents that Ryan obtained) in the hope that a nonprofit organization would prove to be a better steward.

One data point I do want to address is Dr. Hansen Shapiro’s compensation, reported in the National Trust’s public 1099 filings and noted by both the Press Herald at the time that she stepped down and now by the Globe.

Hansen Shapiro did make a lot of money — nearly $371,000 in 2023 compared to just $117,000 in 2021. At the same time, though, 2021 was when the Trust pulled off its first deal, buying 24 weekly and monthly newspapers in the Denver suburbs. The Trust today owns 65 papers in Colorado, Georgia and Maine. Given the Trust’s pivot to a hands-on operating role, Hansen Shapiro’s job responsibilities changed as well.

I’m not writing this to defend her compensation or, for that matter, the Trust’s change of focus. But it’s important context to think about.

“Journalists employed by the Maine Trust said while they remain hopeful about the new ownership, they question aspects of its approach,” Ryan writes, who notes that no one among the rank and file would speak with him on the record “because they feared retaliation.”

Finally, my usual disclosures: Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Hansen Shapiro for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and featured her on our podcast; we are both professional friends with DeSisto; and we gave a book talk at a fundraiser for the Maine Trust last fall.

Google caves

I learned this last night from journalist Dan Gillmor’s Bluesky feed: Google has apparently become the first of the internet map publishers to give in to Donald Trump’s ridiculous demand that the Gulf of Mexico now be referred to as the Gulf of America.

“I typed Gulf of Mexico into Google Maps,” Gillmor wrote. “It edited my query without permission and showed me the Trump cult invention that isn’t and never will be the real thing.”

At least as of this writing, Apple Maps and Microsoft’s Bing Maps are sticking with the Gulf of Mexico. But who knows what we’ll find tomorrow?

After Trump announced that he was renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain in Alaska (it is reverting back to Mount McKinley), The Associated Press issued guidance for its bureaus and any other news outlets who use its stylebook.

The AP will continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico, which is an international body of water whose name has 400 years of tradition behind it; but it will go along with Mount McKinley because it is entirely on U.S. territory. It was only in 2015 that President Barack Obama issued an order restoring the mountain’s original Indigenous name.

By the way, the U.S. Geological Survey is going with Gulf of America too — but that’s hardly surprising given that it’s a federal agency.

No thanks to their owners

Good work is the best answer to the damage that two billionaire owners have done to their storied newspapers.

Semafor reports that The Washington Post has seen an upsurge in web traffic since Trump’s chaotic return to office, notwithstanding owner Jeff Bezos’ untimely killing of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election. One especially hot story: a report on the White House’s illegal federal spending freeze.

Meanwhile, Sarah Scire reports for Nieman Lab that the Los Angeles Times experienced a rise in paid subscriptions during the recent wildfires even though the paper had temporarily dropped its paywall. Like Bezos, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong canceled a Harris endorsement, provoking outrage, resignations and cancellations.