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Poynter’s deep dive into Baltimore’s setting Sun and the rise of the Banner; plus, media notes

Perhaps no city has benefited from a forceful response to the depredations of Alden Global Capital more than Baltimore. In 2021, the slash-and-burn hedge fund purchased Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers, including such storied titles as the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant.

And The Baltimore Sun.

Now Angela Fu of Poynter Online has written a deep dive into the Baltimore media scene on what happened after Alden’s subsequent sale of the Sun a year ago to David Smith, the head of Sinclair Broadcast Group, infamous for imposing his right-wing views on newscasts at the company’s national empire of television stations (in New England, Sinclair has stations in Portland and Providence).

The other principal subject of Fu’s article is The Baltimore Banner, a digital nonprofit begun in 2022 by wealthy hotelier Stewart Bainum after his efforts to purchase the Sun — and then the entire Tribune chain — were spurned by Tribune’s board. Unlike most nonprofits, even some of the larger ones that Ellen Clegg and I included in our book, “What Works in Community News,” the Banner is what you might call a full-service news project, with a newsroom staff of about 80. (The Sun now employs just 56.) The Banner offers breaking news, sports, arts and culture in addition to the accountability journalism that is the hallmark of such projects. Fu writes:

While the Sun battles staff attrition, the Banner continues to grow. Since June, it has launched an “Education Hub” and expanded business coverage. The Banner is also working to extend its footprint across the state, hiring a number of regional reporters to cover counties that lack local news sources and starting region-specific newsletters. Ongoing experiments include live blogs, vertical video on the site’s homepage and comment sections on certain stories for subscribers.

Fu’s reporting is detailed and even-handed. At the Sun, she reports that there has been a wave of departures since the Smith takeover and widespread angst over his forcing the paper to run second-rate stories from the Baltimore television station that he owns. Smith has also ordered up critical reporting on the city council while funding a campaign to shrink the size of the council from 14 members to eight.

But though the Banner has been widely praised for its all-in approach to filling the gap created by the Sun’s decline, Fu writes that it has also come under criticism for taking an outmoded approach to reporting on law enforcement and for covering the city’s opioid crisis (in partnership with The New York Times) in a way that failed to acknowledge the work of grassroots organizations.

Also of note: The Banner’s board of directors includes Brian McGrory, chair of Boston University’s journalism program and a former editor of The Boston Globe. The city is also served by the Baltimore Beat, a nonprofit that covers the Black community.

What I found kind of odd about Fu’s story was the framing. She found that the Sun under Alden did not turn into the fiasco many had predicted, and that the real newsroom exodus didn’t begin until after Smith acquired it. She begins by describing the competition between the Banner and the Sun in covering the catastrophic accident that took out the Francis Scott Key Bridge last March, competition that she says was good for the city, and she wonders whether that brief moment is closing as Smith imposes his will.

Fu’s done the work, so I’m not disagreeing with any of this. Nor do I disagree with her observation that Alden may have held back on budget cuts at the Sun because it didn’t want to fall behind the Banner. But did anyone think it was going to last? In fact, it took Alden less than three years after it bought the Sun to turn around and sell it to a terrible owner who is transforming the paper into something of a right-wing laughingstock. Does it really matter if Alden destroyed the Sun by cutting it or by letting David Smith ruin it? Pick your poison.

The reality is that Baltimore is incredibly lucky to have one news source of record, and that source is now The Baltimore Banner. Bainum tells Fu that the Banner is eventually going to have to break even and survive on its own. Let’s hope the community gives it the support that it needs.

Media notes

• Muzzle follow-up. Last July, I gave a New England Muzzle Award to Waltham Community Access Corp., which claimed a rival had violated its copyright by grabbing clips of government meetings, even though WCAC receives guaranteed funding from licensing fees mandated by state law. That rival, a citizens journalism group known as Channel 781, sued, claiming that WCAC had acted in bad faith. Now a federal judge, Patti Saris, has refused to dismiss the suit and has instead asked the two sides to work out a settlement, Aubrey Hawkes reports in The Waltham Times.

• Going hybrid in New Hampshire. The Keene Sentinel of New Hampshire, one of New England’s feistier independent daily newspapers, is emulating many of its for-profit peers by starting a nonprofit arm that will accept donations to pay for certain types of public interest reporting. According to an announcement, the Local Journalism Fund aims to raise $75,000 in 2025, and will kick it off with a public event on Jan. 21 featuring two journalists from the Uvalde News Leader in Texas, which covered a horrific mass shooting at a local elementary school in 2022.

• The blizzard of Ozy. I never thought anyone could make me care about the decline and fall Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson and his associates. I have to say that I wasn’t even sure what it was, though I have since learned that it published meme-friendly news (and some serious stuff) in the same digital space as BuzzFeed, Mic and Upworthy. At my friend Emily Rooney’s urging, though, I listened to a three-part podcast on Watson’s rise, fall and his criminal trial hosted by the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s little more than a conversation between host Josh Hersh and my former “Beat the Press colleague Susie Banikarim, who covered the trial. That doesn’t sound too exciting, but — as Emily promised — it’s smart and riveting. Highly recommended.

In Vermont, a mayoral Muzzle for silencing the police and freezing out the press; plus, media notes

Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.

It might be high-handed for a mayor to order her police chief to funnel all public statements through her office, but it isn’t necessarily such an outrage that it warrants a coveted New England Muzzle Award. But to compound that by announcing she would have a press availability to which not all local news organizations were invited — well, come on down and claim your prize, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak.

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Mulvaney-Stanak, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and a leader in that state’s Progressive Party, signed an executive order last Wednesday ordering the Burlington Police Department to route all press releases through her office before distributing them to the public. “People need the basic facts of situations for the sake of public safety and nothing more than that,” the mayor was quoted as saying.

According to Colin Flanders, a reporter for the Burlington-based newspaper Seven Days, Mulvaney-Stanak had “raised concerns” with Police Chief Jon Murad “about the content of his department’s public statements in the past. Murad has used press releases in recent years to criticize the court system and a perceived lack of accountability for repeat offenders.”

Murad was silenced after a defense lawyer asked a judge to impose a gag order on the Burlington police in response to statements by the chief concerning a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Murad had accused the man of “violent, incorrigible, antisocial behavior” — and some of Murad’s comments were repeated on the public radio program “On Point,” produced by WBUR in Boston and distributed nationwide. It’s hard to imagine that the mayor was pleased by that.

Meanwhile, Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, writing in the Vermont Daily Chronicle for Vermont News First, reported on Friday that Mulvaney-Stanak would speak to the press at a media availability that afternoon — but that Vermont News First, which had been dogging the mayor over her acceptance of free donated meals, had not been invited. After Donoghue’s story was posted, he added an update reporting that Seven Days hadn’t been invited, either.

“She doesn’t answer her cellphone and actually has asked VNF to stop calling,” Donoghue wrote.

(Update: Donoghue later explained to me that VNF is his own journalism endeavor and that the Vermont Daily Chronicle is one of his clients.)

Well, if Seven Days and Vermont News First were left off the invitation list, who was invited? The city’s daily, the Burlington Free Press, didn’t report on the mayor’s muzzling of Chief Murad until today, and there are no quotes from her in the article. There’s nothing about any sort of press availability in the statewide news organization VTDigger, whose reporter Corey McDonald wrote about Mulvaney-Stanak’s silencing of Murad last Thursday, on the same day as Seven Days. Nor is there anything from Vermont Public Radio.

Chief Murad, who’s leaving his post this April, may or may not have been out of line in disparaging a notorious frequent flier in the criminal justice system. But holding law enforcement to account is difficult enough without the mayor stepping in and lowering the cone of silence.

For Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak to worsen that situation by creating the impression that she would exclude some news outlets from a media availability (it’s not clear whether that availability ever happened) goes beyond acceptable and pushes this story into the Muzzle Zone.

Media notes

• Donald Trump v. Nancy Barnes. Among the journalism organizations Donald Trump has targeted for libel suits is the Pulitzer Board, which awarded a Pulitzer Prize to The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2018 for their reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia. Trump is claiming the award was somehow libelous — and Ben Smith of Semafor reports that he’s is suing not just the board but individual members of that board, including, locally, Boston Globe executive editor Nancy Barnes.

• A liberal counterpart to The Free Press? Another star opinion journalist has fled the rapidly declining Washington Post. Jennifer Rubin, a conservative-turned-centrist-turned-liberal with a strong social media presence, is moving to Substack, where she’ll be the editor-in-chief of a new publication called The Contrarian — which, she tells CNN’s Brian Stelter, will “combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face.” Stelter’s report and Rubin’s introductory post suggest that The Contrarian could serve as a welcome liberal counterpart to the right-leaning Free Press, founded in 2021 by disgruntled New York Times opinion journalist Bari Weiss.

• New Jersey’s post-print future. This past fall I observed that Advance Local was closing its New Jersey print newspapers, the largest of which is The Star-Ledger of Newark, and doubling down on digital with its statewide NJ.com site. Now Marc Pfeiffer, a policy fellow at Rutgers University, has written a commentary for NJ Spotlight News arguing that print is not essential to maintaining a rich media ecosystem. “The future of New Jersey news is primarily digital — and that’s OK,” Pfeiffer writes. “What matters isn’t the delivery method but the quality and accessibility of local journalism. Our democracy depends on having informed citizens who know what’s happening in their State House, county seats, and town halls.”

• An update on that Colorado assault. A couple of weeks ago I noted that a television journalist in Grand Junction, Colorado, had allegedly been assaulted by a Trump supporter who followed his car to the journalist’s television station, tried to choke him, and shouted “This is Trump’s America now.” In his latest newsletter, Corey Hutchins writes that the 22-year-old journalist, Ja’Ronn Alex, is out on paid leave while Patrick Egan, the taxi driver who’s been charged, is out on bail, with his lawyer claiming that he suffers from mental health issues.

CNN’s risky decision to defend a libel claim; plus, billionaires bad and good, and media notes

Photo (cc) 2010 by red, white, and black eyes forever

Ordinarily when I write about libel suits, it’s to call your attention to some bad actor whose ridiculous claims threaten to damage freedom of the press. Today, though, I want to tell you about a case involving CNN that has me wondering what on earth executives at the news channel could be thinking.

Media reporter David Folkenflik of NPR explains the case in some detail. In November 2021, CNN’s Alex Marquardt reported that Zachary Young, who runs an outfit called Nemex Enterprises, was taking advantage of desperate Afghans by charging them “exorbitant fees” to extract them from Afghanistan after the U.S. pulled out and the government fell into the hands of the Taliban.

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CNN said there was no evidence that Young had been successful in evacuating anyone. Young claims otherwise. Folkenflik writes:

Young has sued CNN for defamation. In his complaint, his attorneys say CNN gave him just hours to respond to its questions before it first aired that story on “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” They say Young had, in fact, successfully evacuated dozens of people from Afghanistan.

In rebutting those allegations in court, CNN has since cast doubt on Young’s claim of the successful evacuations. Behind the scenes, however, some editors expressed qualms about the reporting, court filings show.

You should read Folkenflik’s full story. What you’ll learn is that:

CNN may or may not have gotten it right, but it is basing its defense, in part, on what it describes as Young’s refusal “to cooperate with CNN’s reporting efforts,” as if he was under any legal obligation to do so. Also, keep in mind that Young argues he was given “just hours to respond.”
Tom Lumley, CNN’s senior national security editor, privately called the story “a mess.” Megan Trimble, a top editor, agreed that “it’s messy.”
There was some sentiment within CNN that it was all right to go ahead with a fleeting television version of the story that wouldn’t attract much notice but that posting a written article was risky.
Marquardt, in an internal message, had written, “We gonna nail this Zachary Young mf*****,” and at least two other CNN journalists had disparaged Young besides, with one saying Young had “a punchable face.”

Continue reading “CNN’s risky decision to defend a libel claim; plus, billionaires bad and good, and media notes”

Mark Zuckerberg’s capitulation to Trump is all about his relentless pursuit of profits

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo (cc) 2019 by Billionaires Success.

On Tuesday I spoke with Jon Keller of Boston’s WBZ-TV (Channel 4) about Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to eliminate independent fact-checking and tone down the moderation on Meta’s social-media various platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

Among other things, Zuckerberg said he’s going to let pretty much anything go on immigration and gender on the grounds that stamping out hate speech is “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He’s also copying the Community Notes feature from Elon Musk, who has turned over fact-checking to users at his Twitter/X platform.

For all the details, I recommend this Wall Street Journal article (gift link) and Zuckerberg’s own video announcement.

Jon and I were only able to hit a few points in our conversation, so I want to say a bit more. What Zuckerberg is doing amounts to unconditional surrender to Donald Trump. Four and five years ago, Facebook struggled to clamp down on dangerous misinformation about COVID and suspended Trump from the platform after he fomented the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Now Zuckerberg is giving in completely.

Essentially we have three billionaire tech moguls who are doing everything they can to enable Trump. Musk, of course, isn’t just enabling Trump; he’s moved in with him, and his bizarre pronouncements about everything from the alleged criminality of the British government to the size of newborns’ heads now carry with them the imprimatur of our authoritarian president-elect.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is systematically destroying The Washington Post, one of our four national newspapers, for no discernible reason other than to curry favor with Trump. And now Zuckerberg has signaled his willingness to surrender unconditionally.

The dispiriting reality is that Zuckerberg has placed profit above all other values for many years, no matter what the human cost. According to Amnesty International, Facebook was complicit in genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. His products have been linked to depression and suicide among teenagers. If Zuckerberg cared about any of this, he would have taken steps to make his platforms safer even at the expense of some of his profit margin. To be clear, Zuckerberg obviously doesn’t support genocide or suicide, and he has taken some steps — but those measures have been inadequate.

We should always keep in mind what the business model is for social media, whether it be Facebook, Threads, Twitter or TikTok. All of them employ opaque algorithms to show users more of the content that keeps them engaged so that they can sell them more stuff. And studies have demonstrated that what keeps users engaged is what makes them angry and upset. This is protected by Section 230, a federal law that holds internet publishers legally harmless for any content posted by third-party users.

As Twitter has continued its descent into the right-wing fever swamps, two platforms have emerged as alternatives — Threads and the much-smaller Bluesky. The latter has received several big bumps since the election, and is likely to get another one now that Zuckerberg has harmed the Threads brand. Bluesky doesn’t use a centralized algorithm — you’re free to use one designed by other users or none at all. (That’s also the case with Mastodon, but Bluesky has zoomed well ahead in the public consciousness.)

Unfortunately, Bluesky also lacks the capacity to engage in the kind of fact-checking and moderation that Meta once used. And with growth comes toxicity.

I’ve seen a number of folks on Threads saying on Tuesday that they’re leaving for Bluesky, just as many others said last year that they were leaving Twitter for Threads. It’s all futile. What we need is less social media and more real human connection. What Zuckerberg did Tuesday didn’t destroy something great. Rather, he made something that was already bad considerably worse.

The Globe’s new Starting Point lead writer was co-writer of the Times’ morning newsletter

In her recent New Year’s message to readers, Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry listed an expanded morning newsletter as one of her goals for 2025. Today the Globe took a step toward accomplishing that goal, hiring Ian Prasad Philbrick, co-writer of The New York Times’ flagship newsletter, The Morning, to serve as chief writer for the Globe’s Starting Point.

According to Philbrick’s LinkedIn page, he’s currently living in Washington, but the Globe’s announcement says that he plans to relocate to the Roslindale area, where he has family.

No word in the announcement whether Starting Point will move from three days a week to five, which strikes me as a necessity, but perhaps that will be the next step. I should note that the Globe has a number of other newsletters, including a weekday-morning offering called The B-Side, which is part of Globe Media’s free Boston.com site and aimed at a younger audience.

What follows is the announcement to the newsroom from Jacqué Palmer, senior editorial director for newsletters; Teresa Hanafin, the editor of Starting Point; and Heather Ciras, deputy managing editor for audience.

We’re thrilled to announce that Ian Prasad Philbrick, a former co-writer of The Morning newsletter from The New York Times, has joined the Globe as our lead Starting Point writer.

Ian not only co-wrote The Morning, but was also a key player in its ongoing development since its inception five years ago. He has the journalistic mindset, skills, and strategic foresight required to successfully helm a flagship newsletter like Starting Point. We are delighted to have him step into this role and help us reach our subscription goals.

Ian’s former colleagues raved about his ability to write big, sweepy, and informative stories, but also dig into data, identify trends, and offer fresh takes on the old, but interesting. His former editor went on at length about how thoughtful, careful, and smart Ian’s work is — and the Starting Point team couldn’t agree more.

Ian grew up in rural Maine, taught in a Boston public school for City Year, and studied politics at Georgetown University. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his fiancée Madeline, his dog Pearl, and his cat Squash. In his free time, you’re likely to find Ian reading a presidential biography, jogging in the park, or trying out a new recipe (this pumpkin maple cornbread is a current favorite).

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Ian. He will soon relocate and is hoping to land near family in the Roslindale area. He reports to Jacqué, is edited by Teresa, and will sit with the audience team when he is in the office.

Thank you to all who have contributed to Starting Point since it launched in September. (And we may still come to you from time to time for guest essays.) Because of your work, we already have close to 30,000 subscribers, with more signing up every week. In fact, we regularly get emails from readers thanking us for this newsletter. If you have any questions about how we can highlight your work, please email the Starting Point team at startingpoint@globe.com.

The Washington Post suffers another self-inflicted blow as Ann Telnaes quits over a killed cartoon

The rough draft of the Ann Telnaes cartoon that was killed by her editor. Via Telnaes’ newsletter, Open Windows.

The latest self-inflicted blow to The Washington Post has been rocketing around the internet since Friday. Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose wickedly funny editorial cartoons have graced the Post’s opinion section since 2008, quit after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes writes in her newsletter, Open Windows:

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

She’s wrong about one thing: Her resignation has created an enormous stir. Right now it’s trending at The New York Times and is No. 7 on The Boston Globe‘s most-read list. It’s all over social media as well.

The rough draft of Telnaes’ cartoon (above) shows Bezos and fellow billionaires Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of Open AI and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong kneeling before a giant statue of Trump. Three are holding bags of money in supplication. I’m not sure what Soon-Shiong is doing, though he appears to be wielding a container of lipstick. Mickey Mouse somehow figures into it as well.

Shipley, who was hired in 2022, is trying to do damage control, saying in a statement reported by New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin that he was simply engaged in normal editing and believed that the Post was running too much commentary about Trump’s billionaire courtiers:

Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.

I’m going to take Shipley at his word. Opinion editors should assert themselves from time to time and insist on less repetition. But not in this particular instance. Given the fraught nature of Bezos’ recent Trump-friendly moves, including his decision to kill the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund (which is what Telnaes was mocking in her cartoon), Shipley should have left this one go. By killing Telnaes cartoon, he acted in a deeply irresponsible manner at the worst possible time. And he lost one of his brightest stars.

I’ve enjoyed Telnaes’ work for years. During the Trump presidency, she often drew animated cartoons that were published on the Post’s digital platforms. Under her skillful pen, Trump was a grotesque figure, covered with makeup with his long red tie often reaching the floor.

Sadly, we are at a moment when editorial cartooning in general is on the decline, and it’s not a given that Telnaes will be picked up by another paper. The Times, which has been scooping up disaffected Posties, famously does not run editorial cartoons. Shipley says he hopes Telnaes will reconsider, but that seems unlikely.

No doubt Telnaes won’t come cheap. But several papers distinguished themselves with tough anti-Trump opinionating during the 2024 campaign, including The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I hope one of them sees fit to open up their checkbook and bring her on. The Atlantic, which like the Times has been hiring former Post staffers, is a possible landing spot as well.

At 50 hours, the audio version of Chernow’s Grant biography is scarcely shorter than the Civil War

I gave quite a bit of thought to whether I wanted to spend 50 hours with the audio version of Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant before deciding to take the plunge. I knew I was unlikely to find the time to read all 1,074 pages, and I wanted to know more about Grant and his era.

So I started it in mid-October during a drive to Portland, Maine, and kept at it an hour at a time, mainly on walks. I finished on New Year’s Day, and I’m here to report that it took longer for Grant to die than it did Joan of Arc during her interminable burning at the stake in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a 1928 silent film that we saw a few years ago accompanied by music written and performed brilliantly by a group of Berklee students.

I had previously listened to Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which, at 36 hours, was a romp by comparison. I don’t regret the time I spent getting to know Grant; Chernow is an eloquent writer and a skilled researcher, and, as I had hoped, I came away much more knowledgeable about his life and times.

But the level of detail about every trivial occurrence, and the repetitiveness about topics such as Grant’s alcoholism, military genius and ineptitude when not on the battlefield gets to be enervating after a while. As Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times: “Chernow likes extreme research; if a Civil War luminary had hemorrhoids, you can read about them here.”

I find that I absorb information from an audiobook about as well as I do from print, but since I’m not taking notes, I can’t really go back and offer much in the way of detail. More than anything, though, what stood out was Grant’s dedication to Black equality. In Chernow’s telling, Grant and Abraham Lincoln were the foremost white advocates of civil rights until Lyndon Johnson. Grant eagerly made use of Black troops during the Civil War, pushed for an expansive approach to Reconstruction, and, as president, dispatched the military to the South to break the Ku Klux Klan.

Thus it’s more than a little disconcerting to come to the end of Grant’s presidency in 1877, when Northern support for Reconstruction was waning, and learn that he believed the Civil War — which claimed an estimated 750,000 lives — had all been for naught. It’s hard to disagree, as slavery in the South morphed into Jim Crow and lynchings, a reign of terror that extended into the 1960s and whose legacy has still not been entirely put behind us.

Media notes

• Unpacking New Orleans and Las Vegas. Around this time Thursday, authorities were reportedly investigating whether the terrorist in New Orleans had accomplices and if the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion might somehow be tied in. Then, too, Donald Trump was parroting a false report from Fox News that the New Orleans attacker had driven across the border from Mexico. Today, we know that none of it was true. As the “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” from the public radio program “On the Media” puts it: “In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong” and “There’s almost never a second shooter” — or, in this case, a second attacker.

• A challenge to the AP. Reuters and Gannett are planning to offer some sort of subscription-based service to regional and local news publishers, according to Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, marking the next step in a partnership that began last spring. This is potentially bad news for The Associated Press, which has been losing customers because of its high prices. But it’s not clear how the arrangement will work. Reuters is a high-quality source of national and international news. Gannett, which publishes USA Today and owns some 200 local news outlets, is notorious for slashing its newsrooms and cutting their reporting capacity.

• Why local news matters. The Los Angeles Times has lost some 20,000 subscribers since owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and began embracing various Trump-friendly ideas, according to media reporter Oliver Darcy. Not good — but far fewer than the 250,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions over owner Jeff Bezos’ similar moves. The LA Times was starting from a smaller base, but there’s an additional factor that may be at play.

Under Bezos’ ownership, the Post reinvented itself as a nationally focused digital publication — making it relatively easy to cancel, since there are plenty of other sources of national and international news, starting with the Post’s ancient rival, The New York Times. By contrast, the LA Times is primarily a regional publication, not unlike The Boston Globe. Canceling the LA Times would mean losing access to important local and regional stories that no one else has.

A look back at the ‘attitude’ and ‘edge’ of the late Aaron Brown’s CNN newscast

Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown died on Sunday. His passing recalls what might be called a golden era in cable news. Brown, who worked for CNN from 2001 to ’05, hosted a prime-time newscast, competing with yet another prime-time newscast on MSNBC anchored by Brian Williams. Sadly, cable news has long since given way to politically oriented talk shows during the prime viewing hours of 8 to 11 p.m.

On June 20, 2002, I wrote a critical overview for The Boston Phoenix of what Brown and Williams were up to; at 2,700 words, it’s as much an artifact of a bygone era as Brown’s and Williams’ programs. Courtesy of the Northeastern University Library Archives, I’m republishing it here. As The Associated Press’ obituary puts it, Brown’s newscast was “quirky” and “cerebral.” There’s nothing remotely like it on television today.

Anchors away

While NBC grooms old-fashioned Brian Williams, CNN’s Aaron Brown is honing the new New Thing

By Dan Kennedy | The Boston Phoenix | June 20, 2002

For a man who’s supposed to be the future of network television news, Brian Williams looks an awful lot like the past.

Just 43 when it was announced that he would anchor the “NBC Nightly News” starting in 2004, Williams in some respects seems older than Tom Brokaw, whom he’ll succeed. At 62, Brokaw is the youngest of the Big Three (CBS’ Dan Rather is 70; ABC’s Peter Jennings is 63). And Brokaw’s folksy-yet-serious, everyman persona still seems modern compared to the stern omniscience of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and John Chancellor in the 1960s and ’70s — or, for that matter, of Ted Koppel today.

But though the Cronkites and the Koppels have always been able to trade on their experience and credibility, Williams — who anchors “The News with Brian Williams” on MSNBC at 8 p.m. — often comes off as stiff and portentous. He is said to be intelligent and funny, and he probably is. On camera, though, the expensive dark suit, the cuff links, the perfect tan, the just-so head angle designed to show off his “good” side (does he in fact have a left ear?), and the grave, hectoring tone can border on the ridiculous, especially on a slow news day.

Continue reading “A look back at the ‘attitude’ and ‘edge’ of the late Aaron Brown’s CNN newscast”

Uri Berliner’s disingenuous critique of NPR was the most-viewed Media Nation post of 2024

Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.

On this last day of 2024, I’m taking a look back before we plunge ahead into the new year. Media Nation’s 10 most viewed posts for the year range from my takedown of an intellectually dishonest critique of NPR, to CBS News’ reprimand of an on-air host for being too confrontational with a guest, to news that The Boston Globe is seeking to acquire Boston magazine. So let’s get right to it.

1. Fish in a barrel: Berliner’s case against NPR is based on false and out-of-context facts (April 11). Uri Berliner, a top editor at NPR, created a stir when he accused his employer of liberal bias in a long essay for The Free Press. The problem was that his examples didn’t hold up to scrutiny. To name just one: Berliner wrote that NPR failed to confess its sins after special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia, which isn’t even remotely what Mueller reported. There was a lot more disingenuousness where that came from. Berliner ended up resigning his post at NPR and going to work for — yes, The Free Press.

2. Less news, more happy talk: Why CBS News’ reprimand of Tony Dokoupil is so ridiculous (Oct. 8). Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates popped up on the CBS morning newscast to promote latest book, “The Message,” and faced an unexpectedly tough grilling over his anti-Israeli views from co-host Tony Dokoupil. Among other things, Dokoupil told Coates that his book woudn’t be out of place “in the backpack of an extremist.” Coates gave as good as he got, and he probably sold a few more books than he otherwise would have. Nevertheless, CBS News management called Dokoupil on the carpet — probably because his attempt to commit journalism contradicted the light banter that defines the morning-news format.

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3. A riveting Boston Globe story about a medical disaster with ties to the local news crisis (Jan. 29). A Globe report about the death of a new mother at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital had something in common with the same forces that have hollowed out much of the local-news business. The mother’s death may have been caused by the hospital’s lacking a basic piece of equipment that had been repossessed because its corporate owner, Steward Health Care, wasn’t paying its bills. Steward, in turn, had been pillaged by a private-equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which is the same outfit that helped the notorious newsroom-gutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital acquire Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers in 2021.

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In Colorado, a Trumper is charged with assaulting a journalist of color; plus, media notes

“This is Trump’s America now.” Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.

This story has been slowly building since Dec. 18 and finally broke through over the weekend. A Colorado television journalist who’s a person of color was reportedly attacked by a taxi driver who attempted to choke him, demanded to know whether he was a U.S. citizen, and taunted him by shouting, “This is Trump’s America now.”

No doubt we can expect to see more of this as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House on Jan. 20. Trump has normalized attacks on the media, and we shouldn’t be surprised that some of his more unhinged supporters would escalate that hatred into actual physical assaults.

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I learned about the incident from Corey Hutchins, who writes Inside the News in Colorado, a weekly newsletter. He wrote about it on Dec. 27 and decided not to name either the alleged assailant or the journalist, though both had been previously identified by CBS Colorado. Hutchins explained:

I haven’t yet seen the victim say anything publicly beyond what he told police, though I’ve reached out, and you can imagine what kind of hate and harassment might come his way these days with his name widely known. As for the accused, I haven’t seen him reached for comment yet, either. A Mesa County Court official said on Thursday he is represented by a public defender; her voicemail stated she is out of the office until after the new year.

That was a smart ethical decision on Hutchins’ part, though it didn’t hold for very long. As he notes, the story was picked up by The Associated Press on Dec. 28 and has since been reported by a number of news outlets including CNN, Axios and The Guardian.

According to the AP account, the taxi driver, 39-year-old Patrick Thomas Egan, was arrested on Dec. 18 in Grand Junction after police say he followed reporter Ja’Ronn Alex for about 40 miles. Egan pulled up next to Alex at a stoplight and, according to police, said something like “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”

Alex is a native of Detroit with a Pacific Islands background, according to news accounts.

Alex drove his news vehicle back to his station, KKCO/KJCT and, after he got out, was reportedly chased by Egan, who demanded to see his ID. Egan is accused of then tackling Alex, putting him in a headlock and attempting “to strangle him,” police said. Coworkers and others came to Alex’s rescue and said he was starting to lose his ability to breathe.

Egan has not yet been formally charged but is being held on $20,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday.

Hutchins also quotes from a recent study finding that 37% of white respondents thought it was acceptable for political leaders to target journalists and news outlets. As the authors of the study, Julie Posetti and Waqas Ejaz, wrote for The Conversation: “It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face…. Trump has effectively licensed attacks on American journalists through anti-press rhetoric and undermined respect for press freedom.”

Media notes

• Through a glass, darkly. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is slow-walking a pledge she made during her 2022 campaign to bring the governor’s office under the purview of the state’s public-records laws, according to Matt Stout of The Boston Globe. Healey says she still supports “transparency,” and would like to extend the law to the legislative and judicial branches as well — but she now says the governor needs to be able to invoke unspecified “exceptions.” The public-records law is one of the most restrictive in the country.

• Battle of the MAGAs. In case you missed it over the holidays, Heather Cox Richardson has a good overview of the battle that broke out online last week between Tech Bro MAGA and White Racist Twitter. The fight is between newly minted Trumpers like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who don’t want immigration restrictions to apply to highly educated tech workers, and classic haters like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon, who really, really want to prevent anyone who doesn’t look like from them entering the country. “Now, with Trump not even in office yet, the two factions of Trump’s MAGA base — which, indeed, have opposing interests — are at war,” Richardson writes.

• Coming attractions. Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry’s year-end message, published as a full-page ad in Sunday’s print edition and emailed to subscribers (you can read it here), lays out a number of goals for 2025. I found two especially worthy of note. The morning newsletter, Starting Point, will be expanded, which I hope means it will be come out every weekday instead of just on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Earlier would be better, too. By 7 a.m., most of us are off and running for the day.

Another smart goal: “Enhancing our high school sports coverage to further local engagement.” The region’s legacy newspapers are barely covering school sports these days, and many of the nonprofit startups don’t see it as part of their mission. More Globe sports coverage would fill a real need.

• Remembering Jimmy Carter. The late, great Jimmy Carter lived so long that several of the journalists who wrote his obituary years ago were no longer with us by the time their work was published. At The New York Times (gift link), Peter Baker shares a byline with Roy Reed, who died in 2017. The Washington Post’s obit (gift link) was written by Kevin Sullivan and Edward Walsh, the latter of whom died in 2014. Carter left office 43 years ago. For perspective, Franklin Roosevelt was in the midst of his second term 43 years before that.