Following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday, non-MAGA commentators who have felt compelled to weigh in have struggled to find the right balance between expressing their loathing for what Kirk stood for without making it seem like they were celebrating his death.
Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as someone embracing the reasoned debate central to democracy, although he became famous by establishing a database designed to dox professors who expressed opinions he disliked so they would be silenced (I am included on this list).
Indeed, she wrote about her inclusion on Kirk’s Professor Watchlist shortly after it was established in 2016, saying, “I am dangerous not to America but to the people soon to be in charge of it, people like the youngster who wrote this list.” She closed with this: “No, I will not shut up. America is still worth fighting for.”
On the afternoon that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was murdered, three teenagers, including the shooter, were reported to be in critical condition following a school shooting in Evergreen, Colorado. The shooter later died.
The only difference between these two awful events is that we’ve become numb to gun violence aimed at our children. Indeed, the Colorado incident barely registered in the media, while Kirk’s assassination got front-page coverage and was virtually the only story on cable news Wednesday evening.
What can any of us say at a moment like this except that it was just another day in America? Oliver Darcy offers a rundown (sub. req.) of recent incidents involving political violence:
Acts of political extremism are surfacing with alarming regularity in this country. Paul Pelosi was brutally attacked in his own home. Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer. Luigi Mangione was charged in December with killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in what authorities described as a politically motivated act. In the spring, an arsonist set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence and prosecutors later charged a suspect with attempted murder. In Minnesota over the summer, a man was charged after stalking Democrats and murdering House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband. Last month, a gunman sprayed more than 180 bullets at the Centers for Disease Control headquarters, killing a police officer. Each of the incidents were different, but together they paint an unsettling portrait: political violence is increasingly becoming the norm in America.
Darcy is correct in observing that the rise of politically motivated attacks is deeply disturbing. So is the ongoing epidemic of school shootings — not to mention mass gun violence in general. Let’s not forget the horror that unfolded in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023, when a gunman killed 18 people and injured 13 more.
The Charlie Kirk killing is different in that it has all the appearances of a political assassination; it took place in front of a large crowd of students at Utah Valley University; and the shooting was captured on video that then went viral on social media. One of the videos making the rounds was among the most graphic and disturbing I’ve seen.
Then, too, there was Kirk’s notoriety. He was about as famous as it is possible for a political figure to become without actually serving as an elected official or in a high government position. He was, as you no doubt know, notorious on the left, which led to a lot of offensive social media posts from people who ought to know better. MSNBC fired conservative-turned-liberal commentator Matthew Dowd after he walked right up to the edge of suggesting that Kirk got what he deserved. Dowd later apologized.
There’s really nothing to say at a time like this except that we have to do something about gun violence in this country, and that violence of any kind needs to be firmly condemned by all of us. Our thoughts today should be with Charlie Kirk and his family — as well as the families of the school shooting victims in Colorado, in addition to all the other victims of shootings, past and future.
Fox News wall in New York City. Photo (cc) 2019 by ajay_suresh.
Until this week, I had been cautiously optimistic about the future of the Murdoch media empire. That optimism was based on two accounts that were published last February.
The New York Times Magazine weighed in with an article about the succession drama involving the four adult children of Rupert Murdoch who had been designated as his heirs, while The Atlantic ran with a lengthy profile of James Murdoch, the brother who had lost power and who was seeking revenge, redemption or both.
The upshot was that James and his two sisters had won a convoluted civil suit to overturn the terms of their inheritance. Rupert’s designated heir, Lachlan, would be outnumbered by his three siblings after their father departs this vale of tears. And there was reason to believe that James, Prudence and Elisabeth might try to remake Murdoch’s right-wing properties — especially Fox News — along the lines of more normal conservative outlets.
It was not to be. On Monday evening, Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler of the Times, who wrote the earlier Times Magazine story, reported that James, Prudence and Elisabeth Murdoch had sold their shares of the family’s holdings for $1.1 billion apiece. The deal ensures that Lachlan Murdoch will remain in charge. Given that he is regarded as even more right-wing than his father, and politically out of step with his more moderate siblings, it would seem that Fox News, the New York Post et al. will continue as a toxic fungus spreading across the body politic.
The Times story suggests that James Murdoch’s indiscretions in talking with McKay Coppins of The Atlantic may have hastened the deal. Legal proceedings were under way accusing James of violating the terms of the family trust by disclosing confidential information to Coppins. Perhaps James decided to throw in the towel rather than get caught up in yet another protracted court fight.
Then again, it was never clear that the three siblings’ distaste for the lying and hate-mongering that define Fox News outweighed their interest in keeping it the money flowing in. They are all well aware of what happened when Fox called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden on the grounds that he had, you know, won. A large share of Fox’s Trump-worshipping audience immediately decamped for even farther-right cable channels like NewsMax and OAN. Fox soon got with the program, and the audience returned, though the Murdochs ended up having to pay a $787.5 million libel settlement because several of their on-air hosts lied about the Dominion voting-machine company.
With Fox News now officially a lost cause, we can only hope that the Murdochs maintain the excellence of The Wall Street Journal. Though the Journal’s editorial pages are conservative, they are normal (even more so than before Murdoch bought the paper in 2007), and they’ve taken Donald Trump to task on such anti-business moves as tariffs.
Moreover, the Journal’s news pages are on fire. Editor-in-chief Emma Tucker has emerged as perhaps our most prominent and respected editor following Marty Baron’s retirement at The Washington Post. Not only has the Journal broken some major stories about Trump’s depravity, including his birthday letter to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, but it is filled every day with interesting stories about business and culture that you won’t see in the Times.
Lachlan Murdoch’s purview includes the Journal even now. So we can only hope that the Journal’s status as one of our great papers continues after Rupert is no longer looking over his shoulder.
Note: With this post I am starting a new practice. Rather than indicating which stories are available through gift links, I am simply going to note when a story is blocked by a paywall. I’ll use the old Romenesko label: “sub. req.”
J. Jonah Jameson of “Spider-Man” fame visits the San Diego Comic-Con in 2017. Photo (cc) by William Tung.
When does aggressive but acceptable behavior on the part of editors cross the line into workplace abuse? Back when I was covering the media for The Boston Phoenix, I heard some hair-raising stories emanating from the newsrooms at The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.
But though the targets of that abuse were shaken up, consequences for perpetrators were few. There was a sense at least among some folks that it went with the territory, and that if you didn’t like it, you should suck it up. I’ll hasten to add that I didn’t accept that line of thinking, and I’m fortunate to have never been yelled at by an editor — at least not one I worked for. (A few editors I’ve reported on let me have it, but that’s OK.)
What would Walter Cronkite say? The legendary CBS News anchorman at the 1976 presidential debate between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Public domain photo.
Is there a media organization that’s fallen harder or faster in the Age of Trump II than CBS News? You might point to The Washington Post, but Jeff Bezos has thus far left its news coverage alone, contenting himself with taking a wrecking ball to the opinion section.
By contrast, CBS’s corporate overlords earlier this year settled a bogus lawsuit brought by Donald Trump against the network’s premier news program, “60 Minutes,” for $16 million in order to grease the skids for a sale to Skydance Media, headed by the Trump-friendly David Ellison.
And now comes the next act in this tragedy. According to a story first broken by Puck and since confirmed by other news outlets, Ellison is on the verge of acquiring The Free Press, a prominent right-leaning opinion outlet founded by Bari Weiss, the celebrity former New York Times opinion editor. The price tag could be somewhere between $100 million and $200 million. The idea is to bring Weiss inside the CBS tent and give her a major leadership role over CBS News.
What a revolting development. I’m not a regular reader of The Free Press, but its reputation is not so much right-wing as it is anti-anti-Trump. As CNN media reporter Brian Stelter wrote in July, when talk of a Weiss-Ellison alliance was starting to bubble up: “Earlier this year New York magazine described The Free Press as a media organ that ‘both wants to excoriate liberals but not fold fully into the MAGA wing.’”
Perhaps The Free Press’ most notorious piece was a takedown of NPR by one of the network’s former top editors, Uri Berliner. As I wrote at the time, Berliner’s screed was shot through with intellectual dishonesty, as he built his argument that NPR had fallen victim to liberal bias on a scaffolding of mischaracterizations and outright falsehoods. Look at its homepage this morning and you’ll see clickbait such as “How Zohran Mamdani Could Kill New York’s Schools,” “Is There a Dumber Housing Policy Than Rent Control?” and “The Democratic Socialists of America Don’t Know If They Should Condemn Murder.”
Media reporter Oliver Darcy on Wednesday wrote an excoriating takedown of the pending deal and the absurd notion that The Free Press is somehow worth $100 million or more, saying in part:
Ellison appears determined to replicate the John Malone playbook at CNN: nudge the newsroom into a posture more deferential to Trump, launder that shift as “balance,” and hope the MAGA crowd will suddenly reward him. But this formula is already tired and simply doesn’t work. Meddling at CNN, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times has only destabilized those institutions. It chases away the core audience, while failing to win over the right-wing demographic, which has no interest in embracing legacy news brands no matter how many concessions are made. These audiences celebrate the destabilization of news institutions, not because they will ever turn to them for information, but because they despise them and want to see them burn to ash.
CBS News was never quite the “Tiffany network” of legend. Edward R. Murrow was gradually sidelined during the years after he publicly called out Red Scare-monger Joseph McCarthy. Dan Rather, still going strong at 93, was eased out as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and producer Mary Mapes was fired after the short-lived “60 Minutes II” aired a report in 2004 about then-President George W. Bush’s sketchy service in the Air National Guard that was, admittedly, based in part on phony documents.
Never, though, has CBS News fallen as far as it has this year. Giving Bari Weiss some sort of oversight role may represent a new low, but I have a feeling that will soon be eclipsed by some other outrage. Walter Cronkite weeps.
It’s time for the Globe to ease up a bit on the metered paywall. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kali Norby.
Boston Globe Media has named a vice president of product. Jim Bodor “will help define and implement our product vision and strategy, ensuring our products are customer-centric, innovative, and market-leading,” according to an email to the staff forwarded to me by a trusted source. And I could give him an earful. Here are three ideas I hope are on his to-do list:
Clean up the homepage. Overly busy homepages are epidemic among leading newspaper websites, including those of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — not to mention large regionals like The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Minnesota Star Tribune. Still, the Globe takes it to another level. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Offer some gift links. The Times and the Post give subscribers 10 links a month that they can share on social media or with friends. The Journal and The Atlantic offer unlimited sharing. Giving non-subscribers some grazing privileges can turn them into paying customers. Why not start with five or six shares a month and see how it goes?
Fix the social connection. Sometimes I’ll be scrolling Bluesky or Facebook and I’ll see a link to a Globe story that I want to read. I’m a paying subscriber. I’m logged in. Yet if I try to come in from an external link, more often than not I’ll hit the Globe’s paywall. The Globe isn’t the only publication that has that issue, but it’s time to repair it once and for all.
What follows is the full text of the memo announcing Bodor’s appointment. Dhiraj is Dhiraj Nayar, the president and chief financial officer of Globe Media. AB is Anthony Bonfiglio, the chief technology officer.
Team,
We are excited to share that Jim Bodor joined us today in the new role of VP of Product at Boston Globe Media. Jim will help define and implement our product vision and strategy, ensuring our products are customer-centric, innovative, and market-leading.
Jim will partner closely with the newsrooms, sales, business, technology, and marketing to achieve key business outcomes focused on furthering our product-led culture of innovation, experimentation, and audience-first thinking.
Jim brings extensive experience as a digital product leader in the media and learning industries. Most recently, he served as vice president of product management at Harvard Business Publishing (HBR), where he led HBR’s first generative AI initiatives, directed the relaunch of the HBR.org mobile app, and championed the company’s first virtual events program, among other things.
Early in his career, Jim held leadership roles at WGBH and The Boston Globe, where he launched subscription products, scaled digital platforms, modernized content strategy, and led redesigns of award-winning programs.
Across all of these roles, Jim has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to balance strategic vision with operational excellence, blending business acumen, customer focus, and product innovation.
A photo editor for The Boston Globe was killed last Saturday when he was struck by a car while bicycling in rural Illinois. Lloyd Young, 57, had traveled to Illinois to visit family, according to the Globe. The driver, a 54-year-old woman, was not identified.
According to 25News, a local television station, Young had worked for the Bloomington Pentagraph before coming to the Globe, where he had worked since 2006. In an email to the staff earlier this week from editor Nancy Barnes and other top editors, they said in part:
Lloyd has been a part of the Globe family since 2006, joining from the Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers in Stuart, FL. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 and received his Master’s degree from the VisCom program at Ohio University, focusing on picture editing & newsroom management.
Lloyd led our photographic news coverage, day in and day out. He was an exceptional colleague to other photo editors, photographers and designers, working closely with the copy desk daily, selecting the most significant images locally and from around the world.
We will dearly miss him at the Globe. Please keep Lloyd’s family in your heart and prayers.
In 2013, Young talked about his work in a video interview produced by the Globe. You can watch it by clicking above.
Jennifer Peter, the longtime number-two editor at The Boston Globe, is leaving to become editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, a highly regarded nonprofit news organization that covers criminal justice. Peter will start her new job on Sept. 29.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning outlet was founded 10 years ago with former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller as its top editor. Peter succeeds Susan Chira, who stepped down in December 2024. At The Marshall Project, Peter will be in charge of a staff of more than 60 journalists.
“I’m beyond thrilled to be joining such a high-caliber news organization with such a critical mission, particularly at this time in our history,” Peter was quoted as saying. “The Marshall Project was launched to meet the urgency of this moment, when so much of the criminal justice system is being reshaped.”
Added CEO Katrice Hardy: “Jennifer is the kind of leader and editor who has spent her career helping produce groundbreaking investigations and journalism, sometimes under the most trying circumstances.”
Peter has a background in newspapers and at The Associated Press, joining the Globe in 2004. She’s worked in a variety of editing jobs and oversaw the Globe’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. She was named managing editor in 2017.
In an email to the Globe staff that a source forwarded to me, Globe editor Nancy Barnes called Peter’s departure “bittersweet news” and said “she models a leadership quality that I admire: the ability to be kind, compassionate and yet unbending in her commitment to truth and ethics.” The full text of Barnes’ email follows:
Dear all,
This is bittersweet news that I am about to share with you, so brace yourselves.
After nearly 21 remarkable years at The Boston Globe, Jen Peter is leaving to become the editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization focused on criminal justice reporting.
I know this is tough news for so many of you, who have worked with Jen for a long time. As I was joining the Globe, Brian McGrory told me she was beloved, devoted to the newsroom, and incredibly hard-working. I have found all of this to be true. I would add that she models a leadership quality that I admire: the ability to be kind, compassionate and yet unbending in her commitment to truth and ethics. During my tenure, she has overseen our daily news report through a torrential cycle of news, taken leadership of several departments, and guided important projects, including last year’s examination of the handling of the state’s emergency shelter system. In addition, she has served as chief of staff, and helped with budget issues. She seems irreplaceable.
And yet… This is an exciting opportunity for Jen, to lead her own news organization at a time when so much is happening in the criminal justice space. I’m looking forward to seeing where she takes that organization next. Her last day in this newsroom will be Wednesday, Sept. 17. However, the good news is that she won’t be going far as this job will be mostly remote and she and her family will remain in Boston.
Jen started her journey at the Globe in 2004 as a co-editor of Globe North, moving on to become state politics editor and then city editor under then Metro Editor Brian McGrory. She succeeded him in that role during another turbulent news cycle: the Boston Marathon bombing, the capture and trial of Whitey Bulger, the conviction and suicide of Aaron Hernandez, the drug lab scandal, and several hotly contested mayoral, gubernatorial and US Senate elections.
She also oversaw several major projects, including 68 Blocks, a year-long immersion in the Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood; Getting In, which involved assigning eight reporters to follow families trying to get their children into the Boston Public Schools; Bus 19, which told the story of inequality in Boston through the regulars on a bus that traversed the city; and the Power of Will, Billy Baker’s story of one family’s relentless (and successful) pursuit of a cure for their child’s brain cancer. As managing editor, she conceived of the Valedictorian Project, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and helped guide the newsroom through the COVID years.
Many of you will want to know what’s next for the newsroom as Jen moves on to new challenges. We are going to put that question aside for a few weeks so that we can properly thank Jen, celebrate her innumerable contributions, and send her off in style.
Please join me in congratulating her — and let’s also remind her every day why she is going to miss this newsroom.
At a moment when public broadcasters are staggering from the loss of $1.1 billion in federal funds over the next two years, Boston’s two leading public media executives say that rebuilding trust and community are the keys to survival.
“I think the best way to build trust is from the local community up,” said Susan Goldberg, president and chief executive of GBH, which operates television, radio, and digital platforms. She touted the radio station’s studio at the Boston Public Library as a way for people to come in “and watch us create the content in front of them,” saying: “I think it’s that kind of transparency that can help build back trust.”
Margaret Low, chief executive of WBUR Radio, agreed, observing that her station reaches beyond its airwaves and digital presence through events at its CitySpace venue and through such initiatives as the WBUR Festival.
“There’s something very powerful about bringing people together in a place to talk about some of the most pressing issues of the day,” she said. “And it’s different than the one-to-many that broadcasting is, or even a newsletter is. It’s actually people feeling like they’re part of something bigger than themselves, that they’re part of a community.”
Goldberg and Low spoke Wednesday at a webinar sponsored by the New England chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The theme of the evening was survival. Earlier this summer the Republican-controlled Congress, acting at the behest of President Trump, eliminated the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a semi-independent agency that provided funding for PBS, NPR and local public television and radio stations.
Major philanthropies are stepping up to offset some of the cuts to public television and radio, Benjamin Mullin reports in The New York Times (gift link). But will it be enough? And what possible downstream effects might there be on local news organizations that also depend heavily on foundation money?
As we all know, the Republican Congress, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, eliminated funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting earlier this summer. The CPB, a semi-independent agency, had been set to spend $500 million over the next two years.
PBS and NPR receive most of their funding from grants and donations by, well, viewers and listeners like you, but their member stations — especially in less affluent and rural areas — are more dependent on government funding. Both national networks have been cutting their budgets in an attempt to help their member stations survive.
According to Mullin, foundations such as Knight, MacArthur, Ford and others have come up with an emergency $26.5 million to keep those stations afloat with a goal of reaching $50 million this year. “We believe it’s crucial to have a concerted, coordinated effort to make sure that the stations that most critically need these funds right now have a pathway to get them,” Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, the president and chief executive of the Knight Foundation, was quoted as saying.
