Category: Media

T&G editor says he held Fattman story because it lacked ‘confirmation’

The Telegram & Gazette of Worcester published a story with some mighty odd timing. Like many media outlets, the paper reported Tuesday that state Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office had reached a settlement with state Sen. Ryan Fattman and his wife, Worcester Registrar of Probate Stephanie Fattman, to end a three-year investigation into campaign-finance improprieties.

But wait. The T&G story, by Kinga Borondy, includes quotes from an interview with the Fattmans conducted at Sen. Fattman’s Statehouse office last Friday. “There was no finding of liability, no admission of wrongdoing,” Ryan Fattman was quoted as saying.

On the surface, it looks like the T&G held important news about campaign-finance irregularities for four days. Lance Harris, who writes the Central Mass. Politics blog, wrote on X/Twitter: “Wait. The T&G knew Friday that the Fattmans were settling the case with OCPF [the Office of Campaign and Political Finance] and sat on it until today? The Fattmans gave an exclusive ‘our side of the story’ in exchange for the T&G embargoing the interview?”

I asked the T&G’s executive editor, Michael McDermott, why his paper held the story. Here was his emailed answer:

We did have an interview with the Fattmans on Friday afternoon and a story was filed. I felt that what they said needed to be confirmed by the attorney general’s office, so I decided not to publish until we got that confirmation. It came on Tuesday morning. Once we got the confirmation, we published. I’m glad we waited because the attorney general provided significant additional context that would have otherwise been missing.

You know what? That’s a good answer. If the T&G had rushed to publish as soon as the interview with the Fattmans was over, it would have only had one side of the story. By waiting, the paper was able to include the attorney general’s official disposition of the case, which covered both Fattmans, other members of their family, and state and local Republican committees. It’s a complicated story, but the bottom line is that the Fattmans owe several hundred thousand dollars in compensation and fines.

Borondy’s article includes a statement from Campbell that said: “Enforcing our campaign finance laws, and holding those who violate them accountable, are critical functions of our office. We will continue to hold accountable those who misuse positions of power, break the law and undermine the public’s trust.”

And I give McDermott credit for resisting the urge to press the “publish” button before the T&G had a complete account.

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NYT journalists who pushed back on that botched hospital headline were overruled

A disturbing new development has emerged in The New York Times’ botched initial headline about the Gaza hospital explosion. Charlotte Klein of Vanity Fair obtained internal Slack messages that show there was internal pushback in the Times newsroom, but that those raising concerns were overruled by senior editors. I don’t have a log-in for Vanity Fair, but Tom Jones of Poynter Online has summarized her story:

Klein wrote, “… senior editors appear to have dismissed suggestions from an international editor, along with a junior reporter stationed in Israel who has been contributing to the paper’s coverage of the war, that the paper hedge in its framing of events.”…

[T]he international editor wrote, “I think we can’t just hang the attribution of something so big on one source without having tried to verify it. And then slap it across the top of the [homepage]. Putting the attribution at the end doesn’t give us cover, if we’ve been burned and we’re wrong.”

No kidding. Please read Jones’ item in full; trust me when I tell you that it gets worse.

As we know, the Times and a number of other media outlets claimed Oct. 17 that an Israeli missile had struck Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City and killed an estimated 500 people, attributing the news to the Hamas-led Palestinian government. It took the Times at least an hour and a half to add that Israeli officials were claiming that the explosion was the result of a failed missile launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Hamas ally. The Times published an Editor’s Note on Monday acknowledging that it fell short of its own standards.

Based on the best available evidence, it now appears likely that Israeli officials were correct; that the Islamic Jihad missile did not actually strike the hospital but exploded nearby; and that the death toll, though still uncertain, is considerably lower than 500. This BBC News assessment, which points in that direction, is now six days old, but The Washington Post reports that U.S. intelligence now believes with “high confidence” that Israel was not responsible.

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A New York Times ‘Editor’s Note’ says it fell short on the Gazan hospital story

Photo (cc) 2011 by Tomas Roggero

The New York Times has published an “Editor’s Note” acknowledging that it shouldn’t have based its initial reports on an explosion at a Gazan hospital solely on the word of the terrorist group Hamas.

As I wrote last week, the Times’ initial coverage on its website and on the social network Threads took Hamas’ claims at face value in reporting that the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City had been struck by an Israeli rocket last Tuesday and that as many as 500 civilians had been killed. Nor was the Times alone in reporting those unverified claims. It later emerged that the evidence suggested the explosion was caused by a botched missile launch by Islamic Jihad, a Hamas ally; that the death toll may have been much lower than 500; and that the hospital was not extensively damaged, as the explosion took place in a parking lot next to the hospital. Here’s the heart of the Times’ Editor’s Note:

Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received, Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified.

The incident set off anti-Israeli protests across the Middle East, in Europe and in the U.S. Of course, we can’t know what the effect would have been had the media shown more initial caution. But surely the early coverage helped establish the narrative that Israel had committed a war crime, helping to turn the tide of public sympathy against Israel just a little more than week after the country had suffered from a horrendous terrorist attack at the hands of Hamas, with some 1,400 people killed and more than 200 taken hostage.

The Times also has a follow-up story today on what we know about the hospital explosion. It begins:

Six days after Hamas accused Israel of bombing a hospital in Gaza City and killing hundreds of people, the armed Palestinian group has yet to produce or describe any evidence linking Israel to the strike, says it cannot find the munition that hit the site and has declined to provide detail to support its count of the casualties.

That’s the sort of journalistic skepticism that should have been present right from the start. I thought Ben Smith’s comment in Semafor’s Sunday night media newsletter was right on point. He wrote:

I’ve never been more relieved to be late on a story than on the explosion at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, where our small breaking news team took a long pause before publishing even a carefully-hedged attempt to describe what happened and what Hamas and the Israeli government had said about it.

[F]ew … analysts are claiming to be absolutely sure what happened in Gaza five days ago. Most seem to have reached the consensus that it wasn’t the result of a direct Israeli strike, and many think it could have been a stray rocket fired from Gaza, but few are sure.

What’s left is a demand for patience. While reporters and analysts compare photographic evidence, heads of state make decisions and protesters protest.

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Friedman to Israel: Take a deep breath and don’t do this

When Thomas Friedman of The New York Times writes about Israel and the broader Middle East, he generally comes up with something worth paying attention to. So I recommend this excellent piece in today’s edition headlined “Israel Is About to Make a Terrible Mistake” (free link). He manages to encapsulate the immensely complicated dilemma over how Israel should avenge Hamas’ terrorist attacks without causing so much chaos that the world will be dealing with it for many years to come. Here’s the heart of it:

I believe that if Israel rushes headlong into Gaza now to destroy Hamas — and does so without expressing a clear commitment to seek a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority and end Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank — it will be making a grave mistake that will be devastating for Israeli interests and American interests.

It’s not a matter of going soft on Hamas; rather, it’s a matter of what’s in Israel’s best interests. Friedman is convinced that the Netanyahu government is ignoring the advice that President Joe Biden gave them and is on the verge of making a historic, tragic blunder.

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Mainstream media, elected officials feed misinformation in Israel-Hamas war

The war between Israel and Hamas has given rise to a cornucopia of misinformation and disinformation on social media — especially with Elon Musk’s mean, shrunken version of X/Twitter doing little to screen out the worst stuff. But we should keep in mind that several dangerously wrong stories have been reported or amplified by mainstream news sources and political figures.

The most significant is the explosion at Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday, a disaster that has reportedly claimed hundreds of  lives. Palestinian officials immediately blamed the blast on an Israeli rocket attack and, in the absence of any independent verification, news outlets were quick to report that claim as though it were fact. I’ll use The New York Times as an example, but it was hardly alone. According to the Internet Archive, the Times homepage published a headline on Tuesday at 2:25 p.m. that said, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.” Over the next hour or so, a subhead appeared saying that Israel was urging “caution.” Then, finally, at 3:46 p.m., came a subhead that stated, “Israelis Say Misfired Palestinian Rocket Was Cause of Explosion.” (I’m using the time stamps from the Times’ live blog rather than the Internet Archive’s.)

The Times’ evolution played out on Threads as well. Threads posts are not time-stamped, and at the moment this says only “one day ago,” though it was clearly posted sometime in the afternoon on Tuesday: “Breaking News: An Israeli airstrike hit a Gaza hospital on Tuesday, killing at least 200 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which said the number of casualties was expected to rise.” A short time later: “Update: At least 500 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike at a Gaza hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.” Then, finally: “Update: The Israeli military said its intelligence indicated that a rocket that malfunctioned after it was launched by a Palestinian armed group was responsible for the explosion that killed hundreds of people at a Gaza City hospital.”

Screen image from Threads

Now, we still don’t know exactly what happened. But the weight of the evidence suggests that Israeli officials are correct in asserting that the missile was actually fired by Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, and that it accidentally damaged the hospital. BBC News reported Wednesday that the evidence is “inconclusive” but added: “Three experts we spoke to say it is not consistent with what you would expect from a typical Israeli air strike with a large munition.” The independent investigative project Bellingcat cited a tweet by Marc Garlasco, a war-crimes investigator, who said, “Whatever hit the hospital in #Gaza it wasn’t an airstrike.”

The problem is that the initial incautious reports by the Times and other mainstream media, quoting Palestinian statements as though they were fact, clearly created a public narrative that Israel had committed a horrific war crime by bombing a hospital and killing hundreds of people. Indeed, two Muslim members of Congress, Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilan Omar, tweeted out the original unverified report.

Two other examples:

• The claim that Hamas terrorists beheaded Israeli babies has become so widespread that President Biden repeated it several days ago, and even appeared to say that he had seen photographic evidence. The White House had to walk that back. But though Hamas acted brutally in slaughtering civilians and taking hostages, no evidence has emerged for that particular incendiary assertion. The fact-checking website Snopes reports: “As we looked into the claim, we found contradictory reports from journalists, Israeli army officials, and almost no independent corroborations of the alleged war crime, leading to concerns among fact-checkers that such a claim may be premature or unsubstantiated.”

• There remains no evidence beyond an initial report by The Wall Street Journal that Iran was directly involved in planning and approving Hamas’ attack on Israel. This was an especially dangerous assertion since it could have led to a wider war — and still could if the Journal’s story ends up being true. At the moment, though, it appears that the Journal’s reliance on Hamas and Hezbollah sources were spreading misinformation, perhaps deliberately. Indeed, Max Tani of Semafor reported earlier this week that the Journal’s own Washington bureau had raised “concerns about the story” before it was published.

Correction: This post originally said that the hospital had been “obliterated,” but the evidence suggests that the damage fell well short of that.

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GBH News will launch a daily arts and culture program on radio and YouTube

A lot of observers were surprised earlier this year when GBH News canceled its weekly arts and culture television show, “Open Studio,” hosted by Jared Bowen. Even more surprising was a statement from GBH president and CEO Susan Goldberg: “We’ve had the privilege of showcasing the depth and breadth of Boston’s incredible arts and culture scene through Jared’s eyes. We will be building on that strength as well as on GBH’s long legacy as a leader in culture content. GBH continues to be deeply committed to covering the local scene.”

It turns out that Goldberg knew whereof she spoke. Because GBH News is getting ready to launch a daily one-hour radio program devoted to arts and culture, also hosted by Bowen, that will have a video component as well. The program will have rotating co-hosts, including my former “Beat the Press” co-panelist Callie Crossley. Here’s the full press release:

In a major expansion of GBH’s local arts and culture programming, GBH News is launching The Culture Show, a one-hour daily local radio program on 89.7 offering listeners a wide-ranging look at society through art, culture and entertainment. Beginning November 3, The Culture Show will air on Fridays from 2–3 p.m., following Boston Public Radio with Jim Braude and Margery Eagan.

On December 4, The Culture Show will expand to a daily broadcast, Monday through Friday, at the same time slot, adding five hours per week of local arts and culture content to the Greater Boston media market. The show will also air on CAI, the Cape, Coast and Islands NPR station, starting on December 4. Beginning in the new year, the show will also stream on the GBH News YouTube channel, and video clips will be integrated into the daily GBH News program Greater Boston.

“The Culture Show builds on GBH’s deep legacy in the arts and culture space. We are proud of our seven-decade commitment to bringing local audiences vibrant and inspirational culture programming,” said Pam Johnston, general manager of news at GBH. “Culture is the lens through which our audiences experience the world. We’re proud to be expanding our arts and culture team, offering people daily engaging conversations about what we see, watch, taste, hear, feel and talk about.”

GBH Executive Arts Editor Jared Bowen will host The Culture Show. He will be joined by rotating co-hosts Callie Crossley, the host of Under the Radar with Callie Crossley; Edgar B. Herwick III, host of The Curiosity Desk; and James Bennett II, a GBH News arts and culture reporter and CRB Classical 99.5 contributor  and a panel of cultural correspondents.

“The arts are vital to articulating and understanding our place in the world. The Culture Show offers an unprecedented opportunity to put the local arts scene front and center for listeners,” said Jared Bowen. “I can’t wait to join Callie, Edgar, James, and our listeners and guests in a shared exploration of our region’s extraordinarily vibrant cultural landscape.”

The Culture Show will drive conversations about how listeners experience culture across music, movies, fashion, TV, art, books, theater, dance, food and more, and help audiences make the most of their leisure time by guiding listeners to the best cultural experiences within a day’s drive from Boston. The show will amplify local creatives, profile the homegrown arts and culture landscape, check in with touring productions and tap into conversations about topics in the national cultural spotlight. The show will introduce a newsletter to expand its offerings in the new year.

The Culture Show will be the first permanent new daily radio show launched by GBH News since the debut of Boston Public Radio in 2013. The Executive Producer of The Culture Show is Chelsea Merz, who has a decade of experience as the executive producer of the market’s most popular midday show, Boston Public Radio. Accomplished radio professional Brian Bell will be the show’s producer and engineer.

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That WSJ report on Iranian involvement in Hamas’ attack is coming under question

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini. 2015 photo by President of Russia.

One of the more chilling early reports following Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel was that Iran was involved in planning and approving it. The story, reported by The Wall Street Journal (free link), began:

Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.

The story conjured up the horrifying possibility of a multi-front war dragging in not just Israel and Iran but possibly the United States and Russia as well. It was a Journal exclusive, and the paper has not retracted its report. But the problem with an exclusive is that, as the days go by and no one else matches your reporting, it starts to look like an exclusive for the wrong reasons.

Almost immediately, Josh Marshall took note of the Journal’s reliance on sources inside Hamas and Hezbollah and dismissed the notion of any direct tie between Iran and Hamas’ actions over the weekend. “Anyone looking for a rationale for Israel or the U.S. to declare war on Iran needs to be smacked down hard and ignored,” he wrote. Of course, Iran and Hamas are close allies, and Marshall was careful to note this:

Iran funds and arms Hamas and is cheering on their attack. Hamas also receives training from the network of Iran-backed militias in the region. So it’s not like there’s some big mystery about whose side they’re on or whether they support and supply Hamas.

On Wednesday, meanwhile, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies could find no evidence that Iranian officials had advance knowledge of the Hamas attack. The account begins:

The United States has collected multiple pieces of intelligence that show that key Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas attack in Israel, information that has fueled U.S. doubts that Iran played a direct role in planning the assault, according to several American officials.

The events that are unfolding right now are bad enough without whipping up hysteria that could lead to a wider, even more deadly conflict. Although we can’t know for sure, it looks like the Journal might have gotten played. It’s in Hamas’ interests to drag Iran into the war, and of course Iran would like to stop peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But that doesn’t make the Journal’s story true, and we should regard it as unsupported unless more evidence emerges.

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Circulation holds steady at the Globe while it continues its slow decline at the Herald

Photo (cc) 2008 by Dan Kennedy

The news about paid circulation at Boston’s two daily newspapers is so-so. The Boston Globe is hanging in there, trading paid print for paid digital, while the Boston Herald continues its long, slow slide.

First the Globe. This week the paper published its Statements of Ownership for both the Sunday and daily papers, something it’s required to do under federal postal laws. Average weekday paid print distribution for the one-year period from Sept. 1, 2022, to Aug. 31, 2023, was 64,977, down from 74,220 a year earlier. That’s a decline of nearly 12.5%. The story was the same on Sunday, as the paid print edition on average registered a decline from 128,920 to 116,456, or about 9.7%.

Paid digital, though, gave those numbers a boost. Using the methodology employed by the Alliance for Audited Media, the average weekday combined print and digital circulation for the 12-month period that ended Aug. 31 was, 346,944, up from 337,748 a year earlier. That’s an increase of 2.7%. On Sunday, total paid circulation is now at 408,974, compared to 403,566 the year before. That’s up about 1.3%.

Now, why am I invoking AAM’s methodology? Because its figures have always involved some double-counting, and it’s not entirely clear what they’re measuring and what they’re not measuring. For instance, according to the Globe’s Statements of Ownership, its current average paid electronic distribution on weekdays is 281,967, and on Sundays it’s 292,518. Globe spokeswoman Heidi Flood told me that those numbers are taken from the figures that the paper reports to AAN using the auditing agency’s rules. Also, digital subscribers to the Globe know that you pay one price, so different numbers for weekdays and Sundays make little sense.

So what is the Globe’s own assessment of its paid digital circulation base? Flood told me in an email that the Globe currently has “more than 245,000 digital-only subscriptions.” That’s an increase of about 10,000 since February 2022, when then-editor Brian McGrory said in an email to his staff that paid digital was around 235,000.

Given all that, let’s put current paid circulation of the Globe at about 310,000 on weekdays and 361,000 on Sundays. That’s more or less unchanged over the past year or so, although readership continues to shift from print to digital. Print brings in more money than digital both from subscribers and advertisers, but it also costs more. The Trump years and the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a lot of growth at the Globe, and that has now leveled off.

One possible good omen for the Globe is that the Statements of Ownership show slightly higher paid circulation on the days closest to the filing dates, in early September 2023, than the 12-month averages. That could mean growth continued over the previous year, but I don’t want to overinterpret a small (literally a one-day) sample size.

Over at the Herald, meanwhile, journalist Mark Pickering has taken a look at the latest AAM reports, which cover the six-month period ending March 31 of this year. Pickering, writing for the newsletter Contrarian Boston (sub. req.), found that paid weekday print circulation at the Herald was down 20%, from 20,353 to 16,043; on Sunday, the print Herald dropped 16%, from 23,702 to 19,799.

The Herald’s combined print and digital weekday circulation dropped from 50,707 to 46,783, for a decline of around 8%. But remember, AAM’s digital numbers are somewhat inflated, as some print subscribers are also counted as digital subscribers. As with the weekday numbers, add about 30,000 digital subscribers to get the Herald’s combined paid Sunday circulation.

“For the Herald,” Pickering wrote, “the numbers seem to show that there will be some circulation to be gained through digital subscribers, but how much remains to be seen.”

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The gap between the NY Times and the WashPost continues to widen

Two consecutive headlines in Nieman Lab’s daily newsletter Tuesday drove home the growing gap between The New York Times and The Washington Post. The first: “The Washington Post is reducing its workforce by 240 positions.” The second: “The New York Times opinion section has tripled its size since 2017.”

I’ve written about this before, including a suggestion I made last year that the Post should reconnect with local news. As someone who covered the early years of the Post’s revival under Jeff Bezos, I find the current situation sad. Both the Post and the Times flourished during the Trump presidency, but the Times has continued to soar in the post-Trump years (yes, I know we’re not really in the post-Trump years) while the Post has sputtered, losing money and circulation.

We need two great general-interest national newspapers. If the Post is going to get back in the race, it needs to find a way to differentiate itself from the Times. For a few years, the Post difference was a tougher, more truth-telling brand of political coverage, but these days both papers seem pretty much the same. I don’t blame Sally Buzbee, who succeeded the legendary Marty Baron as executive editor. The vision — and the resources — have to come from the very top.

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Student journalists are essential to knowing what’s taking place on campus

I just want to give a quick shoutout to our great student journalists at Northeastern. The Boston Globe published a story Monday about problems with NU Bound, a program under which our students begin their education at campuses outside of Boston — especially Oakland, California, and London. Students talk about running into a housing squeeze as well as a sense that they’ve fallen behind academically and socially, according to Globe reporter Vivi Smilgius.

The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper, posted an article that covered similar ground on Oct. 2. Written by Jackson Laramee, the story is especially strong on the different academic culture in London, where students are given little in the way of graded assignments and professors, according one student, are disorganized and short on preparation.

And let’s not overlook The Daily Free Press at Boston University, where student journalists published a comprehensive report on problems at Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Research Center that had other media scrambling to catch up.

Student journalists are doing a great job, and their work is essential to understanding what is taking place on college campuses.

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