New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has spoken out against the cancellation of a speaking appearance by his Times colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones at the Middlesex School in Concord. Stephens is an alumnus and a member of the board of trustees. Stephens told Christopher Galvin of Boston.com:
I had no knowledge that an invitation had been extended to Nikole. I had nothing to do with the decision not to bring her to the school. The first I heard about it was when someone sent me her tweet… I don’t believe in canceling speakers.
Stephens is a conservative who has written critically about the 1619 Project, a reimagining of the role of slavery in American history that Hannah-Jones oversaw and for which she won a Pulitzer Prize.
Eliot Hall at the Middlesex School. Public domain photo by Daderot.
I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re only in the beginning stages of learning the story behind the Middlesex School’s decision to invite, and then uninvite, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones to speak during Black History Month. Middlesex is an exclusive prep school in Concord. Hannah-Jones is best known for the 1619 Project, a reimagining of the role of slavery in American history that won her a Pulitzer Prize.
What always amazes me when something like this happens is the failure of the imagination we see on the part of those in charge. Does David Beare, the head of school who issued a limp statement about concerns over “individuals from outside our community” making a ruckus, really think this is going to end well either for the school or for him? This is not North Carolina.
A few other points worth noting. Among the school’s trustees is New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a conservative and frequent critic of so-called cancel culture. Will he speak up on behalf of his Times colleague? Another prominent trustee is Cass Sunstein, a well-known Harvard Law School professor and a good bet to criticize this abomination.
Of possibly more significance is that Robert and Anne Bass are both vice presidents of the board. As Gabriel Snyder observes, the Basses are “part of a billionaire family that has bankrolled a lot of campus conservative outrage over the years.”
Two other names on the list: Robert and Anne Bass, part of a billionaire family that has bankrolled a lot of campus conservative outrage over the years
Stay tuned. There is going to be much more to come, I’m sure.
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Did a member of Donald Trump’s inner circle tell a woman he was trying to pick up that he’d killed two men during his misspent youth? And if he did say that, was he telling the truth — or was he merely boasting?
The answers to those questions could presumably be obtained through a vigorous probe by law enforcement officials as well as some dogged investigative reporting. But the story slipped beneath the surface almost as soon as it broke three weeks ago.
That lassitude stands in contrast to the endless updates we’ve been subjected to on what is rattling around inside Sens. Joe Manchin’s and Kyrsten Sinema’s heads at any given moment. Then again, “Dems in Disarray” is a narrative the media never tire of. Who cares if someone who may yet play a prominent role in Trump’s comeback is a killer, or likes to play one when he’s trying to impress women?
Our story begins on Sept. 29, when Alex Isenstadt of Politico reported that a well-connected Republican donor named Trashelle Odom was claiming that Corey Lewandowski — one of Trump’s 2016 campaign managers and still someone who has the former president’s ear — had made “unwanted sexual advances toward her at a Las Vegas charity event over the weekend.”
Isenstadt’s article included a number of disturbing allegations Odom had made about Lewandowski — that he had crudely bragged about the size of his endowment, that he had stalked and touched her and that “she grew fearful for her personal safety as Lewandowski described incidents of violence that took place earlier in his life.”
Isenstadt followed up on Oct. 1 with a report that Odom had filed a statement with police. Details, though, were lacking.
And here we come to the most problematic part of this saga. Because the following day the full text of Odom’s statement was made public — not by a reputable news organization, but by the Daily Mail, a sleazy tabloid based in the U.K. The statement contained all the salacious details, including Lewandowski’s alleged claim that he had killed two men by stabbing them in the back of the head, once when he was just a wee lad of 10, and again at some unspecified time when he was older.
Was the statement for real?
The quality media, understandably, have approached the document with rubber gloves and tweezers, alluding to Odom’s claims in general terms (remember, Politico had already reported on them) while staying away from the details contained in the alleged police statement. Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post has reported Odom’s supposed claim about Lewandowski’s homicidal boasting.
Among those that have taken the plunge by citing the Daily Mail’s story are The Daily Beast, Salon, Mediaite and The Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative website that ran a piece by Tim Miller mocking Lewandowki. But Miller also asked a serious question, and it’s one we all ought to ponder:
“Maybe the whole thing will turn out to be a hilarious mixup, the kind of sitcom setup that everyone laughs about later. Ross said to Rachel, ‘I stabbed five guys!’ And Chandler says, ‘Ix-nay on the abby-stay!’
“But also: Maybe not?”
Indeed. Maybe not. Assuming the police report is genuine and that Odom was telling the truth, it seems more likely than not that Lewandowski was lying, just as he was lying about running 400 miles a week and staying in “the Elvis suite.” But Lewandowski has a thuggish reputation as well as a history of women filing assault claims against him. So who knows?
Almost as soon as the Politico story was published, Lewandowski was removed from the Trump-aligned Super PAC he had been running. “He will no longer be associated with Trump World,” a Trump spokesman was quoted as saying. But as Maggie Haberman wrote in The New York Times, “Whether Mr. Lewandowski remains permanently banished from Mr. Trump’s orbit remains to be seen.”
The next day, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem announced that Lewandowki was being cut off from his role as an unpaid adviser to her campaign. Noem’s statement cited Odom’s allegations as the reason. Michael Scherer of The Washington Post noted, though, that Noem has also been hit with allegations that she and Lewandowski had an extramarital affair — rumors that she called “total garbage and a disgusting lie.”
After that, the story all but vanished.
Any day now, it seems, Trump will announce he’s running for president in 2024. Will Lewandowski be at his side once again?
Maybe Trump’s supporters, who don’t care that he was impeached twice and now praises the Jan. 6 insurrection he helped incite, also won’t care if one of his advisers may have boasted that he had fatally knifed two men. Maybe they won’t even care if it’s actually true.
But journalists ought to care. This isn’t a matter of political commentators gaming out how murder plays with undecided voters in swing states. This is as serious as it gets. I hope that teams of investigative reporters are looking into it right now.
Eric Clapton was one of my first musical heroes. As an aspiring blues guitarist of soaring ambitions and slight talent, I played his greatest album — Derek and Dominos’ “Layla” (No. 6 on my all-time list, by the way) — over and over again, trying to figure out what he was doing on songs like “Key to the Highway” and “Have You Ever Loved a Woman.” I saw him at the Boston Garden in 1974, one of my first rock concerts. A full-page ad for that show from one of the alt-weeklies (probably The Real Paper) was on my bedroom wall. Clapton was and is a great guitarist, and by all appearances seemed to be a humble, generous ambassador for the Black music that he championed.
But appearances can be deceiving. Throughout this year, bits and pieces of Clapton’s dark side have been emerging. He came out as an anti-vaxxer along with Van Morrison (at least we already knew he was a jerk). Old racist comments surfaced, along with his cringe-inducing I-apologize-but-not-really reactions.
Now Rolling Stone has pulled it all together (sub. req.) and added some details. A 5,000-word-plus story by David Browne reports on Clapton’s racist outbursts, focusing especially on a drunken rant he delivered at a Birmingham concert in 1976 during which he offered up some vile racial slurs and spoke favorably of a British politician named Enoch Powell, described in the article as the George Wallace of the U.K. Over the years Clapton has repeatedly apologized and blamed it on the booze; he has also repeatedly said it was no big deal and that he continues to think it was “funny.”
His current anti-vax crusade extends to sending money to a down-on-their-luck anti-vax band and playing shows in the U.S. before maskless audiences in the Deep Red South. As Browne writes:
For the longest time, anyone asked to rattle off Clapton’s accomplishments would cite the vital role he played in bringing blues and reggae into mainstream culture and his prodigious guitar playing. (There was a reason someone spray-painted “Clapton Is God” on a London subway wall in the mid-Sixties.) Others couldn’t help but remember the horrific tragedy of his four-year-old son’s death and the emotional catharsis of “Tears in Heaven.” But the current controversy is prompting a fresh examination of Clapton’s past behavior, which includes jarringly racist statements he made in the early part of his career. How did we get from admiration and empathy to bewilderment and even a feeling of betrayal?
Although it wasn’t in the Rolling Stone article, Twitter reminded me this week that Clapton admitted to raping his wife in the 1970s, back when he had serious alcohol and heroin addictions. That’s not an excuse — it’s just evidence of how low he had sunk.
Here we get to the age-old dilemma about separating the art from the artist. Clapton is a great artist. He’s also a racist anti-vaxxer who’s also admitted to sexual assault. That said, John Lennon, Miles Davis and any number of other great musicians could be pretty terrible people as well. Do we still want to listen to Clapton’s music? Is it possible to do so without thinking about Clapton the person?
Clapton has had an odd career, as he’s remained at least somewhat in the spotlight even though his last good album, “461 Ocean Boulevard,” was released nearly 50 years ago. He’s done it on the strength of a few hit singles here and there, especially the aforementioned “Tears in Heaven”; an overpraised blues album, 1994’s “From the Cradle,” that’s derivative and flat compared to “Layla”; and his live performances, which have included multiple televised benefit concerts on which his guitar wizardry has stolen the show.
Now, at 76, wealthy and successful, he’s tearing down his legacy. Maybe we can let Buddy Guy remind Clapton of how lucky he’s been. “The man can play,” he told Rolling Stone. “If somebody’s good, I don’t call you big, fat, or tall. He just bent those strings, and I guess he bent them right on time. The British exploded the blues and put it in places we didn’t put it. I wish I could have had the popularity he got. Maybe I wouldn’t have to work so damn hard.”
More: Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan takes a look at Rolling Stone under new editor Noah Shachtman and what the Clapton story says about his plans to toughen up the magazine’s coverage.
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I knew I wasn’t going to get around to reading “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?,” a wild piece published recently by The New York Times Magazine about plagiarism, narcissism and the nature of art. But after someone I interviewed last week started raving about it, I knew I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
Fortunately, the Times has posted the audio. The nearly 10,000-word article, by Robert Kolker, clocks in at slightly more than an hour. But it flew by, as it is beautifully written with compelling lead characters. I loved the ambiguity, too. At the end, I found the two writers at the heart of the story, Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson, to be more or less equally sympathetic and flawed.
The story has a significant Boston angle, too, as the writers met and became friends — or at least acquaintances — at GrubStreet, a well-known creative writing center based in Boston.
Everyone’s been talking about it, but the sheer length might have put you off as it did me. Give it a read — or a listen. You’ll be glad you did.
At the heart of a bombshell report showing that AT&T nurtured and enriched the far-right One America News cable network is a larger, more ominous issue: a broken media system that forces all of us to subsidize content we don’t want — and that, in this case, is actually undermining democracy.
Last week Reuters uncorked the results of a massive investigation into the tangled relationship between the two companies. Reporter John Shiffman, delving deep into court records, showed that OAN’s 2013 launch came at AT&T’s instigation and that the telecom giant’s continuing patronage is responsible for some 90% of OAN’s revenues.
“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” OAN founder Robert Herring Sr. said of AT&T executives during a 2019 deposition. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”
OAN first came to prominence last fall, after Fox (briefly) refused to lend credence to Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud. OAN and another far-right cable net, Newsmax, soared in the ratings by embracing Trump’s falsehoods. Today both networks, along with Fox, have positioned themselves as firehoses of misinformation and disinformation about the election, the Jan. 6 insurrection and COVID-19.
At a time when the reach of even small media outlets can greatly exceed their core audience through amplification on Facebook and other social networks, what OAN tells its audience matters a great deal.
“OAN’s television reach may not be vast: Most Americans won’t encounter it when they turn on their TV,” writes Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan. “But its website’s offerings very well may show up in their social media feeds.”
But why would a major corporation like AT&T subsidize a shady operation like OAN? After all, high-powered business executives tend to be conservative in the old-fashioned sense of the word — they don’t like taxes or regulations, but they do like stability. The second to last thing a company like AT&T wants is for a Confederate flag-waving mob to storm the Capitol. And the last thing it wants is to be associated with a media outlet that revels in such anarchy.
The answer may lie in our perverse cable television system, which forces us to pay for channels we don’t want and which in turn depends on favors from the government in order to keep the money spigot flowing.
According to Shiffman’s reporting, in 2014 AT&T was attempting to acquire the satellite service DirecTV, and its executives were concerned about whether they might run afoul of regulators. OAN and another network owned by the Herrings, WealthTV, were already running on U-verse, a smaller outlet that AT&T owned. So AT&T suggested that it run both channels on DirecTV as well.
By doing so, court documents suggest, AT&T could allay worries that the acquisition would make it more difficult for independent networks to be carried by major cable providers. The optics of reaching out to carry a conservative network may have been helpful even though Barack Obama was president at the time.
“What we seem to see here,” writes Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, “is that regardless of personal politics AT&T was operating in and expanding in one of the most regulatory-dependent industry spaces — telecom, cable TV, internet service, content — and they wanted more conservative programming because that helps get regulatory help.”
Now, it’s also true that AT&T is a fading player in the cable wars, and that OAN is carried by other providers. So it’s not necessarily a slam dunk that AT&T enabled OAN for the sole purpose of obtaining regulatory goodies from the FCC. But if Marshall’s theorizing is correct, then it’s a good illustration of how our media system works on behalf of giant corporations and against the rest of us.
There is a simple solution to this, which I’ve written about before: breaking the connection between cable services (and, in the case of DirecTV, satellite) and programming. Beyond basic local channels, require that cable companies offer additional channels on an à la carte basis. If you want the Food Channel but don’t want HGTV, you shouldn’t have to pay for both. You could pay only for the news channels you want as well.
Of course, all of this comes at a time when we can see that cable TV will eventually go away as more and more people cut the cord and get all their video programming through the internet. So the problem I describe is one that will eventually be solved on its own.
Yet technologies can take a long time to die. AM radio is still with us, as are print newspapers. Similarly, we may assume that cable TV will be with us for years to come, even as its audience shrinks and ages.
Given that, it makes sense to let us pay only for the channels we want. Such a move would be pro-consumer and pro-democracy. And it would remove incentives for corporations like AT&T to promote dangerous propaganda for the sole purpose of appeasing their regulatory overlords.
New York Times media columnist Ben Smith has a fun piece today on two retired Boston Globe stalwarts, Tom Palmer and Alan Berger.
In 1979, when Berger was writing media criticism for The Real Paper (a competitor to The Boston Phoenix), he called out Palmer for what he regarded as overweening objectivity following a dangerous accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. Berger called Palmer “thoughtful, honest, and entirely conventional” for failing to emphasize the dangers of nuclear power.
Palmer told Smith: “Journalists are simply not smart enough and educated enough to change the world. They should damn well just inform the public to the best of their abilities and let the public decide.”
I know Berger only by reputation, but I’ve known Palmer for years. He spoke to my graduate ethics class in February 2020 about his critique of liberal media bias, and he may have been my last in-person guest speaker before the pandemic.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
Facebook in the midst of what we can only hope will prove to be an existential crisis. So I was struck this morning when Boston Globe technology columnist Hiawatha Bray suggested a step that I proposed more than a year ago — eliminating Section 230 protections from social media platforms that use algorithms. Bray writes:
Maybe we should eliminate Section 230 protections for algorithmically powered social networks. For Internet sites that let readers find their own way around, the law would remain the same. But a Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or TikTok could be sued by private citizens — not the government — for postings that defame somebody or which threaten violence.
One possible approach might be to remove Section 230 protections from any online publisher that uses algorithms in order to drive up engagement. When 230 was enacted, third-party content flowed chronologically. By removing protections from algorithmic content, the law would recognize that digital media have fundamentally changed.
If Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook want to continue profiting from the divisiveness they’ve helped foster, then maybe they should have to pay for it by assuming the same legal liability for third-party content as print publishers.
Could this be the beginning of the end for Facebook?
Even the Cambridge Analytica scandal didn’t bring the sort of white-hot scrutiny the social media giant has been subjected to over the past few weeks — starting with The Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files” series, which proved that company officials were well aware their product had gone septic, and culminating in Sunday’s “60 Minutes” interview with the Journal’s source, Frances Haugen.
As we’ve seen over and over, though, these crises have a tendency to blow over. You could say that “this time it feels different,” but I’m not sure it does. Mark Zuckerberg and company have shown an amazing ability to pick themselves up and keep going, mainly because their 2.8 billion engaged monthly users show an amazing ability not to care.
On Monday, New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose wondered whether the game really is up and argued that Facebook is now on the decline. He wrote:
What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. It’s a cloud of existential dread that hangs over an organization whose best days are behind it, influencing every managerial priority and product decision and leading to increasingly desperate attempts to find a way out. This kind of decline is not necessarily visible from the outside, but insiders see a hundred small, disquieting signs of it every day — user-hostile growth hacks, frenetic pivots, executive paranoia, the gradual attrition of talented colleagues.
The trouble is, as Roose concedes, it could take Facebook an awfully long time to die, and it may prove to be even more of a threat to our culture during its waning years than it was on the way up.
I suspect what keeps Facebook from imploding is that, for most people, it works as intended. Very few of us are spurning vaccines or killing innocent people in Myanmar because of what we’ve seen on Facebook. Instead, we’re sharing personal updates, family photos and, yes, some news stories we’ve run across. For the most part, I like Facebook, even as I recognize what a toxic effect it’s having.
The very real damage that Facebook is doing seems far removed from the experience most of its customers have. And that is what’s going to make it incredibly difficult to do anything about it.
All of a sudden, our crisis of democracy has moved to center stage. Building since 2016, when Donald Trump refused to say whether he’d accept the results of the election if he lost, and boiling since the Jan. 6 insurrection, the rising specter of authoritarian rule is now a lead story in much of our media.
From The Washington Post to Politico, from The Philadelphia Inquirer to The Boston Globe, from CNN to public radio’s “On the Media,” the conversation for the past week has revolved around the likelihood that Trump will run for president in 2024 — and the very real possibility that Republican functionaries at the state level and in Congress will reinstall him in the White House regardless of how the election actually turns out.
Perhaps the most chilling assessment was offered in the Post by Robert Kagan, a “Never Trump” conservative who began his must-read 5,800-word essay like this: “The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”
Appearing on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder, the author of the 2017 book “On Tyranny,” said it was long past time for the press to cover Trump and Trumpism as an existential threat to democracy.
“If we’re not prepared for the attempt for people to take power undemocratically in 2024, then we’re just at this point pathetically naive,” he said. “Preparing for that and getting the facts out so that people can prepare for that and prevent it is what … journalism should be doing.”
Kagan, Snyder and others are right to be alarmed. But what accounts for this moment of media synchronicity? Why have they suddenly gone DEFCON 1 after months and years of covering the Trump movement all too often as a bunch of economically anxious white men in Ohio diners? I think there are three precipitating factors.
• First, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, “Peril,” makes it clear that Trump was actively involved in trying to overturn the election in ways that we didn’t quite understand previously. Perhaps the most bizarre and disturbing of their findings is that a discredited lawyer, John Eastman, concocted a scheme for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election. If Pence had wavered, who knows what might have happened?
• Second, the results of the fraudulent Arizona “audit” actually gave President Joe Biden a bigger lead over Trump than he had previously — and it didn’t make a bit of difference. As Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer observed, copycat attempts are now under way in Texas and Pennsylvania. It’s now obvious, if it wasn’t before (actually, it was), that the purpose of these ridiculous exercises is not to prove that Trump won but to keep his supporters stirred up and angry.
• Third, University of California Irvine law professor Rick Hasen, who’s been ringing the democracy alarm for years, recently published a paper and helped run a conference that generated widespread attention. That, in turn, led to an interview with Hasen by Politico Magazine and an appearance on “On the Media.”
Hasen bluntly described the threat in his interview with Politico, saying that the widespread, false belief among Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen could lead them to steal the 2024 election.
“The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election,” Hasen said. “People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.”
Politico media critic Jack Shafer, trying to be his usual contrarian self, argued that Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior and Republican attempts to rig the 2024 election through voter suppression and outright theft by state legislatures they control is actually a sign of weakness, not of strength.
“By signaling an attempt to regain power by any means necessary,” Shafer wrote, “Trump essentially confesses that Trumpism is not and is not likely to become a majoritarian movement.” He added that a fraudulent Trump victory would essentially amount to a coup, which “would only inspire a counter-coup by the majority, and maybe a counter-counter coup, and a counter-counter-counter coup. Trump is crazy enough to invite this fight, and narcissistic enough not to care what it does to the country. But is he shrewd enough to win it?”
Shafer is right that a Trump coup would lead to outrage on the part of the majority. But what would that look like? It could get incredibly ugly, as Kagan warned. The best way to deal with the Republicans’ assault on democracy is to make sure it fails. Sadly, the Democrat-controlled Congress can’t do much about it unless they abolish the filibuster, regardless of how Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe and his colleagues, writing in The Boston Globe, might wish otherwise. And Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema show no signs of yielding.
So what can and should the media do? Their current focus on the overriding crisis of our time is welcome and long overdue. From the false balance of focusing on lesser stories like Democratic bickering over the infrastructure bills to the situation at the border, the media have demonstrated a maddening impulse to return to business as usual following the chaos of the Trump years.
At the same time, though, the press’ influence is limited. Roughly speaking, 60% of the country is appalled by Trump and 40% is in thrall to him. But thanks to inequities in the Electoral College and the Senate, gerrymandering in the House and increasingly aggressive attempts to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters, the 40% may well succeed in shoving aside the 60%.
The press needs to tell that story, fearlessly and fairly. But let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not going to penetrate Fox News, Breitbart or Facebook. In the end, there may be little that journalism can do to stop our slide into autocracy.
