Nearly every poll says the same thing: Joe Biden is beating Donald Trump nationally, but it’s closer in the swing states, and by no means should we rule out a second term for Trump. For those of us who believe Trump represents an existential threat, it’s a nerve-wracking prospect, conjuring up nightmares from 2016 all over again.
There is not even a long-odds chance that Donald Trump will gain a second term. Nor is this wishful thinking. Compelling evidence abounds that anyone the Democrats nominate will win the popular vote, and by a margin to easily carry the Electoral College. Republicans down the ballot will suffer a similar demise, losing even more House seats, and very likely the Senate.
Among other things, Hacker argues that Hillary Clinton was a uniquely unappealing candidate who combined arrogance with a sense of entitlement (I don’t agree, but I know plenty of people who do); that massive Democratic turnout in the 2018 midterm elections foreshadows a blue wave this November; and that the electorate continues to favor the Democrats demographically as it becomes less white, less straight and better educated.
Hacker wrote “Downfall” before the Democrats had settled on Biden as their presumptive nominee and before anyone had heard of COVID-19. It remains to be seen whether Biden was the best choice to do battle with Trump. But polling shows that the president’s cruel and incompetent response to the pandemic is harming whatever chances he had of being re-elected.
The argument that Hacker offers is in line with that of Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist based at the Niskanen Center, a Washington think tank. Bitecofer made a splash earlier this year with a new election model that said Trump has virtually no chance of winning, mainly because unusually high Democratic turnout this fall is assured.
“In the polarized era, the outcome isn’t really about the candidates,” Bitecofer was quoted as saying in Politico Magazine. “What matters is what percentage of the electorate is Republican and Republican leaners, and what percentage is Democratic and Democratic leaners, and how they get activated.”
Another political scientist, Thomas Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School, argues in a new book that the Republican Party has guaranteed its demise by moving to the extreme right, by ignoring demographic trends, by taking dictation from right-wing media, by showering tax cuts upon the wealthy, and by disregarding democratic norms such as voting rights, through which “it has made lasting enemies and created instruments of power that can be used against it.”
All of this is encouraging if you want to see Trump leave office next January. And the data suggesting that he’ll lose is compelling. But we’ve all been here before, haven’t we? Patterson, after all, is also the author of the definitive analysis of how media malpractice contributed to Trump’s election four years ago — and, as Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan laments, here we go again. So let’s see how it plays out.
Two in-depth reports Friday rendered what was left of Tara Reade’s credibility in tatters.
The more important was a story by the PBS NewsHour. Lisa Desjardins and Daniel Bush interviewed 74 former Joe Biden staff members, 62 of them women. And though they said Biden sometimes had trouble keeping his hands to himself (something Biden acknowledged and apologized for last year), they emphatically denied that they’d ever heard of him engaging in sexual assault.
“The people who spoke to the NewsHour,” they wrote, “described largely positive and gratifying experiences working for Biden, painting a portrait of someone who was ahead of his time in empowering women in the workplace.”
Crucially, an on-the-record source told them that there were problems with Reade’s job performance that may have led to her termination. And the place where the alleged assault took place was entirely out in the open, making it nearly impossible for Biden to have done what she claims without being seen.
Also Friday, Natasha Korecki reported for Politico that Reade has spent much of her adult life as a grifter, lying and cheating people out of money — but never, in the recollection of the people she interviewed, saying anything negative about Biden.
“Over the past decade,” Korecki wrote, “Reade has left a trail of aggrieved acquaintances in California’s Central Coast region whosay they remember two things about her — she spoke favorably about her time working for Biden, and she left them feeling duped.”
In the weeks after I wrote about the Reade case for WGBH News, I’ve gone from thinking there was a reasonable chance that she was telling the truth to now believing it’s highly likely that she made the whole thing up.
But why? Could it have something to do with her weird praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin? What should we make of the fact that her lawyer, who’s representing her for free, is a Trump donor? Or the fact that another lawyer who’s acted on her behalf has ties to Russian propaganda operations?
Ultimately Reade’s story can’t be definitively proven or disproven, but the media have done a good job of laying out the facts and showing how far-fetched it is. Now we need to know who, if anyone, was behind what appears to be a classic political dirty trick. Keep digging.
Much of the recent growth, he said, has been driven by interest in the Globe’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a follow-up email, McGrory told me that the number of digital-only subscribers has risen from about 145,000 just before the pandemic to nearly 205,000 today.
“It took us 7 years to get our first 100,000 digital-only subscribers, and about 11 months to get to 200,000,” he said, adding: “The rise has been substantial, gratifying, and important in terms of supporting our journalism…. We’re the only metro paper that could support the current size of its newsroom through revenue from digital subscribers.”
That 200,000 mark has been a goal for a long time. When I interviewed McGrory in early 2016 for my book “The Return of the Moguls,” he told me, “If we got to 100,000 things would be feeling an awful lot better. And if we got to 200,000, I think we’d be well on our way to establishing a truly sustainable future.”
This week’s landmark comes with some caveats, though.
First, most of those new subscriptions were sold at a steep discount, generally in the range of $1 a month for the first six months. Given that the Globe’s profitability (pre-COVID, anyway) was built on an industry-high rate of $30 a month, the paper will presumably face a challenge in keeping those new subscribers.
Second, although we’ve been heading into the post-advertising era for quite a while, the pandemic has sent ad revenues across the newspaper business into a steep downward plunge. As the newspaper analyst Ken Doctor wrote for Nieman Lab in late March, “Advertising, which has been doing a slow disappearing act since 2008, has been cut in half in the space of two weeks. It’s unlikely to come back quickly — the parts that do come back at all.”
Nor has the Globe been immune from budget cuts. Co-op students, summer internships and freelance were cut right at the start of the shutdown. Don Seiffert recently reported in the Boston Business Journal that there have been an unspecified number of layoffs in advertising and other non-news operations, as well as reduced retirement contributions, in response to “significant” reductions in revenue.
Still, that’s minimal compared to what’s taking place across the newspaper business. The New York Times reported several weeks ago that some 36,000 news employees throughout the United States have been laid off, furloughed or had their pay cut. Many papers have cut back on the number of print days or eliminated print altogether. Some are closing. Poynter Online is keeping a list of cuts, and it is long and daunting.
The three leading national papers — The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal — have been exceptions to the death-of-newspapers narrative for several years. But among the big regional papers, the Globe is doing better than all but a handful. In late 2018, publisher John Henry said the paper had achieved profitability. A year ago, Joshua Benton reported in Nieman Lab that the Globe had become the first U.S. regional paper to sign up more digital subscribers than weekday print subscribers.
But print still accounts for a lot of revenue in the newspaper business. Last week the Times reported that its shrinking print edition still accounted for more than half of its revenues. The Globe charges about $1,300 for seven-day print delivery. That’s a lot of money, but its print subscriber base continues to shrink. According to the Globe’s most recent filing with the Alliance for Audited Media, weekday print circulation is under 85,000 and Sunday print is about 147,000.
During the SPJ session, McGrory was asked why the Globe has kept COVID-19 coverage behind a paywall given that some other news organizations have made it free. McGrory responded that pandemic coverage is already free at two other Globe-owned sites: Stat News, which covers health and life sciences, and Boston.com. He added that he didn’t see cost as an obstacle in light of the discounts.
Via email, I asked McGrory about what steps the Globe was taking to keep all of its new subscribers once they were asked to pay $30 a month. “We’ve significantly ratcheted up the rate at which we’re graduating people from the low introductory rate into the full rate,” he replied. “We were doing really well with that retention before the coronavirus hit, and far better since.”
He added: “To keep the new subscribers who are part of this surge, we’re doing a lot of outreach — letters from notable staff members and the like. We’re also doing gifts, a possible loyalty program, virtual events for new subscribers…. There’s more. These readers are so vital to our future, and we want to let them know that. Of course, the most important thing is to feed them consistently strong and relentlessly interesting journalism. We will be in a huge news cycle for many, many months, between the virus and the massive economic disruption that it’s caused, inequality laid devastatingly bare, an epic presidential race, a reordering of so many things core to so many of our lives, condensed sports seasons, and on and on.”
My Northeastern colleagues Aleszu Bajak and Jeff Howe have written a commentary for The New York Times about how the right-wing media weaponized a Stanford study that suggested COVID-19 infections in Santa Clara, California, might be far more widespread than had been previously thought.
The study showed the infection rate might be 85 times higher than the official estimate. What excited the right about this was that it would mean a much lower death rate — possibly as low as 0.12%. So, gee, let’s open up, shall we?
The larger point Bajak and Howe make in their commentary, complete with data visualizations, is the danger of unvetted science ripping through the media so that it can be exploited for partisan purposes. The Stanford study, a so-called preprint that had not yet been peer-reviewed, turned out to be flawed. That’s not to say there isn’t some valuable data in it. But, as Bajak and Howe write:
The instant sharing of valuable data has accelerated our race for vaccines, antivirals and better tests. But this welter of information, much of it conflicting, has sown confusion and discord with a general public not accustomed to the high level of uncertainty inherent in science.
As it turns out, I spent three hours watching Fox News’ prime-time lineup on April 20, a day when yet another not-ready-for-prime-time study was making the rounds. This one was from the University of Southern California, which suggested — according to a press release (!) — that “infections from the new coronavirus are far more widespread — and the fatality rate much lower — in L.A. County than previously thought.” The release went on to note that the data showed the infection rate might be 28 to 55 times higher than experts had estimated several weeks earlier.
Tucker Carlson touted it. So did Laura Ingraham. “They were predicting doom and gloom,” she asserted, claiming that the response to COVID-19 would have been completely different if officials knew the fatality rate was so low.
Healthline, a respected source of health-related information, analyzed both studies in some depth and took a measured approach in assessing their importance: “There are disagreements about one study’s validity, and experts point out the statistical models and manner that participants were chosen might have biased the results. Although there’s agreement that the findings are plausible.”
What isn’t changed by any of this is that more than 80,000 people in the U.S. have died of COVID-19 in just a few months. And that toll would have been much higher if not for the extraordinary actions taken by state and local governments.
To illustrate how useless the newly unveiled Facebook oversight board will be, consider the top 10 fake-news stories shared by its users in 2019.
As reported by Business Insider, the list included such classics as “NYC Coroner who Declared Epstein death ‘Suicide’ worked for the Clinton foundation making 500k a year up until 2015,” “Omar [as in U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar] Holding Secret Fundraisers with Islamic Groups Tied to Terror,” and “Pelosi Diverts $2.4 Billion From Social Security To Cover Impeachment Costs.”
None of these stories was even remotely true. Yet none of them would have been removed by the oversight board. You see, as Mathew Ingram pointed out in his Columbia Journalism Review newsletter, the 20-member board is charged only with deciding whether content that has already been taken down should be restored.
Now, it’s fair to acknowledge that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has an impossible task in bringing his Frankenstein’s monster under control. But that doesn’t mean any actual good is going to come of this exercise.
The board, which will eventually be expanded to 40, includes a number of distinguished people. Among them: Alan Rusbridger, the respected former editor of The Guardian, as well as international dignitaries and a Nobel Prize laureate. It has independent funding, Zuckerberg has agreed that its decisions will be binding, and eventually its purview may expand to removing false content.
But, fundamentally, this can’t work because Facebook was not designed to be controllable. In The New York Times, technology columnist Kara Swisher explained the problem succinctly. “Facebook’s problems are structural in nature,” she wrote. “It is evolving precisely as it was designed to, much the same way the coronavirus is doing what it is meant to do. And that becomes a problem when some of what flows through the Facebook system — let’s be fair in saying that much of it is entirely benign and anodyne — leads to dangerous and even deadly outcomes.”
It’s not really about the content. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but what makes Facebook a threat to democracy is the way it serves up that content. Its algorithms — which are not well understood by anyone, even at Facebook — are aimed at keeping you engaged so that you stay on the site. And the most effective way to drive engagement is to show users content that makes them angry and upset.
Are you a hardcore supporter of President Donald Trump? If so, you are likely to see memes suggesting that COVID-19 is some sort of Democratic plot to defeat him for re-election — as was the case with a recent semi-fake-news story reporting that hospitals are being paid to attribute illnesses and deaths to the coronavirus even when they’re not. Or links to the right-wing website PJ Media aimed at stirring up outrage over “weed, opioids, booze and ciggies” being given to homeless people in San Francisco who’ve been quarantined. If you are a Trump opponent, you can count on Occupy Democrats to pop up in your feed and keep you in a constant state of agitation.
Now, keep in mind that all of this — even the fake stuff — is free speech that’s protected by the First Amendment. And all of this, plus much worse, is readily available on the open web. What makes Facebook so pernicious is that it amplifies the most divisive speech so that you’ll stay longer and be exposed to more advertising.
What is the oversight board going to do about this? Nothing.
“The new Facebook review board will have no influence over anything that really matters in the world,” wrote longtime Facebook critic Siva Vaidhyanathan at Wired, adding: “The board can’t say anything about the toxic content that Facebook allows and promotes on the site. It will have no authority over advertising or the massive surveillance that makes Facebook ads so valuable. It won’t curb disinformation campaigns or dangerous conspiracies…. And most importantly, the board will have no say over how the algorithms work and thus what gets amplified or muffled by the real power of Facebook.”
In fact, Facebook’s algorithm has already been trained to ban or post warning labels on some speech. In practice, though, such mechanized censorship is aggravatingly inept. Recently the seal of disapproval was slapped on an ad called “Mourning in America,” by the Lincoln Project, a group of “Never Trump” Republicans, because the fact-checking organization PolitiFact had called it partly false. The Lincoln Project, though, claimed that PolitiFact was wrong.
I recently received a warning for posting a photo of Benito Mussolini as a humorous response to a picture of Trump. No doubt the algorithm was too dumb to understand that I was making a political comment and was not expressing my admiration for Il Duce. Others have told me they’ve gotten warnings for referring to trolls as trolls, or for calling unmasked protesters against COVID-19 restrictions “dumber than dirt.”
So what is Facebook good for? I find it useful for staying in touch with family and friends, for promoting my work and for discussing legitimate news stories. Beyond that, much of it is a cesspool of hate speech, fake news and propaganda.
If it were up to me, I’d ban the algorithm. Let people post what they want, but don’t let Facebook robotically weaponize divisive content in order to drive up its profit margins. Zuckerberg himself has said that he expects the government will eventually impose some regulations. Well, this is one way to regulate it without actually making judgments about what speech will be allowed and what speech will be banned.
Meanwhile, I’ll watch with amusement as the oversight board attempts to wrestle this beast into submission. As Kara Swisher said, it “has all the hallmarks of the United Nations, except potentially much less effective.”
The real goal, I suspect, is to provide cover for Zuckerberg and make it appear that Facebook is doing something. In that respect, this initiative may seem harmless — unless it lulls us into complacency about more comprehensive steps that could be taken to reduce the harm that is being inflicted on all of us.
New York Times media columnist Ben Smith reports on efforts to compel Google and Facebook to turn over some of their advertising revenues to the news organizations whose content they repurpose without compensation.
The debate over what platform companies owe the news business goes back many years and has come to resemble a theological dispute in its passions and the certainty expressed by those on either side. Indeed, longtime digital-news pundit Jeff Jarvis immediately weighed in with a smoking hot Twitter thread responding to Smith.
Oh FFS, no, the news business crushed itself by relying on protectionism over innovation. @benyt goes all Murdoch & endorses Australia's digital Stamp Act. This isn't media criticism. It's lobbying. "Big Tech Has Crushed the News Business" https://t.co/vZJXLn4L4n
— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) May 11, 2020
I’m not going to resolve that debate here. Rather, I want to offer some context. First, something like 90% of all new spending on digital advertising goes to Google and Facebook. Second, Google’s auction system for brokering ads destroyed any hopes news publishers had of making actual money from online advertising. How bad is it? Here’s an except from my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls”:
Nicco Mele, the former senior vice president and deputy publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who’s now the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School [he has since moved on], explained at a Shorenstein seminar why a digital advertising strategy based on clicks simply doesn’t work for news organizations that are built around original (which is to say expensive) journalism. “Google has fundamentally shaped the future of advertising by charging on a performance basis — cost per click,” he said. “And that has been a giant, unimaginable anchor weight dragging down all advertising pricing.”
For example, Mele said that a full-page weekday ad in the LA Times, which would reach 500,000 people, costs about $50,000. To reach the same 500,000 people on LATimes.com costs about $7,000. And if that ad appeared on LATimes.com via Google, it might bring in no more than $20. “Models built on scale make zero sense to me,” Mele said, “because I just don’t see any future there.” Yet it has led even our best newspapers to supplement their high-quality journalism with a pursuit of clicks for the sake of clicks.
From $50,000 to $7,000 to $20. This is why the advertising model for digital news is broken, and it’s why newspapers have gone all-in on paid subscriptions.
When the latest Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday afternoon, it felt like they’d been beamed in from another dimension.
The awards honor the best in journalism from the previous year — a time when COVID-19 was barely a blip on the radar and didn’t yet have a name. You can be sure that coverage of the pandemic will dominate next year’s Pulitzers. This year, though, they were all about journalism that exposed neglected communities in rural Alaska, corruption in Baltimore, corporate and governmental malfeasance at Boeing, and the never-ending horror that is the Guantánamo Bay detention center.
Two winners, in particular, caught my eye. Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times won the commentary award for her lead essay accompanying The 1619 Project, a massive effort that re-examined American history through the lens of slavery. The Washington Post took home the explanatory-reporting prize for a series showing the effects of climate change. Both are the sort of journalism that will have staying power even after the pandemic has receded into the background.
Locally, The Boston Globe was left empty-handed for the sixth consecutive year. But it took finalist honors in three separate categories with excellent work that is worth examining more closely.
***
The 1619 Project, grounded in the idea that American history began with the introduction of slavery in Virginia that year, was a massive multimedia effort. It took up an entire issue of The New York Times Magazine last August, featuring contributions from a wide range of writers. It sparked a series of podcasts. It’s been reworked as a school resource. But the animating focus is the 7,600-word lead essay by Hannah-Jones, who conceived of the project and who has been its public face.
By honoring Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer judges chose a piece of writing that is not only worthy but also controversial. And perhaps the most controversial assertion she makes is that the American Revolution was sparked by, among other things, the belief among slave-holding interests that the colonies needed to become independent so that the British wouldn’t abolish slavery. As Hannah-Jones puts it: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
Did she get it right? Late last year, a group of five historians wrote to the Times arguing that Hannah-Jones was wrong about that central argument. “This is not true,” they wrote. “If supportable, the allegation would be astounding — yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false.” That sounds devastating. And Leslie M. Harris, one of the historians with whom The 1619 Project consulted, has written that the Times ignored her warnings. But in an answer to the five historians, Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein cites compelling evidence — including a reference to the Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s book “These Truths” — that fear of abolition was in fact a significant reason why the slave-holding white power structure supported independence.
In the Columbia Journalism Review last August, Alexandria Neason wrote, “For the media to tell the truth about the U.S., it must commit to both a reeducation of its readers and of its workers. Efforts like The 1619 Project look backwards to inform a path forward.”
Almost as an exclamation point, a Pulitzer was also awarded posthumously to Ida B. Wells “for her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.” Hannah-Jones’ Twitter handle is Ida Bae Wells.
By honoring Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer judges have ensured that the conversation she sparked will continue.
***
The Washington Post last August published the first of a series of 10 stories aimed at showing not merely that climate change was inevitable, but that it was already here, resulting in extreme temperatures and other effects in the United States and around the world. The data-driven series, titled “2˚C: Beyond the Limit,” examined places where the average temperature has risen by at least 2 degrees Celsius.
“A Washington Post analysis of multiple temperature data sets found numerous locations around the globe that have warmed by at least 2 degrees Celsius over the past century,” the Post reported. “That’s a number that scientists and policymakers have identified as a red line if the planet is to avoid catastrophic and irreversible consequences. But in regions large and small, that point has already been reached.”
In awarding the explanatory-reporting prize to the Post, the Pulitzer judges called “2˚C: Beyond the Limit” a “groundbreaking series that showed with scientific clarity the dire effects of extreme temperatures on the planet.” The series offers close-up looks at the effects of climate change such as floods, droughts and extreme heat in places ranging from New Jersey to California, from Qatar to Siberia, as well as a conclusion headlined “How We Know Global Warming Is Real.”
Yet in looking over the Post’s award-winning work, I couldn’t help but think of the epistemic closure that characterizes the political right these days. The Post’s audience no doubt appreciated the deep, fact-based reporting. But at a time when extremist allies of President Donald Trump are refusing to accept the reality of a pandemic that has already claimed about 70,000 American lives, it’s hard to imagine that climate change-deniers will be swayed by new evidence.
***
Whether a news organization wins a Pulitzer or not often comes down to the competition. The Baltimore Sun won in the local-reporting category for exposing corruption involving Mayor Catherine Pugh. Actually, make that the former mayor.
The Boston Globe didn’t expose any official wrongdoing in “The Valedictorians Project.” But by comprehensively reporting on the struggles experienced by Boston’s valedictorians in the years following their high-school graduation, the Globe revealed that the city was failing even its brightest, most successful students. The reporting was supplemented by data visualizations, videos and other interactive features. It may not have brought down a mayor, but it was certainly worthy of the finalist citation it received. (Disclosure: Several of our Northeastern journalism students worked on the project.)
Two other finalists from the Globe were also recognized.
In feature writing, Nestor Ramos was cited for his story on Cape Cod and climate change, “At the Edge of a Warming World” — which, like “The Valedictorians Project,” was enhanced with a vibrant multimedia presentation.
In feature photography, Erin Clark was honored for — as the Pulitzer judges put it — her “respectful and compassionate photography of a working Maine family as it falls into homelessness and finds new housing, albeit precarious.”
For an aspiring autocrat like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a gift-wrapped opportunity to crack down on what’s left of his country’s free press.
Hungary’s parliament recently approved a state of emergency that allows Orbán to rule by decree. Among other things, journalists may be imprisoned for up to five years if they spread what the government considers to be misinformation about COVID-19. According to an anonymous journalist quoted in The Guardian, the measure began having its censorious effect even before it was voted on, as she learned after she called a hospital to ask about doctors who may have contracted the virus.
“A few minutes later,” she said, “the hospital’s chief communication officer called me back and asked if I think it’s a good idea to keep asking about this, a day before the government’s bill will be passed.”
Even as COVID-19 spreads disease, death and economic disruption across the world, it may also be contributing to repression in the name of protecting public health. The ominous developments are described in a new report by Reporters without Borders (known by its French acronym, RSF), which accompanies its annual World Press Freedom Index.
The index ranks countries on the basis of how much freedom journalists have to do their jobs and hold the powerful to account. According to RSF, the rankings have dropped several notches among countries that have suppressed the media as part of their response to COVID-19 — not just Hungary (now 89th), but also China (177th), Iran (173rd) and Iraq (162nd).
“The public health crisis provides authoritarian governments with an opportunity to implement the notorious ‘shock doctrine’ — to take advantage of the fact that politics are on hold, the public is stunned and protests are out of the question, in order to impose measures that would be impossible in normal times,” said RSF Secretary-general Christophe Deloire in a statement accompanying the report.
Cracking down on the media is not the only step governments are taking to stifle dissent. As The New York Times recently noted in a round-up of repressive responses to COVID-19, countries ranging from democracies such as Britain and Israel to more authoritarian states such as Chile and Bolivia have trampled on their citizens’ rights in the name of protecting public health. The measures include enhanced detention powers, increased surveillance and, in Bolivia’s case, postponing elections.
Draconian though those measures may be, threats to freedom of the press are uniquely dangerous because of its role as a monitor of power. Take that away and we have no way of knowing about the full extent of government repression.
Nor has the United States escaped the notice of RSF. Although its press freedom ranking of 45th is up slightly over last year, it still lags well behind Western European countries, in large measure because of President Donald Trump’s war against the media. Among other things, the report cites the Justice Department’s decision to file espionage charges against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange as well as the “public denigration and harassment of journalists.”
Although RSF doesn’t mention it, the COVID-19 pandemic could accelerate the deterioration of press freedom in the U.S. In recent weeks President Trump has commandeered an hour or two of television time on many afternoons, using his bully pulpit, so to speak, to insult individual reporters when they try to ask tough questions. The media have been willing participants in their own delegitimization, with many outlets giving Trump free airtime and individual reporters rarely acting in solidarity.
There may be limits. As The Washington Post reported, a CNN reporter refused to move from her front-row seat on Friday after being ordered to do so by a White House official. Despite threats to involve the Secret Service, the White House apparently backed off. (Seat assignments are managed by the independent White House Correspondents Association.) And Trump — humiliated by the mockery he received after suggesting that people could ingest bleach to fight COVID-19 — vowed not to take part in any more press briefings. (By Monday, unsurprisingly, he was back at the podium.)
But though there is a buffoonish nature to Trump’s war against the press that sometimes makes it difficult to take him seriously, the fears raised by the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that has resulted could empower the president to take new measures against journalists, whom he regularly calls “enemies of the people.”
We may be in the midst of a well-meaning reduction in media access at the local level as well. Local officials, like all of us, are meeting via Zoom, which makes it more difficult for reporters to understand what’s going on and to ask questions. And when public officials try to be open, they run the risk of being Zoom-bombed. Just last week the New Haven Independent reported that the city’s board of alders got hit with child pornography. That same night, the Hamden legislative council had to shut down its meeting in the face of Zoom-bombers posting racist and homophobic slurs.
Zoom has security features, such as password protection and waiting rooms, that make it harder for trolls to break in. But that also makes it harder to live up to the letter and the spirit of open-meeting laws. The New England First Amendment Coalition recently urged that local officials delay crucial decisions until in-person meetings can be resumed, saying, “Government bodies should not opportunistically take advantage of the public’s inability to attend large gatherings to make critical decisions affecting the public’s interest if those decisions can reasonably be postponed.” But what if a month or two becomes six? Or 12? Or 18?
The pandemic is also accelerating the censorship of speech on Facebook and other internet platforms. According to an essay in The Atlantic by law professors Jack Goldsmith of Harvard and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona, this is actually a positive development, as, even before COVID-19, algorithmic tools were being brought to bear on “bullying, harassment, child sexual exploitation, revenge porn, disinformation campaigns, digitally manipulated videos, and other forms of harmful content.”
They add: “What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated ‘normal’ to return to. We live — and for several years, we have been living — in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech.” Or, as they put it elsewhere in their essay: “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.”
Good Lord. That’s a lot to wrap our minds around. As Noah Rothman puts it in Commentary: “Much of Goldsmith and Woods’ argument glosses over the important consideration that the Chinese model is dependent on coercion.”
But I’m going to leave aside the larger debate about free speech and repression so that I can hone in on one small but vitally important issue that Goldsmith and Woods gloss over. We already live in a world in which most news consumption takes place online, and an ominously large percentage of that consumption is mediated by Facebook. If Facebook’s role as an arbiter of news is going to grow even more powerful, and if we’re going to applaud the Zuckerborg for eliminating speech that it deems harmful, it seems to me that we’re going to have a free-press problem that is exponentially larger than Reporters without Borders’ most dystopian vision.
Then again, for a lot of us, freedom isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. According to a 2018 study by Elizabeth J. Zechmeister of Vanderbilt University, about one in four U.S. adults “believes a coup would be justifiable in times of high crime or high corruption.” Imagine to what heights that support might soar if we get into, say, September or October, and conditions continue to deteriorate.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, has already warned that President Trump might try to delay the November election. Would he try? Would he attempt to declare a state of emergency, as Hungarian leader Orbán has done? Would U.S. military leaders obey their commander-in-chief — or their oath to defend the Constitution?
Our liberties are fragile, and that is especially the case at a terrible moment like the one we’re living through. Can freedom of the press survive the pandemic? It’s already been seriously damaged in Hungary and elsewhere. And it’s going to require vigilance — and luck — for it not to be seriously damaged in America as well.
A front-page story in today’s New York Times suggests that Sweden hasn’t paid much of a price for its blasé attitude toward COVID-19. Here is the key paragraph supporting that premise:
Sweden’s death rate of 22 per 100,000 people is the same as that of Ireland, which has earned accolades for its handling of the pandemic, and far better than in Britain or France.
As USA Today noted: “Sweden has a population of 10 million people, about twice as large as its nearest Scandinavian neighbors. As of April 28, the country’s Covid-19 death toll reached 2,274, about five times higher than in Denmark and 11 times higher than in Norway.”Nursing home residents account for more than a third of all deaths.
And get this: Friedman supports the Swedish approach, arguing that it’s the only way we’re going to build herd immunity. Yet the World Health Organization recently reported that we don’t know whether people who’ve recovered from COVID can get it again. Needless to say, if there’s no immunity, there will be no herd immunity.
How much support do newspapers owned by cost-cutting corporate chains deserve? It’s a dilemma. On the one hand, the people who live in communities served by those papers need reliable news and information. On the other hand, subsidizing them with money and resources could be considered a reward for bad behavior.
Last week Report for America, or RFA, announced that it would send 225 journalists to news organizations in 46 states and Puerto Rico during 2020-’21. With local news in crisis even before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a welcome piece of good news. Most of the organizations that will host these young journalists are either independent or part of small chains, and they include a sizable number of public broadcasters, nonprofit start-ups, the Associated Press and the like. Locally, The Bay State Banner will be getting a reporter.
But in looking over the list, I also noticed a substantial number of newspapers that are part of corporate chains. By my count, 15 papers are part of McClatchy, which recently declared bankruptcy after staggering under unsupportable debt for many years. Twelve are part of Gannett, recently merged with GateHouse Media; both chains are notorious for slashing their newsrooms, and not just since COVID-19 reared its head. One reporter is even going to Cleveland.com, the website of The Plain Dealer and the scene of a recent union-busting effort on the part of Advance Publications.
As I said, it’s a dilemma. If you attempt to punish chain owners for squeezing out revenues at the expense of newsroom jobs, you wind up hurting communities.
I contacted Report for America co-founders Steven Waldman, who serves as RFA’s president, and Charles Sennott, who’s the chief executive officer and editor of The GroundTruth Project, of which RFA is a part. Their answers have been lightly edited. First Waldman:
My general answer is: Yes, half of our placements are in nonprofit, and others are in locally owned commercial entities. But we do indeed have some placements in newspapers that are owned by chains. Our primary standard is: Will this help the community? So we have on occasion accepted applications from newspapers with the problems you mentioned if we were convinced that they would use the reporter to better serve their readers. If we can be a positive force in helping those newspapers tip more in the direction of great journalism, we view that as a real positive step…. [Ellipses Waldman’s.] In effect, we’re creating hybrid nonprofit/for-profit models that provide even better local journalismBy the way, we have always had newspapers like that in the program, as part of the mix. That’s not new.
Now Sennott:
One of the stronger papers in our original Report for America class of 2018 was the Lexington Herald-Leader, a McClatchy paper in Kentucky. They pitched us on reopening the Pikeville Bureau in the heart of coal country in Eastern Kentucky, a bureau they had been forced to close 10 years earlier. They felt they were not serving well the community there. We placed RFA corps member Will Wright there and he became one of our true stars, breaking a story on a water crisis in which tens of thousands of residents did not have access to clean drinking water. His reporting turned a spotlight on this issue and helped the community force the county officials to repair the work and restore the access to clean drinking water. I went to Pikeville to work alongside Will Wright on this story and saw his incredible impact in that community with my own eyes. That is what we care about, serving the communities in these under-covered corners of America. And that’s why we have always been proud of our work with the Lexington Herald and why we did not rule out McClatchy as a place for us to look for RFA host newsroom partnerships, even if it is a chain that is going through hard economic times.
We did an enterprise project with Will Wright and two other reporters in rural Appalachia. Here is a link to the project, which was also featured on GroundTruth, as home of RFA:
Also, we got news today of a full-page ad was taken out by Republicans and Democrats thanking McClatchy for its service to Kentucky.
And adding a poetic new chapter to the story, Will Wright has been accepted by The New York Times for its very competitive fellowship. And no, we are not leaving them high and dry. In this new class, we will have three journalists (two reporters and one photographer) at the Lexington Herald.
Sending an RFA journalist to a Gannett paper isn’t going to lead directly to a layoff. More public-accountability coverage is in everyone’s interests. And the chains, unfortunately, have a monopoly in many parts of the country, so it’s not like RFA could send someone to another news organization in that community.
Overall, I think RFA is doing the right thing — even if it makes me a bit queasy.
Nearly every poll says the same thing: Joe Biden is beating Donald Trump nationally, but it’s closer in the swing states, and by no means should we rule out a second term for Trump. For those of us who believe Trump represents an existential threat, it’s a nerve-wracking prospect, conjuring up nightmares from 2016 all over again.
