Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen writes that he held out for a long time before coming to the conclusion that the media should stop covering President Trump in real time. Now COVID-19 and Trump’s news conferences, filled with lies and falsehoods, have tipped Cohen over the edge.
“At a moment of true national cataclysm, allowing him to use the bully pulpit in such an irresponsible manner is a risk we can’t afford to take,” Cohen writes. I agree. And he quotes me as telling him, “We can’t knowingly put out disinformation and misinformation. We have to put the public first.”
I’m not saying Trump shouldn’t be covered. If media outlets want to carry his news conferences in full, that’s fine — as long as they wait until they can fact-check his statements. Or simply cover his statements as we would any other news story, being especially careful to vet anything he says that isn’t obviously true.
It’s impossible to fact-check Trump in real time. For instance, who could have imagined that he wasn’t telling the truth about Google? Now he’s putting out false information at the podium and on Twitter (an entirely different problem) about completely unproven remedies that may be dangerous and that are depriving those who really need them.
We’re in the midst of a crisis. No one should be given free rein to spout dangerous nonsense — even if that person is the president of the United States.
• More on the hazards of carrying Trump live from Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post and Jay Rosen of New York University.
So now President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is filing SLAPP suits against news organizations — that is, libel suits with no legal merit whose goal is to intimidate rather than to expose the truth.
The lawsuits have targeted The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, all of which have the resources to defend themselves. But the Trump campaign’s tactics raise a larger question: Will these suits embolden others to weaponize the courts against media outlets that lack the financial wherewithal to fight back against deep-pocketed opponents?
Note: Susan Campbell, a Hartford Courant columnist, posted the following on Facebook earlier today, writing, “I am told the Courant is shifting focus to cover the coronavirus and the column I submitted wouldn’t be read, or run this Sunday. So here is the column I wrote.” I contacted her and asked if I could republish it at Media Nation. She gave her permission, and so here it is. Her column has also been republished by #NewsMatters, “a NewsGuild project for Digital First Media workers.” Digital First Media is an earlier name for MediaNews Group, the newspaper chain that Alden controls. — DK
By Susan Campbell
Dear Hartford Courant reader,
Your roof is on fire.
The signs have been there, but you may not be aware of the damage overhead. What you, the reader, sees are a few typos, a missed paper, or someone on the other end of the phone who cannot stop your paper delivery during your vacation. Worse, there’s no one at your local meeting, because when newspapers had more people on staff, they could afford to come to your traffic commissions, town council meetings, and panel discussions.
Nothing just happens, dear reader, but before we explore what’s going on, see if you can figure out this math: Recently, Tribune Publishing Co. announced that the company’s fourth-quarter profit was $4 million. That should be good news, but these days, newsroom blood-letting has moved from paper cuts to full-on beheadings.
And for that, you can thank Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund, which owns 32% of the Tribune company. Alden is known for one thing and one thing only: Alden kills newspapers. The corporation walks through the battlefield of struggling newspapers (which pretty much describes 99% of newspapers), lifts up the wounded, props them up at a computer, and then methodically sucks up all the resources until there’s nothing left. Their shady business practices — including an accusation that they moved employee pension assets into their own accounts — have earned the notice of the Department of Labor.
The next time you want to complain about your local coverage, remember that you have no idea how hard the dead-last-remainders of America’s newsrooms work to do what they do. They are part of a broken business model, but there is your reporter/photographer/editor, spinning as fast as s/he can.
I know. I was a remainder, until I realized I was so angry at the system I couldn’t exist in it. I left in 2012 when I thought things were pretty bad.
But this isn’t just me, a disgruntled former employee. Last May, some U.S. senators, including Sherrod Brown (husband of Pulitzer-winning newspaper columnist Connie Schultz), Tammy Baldwin and Cory Booker, wrote Alden a letter begging them to abandon their attempted hostile takeover of Gannett because newspapers are a “public good.” Gannett shareholders ultimately rejected the takeover.
Alden’s holdings include The Denver Post, where in December, members of the Denver City Council passed a resolution that called on the company to either invest in the Post or sell it. Alden has been draining the blood from that once-fine newspaper since 2011.
In January, two respected Chicago Tribune columnists wrote a New York Times op-ed calling attention to their own newspaper’s struggles as an Alden holding. In February, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution similar to Denver’s.
We need that here, in Hartford. We need a concerted effort to save the Oldest Continuously Published Newspaper in the Nation, the newspaper that printed a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and was sued for libel by Thomas Jefferson. We need a full-throated show of support, like that of state Sen. Saud Anwar and others. We, too, need to encourage Alden to put up or shut up. We, too, need wealthy people to invest in local journalism.
Mostly, we need to stop the dangerous trend that threatens our free press. According to the Pew Research Center, post-Watergate, the circulation of daily newspapers peaked in the late ’80s. About that same time, third-generation newspaper families began to lose interest in the family business, while corporations began to notice the healthy profit margins found in the newspaper industry. At a rate that accelerated as we barreled through the ‘90s, more and more newspapers became part of media conglomerates.
If the carnage continues, Alden will kill our newspaper. When that happens, we’re left with news deserts, with our “news” shoveled at us by social media, with its lack of fact-checkers and professionalism. Our information age will suffer from an appalling lack of information.
Passivity is not an option. This is our damn newspaper. This is our damn democracy.
Susan Campbell teaches at University of New Haven, and is the author of several books, including, most recently, “Frog Hollow: Stories From an American Neighborhood.” She can be reached at slcampbell417@gmail.com.
UKIAH, Calif. — About 15 people had gathered on the second floor of the Ukiah Brewing Company. The television in the corner was tuned to CNN, and Sen. Bernie Sanders was speaking. This was a pro-Sanders crowd. Nearly everyone stopped what they were doing so they could listen.
Then the band downstairs started playing, and that was the end of that.
I’m here this week learning about The Mendocino Voice, an online news organization started three and a half years ago that is in the process of moving toward a cooperative model of ownership — an innovative step that could help ensure the project’s future. “We are going to be owned by our readers and our staff,” publisher Kate Maxwell told those on hand. “We think that’s the best way to be sustainable and locally owned.”
The Super Tuesday party, which drew a total of 25 to 30 people, was organized by the Voice as a way of bringing the community together to watch not just the presidential results but to find out who had won the primary elections for the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors. There are five supervisors, and three of the seats were contested.
There’s no question, though, that most people were mainly interested in the Democratic presidential primary. Sanders won California easily on a night when the chatter was about former Vice President Joe Biden’s emergence as the clear (though hardly dominant) frontrunner. I was told that Mendocino County, a two-hour drive north of San Francisco, is even more pro-Sanders than the rest of the state. That was certainly true at the Ukiah Brewing Company, where the folks I spoke with expressed their enthusiasm for Bernie over burgers and beer.
“I think the possibility of having a socialist Democrat in the White House is really exciting,” said Rayna Grace, citing Sanders’ “solidarity with the Palestinian people” as well as his support for Medicare for All and for canceling student debt. Her companion, Silver, who declined to tell me her last name, added, “I’m just excited to see a candidate who reflects my radical values.”
Even the only non-Sanders supporter I spoke with said he preferred Sanders to the candidate he actually cast a ballot for — Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “I thought Warren is electable. I don’t know if Bernie is electable,” said John Haschak, a member of the board of supervisors. “Maybe my political calculation is a little off, but we can’t have four more years of Trump.”
Unfortunately for Warren, Haschak’s political calculation turned out to be more than a little off. Warren suffered the worst of what has been a series of bad nights for her, as she came in third in her home state of Massachusetts, behind Biden and Sanders. (WGBH News Senior Political Editor Peter Kadzis breaks down the Bay State results here.) In just a few months, Warren has gone from being the frontrunner to having to do some serious fence-mending with her constituents.
Like many people, I’ve visited California’s urban centers of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. But this is the first time I’ve been in the rural north. The population of Mendocino County is just under 90,000. Yet, geographically, it’s about two-thirds the size of Connecticut (population 3.5 million) and larger than Delaware (nearly a million).
As is the case in many other places, Mendocino County suffers from a dearth of reliable local journalism. Most of the papers in the county — including The Ukiah Daily Journal, the only daily — were absorbed into the MediaNews Group conglomerate years ago, and have been systemically gutted by the chain’s hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital.
Maxwell and Managing Editor Adrian Fernandez Baumann, the Voice’s only full-time staff members, are themselves former MediaNews employees. Though their office — a tiny second-floor room that they rent from a low-power FM radio station — is in the inland city of Ukiah, the county seat, they have positioned the Voice as a county-wide news service. As such, they regularly drive two hours to Fort Bragg, on the Pacific coast, as well as to other parts of the county.
This is weed-and-wine country. The “cannabis economy,” as Baumann calls it, is dominated by so-called back-to-landers, hippies and former hippies who moved to the area in the 1960s. So it’s no surprise that Sanders is the favorite here.
Yes, I did meet a few non-enthusiasts. Before the party, Baumann and I talked with voters outside a polling station at the county offices, where we encountered an older couple who’d cast their ballots for Biden and a volunteer firefighter who’d taken a Republican ballot and voted for President Donald Trump. Overwhelmingly, though, the folks we met had voted for Sanders.
“We’ve been diehard Bernie supporters since the last election,” Moriah McGill told us.
Given Biden’s strong performance across the country Tuesday, it’s no exaggeration to say that voters like McGill, Grace and Silver saved the Sanders campaign. Whether that will be enough to stop Biden is a question for another day.
You may have heard that Chris Matthews’ long, often bizarre stint at MSNBC has come to a close. It’s too bad that he seemed to be the last person to know that his time was up. Then again, he was an aging, sexist blowhard 12 years ago, when I wrote about his shtick for The Guardian.
The Boston Globe continues to make impressive gains in digital subscriptions, while its print circulation keeps on slip-sliding away. Don Seiffert of the Boston Business Journal has the numbers along with some thoughts from me.
We’re all familiar with newspaper endorsements. But what about individual journalists whose job descriptions include expressing their opinions about politics and politicians?
Is the old rule that opinion journalists shouldn’t reveal whom they’re voting for still relevant?
I’m referring to columnists for newspaper op-ed pages, certain types of magazine writers, journalists for websites that combine news and opinion, and the like. I’m not referring to partisan commentators whose loyalties are explicitly with a political party or candidate. That would apply to cable talking heads such as David Axelrod or Rick Santorum. They can do as they like.
But opinion journalism, properly understood, is bound by the same ethical considerations as straight news reporting. You don’t make political contributions, you don’t put bumper stickers on your car or signs on your lawn, and you certainly don’t take part in a campaign in any way.
I’ve been working the opinion side of the street since the early 1990s, first as a writer for the alt-weekly Boston Phoenix, now as a panelist on WGBH-TV’s “Beat the Press” and as a columnist for the WGBH News website. I’ve always tried to take the ethics of my craft seriously.
Though bound by the same ethical considerations, there are some differences between opinion journalism and straight news reporting. The most relevant difference is this: I am free to write (for example) that I think Elizabeth Warren is the best-qualified candidate for president by virtue of her policy positions, her experience and her temperament. What I’m not free to do is to take the next logical step and say I’m voting for Warren.
Unfortunately, as with so many customs, President Donald Trump has broken the mold. Four years ago I made it clear that I would vote for the Democratic nominee against Trump regardless of whether it was Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. I considered Trump a threat to journalism and the First Amendment, and I thought it was important for journalists to take a stand in defense of both. And I’m repeating that in 2020: I will vote for the Democratic nominee.
I’ve seen others make the same assertion. I’ve even seen a few mainstream opinion journalists come very close to disclosing their preferred candidate. Some find themselves in conflicted positions, including two New York Times columnists: Michelle Goldberg, who has disclosed that her husband is a consultant for Warren, and Thomas Friedman, whose every effusion on behalf of Michael Bloomberg is accompanied by a statement that Bloomberg gave money to a literacy museum Friedman’s wife is building.
As with any custom, it makes sense to revisit this one from time to time and ask if it still matters.
The argument in favor of disclosing your vote is that traditional notions of objectivity are obsolete (although I would argue that Walter Lippmann’s original conception of objectivity as the dispassionate pursuit of truth is as relevant as ever), and that journalists should aim to be as transparent as possible.
The argument against disclosure, which I’ve always accepted, is that not only does disclosing your vote change your audience’s perception of you, it also changes the way you write and comment on the candidates.
Some years back, I wrote a commentary for The Huffington Post arguing that President Barack Obama’s crackdown on leaks within his administration was a threat to the First Amendment. His Justice Department at the time was threatening to jail journalists if they refused to reveal their sources. The headline: “Obama’s War on Journalism.”
I admired Obama then and admire him more today. I wrote all kinds of laudatory things about him as a candidate and as president. But I never wrote that I would or had voted for him. If I had, I think it would have changed the calculation, not just for readers but in the way I would have approached writing such a commentary. I don’t need those kinds of entanglements, and readers have a right not to have to wade through them.
I put the question up on Twitter and Facebook earlier this week. A few thought disclosure was acceptable, but most believed that the old rules should still apply.
“Wouldn’t go there,” said Mike Pride, editor emeritus of New Hampshire’s Concord Monitor and retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. “Makes future commentary too easily dismissible. Readers/listeners may figure out where you stand from what you write/say, but keep your vote to yourself.”
Added liberal columnist Michael Cohen of The Boston Globe: “If you take sides, particularly in the primary, it makes it harder to be an effective analyst.”
The other side was perhaps best expressed by Joshua Benton, editor of Nieman Lab, who also used the occasion to snark at The New York Times for its dual endorsement of Democrats Warren and Amy Klobuchar:
“I don’t see why someone paid to have public opinions should be prevented from having this particular one,” Benton said. “I think it’s a useful clarity. In the same way I wouldn’t want an editorial board to interview all the candidates, have clear strong opinions, and then not pick one.”
So is there still a meaningful difference between expressing your opinions about politics and saying whom you’re voting for? I think there is, and I come down on the side of withholding that last piece of information — with just a few obvious exceptions, such as my “anyone but Trump” assertion. (I may have let my 2020 choice slip once or twice on Facebook, and I shouldn’t have.)
“I am a champion of old rules in a new world,” is the way Pride puts it.
I’ll be away on a reporting trip next week, so I’m going to take advantage of early voting by casting my ballot in the Massachusetts Democratic primary this Friday.
Can a news organization help to support itself by opening a café, bar and wedding venue? It’s a good question, but here’s a better one: Can such a gathering place lead to the revival of civic engagement and, thus, to renewed interest in local journalism?
The New York Times last week reported on an interesting experiment taking place at The Big Bend Sentinel of Marfa, Texas. The paper was acquired last year by two former New Yorkers, Maisie Crow and Max Kabat, who quickly found themselves facing the challenge of paying the bills in an era of shrinking ad revenues. Their solution was to renovate a former bar and transform it into a newsroom and café. The revenues, Crow said, would be used to expand the Sentinel’s coverage, explaining that “we wanted to expand the potential.”
But at a time when the decline of civic life is leading to diminishing interest in the day-to-day goings-on that are the staple of local newspapers, bringing journalists and the community together in a common space could help remind residents of why news matters. Indeed, Abbie Perrault, the Sentinel’s managing editor, told the Times that the shared space is “a great way to keep my finger on the pulse and get new leads and find stories.”
The Sentinel is offering a fresh take on an idea that nearly got off the ground a decade ago. That’s when Matt DeRienzo, then the 34-year-old publisher of The Register Citizen in Torrington, Connecticut, was opening up his newsroom to the public with the encouragement of John Paton, an innovative executive who was briefly the toast of the newspaper business.
As The New York Times wrote back then, members of the public could visit The Register Citizen’s Newsroom Café for coffee and muffins and to use the paper’s archives for free. “Matt’s taking his audience and making it a colleague,” Paton was quoted as saying. “A building with open doors, with no walls, is the brick-and-mortar metaphor for how the web works.”
DeRienzo was soon named editor of all of the Journal Register Co. chain’s Connecticut newspapers, including its flagship, the New Haven Register. I interviewed him around that time, and he was brimming with ideas. The company sold off its hulking plant by I-95, and DeRienzo began making plans for an open newsroom on the Yale side of the New Haven Green.
Sadly, it wasn’t to be. Journal Register was merged with another chain, MediaNews Group, and the resulting behemoth was dubbed Digital First Media — an ironic moniker that paid tribute to Paton’s oft-repeated mantra, “digital first,” but that soon proved it was dedicated mainly to squeezing out profits for the benefit of its hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capital. Paton left. DeRienzo left. And the idea of local journalism reinvented around open newsrooms and public participation faded away. (I told the full story of Digital First’s rise and fall in an earlier WGBH News commentary.)
“It elevated the awareness and reputation of the newspaper and the people who worked in the newsroom,” DeRienzo said of the Torrington experiment in a Facebook discussion last week. “It improved transparency and trust with readers. Our audience grew, and our digital revenue grew.”
Nearly a generation ago, the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam wrote in his landmark book “Bowling Alone” that newspaper readership correlates strongly with civic engagement. People who vote in local elections, take part in volunteer activities, attend religious services or engage in any number of other activities are also more likely to read the paper. “Newspaper readers,” he wrote, “are machers and schmoozers.”
Which brings us back to The Big Bend Sentinel. The local news crisis has multiple causes, technological change and corporate greed being foremost among them. But, fundamentally, it’s also about declining interest in what the school board is up to, whether the city council will approve a new liquor license and other quotidian matters.
News organizations that hope to survive and thrive can’t settle for merely covering civic life — they have to teach their communities the importance of local news so that people will start paying attention and realize that what the mayor is doing is likely to have more of an effect on their families than anything that is taking place in Washington.
Such journalism is sometimes derisively called “eating your broccoli.” So kudos to the Sentinel for reimagining the intersection of journalism and audience engagement more along the lines of a cheeseburger and a beer. And look! Here comes the bride!
Correction: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of the town name of Marfa, Texas.
My Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman has written an important thread about political endorsements by news organizations. Her starting point is the Concord Monitor’s unusual decision not to endorse in the New Hampshire primary. (Heckman is a former editor at the Monitor.) Please read it and come back.
1/n Mixed feelings about the @ConMonitorNews's decision not to endorse in the #FITN primary. I'll let the political scientists discuss the impact endorsements do/don't have on election outcomes and focus instead on what this tells us about local news. https://t.co/8rpHjPlBqx
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