Category: Media

Private equity ownership is devastating retail — just as it has destroyed newspapers

The Washington Post reports some startling figures about the role of private equity firms in the retail business. According to the Post’s Abha Bhattarai:

More than 1.3 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past decade as a result of private equity ownership in retail, according to a report released Wednesday. That includes 600,000 retail workers, as well as 728,000 employees in related industries. Overall, the sector added more than 1 million jobs during that period. [my emphasis]

This is exactly what has happened to the newspaper business over the past several decades. Yes, the internet has devastated the economic model, with advertisers fleeing to Craigslist, Google and Facebook. But that’s only part of the story. The other part is that corporate chains have hollowed out newsrooms in order to maximize profits at a time when what was really needed was investment and patience.

The most notorious of the corporate raiders is MediaNews Group, formerly Digital First Media, which is owned by Alden Global Capital. MNG has all but destroyed once-great papers like The Denver Post and The Mercury News of San Jose, as U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren notes in her proposal to re-regulate Wall Street. Cuts continue at MNG’s Massachusetts holdings, the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg. Meanwhile, The Berkshire Eagle is rebuilding after a group of local business people bought the paper back from MNG.

Consider, too, that independent regional papers such as The Boston Globe and the Star Tribune of Minneapolis are doing reasonably well, and others are taking innovative steps such as giving iPads to their readers to ease the transition to all-digital (the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette), operating under hybrid for-profit/nonprofit ownership (The Philadelphia Inquirer) or are pursuing pure nonprofit ownership (The Salt Lake Tribune).

For years we’ve been hearing that Amazon is destroying retail — yet, as the Post observes, that part of the sector not being strangled by private equity has continued to grow. Newspapers’ business problems are very real. But surely they would be shrinking a lot more slowly, and perhaps groping their way toward sustainability, if they weren’t being destroyed by our financial overlords.

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Millennials and the news: A new study shows that they’re tuned in after all

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Is there a more maligned demographic group in the United States than millennials? Blamed for everything from narcissism to avocado toast, adults between the ages of 18 and 34 are regularly disparaged as less ambitious, less tolerant, and less well-informed than members of older generations.

We believe these stereotypes even though they are supported by precious little in the way of evidence. In at least one of those categories, we now have some countervailing data. According to a new study by the Knight Foundation, millennials are regular news consumers who rely on journalism for information, entertainment, and guidance on how to vote.

The survey of 1,660 young adults “shows that 88 percent of people ages 18-34 access news at least weekly, including 53 percent who do so every day,” according to the Knight report. Interestingly, Hispanics and African Americans were somewhat less likely to engage with the news than whites, but were “more likely to share news with friends on social media.” Twitter habits differed by ethnic group as well: “Forty percent of young African American adults get news on Twitter at least once a week, compared to 27 percent of Hispanics and 26 percent of whites.”

I’ve been teaching young adults for the past 15 years, and the Knight findings confirm what I’ve seen. Young people care deeply about the news. But the way they define and consume it is quite different compared to my generation.

Remember Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim that “the medium is the message.” When those of us who grew up with newspapers read journalism on our phones, we might retain some of our pre-digital ways of thinking — oh yeah, if this were the paper, what I’m reading now would be the editorial page. But for young adults who never read a print newspaper, the digital experience is everything. They don’t draw those kinds of analogies, and they accept the mobile environment for what it is: a source of infinite news and information that they have to sort through.

Granted, I teach mainly journalism students, whose interest in the news is more intense than that of other young adults. Still, I have a few observations that I think are applicable to digital natives of all backgrounds:

• Young people are dubious about “the news” as a curated package. Rather than seeing news as a compilation of international, national, and local information that they need to keep up with on a daily basis, younger news consumers tend to dive deeply into a few areas that interest them. They don’t see the digital environment as disaggregated because for them it was never aggregated. They do their own aggregation, making themselves well informed on a few topics.

• Quality is as important to millennials as it is to older generations. Studies show that older people are more likely to believe and share fake news than younger people. If we’re going to offer classes in media literacy, they are needed at the senior center every bit as much as they are in middle school — maybe more so. Perhaps that’s because older news consumers have a reverence for anything that appears in print (or even in digital text), whereas millennials grew up knowing that they have to be their own fact-checkers. In my experience, young adults are intensely concerned about quality, and they know how to separate the good stuff from the garbage.

• Millennials are unlikely to develop brand loyalty in their media habits. National newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are experiencing some success in charging for digital subscriptions, as are a few regional papers like the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe. Long-term, though, those papers may be leaving millennials behind, since they’re not going to want to restrict themselves to a few titles they pay for. We need new ideas, such as subscriptions that include a wide range of news sources, or the ability to pay for that day’s digital paper. Single-copy sales were a staple of the newspaper business for generations; they need to make the leap to the way we consume news today.

The Knight Foundation study, conducted by the NORC research institute at the University of Chicago, also found that young people regard the media as being highly biased — even sources they use regularly. They also worry that the media are harming democracy and national unity. African Americans and Hispanics said that news sources did not portray them accurately. No particular media outlets are mentioned in the report. But it does show that millennials are well aware that the country is in crisis, and that the media are too often part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

All of which shows that we older people ought to welcome our millennial overlords. We can only hope that they’ll show up on Election Day. Sadly, that is one area in which they thoroughly deserve their dismal reputation. Perhaps that will change in 2020.

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Better campaign coverage: More substance, less horse race — and holding Trump to account

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Nineteen days ago, the journalist and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll leveled a credible accusation of rape against President Trump. Carroll’s claim that Trump violently assaulted her during an encounter in the 1990s created a brief stir of outrage — then all but disappeared. Meanwhile, Trump’s lies and falsehoods mount, the abuse of children at the southern border continues, and his contempt for lawful subpoenas and even Supreme Court decisions grows. The press covers all of this, of course, but with an increasingly perfunctory, what-else-is-new tone of resignation.

Compare that with the second Democratic presidential debate, at which Sen. Kamala Harris reinvigorated her campaign by challenging former Vice President Joe Biden on race and by taking a stand in favor of Medicare for all. Here we are nearly two weeks later, and we’re still discussing whether Harris was being disingenuous given her own nuanced position on the use of busing to desegregate public schools and her shifting views on private insurance. Is Harris slippery? Is she electable? Was she too tough on poor old Joe? (And — gasp! — several of the candidates attempted a little Spanish, proving, of course, that they are hopeless panderers.)

Media coverage of the 2020 presidential campaign is shaping up to be the same depressing spectacle that it always is. With few exceptions, the press focuses on polls, fundraising, who’s up, who’s down, and who made a gaffe. Two and a half years after Hillary Clinton was denied the White House despite winning nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, there’s also a lot of dangerously silly talk about whether Americans are willing to elect a woman.

On Twitter, Washington Post political reporter Dave Weigel took a shot at acknowledging legitimate questions about Harris’ shifting views while placing them within a larger Trumpian context. “The question about Harris’s debate win is if she can shake off the problem that sapped her momentum before: Twisting into a pretzel when pressed on a policy question. So far…,” Weigel tweeted. “And yes, this is another area where Trump gets to play by different rules.”

The overarching problem is the same one that defined the 2016 campaign. As Weigel noted, the media hold Trump to a different standard than the Democratic candidates. The Democrats are treated as serious political players who should be held accountable for their policy positions and for what they say. Trump is presumed to be a lying imbecile, and is therefore not covered as though his words matter.

There was at least some justification for that in the last campaign, when media organizations assumed they could exploit the Trump phenomenon for ratings and profits, safe in the knowledge that, you know, he would not actually be elected. Now there are no excuses. But the press, like the rest of us, appears to be suffering from Trump fatigue, covering the president’s latest outbursts but then dropping them almost immediately in order to chase the next shiny object.

What would better coverage look like?

First, even though Trump will be all but uncontested for the Republican nomination (sorry, Bill Weld), reporters need to understand how crucial it is that he be held accountable in exactly the same way the Democratic candidates are. That seems unlikely to happen. But at a minimum we should avoid a repeat performance of 2016, when the media feasted on emails that had been stolen from the Clinton campaign, making themselves unwitting (and witting) accomplices of Russian efforts on Trump’s behalf.

Second, the media need to stop covering politics as a sporting event and focus on what really matters. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has emerged as a leading candidate on the strength of her in-depth policy proposals on issues such as income inequality, student debt relief, and health care. But a candidate’s background, experience, character, and leadership skills are at least as important as policy. Those tend to be the subject of lengthy chin-strokers early in the campaign, supplanted by the horse race once things heat up. It shouldn’t be that way — such stories are essential, and they should be at the center of any serious news organization’s coverage right up until Election Day. On a related note: Chuck Todd of NBC News should be banned from future debates for demanding one-word answers to complex, important questions.

Third, the press should stop trying to “define the narrative.” The narrative, such as it is, is what emerges, and shouldn’t be used as a mnemonic device to make it easier for journalists to do their jobs. Yes, there are serious questions about Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s temperament. But she had long been considered a real contender, and media overkill pretty much derailed her candidacy before it could begin. Warren was described as having missed her best chance by not challenging Clinton in 2016, but here she is. Harris opened strongly! stumbled! and now is back in it! These are normal ups and downs; the press errs by taking them too seriously.

There have been some positive signs. CNN’s one-hour town halls with the Democratic candidates have encouraged thoughtfulness and depth. Unfortunately, they demand too much from all but the most committed viewers. The 10-candidate “debates” on NBC were far too superficial. How about a series of 15-minute interviews, eight a night for three nights? That should be enough time to get into some substance.

As I wrap this up, Yahoo News is reporting that the Seth Rich conspiracy madness — the false tale that the Clintonistas ordered the 2016 murder of a young Democratic operative in order to cover up their own corrupt acts — originated with Russian intelligence. This bit of toxic fakery was not taken seriously by the mainstream media, but it was promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News and, later, by the Trump White House itself. In other words, it got wide distribution and polluted our discourse even though actual news organizations handled it responsibly.

Which brings me to my final observation. Even if political reporters can improve on their efforts to hold Trump to account, to focus more on substance and less on the horse race, and to let the larger narrative emerge rather than trying to define it for us, there are few signs that they are prepared to deal with the new media world of foreign actors, Facebook fakery, and disinformation in which we are now immersed.

That world, as much as anything, got Trump elected in 2016. If the media aren’t prepared to identify and expose such efforts in 2020, it could happen again.

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Some contrary thoughts on the pending closure of Youngstown’s Vindicator

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I want to sound a note of skepticism over the pending closure of The Vindicator, the only daily newspaper in Youngstown, Ohio. The paper is family-owned, and those who have looked at the situation — including Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab and Lukas I. Alpert of The Wall Street Journal — have noted that the family also owns the NBC and CW television affiliates.

That’s where I think some more reporting needs to be done. It’s been said that the owners couldn’t find a buyer, not even a cost-cutting chain like GateHouse Media. But it strikes me that that would be a dicey proposition given that the old owners would still be able to leverage relationships they’ve built with advertisers for many years in order to crush a paper that they would now see as a competitor.

I don’t know what the union situation is at the TV stations. But I do know that, according to the Journal, the unionized Vindicator employs 144 people. The TV stations could, if they wanted to, add some free web-only local coverage while hiring far fewer than 144 people in order to further put pressure on The Vindicator.

I realize this is a pretty cynical take and that The Vindicator’s business model has no doubt broken down, perhaps irretrievably. But I do think a little more needs to be said about this odd development.

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Some thoughts on those 3,000 lost journalism jobs

The news was shocking. On Monday, Gerry Smith of Bloomberg reported that about 3,000 employees at news organizations have lost their jobs through layoffs or buyouts through the first five months of this year — the worst drop since 2009.

There is nothing good to be said about this. But, in looking over the details, it seems to me that things aren’t quite as bad as they first appear.

First, there is that “worst since 2009” claim. For the first five months of 2009, Smith writes, the job loss came to 7,914 — more than double what we’ve seen this year. Of course, that was in the midst of the Great Recession, a time when the structural problems facing the news business were compounded by economic collapse. The New York Times Co. was even threatening to shut down The Boston Globe, which it then owned. In 2019, journalism job losses have accelerated in the midst of prosperity, which is pretty ominous. Still, things are not nearly as bad as they were 10 years ago.

Second, a large share of those 3,000 lost jobs were at digital-only news organizations whose business model has always been dubious. The Bloomberg story puts the number of lost jobs at 800 at HuffPost and Yahoo and another 250 at BuzzFeed News. Todd Spangler reported for Variety earlier this year that Vice Media had eliminated 250 jobs. So that’s a total of 1,300, or more than 43 percent of the 3,000 lost jobs. Obviously I don’t like to see any jobs eliminated, and I especially don’t like the fact that Facebook’s and Google’s ongoing dominance in digital advertising is crushing free news sites. But in these cases, the job losses should mainly be seen as the day of reckoning finally arriving.

That’s good news — or, rather, the not-so-awful news. The bad news is that many of the other job losses involve local news organizations. Many are owned by gigantic corporate chains such as GateHouse Media, MediaNews Enterprises (formerly Digital First), Gannett and McClatchy, all of which have cut numerous jobs this year. Some are independents, such as The Vindicator of Youngstown, Ohio, which, as Joshua Benton notes at Nieman Lab, couldn’t even find a buyer. Via Brian Stelter, I learned this morning that the weekly Katy Times of Texas will go out of business, too.

As I and others have written on multiple occasions, the real crisis in journalism is at the community level. This week’s Bloomberg numbers are sobering, but it’s important to keep in mind what they say and what they don’t say.

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Despite Trump fatigue, the horror of child detention breaks through our apathy

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

President Trump has worn us down. The Mueller report — loaded with evidence that Trump obstructed justice and welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 campaign — bobs, floats, and then sinks beneath the surface. A credible accusation that he raped a woman several decades ago barely registers. Dangerous rhetoric that journalists are “the enemy of the people,” once shocking, is now little more than background noise.

Sometimes, though, the terrible reality of the Trump presidency breaks through, at least for a moment. Such is the case with the hundreds of migrant children being held at a border detention center in Clint, Texas, under conditions of shocking cruelty, according to a group of lawyers that visited the camp. The children are reported to be cold, hungry, and filthy. Many are sick.

Then, on Tuesday, the awful consequences of Trump’s policies were driven home in even more graphic detail, as news organizations published a photo of the bodies of a father and daughter from El Salvador who had drowned while attempting to cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States.

This time the public appears to be paying attention. No, not the way they did several weeks after Trump’s inauguration, when thousands of people turned out in Boston (and many more across the country) to protest the first iteration of his ban on Muslim immigrants. That was before Trump had had a chance to induce inaction through the sheer repetition of outrages. But the news media, at least, have shone a spotlight on the horrifying details coming out of Clint. Media interest is an imperfect measure of public interest, but to the extent that there is some correlation, the news appears to be breaking through. Some examples:

• From The New York Times: “Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.”

• From The Associated Press: “A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.”

• From The New Yorker (quoting Warren Binford, one of the lawyers who visited Clint): “Many of the children reported sleeping on the concrete floor. They are being given army blankets, those wool-type blankets that are really harsh. Most of the children said they’re being given two blankets, one to put beneath them on the floor. Some of the children are describing just being given one blanket and having to decide whether to put it under them or over them, because there is air-conditioning at this facility. And so they’re having to make a choice about, Do I try to protect myself from the cement, or do I try to keep warm?”

Naturally, these reports haven’t stopped Trump from lying about what is happening. Over the weekend, in an interview with Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” Trump blamed his predecessor, President Obama, for the policy of separating migrant children from their families. Not only did the hapless Todd fail to challenge him but, as Aaron Rupar of Vox noted, whoever was running the “Meet the Press” Twitter feed repeated Trump’s assertion. In case you had any doubts, it was entirely false, according to Miriam Valverde’s analysis at PolitiFact.

Trump being Trump, news organizations are not being allowed to witness what is taking place in Clint, or at other detention facilities. We have to rely on the reports of public interest lawyers because the press has been banned from witnessing what’s taking place.

As Paul Farhi reports in The Washington Post: “The blackout on press access has left Americans largely in the dark about conditions in government facilities designed to handle migrants who have crossed the border. Photographs and TV images are both rare and often dated. Rarer still are interviews with federal agency managers and employees and with the children themselves.”

Even so, the news that has trickled out has apparently been enough to prompt action. Some of the children were transferred to other, presumably less crowded, facilities. On Tuesday came word that John Sanders, acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, would resign — a significant move given that, until now, Trump’s immigration officials have generally been pushed out for insufficient rather than excessive cruelty.

Horrors such as this can lead us to feel enraged — and then, because there seems to be so little we can do, apathetic and resigned. So I want to close with two pieces of information that should spark hope rather than despair.

The first is an editorial in The New York Times that closes with a list of steps we can all take — from contacting elected officials, to donating money to humanitarian organizations, to holding political candidates accountable.

The second is from Warren Binford’s interview with The New Yorker. When the interviewer, Isaac Chotiner, asked her about the “attitude of the guards” toward the lawyers, Binford replied: “They are on our side. Multiple guards told us while we were there that they are on our side and they want us to be successful, because the children don’t belong there, and the children need to be picked up and put in appropriate places for children. They want us to be successful.”

Binford is no Pollyanna, and she acknowledged that there is some cruelty among the guards. But, she said, “I do believe in the inherent goodness of people.”

Binford has seen much worse than we on the outside have. I’m struck by her optimism that most people are good, and that there are steps we can take to counteract the evil in our midst. It may seem in these dark times that there is little that decent people can do. We can’t give in to that type of thinking. The stakes are too high.

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End of the line for ‘The Take’

Sue O’Connell

No, we really can’t have nice things. Sue O’Connell, the host of “The Take” on New England Cable News, has announced that her show is being taken off the air at the end of this week. Meanwhile, she just won a “Best of Boston” award from Boston magazine for her “stellar guests, tough but noncombative questions, and a real interest in talking about ideas.”

No word on what NECN has in mind, but “The Take,” under various names, has been around pretty much since the founding of the all-news cable channel in the early 1990s. Previous hosts include RD Sahl, Chet Curtis and Jim Braude, now host of “Greater Boston” on WGBH-TV (Channel 2) and co-host of “Boston Public Radio” on WGBH Radio (89.7 FM).

Sue, a former colleague of mine at The Boston Phoenix as well as the current co-publisher of Bay Windows and the South End News, is a great talent. I hope she moves on to something bigger and better.

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Proposed state commission would study the local news crisis and what to do about it

Photo (cc) 2019 by Dan Kennedy

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Can government play a role in helping to solve the local news crisis? Not directly, perhaps. But indirectly, government can shine a light on the issue, call attention to worthy projects that might inspire others, and offer some policy recommendations.

That’s the goal of House Bill 181, which would create a special commission to study local journalism in underserved Massachusetts communities. Sponsored by Rep. Lori Ehrlich, D-Marblehead, and Sen. Brendan Crighton, D-Lynn, the bill was the subject of a public hearing Tuesday before the Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Businesses. I was among those who testified; here are my prepared remarks.

The idea came about during an exchange I had with Ehrlich last fall. She was lamenting the shrinkage of local news coverage, which has been caused by a combination of factors. The internet, of course, has inflicted immense damage on newspaper advertising, which once accounted for 80 percent of a typical paper’s revenues. But corporate chain ownership has led to cuts even deeper than they otherwise would have been, since shareholders and hedge funds demand unrealistically high profits even as the underlying business model continues to deteriorate.

The commission would comprise 17 people — journalists, academics, and elected officials, as well as members of organizations representing African American, Hispanic, and Asian journalists. The proposal has not been without controversy. After complaints on Monday that the hearing had been scheduled with little advance notice, officials agreed to hold a second hearing sometime within the next few weeks. Questions have been raised about the composition of the commission as well. In her testimony, Ehrlich said that she and Crighton are open to suggestions as to who would ultimately be named to the panel. (As the legislation is currently written, I would be one of the members.)

Government hearings into the state of journalism are not new. Back in 2009, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by John Kerry held a hearing on the topic at which former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, creator of the HBO series “The Wire,” blasted the news business, saying that “raw unencumbered capitalism is never the answer when a public trust or public mission is at issue.”

Government action isn’t new, either. Earlier this month, legislation was filed in Congress to allow newspapers to negotiate collectively with social media platforms in the hopes of extracting some revenues for the use of their content. A second bill, which I had a small role in drafting, would make it easier for news organizations to claim nonprofit status. I should note, too, that public media organizations, including WGBH, benefit from government support in the form of tax-exempt status as well as grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In 2018, New Jersey lawmakers created a 15-member Civic Information Consortium charged with allocating $5 million in public funds to pay for various local reporting projects. That strikes me as more ambitious and controversial than anything that is likely to be attempted in Massachusetts. Among other things, the shrinkage of local news outlets has been more severe in New Jersey than it has been here. Still, it serves as a precedent for state government playing some role in the future of local journalism.

According to a report by the University of North Carolina, about 1,800 newspapers have ceased publishing since 2004. Residents of many parts of the country live in what UNC describes as “news deserts” — that is, communities where there is no local source of news at all. A number of studies have demonstrated that such lack of coverage leads to social ills such as declining voter participation, an increase in political corruption, and even a rise in the cost of government borrowing because of, as the authors put it, “the lack of scrutiny over local deals.”

Things are not quite so bad in Massachusetts. There are no true news deserts here, according to the UNC report. But rather than uncovered communities, we have many undercovered communities. Cities and towns that may have been served by three or four reporters a generation ago are now lucky to have one. In some cases, a harried reporter has the impossible task of covering two or three towns. MediaNews Group (formerly Digital First), which owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell, and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg, and GateHouse Media, which owns dozens of papers in Greater Boston and beyond, have been assiduously eliminating newsroom jobs and merging papers.

A news commission could provide a modest but crucial service. The commission could study the situation on the ground to determine where the gaps in coverage are. It could identify examples of good-quality local journalism that might be emulated elsewhere. It could recommend policy initiatives to encourage for-profit and nonprofit local news projects. One thing I would especially like to see is a plan to help local-access cable TV, an important informational resource that is facing its own financial challenges.

Local journalism is crucial to providing us with the information we need to govern ourselves. The one thing we can’t afford to do is nothing.

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Hearing on bill to create local news panel to be held at the Statehouse at 11 a.m. today

Big doings at the Statehouse later today as the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Businesses will conduct a hearing about H.181, a bill to create a special commission that would study local journalism in underserved communities.

The hearing will take place at 11 a.m. in Room B-1. I’ll be among those testifying in favor.

This nearly got derailed yesterday over complaints that the hearing had been scheduled on short notice. Fortunately, the chairs of the committee agreed to hold a second hearing within a few weeks.

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Danny Schechter’s legacy and the passion of Julian Assange

Danny Schechter in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Photo (cc) 2009 by Dan Kennedy.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The news was disorienting: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose alleged misdeeds range from sexual assault to acting as a Russian intelligence asset, would be honored with an award named after the late Danny Schechter, one of my journalistic role models.

Assange was recently charged under the Espionage Act for his part in obtaining and publishing secret U.S. documents supplied to him by Chelsea Manning, a former Army private. According to Rory O’Connor, Schechter’s longtime business partner, that is precisely why Assange has been named this year’s recipient of the Danny Schechter Global Vision Award for Journalism and Activism.

Schechter, who died four years ago, spent a long and productive career as a left-wing journalist, from his days as the WBCN “News Dissector” in Boston during the 1970s to a respected documentarian and author about issues such as apartheid, economic injustice, and media reform. Schechter was someone I probably checked in with a couple of times a year. In 2009, he and I covered a protest against internet censorship that broke out while we were attending a conference in Kazakhstan. Given all that, I wasn’t sure I was on board with O’Connor’s reasoning.

“The Assange case represents a threat not only to freedom of expression but also to the heart of American democracy itself,” O’Connor wrote. And in a retort to those who argue that Assange is not a journalist, O’Connor observed that Assange has in fact engaged in journalism of a sort: “Much of what he does, after all, involves selecting, editing, verifying and even contextualizing news material.”

Trouble is, Assange was a lot easier to defend back in 2010, when WikiLeaks and Manning were exposing American wrongdoing in the Iraq war, including looking the other way as Iraqi forces tortured prisoners. At that time, Assange appeared to be an honest exemplar of radical transparency. In those days I wrote a weekly column for The Guardian. And I argued that the Obama administration, which was reportedly looking into bringing charges against Assange on the theory that he had colluded with Manning, would be endangering First Amendment protections for mainstream news organizations.

I didn’t see then, and I don’t see now, how any news organization can be said not to have colluded with a source when it receives leaked documents. Didn’t the Times and The Washington Post collude with Daniel Ellsberg when they received the Pentagon Papers from him? Yes, there are differences. Ellsberg had finished making copies long before he began working with the Times, whereas Assange may have goaded Manning. But does that really matter?

The Obama administration, fortunately, decided to back off. But that was a long time ago. Assange, always a problematic figure, looks a lot worse today than he did then. In addition to extremely serious sexual assault charges against him and his role in Russia’s internet campaign against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, Assange spent years evading the authorities by holing up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he reportedly degenerated into the guest from hell, paying little attention to his personal hygience and possibly even neglecting his cat.

All of which, counterintuitively, is why the Danny Schechter Award may actually make sense. President Trump has been trying to delegitimize journalism since he launched his campaign four years ago, denouncing news organizations as “the enemy of the people” and vowing to end some libel protections for the media. Seen in that light, Assange is the ideal conduit through which to undermine freedom of the press. If you don’t want to defend Assange, you may not get the chance to defend The New York Times. If investigative reporting is redefined as a criminal act, who will hold the powerful to account?

When Assange was first charged several months ago it looked like the Trump administration was deliberately avoiding the most provocative course of action. Assange was not initially charged under the Espionage Act, but rather was accused of actively helping Manning steal documents — an activity that most definitely is not protected by the First Amendment.

Even so, there were hints of what was to come. Mathew Ingram, writing at the Columbia Journalism Review, pointed out that the FBI’s affidavit described behavior on Assange’s part such as taking steps to keep his relationship with Manning secret, including the use of encrypted messaging. These days, many top news organizations actively solicit secret documents through encrypted portals. Here, for example, is The Washington Post’s. If Assange broke the law, what about the Post and all the others?

Ingram added: “The affidavit also says Assange collaborated with Manning on ‘the public release of the information’ — in other words, publishing. It goes on to allege that Assange broke the law in part by receiving classified documents without a security clearance, something investigative journalists often do.”

The threat became more ominous last month, when the Trump administration added Espionage Act charges to the case against Assange. The government has never followed through on threats to use the World War I-era law to punish news organizations for publishing classified documents, despite threats to do so after the Pentagon Papers were made public and after The New York Times reported on the George W. Bush administration’s secret (and probably illegal) domestic spying program.

Now Assange has emerged as a test case — and if he loses, it’s hard to imagine why our leading news executives would be exempt. “For good reason, press-rights advocates are far more alarmed now than they were last month when Assange was initially indicted,” wrote Margaret Sullivan, the Post’s media columnist. She added: “What’s alarming about the indictment is the way it would criminalize some of the basic functions of newsgathering and publication.”

In his essay announcing the Danny Schechter Award, O’Connor wrote, “The charges against Assange make the ultimate targets of his prosecution clear: journalists worldwide. Prosecutors are using the case against him to mask a blatantly political campaign to limit all journalists — a cornerstone of the Trump agenda often expressed by the president himself.”

Given all that, I’m not worried about Danny Schechter’s legacy being sullied. In fact, he’d probably love the idea of using an award named after him to shine a spotlight on Assange. Saints and sinners alike deserve the protection of the First Amendment — and sinners, after all, are more in need of it.

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