Category: Media

Arc was supposed to be a key to The Washington Post’s future. It became a problem instead.

Shailesh Prakash, former chief technologist at The Washington Post. Photo (cc) 2017 by Nordiske Mediedager.

Several months ago, Brian Stelter wrote an article (gift link) for The Atlantic exploring how The Washington Post had lost its way. During the Trump years, the Post thrived under the ownership of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, adding audience and staff as well as turning a profit. Since then, all three of those metrics have nose-dived. Bezos’ choice to turn things around, publisher Will Lewis, is beset by ethical problems that no one seems to want to deal with.

All those issues are explored in detail by Stelter, but there was one fact that stood out to me: The Post’s content-management system, Arc, which was supposed to be a money-maker, had instead turned out to be a drag on the bottom line. Stelter wrote:

In 2021, the Post’s total profit was about $60 million. In 2022, the paper began to dip into the red. [Then-publisher Fred] Ryan reassured people that the loss was expected because of the investments in the Post’s journalism and continued losses at Arc XP, the in-house content-management system that the Post expanded during Bezos’s and Ryan’s tenure (the software is now licensed to other companies). Arc needed to spend a lot of money to have a chance to make money in the future, the argument went, and according to two sources, it accounted for the majority of the Post’s losses in 2022 and 2023.

If Ryan was right, then there was nothing wrong with the Post that getting Arc under control wouldn’t fix. I was surprised, and I filed that factoid away for future use. Well, the future arrived this week, as the Post announced it was laying off about 25% of Arc’s staff — more than 50 people — in order to stem those losses.

What happened? Stories about the layoffs in The Wall Street Journal (gift link) and Axios don’t really make it clear. But it seems that what at one time had looked like a smart bet on the future went south in a serious way.

CMS’s are universally loathed, but Arc was billed as something different and better — simple and built in a modular manner to made it easier to add features. It’s fast. To this day, the Post’s mobile apps load much more quickly than The New York Times’. The Boston Globe is an Arc customer, and if you use its Arc-based apps (look for a white “B” against a black background), content loads more or less instantly.

When I was reporting on the Post for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” then-chief technologist Shailesh Prakash touted Arc as a key to the Post’s future success. Internally, the Post’s iteration of Arc featured the infamous “MartyBot” — an image of then-executive editor Marty Baron that popped up on a journalist’s screen as a reminder that a deadline was approaching. One of Arc’s customers was Mark Zusman, the editor and publisher of Willamette Week in Oregon. He told me by email:

They flew a team out here and within three months we were up and running. I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly it happened. Arc creates enormous functionality under the hood. I have a happy news team (talk about unusual) and the Post is rolling out improvements on a regular basis.

Prakash told me that he hoped Arc might help the Post become the hub of a news ecosystem that would benefit both the Post and news organizations that licensed the CMS:

I would love it if the platform we built for the Post was powering a lot of other media organizations. That would definitely break down the silos for content sharing, a lot of the silos for analytics, for personalization. The larger the scale the better you can do in some of those scenarios. But those are still aspirational at this point.

Well, Prakash is long gone, and is now vice president of news at Google. Baron has retired. And Arc has failed to deliver on its promise of becoming a revenue-generator for the Post as well as a way for the paper to establish itself as the center of a network of Arc-using news organizations.

I hope we find out what happened. I know that Arc is expensive — probably too expensive for it to be adopted by more than a handful of news clients. Still Axios reports that the CMS has more than 2,500 customers. Maybe the layoffs will allow for a reset that will lead to future growth. But the story of Arc sounds like one of opportunity that slipped away.

Of elephants, circuses and the Olivia Nuzzi-Robert F. Kennedy Jr. imbroglio

Joe Biden. Photo (cc) 2019 by Matt Johnson.

In the weeks after President Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 presidential debate, there were several crucial data points. His interviews with George Stephanopoulos and Lester Holt, which did little to restore confidence in his abilities to think and communicate clearly. A Wall Street Journal story on how his staff was stage-managing his decline. A New York Times op-ed by the actor George Clooney, a longtime Biden friend and supporter, urging the president to step aside.

So I don’t want to make too much of a story by Olivia Nuzzi, published in early July by New York magazine, which described Biden as increasingly out of it and obviously unfit to stay in the campaign. But I will tell you that it made an impression on me at the time, combining first-hand observation and quotes from people close to Biden. Yes, the quotes were anonymous, a fact that is now being added to the bill of particulars against Nuzzi. But haven’t we all gotten accustomed to that? Did anyone seriously expect Biden’s friends to step forward and attach their names to what they were saying — other than Clooney?

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Here’s an excerpt from Nuzzi’s story that describes — rather compellingly, I think — the rising fears among Biden’s friends and supporters:

When they discussed what they knew, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.

Now we know that Nuzzi’s entire article was corrupt. That is, it’s suffused with a kind of wrongdoing that’s separate from fabulism or plagiarism, two species of journalistic ethics violations that we’re all familiar with. Nuzzi’s piece might be entirely accurate as well as truthful in its judgments and conclusions. But we don’t know. We’ll never know.

You probably have heard that Nuzzi was involved in some sort of sex scandal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was, by turns, a Democratic and then an independent candidate for president before ending his ridiculous campaign and endorsing Trump. The details of the scandal aren’t important; they reportedly involve nude photos, maybe sexting. What matters is Nuzzi was writing that Biden was too infirm to stand for re-election while she was sexually involved with one of his rivals.

The story about Nuzzi and Kennedy was broken last Thursday by independent media reporter Oliver Darcy in his newsletter, Status. Darcy reported that Nuzzi had been placed on leave, and he published this statement from New York magazine:

Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.

Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.

No evidence of bias? I just pointed out massive evidence of bias. You can’t report on one candidate when you’re sexually involved with another. Or as the late New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal once memorably put it: “I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.” Much of what Nuzzi wrote about Biden was obvious to anyone who had watched Biden fumbling and stumbling on TV. But did she lay it on a little thick to help Kennedy? Did she make Biden seem more infirm than he really was? Or was she truly able to separate the personal from the professional? Who knows?

The last Nuzzi story I encountered was just a couple of weeks ago. It was a long interview with Trump that struck me as interesting, offering some insights into Trump’s thinking following the first assassination attempt, but weirdly soft and sympathetic. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now we know that she was involved, or had been involved, with someone who was angling for a high position in a possible Trump administration. Again — no bias? Seriously? By the way, I listened to her Trump profile on The New York Times’ audio app, and I’m sure Times editors are thrilled to have learned that they provided Nuzzi with an additional platform she didn’t deserve.

Unlike some observers who’ve been piling on Nuzzi, I knew nothing about her until last week except that was young (31) and employed by a magazine that I thought had high standards. I remember with relish a story she wrote several years ago about traipsing through New York City with a clearly inebriated Rudy Giuliani. I knew she had a reputation for being extraordinarily talented.

One story of hers I have not read is her profile of Kennedy from last November, which is reportedly what led to whatever it was that came next.

On a personal level, what a mess. The oft-married Kennedy has been caught cheating (I guess?) on his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, while Nuzzi was until recently engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza, who lost a previous job at The New Yorker over some MeToo allegations.

But you can get caught up on all the tabloid details elsewhere. What matters is that Nuzzi, one of our highest-profile political writers, wrote two long profiles this year that were so enmeshed in her undisclosed (at the time) conflict of interest that we now have no way of knowing whether they were on the level — or were instead hopelessly compromised.

Why news outlets are rethinking the way they cover police and crime

The Keene Sentinel has been a leader in changing how it covers police news

Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe has an interesting story exploring why many startup local news organizations are taking a different approach to how they cover police news. Rather than running the police log verbatim, including the names of people charged with minor offenses, they’re taking care to focus only on crime stories that have a real impact on people’s lives. He writes:

As longtime newspapers in Massachusetts and across the country continue to disappear, a new crop of online news sites are looking to win over audiences and reimagine how they share police log information. Some have continued the news industries’ tradition of publishing police logs to give people information about public safety, but limit what details they share. Others have decided not to post the logs in an attempt to move away from a reliance on unchallenged police accounts and avoid potentially contributing to a misperception about crime in their communities.

This is an issue I’ve been following intermittently since the 1980s, when I worked for a small paper whose editor-owner would not publish the names of people who’d been arrested for minor offenses. All of us younger reporters in the newsroom thought he was wrong, but I later came to see the wisdom of his approach. After all, “minimize harm” is one of the four principles contained within the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.

Here are three pieces I’ve written over the years that expand on Ryan’s reporting. I hope you find them of some interest.

Northeastern students weigh in on stories that ought to be getting more coverage

Andrea Martinez, chairwoman of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, stands outside the tribe’s polling location in Schurz, Nev., during the state’s 2024 primary election on June 11, 2024. Photo by Christopher Lomahquahu/News21.

When you page through the national and international news, it can sometimes seem like there is nothing going on except the presidential election campaign and the wars in Gaza (as well as the broader region) and Ukraine.

These are, in fact, news developments of monumental importance. But what would we be talking about if these issues were suddenly taken off the table? Once a semester, I ask my media ethics students to identify an undercovered story and explain why it should have gotten more attention.

It’s a big class — 30 students. And they are all smart and idealistic. I could easily highlight every story they found, but here is a representative sample of 11.

• Voting rights for Native Americans. Despite being recognized as U.S. citizens more than 100 years ago, Indigenous Americans in some places still face barriers to voting. Worse, some states are winding the clock backwards by making it more difficult for Native Americans to vote. This important reporting was produced by Carnegie-Knight News21, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available free of charge to other news organizations — including USA Today.

• The dangers of vaccine hesitancy. As I write this, I’m dealing with the after-effects of my Moderna COVID booster, which I got Monday along with a flu shot. Even now, though, I’d much rather put up with a little discomfort than get COVID. Here is a CBS News story that traces the history of vaccines from Benjamin Franklin to Jonas Salk to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s taken his anti-science views mainstream as a presidential candidate and, now, as a Donald Trump surrogate.

• Lost in space. The fate of two astronauts who are stuck on the International Space Station has gotten more attention lately, but it seems like we heard very little for months. I hesitate to call it a crisis, since it doesn’t seem that the two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are in any danger. But according to The New York Times, they will have wait until next year to come home on a SpaceX capsule rather than a Boeing vehicle, as originally planned.

• Let there be (too much) light. The pervasiveness of artificial light harms animals, including those of the human variety, since it’s a major contributor to overwork and maladjusted body clocks. Light pollution makes it more difficult for astronomers to do their jobs and wreaks havoc with the navigation systems of marine animals such as sea turtles. A story in National Geographic lays out the problem and suggests some steps that can be taken to ease it.

• Black women and breast cancer. In the modern media environment, it’s not just news organizations that are producing useful journalism. For instance, a blog post at the Mayo Clinic website informs us that Black women are “41% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women,” even though they are a lower risk. The reason: breast cancer is more likely to be detected in Black women at a later stage, making it more difficult to treat.

• A horrifying protest goes unnoticed. You would think that when someone who demonstrates in favor of Palestinian rights lights himself on fire and dies of his burns, that story would get a great deal of attention. Yet the tragic story of Matt Nelson, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli consulate in Boston on Sept. 11, has attracted little notice. The left-leaning news site Common Dreams covered it, as did the Cape Cod Times, which noted that Nelson had ties to the Cape. Nothing in The Boston Globe, though; NBC Boston ran a brief story, and there was very little else, at least not in the local media.

• A recognition of public service. At a time when working for the government is disparaged, as it has been pretty much since the Reagan era, it’s useful to be reminded of the good work that many public servants perform. The Federal News Network reported last week on the 2024 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, known as the “Sammies,” which recognizes federal employees who have achieved excellence. How did a student find this story? She told me that she was reading The Washington Post and came across a link. The Post, of course, is the hometown paper for the federal government.

• Threatening the right to read. Book-banning doesn’t quite fall into the category of an undercovered story, but we don’t know as much about it as we ought to — especially on the state level and exactly what books are being banned. Word In Black, which describes itself as a “groundbreaking collaboration of 10 legendary Black news publishers,” reports that Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Utah and Tennessee are among the states that have restricted the books that public school students can access related to sex and Black history.

• Trump’s blood lust. This story from Rolling Stone is more than a year and a half old — but that’s what makes it important. As Trump was in the final months of his term in 2020 and early 2021, he embarked on an unprecedented spree of federal executions. As the story puts it, “Before 2020, there had been three federal executions in 60 years. Then Trump put 13 people to death in six months.” The article is behind a paywall (I accessed it through a library database), but for anyone who is horrified by the continued use of the death penalty, it would make sense to be reminded of Trump’s record during the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign.

• A deadly storm in Vietnam. It’s not unusual for our news feeds to be filled with weather-related stories, from the mundane (will it rain this weekend?) to serious coverage of floods and wildfires. Overseas, though, is another matter. Did you know, for instance, that Typhoon Yagi has claimed 143 lives in Vietnam, and many more people are missing? According to The New York Times, Yagi is just the latest example of a storm that was made more extreme because of climate change.

• The war on terror’s awful legacy. As a country, we have moved on from our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without ever coming to terms with the legacy of those conflicts. The New Yorker, with support from the Pulitzer Center, has gone back and reported on war crimes committed by U.S. forces, putting together a database of “the largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11 — nearly eight hundred incidents in all.” These incidents include murder, sexual assault and other forms of abuse. It is interesting, to say the least, that Vice President Kamala Harris has gratefully accepted the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of the so-called war on terror. We should not forget what happened during those years.

An ethical dilemma for The Boston Globe after the host of its TV newscast endorses Harris

“Boston Globe Today” host Segun on a Harris-Walz fundraising call.

The Boston Globe has an ethical dilemma on its hands. Segun Oduolowu, who is the host of the Globe’s daily television newscast, “Boston Globe Today,” recently took part in a fundraising call for Vice President Kamala Harris and spoke enthusiastically on behalf of her presidential campaign.

But according to Jennifer Smith of CommonWealth Beacon, the newscast came under the control of the newsroom only recently, after the fundraiser, making it unclear whether Oduolowu violated the paper’s ethical guidelines.

Smith wrote that “the repercussions of his remarks are messy. The call was just two weeks before an internal email announced that the ‘Boston Globe Today’ show would be moving under newsroom control — likely subjecting it to a typical set of journalistic ethics rules.” (Disclosure: I’m a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s editorial advisory board.)

Oduolowu spoke for about seven minutes as part of an “African Diaspora for Harris-Walz” video event. Oduolowu’s remarks start here. Among other things, he said:

November 5, when you go to those polls, make the right decision for not just you, but the people who fought so hard for you to have that opportunity, to be in a call like this, to be in this country, to make that choice and put this woman in office…. I think the choice is simple.

Smith quoted a statement from the Globe that seems carefully worded to distance itself from Oduolowu’s actions without saying explicitly that he’d deviated from any ethical policy:

Boston Globe Media employees are expected to adhere to our company guidelines, standards, and policies which align with their role. In this case, the personal political comments made by an employee were their own and were not endorsed by or reflective of Boston Globe Media, nor were the comments shared via one of our products, platforms, or events.

Frankly, I’m confused. By all appearances, “Boston Globe Today” is an extension of the Globe’s journalism, presented as a newscast and frequently featuring interviews with Globe reporters.

But it does sound like any ambiguities are about to be eliminated, as Smith reports that editor Nancy Barnes sent an email to the staff on Sept. 10 announcing that “Boston Globe Today” would be moved “under the auspices of the newsroom.” The Harris-Walz call on which Oduolowu appeared took place on Aug. 26.

Trump’s threat to ABC shows that Nixon’s still the one; plus, media notes

It all goes back to Nixon. 1972 photo (cc) by Charles Harrity of The Associated Press.

Something that Donald Trump said after his disastrous debate with Kamala Harris served to confirm my Richard Nixon Unified Field Theory of Everything.

The morning after the debate, Trump called in to Fox News, and he was mighty unhappy. He began complaining about ABC News and its debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, who had the temerity to correct him when he said that undocumented immigrants are feasting on pets fricassee and that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, support “executing” infants after they are born. Then he issued a threat:

I think ABC took a big hit last night. I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Now, ABC is a network, and it doesn’t hold a license. But it does own stations in some of the largest media markets in the country, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. (The ABC affiliate in Boston, WCVB-TV Channel 5, is owned by the Hearst chain.) So even though no one can take away a non-existent license from the ABC network, a fact that Trump may or may not understand, he could threaten local licenses.

Which brings me to Nixon. After he won re-election in 1972, his presidency started to unravel over the Watergate scandal — and coverage of that scandal was being driven by The Washington Post. One of Nixon’s responses was to threaten (not in so many words, mind you) to pull the licenses from several television stations that the Post then owned. For instance, a close friend of Nixon’s, Cromwell Anderson, headed up a group that challenged the Post’s license at a Miami TV station. Then-publisher Katharine Graham wrote in her memoir (free link), “Personal History”:

Anderson began to move against our station in Miami in September of 1972. This happened to be the same month Nixon (as later heard on the tapes) said that The Post would have “damnable, damnable problems” about our license renewals, a phrase that was censored when the tapes were first released by the White House….

[T]he legal costs of defending the licenses added up to well over a million dollars in the 2½ years the entire process took — a far larger sum then than now for a small company like ours.

Back then, presidents and former presidents didn’t blurt out such threats on national television. They worked behind the scenes, and Graham couldn’t be sure if Nixon had a direct role in the license challenges or not. Then as now, though, allowing the government to have a say in regulating the media can lead to threats and retaliation — something that Nixon took advantage of, and that Trump would like to emulate.

Media notes

• My Northeastern journalism colleague John Wihbey and I spoke with Patrick Daly of Northeastern Global News about why some media outlets in the U.K. are charging readers an extra fee if they don’t want to be tracked by advertising cookies. I told Daly that the practice hasn’t caught on in the U.S. because most people don’t care all that much about privacy. Daly, by the way, is based in Global News’ London office, where Northeastern has a campus.

• The once-great Baltimore Sun has fired reporter Madeleine O’Neill for comments she made on the Sun’s internal Slack channel about the paper’s newish owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group chair David Smith. Among other things, the op-ed page has been running pieces by Smith’s buddies without disclosing that Smith has been funding the causes they’re pushing. Fern Shen of the Baltimore Brew has the story.

Talking about the media with ‘SouthCoast Matters’

About once a year I drive down to Taunton in order to appear on “SouthCoast Matters,” a public affairs program hosted by Paul Letendre, to talk about a variety of media issues.

This year Paul was joined by Lean Camara, the CEO at The New Bedford Light, a vibrant nonprofit news outlet. Part one of our conversation aired on Sept. 5 and part two on Sept. 7. Paul is a terrific host, and I always enjoy appearing on his program.

Kamala Harris may have turned in the best performance in the history of national TV debates

After Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, I was trying to think of a better performance than Harris’.

The proper superlative was hard to come by. Joe Biden humiliated Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice presidential debate but was no better than good enough against Trump in 2020. Barack Obama, for all his rhetorical gifts, was only a so-so debater. Ronald Reagan may have won the 1980 election when he turned to President Jimmy Carter and said, “There you go again,” but Reagan was hardly a master of thrust-and-parry. I have not gone back and watched the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, but historians have said that people who listened on the radio actually thought Richard Nixon won.

So yes, it’s possible that Harris’ overwhelmingly dominant performance was the best in the history of televised national debates. What was so impressive was that she did not do particularly well in the 2019 Democratic primary debates, though she smoked Mike Pence a year later. And before you say, well, Trump helped Harris by melting down, a lot of that had to do with her.

Trump’s not easy to debate — just ask Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. His firehose of lies makes it difficult to find a point of entry. Harris did it by getting under his skin early on and making him lose his cool. Her body language was superb. She made sure to mention that he’s been found liable for sexual assault and faces sentencing in an unrelated criminal case. In retrospect, it’s a good thing that Harris lost her bid to keep both mics on throughout, since forcing Trump to stay (relatively) quiet allowed her to build her case.

My former Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, a leading historian of presidential debates, put it this way on Twitter/X:

The worst possible version of Trump showed up for this debate tonight. Harris had him on the defensive from the opening handshake, and that’s where he stayed for the rest of the night. This is as clear-cut a win as I’ve seen in a presidential debate.

Here I’ll note that a few non-MAGA pundits were less than impressed with Harris. “For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed,” wrote New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. Boston Globe political analyst James Pindell actually gave Harris a “C” and Trump a “C-minus,” saying, “Within the context of this campaign, this was a missed opportunity for Harris. She didn’t truly stand out.” I honestly don’t know what to say except: Good Lord, what were they watching?

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The right is freaking out over the ABC News debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for having the temerity to call out a few of Trump’s more egregious lies. But though you can make the case that fact-checking should be on the candidates, the moderators shouldn’t sit there liked potted plants, either. It shouldn’t have been left solely to Harris to highlight Trump’s grotesque lies about non-existent abortion laws that allow just-born babies to be “executed” and fake memes claiming that undocumented immigrants are eating dogs and cats. Oliver Darcy put it this way in his media newsletter:

While it was not feasible for Muir and Davis to correct every lie that streamed from Trump’s mouth, the duo admirably worked to ensure that on issues of major importance, the debate was not reduced to a he-said, she-said. Instead, ABC News made certain that the debate was tethered to reality and that brazen mis-and-disinformation was not given a free haven to infect the public discourse.

The questions for the most part were very good, too, getting into real substance about Trump’s unfitness to lead — especially his racism and his role in the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021.

Then again, Trump continually turned questions that should have been helpful to him against himself, especially regarding the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that took place under President Biden’s watch. I mean, who is “Abdul,” anyway?

And to top it off, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris after the debate ended, signing off her Instagram post as “Childless Cat Lady.”

The Washington Post checked in with 25 uncommitted swing-state voters after the debate; 23 said Harris performed better and only two thought Trump did. There’s also this remarkable finding from CNN’s flash poll of registered voters who watched the debate:

Debate watchers said, 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia. Prior to the debate, the same voters were evenly split on which candidate would perform more strongly, with 50% saying Harris would do so and 50% that Trump would. And afterward, 96% of Harris supporters who tuned in said that their chosen candidate had done a better job, while a smaller 69% majority of Trump’s supporters credited him with having a better night.

Two and a half months ago, President Biden turned in what might have been the worst debate performance in history, raising questions about his age and stamina and ultimately forcing him out of the race — and overshadowing Trump’s own miserable lie-infested performance. Last night we saw exactly the opposite.

Will it matter? Probably not. The race remains unimaginably tight. But for 90 minutes, Kamala Harris made the best possible case for herself and Donald Trump made the worst. That has to count for something.

The New York Times reports that the far-right media ecosystem is awash in Russian cash

Russian President Vladimir Putin. 2022 photo via President of Russia.

The New York Times is doing some crucially important work on how the far-right media in this country are being influenced by Russian money.

The latest is a report detailing how $10 million from Russia (free link) was funneled to a Canadian couple who set up a company in Tennessee called Tenet Media that paid right-wing influencers to produce pro-Kremlin messages for their site. The story is based on Justice Department documents. The couple, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, have not been charged, and the influencers themselves may be dupes. So far, the only charges that have been filed are against two RT employees accused of violating money-laundering laws.

But the Times’ reporting shows that vast chunks of the right-wing media ecosystem is awash in Russian cash, “trafficking in pointed political commentary as well as conspiracy theories about election fraud, Covid-19, immigrants and Russia’s war with Ukraine.” The influence extended all the way to Tayler Hansen, who filmed the shooting of Ashli Babbitt at the Capitol during the attemped coup of Jan. 6, 2021.

I have to confess that I had not heard of these influences. They are not name brands like, say, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens. But in many respects their messages are similar, and they help spread pro-Russian propaganda across a range of social media platforms.

You can fault Attorney General Merrick Garland for moving too slowly on a number of fronts. But at least this time, unlike 2016, we’re learning about Russian attempts to influence the presidential campaign before Election Day.

The Boston Globe will unveil a new morning newsletter on Monday

I just signed up for Starting Point, The Boston Globe’s new morning newsletter, scheduled to debut on Monday. It sounds like it’s being positioned as a more serious alternative to The B-Side, a breezy take on the day’s events aimed at younger readers that’s part of the Globe’s free Boston.com website.

Here’s the email that I got a little while ago:

Dear Globe reader,

We’re Boston Globe journalists Diamond Naga Siu and Jazmin Aguilera, and on Sep. 9 we’re launching a morning newsletter called Starting Point.

How is it different from every other morning newsletter out there?

First, it’s focused on New England, with a selection of the most consequential stories from our region. But we’ll also survey the national and international scene, picking out the most important and interesting stories. The reporters in our Washington Bureau will provide insights into the presidential election and critical races around the US. We’ll chat with Globe journalists about the stories behind their stories. There will be special guest writers from time to time.

And because we all love a good read and honest recommendations, we’ll share our favorite books and articles, restaurants and cafes, great places to visit, and interesting things to do throughout New England.

Our goal is to inform, intrigue, and delight you. Give Starting Point a try — it’s free — and let us know what you think.

Update: As alert reader Greg Reibman notes, the sign-up pages says that Starting Point will only come out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Not much of a daily newsletter, but maybe they’re rolling it out slowly.