Media – Page 9 – Media Nation

Scott Jennings is the latest partisan hack to embarrass independent opinion journalists

Trump and Jennings on stage in Michigan. Click on image to view the clip.

This morning I want to defend the honor and integrity of opinion journalism, which is the side of the street I’ve worked for most of my career.

Done well, opinion journalism combines reporting, research and, yes, opinion that illuminates issues in a way that goes beyond what straight news reporting can offer. Above all, we honor the same rules of independence as everyone else in the newsroom. We don’t make political donations, put signs on our lawns or (I think you know where I’m going with this) speak at political rallies.

Become a part of Media Nation. For $5 a month, you’ll receive a weekly newsletter for supporters with all kinds of exclusive goodies.

On Tuesday, CNN’s MAGA talking head, Scott Jennings, leaped up on a Michigan stage at President Trump’s invitation, embraced his idol, and then took the mic. I’ll let media reporter Oliver Darcy describe what happened next:

After Trump asked Jennings to come up on stage, Jennings obliged and then very briefly spoke from the podium. The CNN commentator joked he was looking at perhaps buying a farm in Michigan “because when you own as many libs as I do, you have got to have a place to put them all.”

Mediate has the gruesome video, which you can watch here or by clicking on the image above.

Darcy writes that a CNN spokesperson told him the network was fine with Jennings’ appearance with Trump, even though Fox News once upbraided talk-show host Sean Hannity for doing the same thing. Which leads to where I think the line is being drawn.

The cable networks employ journalists, including straight news reporters and opinionators; talk-show hosts like Hannity; and partisan hacks. (Yes, Hannity is a partisan hack, but his primary allegiance is to Fox, not Trump.) Since we’re talking about CNN, I’ll observe that it’s brought on board MAGA sycophants like Jeffrey Lord, Rick Santorum and Jennings as well as Democratic operatives such as Donna Brazile and David Axelrod. Brazile actually tipped off the Hillary Clinton campaign about a CNN debate question while she was working for the network, according to an email unearthed by WikiLeaks.

This is all sordid stuff, and it stems from cable executives’ desire to have predictable partisan commentators offering predictable partisan talking points rather than honest opinion journalists who might say something contrarian. Scott Jennings is merely a symptom. The disease is that the cable nets have elevated talk over actual news.

Lindsey Graham’s bizarre suck-up; plus, the LA Times’ latest woes, and the Trumps’ crypto grift

It’s now being laughed off as a joke, and I suppose that’s right. But social media on Tuesday was going a little nuts over Sen. Lindsey Graham’s ridiculous post on Twitter in which he endorsed Donald Trump’s expressed desire to be the next pope. I thought the always astute Richard Nixon, writing on Bluesky, put it best:

On the bright side, becoming pope would get Trump out of the U.S.

Tough Times in LA

Jeff Bezos isn’t the only billionaire-gone-bad who’s running a major American newspaper. In fact, he may not even be the worst. After all, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris before Bezos did the same at The Washington Post, is actually using AI to label the bias of opinion journalists.

An aside: Opinion journalists are supposed to be biased.

Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy, who’s done yeoman’s work in keeping track of the LA Times’ travails, writes that layoffs are on the way. Darcy also cites reporting by Adweek that the paper lost $50 million in 2024 and that subscribers continue to head for the exits.

You’d like to think that steady, forward-looking ownership would put the Times in a position to thrive as other billionaire-owned papers have done — principally The Boston Globe and The Minnesota Star Tribune.

Maybe Boston and the Twin Cities are just better news towns with a higher level of civic engagement than the notoriously transient Los Angeles area. Still, Soon-Shiong’s feckless and irresponsible management certainly has not helped.

The crypto presidency

I read this in horror Tuesday — an in-depth investigation by The New York Times into the Trump family’s crypto grift, an entirely new way for foreign powers to bribe Trump while skirting federal laws.

As Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ben Protess report, the Trump-controlled crypto company World Liberty Financial also puts the Trump family in close contact with some might unsavory characters. They write:

The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.

Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

Because it’s the last day of the month and I still have some gift links to distribute, you can read it here for free. And here’s a gift link to a sidebar on yet another dubious Trump crypto relationship.

No, the arrest of Judge Dugan is not unprecedented. Plus, DOJ targets leaks, and Bezos’ original sin

Judge's gavel — Illustration produced by AI using DALL-E

It’s important at a historical moment like this to keep our heads about us. Social media was filled with dark warnings about authoritarianism on Friday after the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan and charged her with illegally helping an undocumented immigrant avoid being detained by federal agents. I even saw a quote attributed to Hitler.

Become a supporter of Media Nation for just $5 a month. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter with all kinds of exclusive goodies.

We should leave it to the legal system to determine whether Judge Dugan broke the law or not. But, to their credit, a number of news organizations noted that the Dugan case is remarkably similar to that of Massachusetts District Court Judge Shelley Joseph. Joseph was charged by federal authorities in 2019 with obstruction of justice after she helped an undocumented immigrant escape out the back of her courtroom when she learned that the feds were waiting to take him into custody.

Charges against Joseph were dropped in 2022 after she agreed to a state investigation into her conduct. As of late 2024, her case was still wending its way through the disciplinary system.

Continue reading “No, the arrest of Judge Dugan is not unprecedented. Plus, DOJ targets leaks, and Bezos’ original sin”

Checking in with the Catholic press following the death of Pope Francis

Pope Francis. Photo (cc) 2016 by Long Thiên.

When a major world leader is elderly and and has been sick for as long as Pope Francis was, news organizations have a lot of time to prepare. And so it was with the Catholic press, which was ready when Francis died earlier today at 88.

NPR reporter Sylvia Poggioli, a legend in her own right, has written a lengthy obituary in which she observes:

The outspoken pope lent his voice to almost every modern issue facing the world, often taking the side of the marginalized and vulnerable. He spoke out against commercial exploitation of the environment, rich countries’ unwillingness to accept migrants, the alienation caused by technology and the lucrative sale of weapons of war.

Now for a roundup of some leading Catholic publications. I’ll start with Crux, the digital outlet launched by Boston Globe Media to take advantage of the initial excitement over the Francis papacy. The Globe cut it loose years ago, but Crux continues as an independent website. Editor John L. Allen Jr. writes:

This was the pontiff, after all, who took the name “Francis” in homage to Catholicism’s most iconic and beloved saint, the “little poor man” of Assisi; the pope who rejected the marble and gold of the Papal Apartments in favor of the Domus Santa Marta, a modest hotel on Vatican grounds; the pope who returned to the clerical residence where he’d stayed prior to his election to pack his own bag and to pay his own bill; and the pope who, 15 days later, spent his first Holy Thursday not in the ornate setting of St. Peter’s Basilica, but at a youth prison in Rome where he washed the feet of 12 inmates, including two Muslims and two women.

In a similar vein, Gerard O’Connell of America magazine stresses the pope’s humility. The magazine, by the way, is a Jesuit publication, and Francis was the first Jesuit pope. O’Connell says:

From the moment he took office, Francis astounded Vatican officials as he began to dispense with the trappings of worldly power and status that had been features of the papal court for centuries. He refused the gold cross and ring and the papal mozzetta, the short cape previous popes had worn. On his first morning as pope, he insisted on riding in a small economy car, not the papal limousine, and without police escort to the Basilica of St. Mary Major to pray before the revered icon of Our Lady, Protectress of the Roman People. Afterward, he went to pay his bill at the Vatican residence for clergy where he had resided before the conclave.

National Catholic Reporter, a liberal publication, notes that Francis did not make much progress on the position of women in the church despite his inclusive rhetoric. Joshua J. McElwee puts it this way:

A disappointment for many Catholics was Francis’ relatively slow movement with regards to opening leadership roles for women in the church. Although he made strides later in his papacy — opening all Vatican positions, including top posts, to women and allowing lay men and women to vote at synod meetings — Francis leaves the Vatican a thoroughly clerical, and male, environment.

At the official Vatican News service, Devin Watkins begins:

Pope Francis loved people being with other people. You could see it every Wednesday morning when he held his weekly General Audiences. It was even visible when he would appear at the window of his office in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace at noon on Sunday to pray the Angelus. Despite the physical distance to St. Peter’s Square below, he would wave heartily and greeted countless groups of visiting Catholics.

The Tablet, a Catholic publication from the U.K., adds a distinctly British touch, with Patrick Hudson writing:

Buckingham Palace released a message of condolence from the King, in which he said he and Queen Camilla, who visited the Pope on their wedding anniversary on 9 April, were “most deeply saddened” by his death.

“Our heavy hearts have been somewhat eased, however, to know that His Holiness was able to share an Easter greeting with the Church and the world he served with such devotion throughout his life and ministry,” he said.

Francis was a landmark pope, more progressive and modern than his predecessors, even if his actions didn’t always match his words on issues such as the role of women, the place of LGBTQ folks in the church, and the never-ending crisis over child sexual abuse at the hands of clergy members. Despite those shortcomings, he’s built an admirable, forward-looking legacy that his successor can expand on.

His funeral and the choice of the next pope are going to be enormous news stories in the days and weeks ahead.

Sewell Chan’s abrupt firing as editor of the CJR raises a lot of questions. So far, there are no answers.

Sewell Chan, right, with USA Today’s Susan Page at an event at the LBJ Library in 2024. LBJ Library photo by Laura Skelding.

I hope we learn more soon about why Columbia Journalism Review executive editor Sewell Chan was abruptly fired on Friday. In the immediate aftermath, he has been portrayed as the boss from hell, while Chan himself has claimed he was the victim of a toxic workplace culture.

I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about either Chan or Columbia Journalism School dean Jelani Cobb, who fired him. Like Chan, Cobb is a high-quality, serious journalism leader, and social-media posts suggesting that Chan was done in by the mishegas into which Columbia has descended can’t be right. But what was it?

I’m sharing this New York Times story because it does a good job of laying out what we know, which isn’t much.

Earlier this week, Chan wrote what struck me as an exceptionally fine analysis of what went wrong at Houston Landing, which announced on Tuesday that it was ceasing operations. Chan also sent a friendly email to my What Works collaborator Ellen Clegg and me after Ellen wrote a story about Sonal Shah’s announcement that she would leave as CEO of The Texas Tribune at the end of the year. (Chan is a former editor of the Tribune.)

There was no indication in Chan’s email that there was anything amiss at the CJR. And now this.

Judge in AP case stands up for the First Amendment; plus, protest coverage, and news you can’t use

By ruling in favor of The Associated Press in its lawsuit to overturn a ban imposed by the Trump White House, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden applied the First Amendment in a straightforward, entirely predictable manner. The Trump administration may appeal, but it would be shocking and deeply disturbing if McFadden’s decision isn’t upheld.

Become a Media Nation supporter for just $5 a month. You’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive commentary, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.

First, McFadden ruled that though the White House can exercise broad discretion in terms of which news organizations are allowed access to the Oval Office, Mar-a-Lago and other venues, it must do so in a neutral manner. The White House, by explicitly stating that the AP was being banned for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its proper name rather than the “Gulf of America,” was engaging in unconstitutional “viewpoint discrimination,” McFadden wrote. He continued:

The analysis is straightforward. The AP made an editorial decision to continue using “Gulf of Mexico” in its Stylebook. The Government responded publicly with displeasure and explicitly announced it was curtailing the AP’s access to the Oval Office, press pool events, and East Room activities. If there is a benign explanation for the Government’s decision, it has not been presented here.

The judge also rejected the Trump administration’s claim that the AP was seeking special privileges. First Amendment precedent holds that a news organization has no right to demand, say, an interview with a public official, or to be called on at a news conference. The White House claimed that’s what the AP was seeking.

Continue reading “Judge in AP case stands up for the First Amendment; plus, protest coverage, and news you can’t use”

The impact of NPR cuts; plus, a National Trust update, Tufts journalists and libel fallout in Everett

You may have heard that less than 1% of NPR’s budget comes from the federal government. That figure is sometimes bandied about by those who wonder why the news organization doesn’t just cut the cord and end the debate over taxpayer-funded news. The problem is that it’s more complicated than that.

Become a supporter of Media Nation. For just $5 a month, you’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive commentary, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.

In today’s New York Times morning newsletter, media reporter Benjamin Mullin explains the reality. Public radio stations in general are highly dependent on funding from the quasi-governmental Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and those member stations pay a lot for NPR programming.

In rural areas, in particular, public radio is a primary source of news when there is an emergency such as a tornado or flooding. And many of those stations would not survive a cutoff in government funding. Mullin writes:

NPR can weather the funding cut, … thanks in part to aggrieved listeners: Executives predict a sudden boom in donations if Congress defunds it, as listeners rush to defend their favorite programs. But they will likely give more in big-city markets.

Or as former CPB board member Howard Husock has put it: “NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law.”

Continue reading “The impact of NPR cuts; plus, a National Trust update, Tufts journalists and libel fallout in Everett”

Bob McChesney was a media thinker whose idealism could have led to a better world

Earlier this morning I looked up a review that I wrote for The Boston Phoenix of Robert McChesney’s breakthrough 1999 book, “Rich Media, Poor Democracy.” I had to laugh, because Bob was right and I was wrong, and for a reason I wouldn’t have expected. Over the years I had come to regard myself as more realistic than progressive media reformers like Bob, whose fertile mind produced all sorts of idealistic proposals for improving the media. In this case, though, he was the realistic one.

Become a supporter of Media Nation. For just $5 a month, you’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.

Bob McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a leading progressive thinker in media-reform circles, died last Tuesday at 72. His friend and longtime collaborator John Nichols has a moving remembrance in The Nation, writing:

As new political and societal challenges arose in an ever more chaotic moment for America and the world, Bob explained how they should be understood as fresh manifestations of an ancient danger: the concentration of power—in this case, the power of the media, in the hands of old-media CEOs and new tech oligarchs, all of whom cared more about commercial and entertainment strategies than democratic and social values.

To get back to that review: In the Oct. 1, 1999, edition of the Phoenix, I wrote about two important books about the media by then-rising scholars. Jay Rosen of New York University had just published “What Are Journalists For?,” an exploration of his involvement in the public journalism movement, which sought to involve citizen as collaborators in how the media cover their communities. McChesney’s book examined the effects of monopolistic corporate control of the news media, building on the earlier work of Ben Bagdikian, author of the oft-updated “The Media Monopoly.”

Continue reading “Bob McChesney was a media thinker whose idealism could have led to a better world”

Emigration, segregation, privacy and AI: Northeastern students flag undercovered stories

Every semester I ask my media ethics and diversity students at Northeastern to identify stories in the news that they think haven’t received as much coverage as they should have.

It’s always an enlightening experience — all of these stories have obviously received some coverage, but in my students’ view they weren’t repeated and amplified enough to penetrate the public consciousness. Right now, of course, there’s the Trump factor, as we all ponder what important news is being undercovered because of the way that the White House is dominating the news.

My class comprises nine graduate students and advanced undergrads. Here’s what they came up with.

• O Canada. The Trump administration’s brutal treatment of immigrants is getting plenty of attention, but The Atlantic reports (gift link) that Americans are looking to leave as well: “U.S. citizens now represent the majority of clients looking for an exit, through foreign citizenship, permanent residence, or a visa that allows them to live abroad.” Indeed, three prominent Yale professors, including Timothy Snyder, the author of “On Tyranny,” said this week that they’re decamping for the University of Toronto.

• Tax privacy takes a hit. The IRS may soon reach an agreement with immigration officials to turn over tax data, including the names and addresses of undocumented immigrants, according to The Washington Post, which reports: “The proposed agreement has alarmed career officials at the IRS, … who worry that the arrangement risks abusing a narrow and seldom-used section of privacy law that’s meant to help investigators build criminal cases, not enforce criminal penalties.”

• Journalists killed by Israel. Two more journalists working in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces, Al Jazeera reports. Hossam Shabat, who worked for Al Jazeera, died after his car was targeted. Another, Mohammad Mansour, who worked for Palestine Today, was killed in his house, along with his wife and son, according to reports. “The deliberate and targeted killing of a journalist, of a civilian, is a war crime,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which reports that 173 journalists, mostly Palestinian, have been killed in the Israel-Gaza war. Other reports put the number of killed media workers at more than 230.

• Human trafficking or not? A high-priced brothel that catered to wealthy clients in Cambridge, Watertown and Washington has certainly gotten plenty of coverage, but there’s an important nuance that may have been overlooked. According to Cambridge Day, prosecutors have made “no distinction” between consensual sex work and human trafficking — casting a very different light on the sensational story, which has encompassed issues ranging from victimhood to privacy.

• Exploiting pregnant women. So-called crisis pregnancy centers lure pregnant women who may be considering abortion, and who instead find themselves dealing with anti-abortion activists. “The anti-abortion movement takes advantage of their economic vulnerability,” reports The New York Times (gift link), adding that some clients are required to take parenting or even Bible classes in order to obtain medical care that they need.

• AI and climate change. There’s so much cheerleading going on in the media about artificial intelligence that the environmental cost tends to get overlooked. The reality is that AI uses enormous amounts of energy and water (for cooling), thus contributing to climate change. And though some solutions are coming on line, the Harvard Business Review reports that the “adverse environmental impacts of AI disproportionately burden communities and regions that are particularly vulnerable to the resulting environmental harms.”

• Climate case is quietly dismissed. An under-publicized case came to a quiet end recently as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal brought by 21 young people who sued the federal government on the grounds that their constitutional rights had been violated through policies that encouraged the use of fossil fuels. According to The New York Times (gift link), the Supreme Court’s action in the case of Juliana v. United States came after 10 years of legal maneuvering.

• Is it safe to fly? Plane crashes tend to be well-covered when they occur. But who is looking into the question of whether they are increasing in frequency, or the fears that passengers have about flying at a moment when it seems that safety can’t be ensured? The New York Times (gift link) pulled some of that information together by recounting three recent crashes, in Washington, Philadelphia and Alaska.

• Segregation in the South. This May will mark the 71st anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed school segregation throughout the U.S. Yet ProPublica reported recently that Alabama continues to be the home of numerous “segregation academies” — private schools set up for white families, while Black students attend increasingly segregated public schools. “ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating,” according to the report.

Why Democrats, lacking power, won’t be able to keep the war-plan texting scandal alive

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Photo (cc) 2020 by Gage Skidmore.

We are about to experience the full consequences — or, rather, the lack of consequences — stemming from the Democrats’ electoral wipeout last November.

The texting scandal exposed by The Atlantic earlier this week is serious business. As you have no doubt heard, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a group chat by national security adviser Mike Waltz. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used that chat to share war plans about an upcoming air attack in Yemen. In case you haven’t had a chance to read Goldberg’s story, here’s a gift link.

Please become a supporter of this free source of news and commentary. For just $5 a month, you’ll receive a weekly newsletter with all kinds of exclusive goodies.

The scandal raises all sorts of questions. Why were top White House officials using Signal, a commercial app not approved for secure governmental communications? Signal messages automatically expire after a certain amount of time; were steps taken to override that and preserve those messages in accordance with the law? Are Signal chats about sensitive national security issues common within Trump’s inner circle? Are any foreign adversaries listening in? (One of the participants, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, took part while he was in Russia.)

So where do we go from here? Not very far, I’m afraid. A number of observers have compared this to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, which became the cause célèbre of the 2016 presidential campaign. So consider:

• This time there will be no criminal investigation — or, if anyone tries, Donald Trump will quickly shut it down. James Comey is not walking through that door. Barack Obama, a Democrat, was president in 2016, but he was also a person of integrity who did not interfere with the independence of the Justice Department or the FBI. Such is no longer the case.

• There will be no congressional investigation, not with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate. (In 2016, Republicans held both branches.) House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called on Trump to fire Hegseth, but Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has said only that Republicans and Democrats should work together on a “full investigation.” Good luck with that.

• Absent a criminal investigation or meaningful congressional hearings, the media coverage will soon fade away. We all remember The New York Times’ obsession with Clinton’s emails, but we tend to forget that it was largely fed by governmental action, especially by Comey. It was his last-minute intervention over what he described as another round of emails — followed by a “never mind” — that probably cost Clinton the election.

The print edition of today’s Times leads with two stories related to the scandal. I thought I’d point that out given the outrage I saw on social media claiming that Tuesday’s print edition played the story down — a consequence, I’m sure, of early print deadlines and the difficulty of reacting instantly to a huge story broken by another media outlet.

Unless there are more revelations, though, the media wave is likely to crest within the next few days. And then we’ll be on to the next Trump scandal.

Correction: I had a brain cramp regarding Jeffrey Goldberg’s name. Now fixed.