Madison County, N.Y. Photo (cc) 2011 by Doug Kerr.
It’s almost the end of the month, which means that the free September shares that I still have for The New York Times will disappear. So here are gift links to three stories that caught my eye earlier today. Enjoy!
► “How 106 People Got Together to Stop a School Shooting — Before It Happened,” by John Leland. The remarkable tale of a team in rural Madison County, New York, comprising law enforcement, mental health professionals, social workers and educators that intervened with a desperately unhappy high school student who was being bullied by his peers and derided as “the next school shooter.” The team’s intervention may have saved his life — as well as those of his fellow students.
► “To Get People Off the Street, He Pays for a One-Way Ticket Home,” by Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff. John Alle is a wealthy businessman in Santa Monica, California, who’s taken the vexing problem of homelessness into his own hands by paying people living on the streets to go back to where they came from. Alle himself was the victim of a severe beating at the hands of a homeless person, and he counts Stephen Miller as one of his heroes. Is Alle a good guy or a bad guy? There are no definitive answers here, but the article and accompanying visuals will make you think.
“NJ Spotlight News” anchor Briana Vannozzi, right, interviews U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.
NJ PBS chair Scott Kobler has issued a statement in which he criticizes New Jersey government officials for “intransigence or maybe even apathy” over the public broadcasting funding crisis.
As I noted Wednesday, NJ PBS may shut down in June 2026 following a breakdown in negotiations between the state and WNET of New York, the public media organization that runs the New Jersey operation. In addition to losing some $1.5 million in federal funds, NJ PBS’s allotment of state funds has been cut from $1 million for the coming year to just $250,000.
The cuts are likely to affect NJ Spotlight News, a website covering statewide politics and public policy as well as the name of NJ PBS’s daily half-hour newscast. The two operations merged in 2019. Although WNET has pledged to keep the news operation alive online and on its New York-based station, Thirteen, regardless of what happens, its reporting capacity is likely to be reduced unless a well-heeled benefactor or two steps up.
A network of more than 1,200 websites better known for publishing so-called pink slime designed to look like legitimate local news is now branching out.
Kirk Carapezza reports for GBH News that Metric Media is flooding public colleges and universities in Massachusetts with public-records requests in order to find what its founder, Brian Timpone, calls “anti-American” classroom materials. The company is also seeking to learn the number of Chinese nationals enrolled as students at those institutions.
“There’s great public interest in what public universities are teaching students,” Timpone told Carapezza. “We want to see what they’re teaching and why.” Among the institutions that Metric Media has targeted are Salem State University, UMass Boston and Bridgewater State University.
I was one of the people who Kirk interviewed, and as I told him, I was surprised to see Metric Media taking such a pro-active role. Timpone’s various media ventures over the years have been involved in passive, money-making operations such as publishing alleged local news produced by distant employees, some in the Philippines, as the public radio program “This American Life” reported way back in 2012.
In recent years, Metric Media pink-slime sites such as North Boston News (a travel tip for those of you who aren’t from around here: North Boston is not a place that actually exists) have been publishing weirdly irrelevant slop, perhaps produced by AI. If you look right now, for instance, North Boston News features repetitive pseudo-stories on school test scores, high school sports and gas prices.
In 2021, the Columbia Journalism Review published the results of an investigation that showed Metric Media has ties to a variety of right-wing interests.
The public-records law in Massachusetts is notoriously weak, yet teaching materials such as syllabuses and reading lists at public institutions are arguably covered by it. Since I teach at Northeastern University, a private institution, it’s not something I have to be concerned about. On the face of it, I’m not sure why the two should be treated differently.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what Metric Media does with this material. And by “interesting,” I don’t mean to suggest that it will be anything good.
First, though I’m deeply skeptical about the power of boycotts and protests, this one seems to have worked. A combination of cancellations, petitions, announcements by creatives that they would no longer work for Disney, and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s trash-talking his successor, Bob Iger (though not by name), apparently had a lot to do with the lifting of Kimmel’s suspension.
Second, there are a few factors that have yet to play out. FCC chair Brendan Carr, whose threat to Disney and to broadcasters that continued to carry Kimmel’s show is what started all this, lied on Monday by saying he had not threatened anyone. Well, if that’s what he’s claiming now and he’s sticking to it, then that’s good news.
But though Kimmel may be coming back to ABC, we have not yet heard a final decision from Nexstar or Sinclair, two giant broadcasting companies that together own about 25% of the country’s ABC affiliates. Nexstar is trying to pull off a merger with another media company and needs FCC approval.
Sinclair is controlled by right-wing interests, and the company went so far last week as to demand that Kimmel apologize for his mildly offensive monologue about Donald Trump and the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and make a sizable donation to Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Kirk.
George W. Bush in 2001. Public domain photo via the U.S. National Archives.
FCC chair Brendan Carr’s thuggish threat to crack down on media companies following late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk differed from past instances only in that he said it out loud.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an appearance on a right-wing podcaster’s show. And Disney, Nexstar and Sinclair, all of which have significant regulatory issues before the FCC, wasted no time in making sure that Kimmel was banished from ABC’s airwaves.
Trump himself put it even more bluntly, saying that broadcasters who are “against me” should lose their licenses, reported Zoë Richards of NBC News.
The first comparison that comes to mind, naturally, is Richard Nixon’s threat in 1973 to take away the licenses of two Florida television stations owned by The Washington Post amid the paper’s dogged reporting on the Watergate scandal. “The difference here is that Nixon talked about the scheme only privately,” the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote about the scheme many years later.
Two departures from The Boston Globe to take note of: Teresa Hanafin, a longtime veteran of the newsroom, is retiring, and Melissa Taboada is moving to Texas in order to run a local news initiative for The Texas Tribune.
Hanafin ran the Globe’s local news operation as metro editor in the late ’90s and later became one of the paper’s digital pioneers at Boston.com and with some of the Globe’s newsletter initiatives. The email to the staff, provided to me by a trusted source, is from senior editorial director for newsletters Jacqué Palmer and deputy managing editor for audience Heather Ciras.
Globe Opinion’s original headline. It was later changed to “Charlie Kirk murder: America needs dialogue, not bullets” online and “An attack on democracy” in print.
Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham has quit the paper’s editorial board in protest over last week’s editorial (sub. req.) praising the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s commitment to free speech — an editorial that was widely derided by critics who objected to Kirk’s often hateful rhetoric. Graham will remain as a columnist and will continue to write her Globe newsletter, Outtakes.
Graham confirmed those developments in an email exchange but would not offer any further comment.
A Globe spokesperson said of Graham’s decision: “We are grateful to Renée Graham for her valuable contributions to our team and to the editorial board. We respect her decision to resign from the board and are pleased that she will continue in her role as a Globe Opinion associate editor, columnist, and newsletter writer.”
Kirk was murdered during an appearance at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. It’s been the top story in the news ever since given the public nature of his death (including a graphic video), the devotion of his millions of followers (Donald Trump and JD Vance among them), and his comments targeting Black women, members of the LGBTQ community, immigrants and others.
As best as I can determine, in the 11 months since The Washington Post’s opinion section descended into Jeff Bezos-imposed turmoil, no one had been fired — until now. Some people quit in protest, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, or because they disagreed with Bezos’ mandate to focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets,” such as opinion editor David Shipley. But Karen Attiah is the first to lose her job.
Attiah, who had been a columnist for the Post, took to her Substack newsletter on Monday to announce that she had been sacked for a series of posts on Bluesky in which she condemned gun violence following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday. By her own account, her only post even mentioning Kirk was this one, quoting Kirk’s own words:
“Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot”. -Charlie Kirk
Some have argued that Kirk’s quote had been taken out of context because he was referring to specific Black women and was characterizing what others were saying, as David Gilmour writes at Mediaite. To which I would observe that Kirk’s quotes and what he meant are sometimes difficult to parse. Attiah is hardly the only journalist who may have misconstrued something that he said.
Attiah, noting that she was the Post’s last remaining full-time Black columnist, wrote:
My commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.
And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation — claiming disparagement on race. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.
Media reporter Oliver Darcy obtained (sub. req.) a copy of the letter in which Attiah was fired, from human resources head Wayne Connell, who claimed that she had disparaged white men. Connell’s letter begins with this:
I am writing to inform you that The Post is terminating your employment effective immediately for gross misconduct. Your public comments on social media regarding the death of Charlie Kirk violate The Post’s social media policies, harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff.
Of course, taking to social media in the immediate aftermath of a tragic event such as the Kirk assassination is fraught with danger. Opinion journalists, though, should be able to post freely as long as they maintain the same tone they would be expected to adhere to in their day job. Attiah’s posts on Bluesky were certainly provocative, but they strike me as being well within the bounds of what is acceptable.
Then again, this may have amounted to a convenient excuse to get rid of a troublesome internal critic. Darcy reported last month (sub. req.) that Attiah had a tense meeting with the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, and declined to take a buyout that was being offered even though O’Neal was trying to push out anyone whose work “work didn’t align with his vision for the section.”
Poynter Online media columnist Tom Jones reports that the Post’s union issued a statement condemning Attiah’s firing “and will continue to support her and defend her rights.” What form that support may take is not specified.
Meanwhile, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter writes that Attiah’s newsletter, The Golden Hour, gained 10,000 new subscribers in the immediate aftermath of her post about having been fired. Then, too, Matthew Dowd, fired by MSNBC last week after he said “hateful words lead to hateful thoughts lead to hateful actions” while commenting on Kirk’s murder, is also promoting his Substack newsletter, Lighthouse Sentinel.
We are in the midst of a right-wing backlash, led by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are using Kirk’s tragic death as an opportunity to punish their critics. As the BBC notes, “Pilots, medical professionals, teachers and one Secret Service employee are among those who have been suspended or sacked for social media posts that were deemed inappropriate about Kirk’s death.”
Of course, no one should be celebrating Kirk’s death, which was a tragedy for his family and friends. But for the MAGA movement to use it as an opportunity to unleash a witch hunt against their opponents is as sickening as it is predictable. I don’t think this is going to blow over any time soon.
Following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday, non-MAGA commentators who have felt compelled to weigh in have struggled to find the right balance between expressing their loathing for what Kirk stood for without making it seem like they were celebrating his death.
Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as someone embracing the reasoned debate central to democracy, although he became famous by establishing a database designed to dox professors who expressed opinions he disliked so they would be silenced (I am included on this list).
Indeed, she wrote about her inclusion on Kirk’s Professor Watchlist shortly after it was established in 2016, saying, “I am dangerous not to America but to the people soon to be in charge of it, people like the youngster who wrote this list.” She closed with this: “No, I will not shut up. America is still worth fighting for.”
On the afternoon that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was murdered, three teenagers, including the shooter, were reported to be in critical condition following a school shooting in Evergreen, Colorado. The shooter later died.
The only difference between these two awful events is that we’ve become numb to gun violence aimed at our children. Indeed, the Colorado incident barely registered in the media, while Kirk’s assassination got front-page coverage and was virtually the only story on cable news Wednesday evening.
What can any of us say at a moment like this except that it was just another day in America? Oliver Darcy offers a rundown (sub. req.) of recent incidents involving political violence:
Acts of political extremism are surfacing with alarming regularity in this country. Paul Pelosi was brutally attacked in his own home. Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer. Luigi Mangione was charged in December with killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in what authorities described as a politically motivated act. In the spring, an arsonist set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence and prosecutors later charged a suspect with attempted murder. In Minnesota over the summer, a man was charged after stalking Democrats and murdering House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband. Last month, a gunman sprayed more than 180 bullets at the Centers for Disease Control headquarters, killing a police officer. Each of the incidents were different, but together they paint an unsettling portrait: political violence is increasingly becoming the norm in America.
Darcy is correct in observing that the rise of politically motivated attacks is deeply disturbing. So is the ongoing epidemic of school shootings — not to mention mass gun violence in general. Let’s not forget the horror that unfolded in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023, when a gunman killed 18 people and injured 13 more.
The Charlie Kirk killing is different in that it has all the appearances of a political assassination; it took place in front of a large crowd of students at Utah Valley University; and the shooting was captured on video that then went viral on social media. One of the videos making the rounds was among the most graphic and disturbing I’ve seen.
Then, too, there was Kirk’s notoriety. He was about as famous as it is possible for a political figure to become without actually serving as an elected official or in a high government position. He was, as you no doubt know, notorious on the left, which led to a lot of offensive social media posts from people who ought to know better. MSNBC fired conservative-turned-liberal commentator Matthew Dowd after he walked right up to the edge of suggesting that Kirk got what he deserved. Dowd later apologized.
There’s really nothing to say at a time like this except that we have to do something about gun violence in this country, and that violence of any kind needs to be firmly condemned by all of us. Our thoughts today should be with Charlie Kirk and his family — as well as the families of the school shooting victims in Colorado, in addition to all the other victims of shootings, past and future.
