Sayles Hall at Brown University. Photo (cc) 2021 by Chris Rycroft.
Recalcitrant administrators, emails and phone calls that go unreturned, and complaints from the people they write about — student journalists have a hard time, just as journalists do everywhere.
What happened to Brown University student Alex Shieh, though, went well beyond that. According to Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times, Shieh was investigated to determine whether he had violated the school’s code of conduct. Shieh’s offense was committing journalism by sending an email to 3,805 administrators in March and asking them, DOGE-like, “what tasks you performed in the past week.”
As Dominic Coletti wrote for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which took up Shieh’s cause, Shieh was accused of misrepresenting himself by claiming that he was a reporter for The Brown Spectator, a conservative student publication — except that he was telling the truth. (The Spectator had gone on hiatus but was revived recently, so it’s possible that particular accusation was technically accurate. Not that it matters. You don’t need a news outlet to exercise your First Amendment rights.)
Two other students were also investigated. Though the Times reports that all three were cleared, the university administration has earned a New England Muzzle Award for its censorious approach to journalists who ask tough questions. After all, none of those administrators who were emailed had to respond, and reportedly many of them didn’t. FIRE’s Coletti writes:
Brown’s response here flies in the face of its due process and free expression guarantees, and threatens to chill student reporting on campus. Due process is essential not just to guarantee defendants a fair shake, but to uphold the legitimacy of campus disciplinary proceedings. It also acts as a bulwark protecting students’ individual liberties.
By the way, Shieh is an occasional contributor to The Boston Globe, and Globe columnist Carine Hajjar reported on his plight several weeks ago. She noted that one of Shieh’s fellow students at the Spectator criticized him because he “sorted scores of administrators, by name, into pejorative categories … all before having conducted a single interview.”
That’s pretty poor journalistic practice. It’s also protected by the First Amendment, especially at an independent publication like the Spectator, which has no ties to the university. Indeed, the administration is trying to force the paper to drop “Brown” from its name.
“Instead of chilling dissenting takes inside its community, Brown should be keener than ever to cultivate them,” Hajjar wrote. “Otherwise it’s asking for the Trump administration to swoop in with instructions.”
Kevin Dale, executive editor of Colorado Public Radio. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
I haven’t seen any explanation for why three public radio outlets in Colorado joined NPR in suing the Trump administration over its threat to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I’m glad they did, but it seems to me that all 246 member stations ought to sign on, including GBH and WBUR in Boston.
When I was in Colorado several years ago to interview people for the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote, “What Works in Community News,” CPR was perhaps the largest news organization in the state, with a staff of 65 journalists. (I say “perhaps” because executive editor Kevin Dale thought one or two television stations might be bigger.) Some cuts were made last year as business challenges hit a number of public broadcasting outlets as well as NPR itself.
The basis of the lawsuit, writes NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, is that CPB is an independent, private nonprofit that is funded by Congress. The suit claims that the president has no right to rescind any money through an executive order; only Congress can do that. Moreover, the suit contends that this is pure viewpoint discrimination, as demonstrated by Trump’s own words — that NPR and PBS, which also relies on CPB funding, present “biased and partisan news coverage.”
It was a decision oblivious to religious and cultural differences. Roxbury Municipal Court Judge Kenneth Fiandaca ruled recently that a Muslim woman would have to remove her niqab, a religious head scarf that covered most of her face, when she testified against her ex-boyfriend, who was on trial to face charges of domestic violence.
As Sean Cotter reported in The Boston Globe, the Suffolk County district attorney’s office said the ruling was “tantamount to a dismissal” since the woman had no intention of violating her religious beliefs by complying. And thus we present a New England Muzzle Award to Judge Fiandaca for his insistence on following the letter but ignoring the spirit of the Constitution.
Fiandaca was relying on the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees that a criminal defendant has the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” In nearly all cases, that means a face-to-face encounter. Fiandaca was of the opinion that the accuser’s niqab, which covered all of her face except a slit for her eyes, amounted to a denial of the defendant’s rights.
If Fiandaca’s ruling had stood, the defendant would have immediately walked free without the jury having a chance to hear the woman’s testimony that “he was drunk and invaded her house, grabbed her by the throat, and punched her in the face while her current partner tried to fend him off,” as Cotter reported.
Fortunately a more legally astute mind prevailed. A single justice of the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, Serge Georges Jr., ruled against Fiandaca, writing, “The right to confrontation is not absolute,” explaining that other courts have “recognized limited and exceptional circumstances in which a defendant’s rights under the Sixth Amendment … appropriately yield to competing constitutional interests.”
The woman was thus allowed to testify while wearing her niqab, and a jury found the defendant not guilty. But that’s not the point. The point is that her right to practice her Muslim faith should not have prevented her from appearing in court to give her version of what happened. Thanks to Justice Georges, her religious liberties were recognized, and justice was done.
The assault on freedom of expression being waged by the Trump White House is so wide-ranging that it’s hard to know where to begin. From threats against universities to bogus lawsuits targeting news organizations, it is clear that President Trump and his thuggish allies want to silence criticism and force civil society to cower in fear.
But there is one action in particular that stands out for its cruelty as well as its blatant disregard for the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and of the press. And that’s the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk, who, at long last, was freed over the weekend. It also happens to have played out in New England, from her Soviet-style snatch-and-grab by black-clad ICE goons on the Tufts campus, where she’s a Ph.D. student, to her release at the hands of a federal judge in Vermont.
The anti-First Amendment intent of the government’s actions was underscored by U.S. District Judge William Sessions III in Burlington, Vermont, who said that he could find no reason for detaining Öztürk other than her co-authoring an op-ed piece in The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel and sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian cause.
“That literally is the case. There is no evidence here … absent consideration of the op-ed,” Sessions said, according to an account by Liz Crampton and Kyle Cheney in Politico. “Her continued detention cannot stand.”
Which is why this whole sordid affair is worthy of a New England Muzzle Award. In fact, it may be the most worthy Muzzle since I started handing them out at The Boston Phoenix 27 years ago.
But who should be the winner? My choice is Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and the dark lord of Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Over the years, Miller has made his hatred for non-white immigrants clear, and though he generally directs his rhetoric at those who are undocumented, his overall contempt for people who don’t look like him permeates the Trump gang, starting at the very orange-hued top.
For example, here’s something that Miller wrote about Muslims for his high-school newspaper, according to a profile by William D. Cohan for Vanity Fair:
Blaming America for the problems of countries whose citizens would rather spend time sewing blankets to cover women’s faces than improving the quality of life is utterly ludicrous.
And in a speech to his high-school classmates, Miller once said: “I will say and I will do things that no one else in their right mind would do.”
Now, is it fair to cite things that Miller wrote and said in high school to build a case against him today? In his case, the answer is yes, because he devolved into exactly the sort of adult that he said he would nearly a quarter of a century ago. I mean, if you want something recent, he called for the suspension of habeas corpus — a basic protection against false imprisonment guaranteed not just by the Constitution but by Magna Carta — on Friday, as Steve Vladeck writes in his newsletter, One First.
ICE goons grab Rümeysa Öztürk near Tufts.
As for Öztürk, her ordeal is not over yet. A Turkish citizen, she was attending Tufts legally on a student visa. That visa was revoked by the State Department on the grounds that her activism could create a “hostile environment for Jewish students” and that she might support “a designated terrorist organization,” according to an account by Rodrique Ngowi and Claire Rush in The Associated Press. But the State Department’s own case cites nothing except the op-ed, which merely argues that the university administration should uphold resolutions passed by the faculty senate.
In other words, Öztürk could still be deported for nothing more than expressing her views, which the First Amendment protects for anyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status. That would be an outrage, and if the Trump administration can find a judge who’s willing to go along, a second Muzzle Award might be looming on the horizon.
But at least Öztürk is free to defend herself, no longer locked up in a Louisiana detention facility, where she reportedly experienced multiple asthma attacks without access to her medication.
Sadly for all of us, it’s Miller Time. We can only hope that his day of reckoning is coming soon.
New Hampshire Statehouse in Concord. Photo (cc) 2005 by Ken Lund.
New Hampshire state Rep. Glenn Cordelli says he hasn’t read “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” 1999 young-adult novel by Stephen Chbosky that deals with issues such as sexual assault and mental health. But that hasn’t stopped him from having an opinion about it.
“If people think that this crap is culture, then we’re in bad trouble in New Hampshire,” the Republican legislator said at a recent hearing, according to a report by Anthony Brooks of WBUR Radio. “These explicit sexual materials have no place in our schools.”
When pressed by Democratic Sen. Debra Altschiller as to whether Cordelli had actually read the entire book, Cordelli replied that he had not — and that he had “no interest” in completing her homework assignment.
Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped Cordelli from filing a bill that would ease the way for parents to challenge books they don’t want their children to have access to. If the bill becomes law, such books could be “restricted or removed from public school classrooms and libraries,” Brooks writes. “The bill would allow parents to their take complaints to the state Department of Education, and expands state obscenity laws.”
For this assault on the right of kids to be educated, Cordelli has richly earned a New England Muzzle Award.
Cordelli’s proposal, House Bill 324, would ban depictions of “nudity,” “sadomasochistic abuse,” “sexual conduct” and “sexual excitement,” all of which are described in such excruciatingly explicit detail that one suspects the legislation itself might be banned from the classroom should it ever be enacted.
Brooks’ report also quotes Katie DeAngelis, a New Hampshire woman who said that reading Chbosky’s book helped her deal with her own experience of sexual assault. “What it did do is make me feel a lot less alone,” she told WBUR.
By the way, Cordelli appears to be quite a piece of work. According to Ethan DeWitt of the New Hampshire Bulletin, he has also filed a bill that would subject anyone who helps an unemancipated pregnant minor get an abortion to criminal and civil penalties.
The book ban that Cordelli and his fellow Republican legislators are pushing for comes in the midst of a repressive political climate in the Granite State. Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and though Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte has at least some moderate credentials, it’s unclear whether she would sign the bill or not.
This has become a perennial. Every semester, I ask students in my journalism ethics class to come up with a fifth principle that could be added to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. The code identifies four broad principles: Seek Truth and Report It; Minimize Harm; Act Independently; and Be Accountable. Each of them is fleshed out in some detail.
On Wednesday evening, I asked my current class, a small seminar comprising graduate students and advanced undergrads, to think of a fifth principle in three teams of three students apiece. Here’s what they came up with. I’ve done some minor editing in the interests of parallel construction, but otherwise this is entirely their work.
Ensure accessibility for your audience
Use plain language whenever possible.
Use multiple formats and multimedia as resources permit.
Reporters and sources should reflect the diversity of the community.
Neighborhoods and areas within the coverage area should be covered equitably.
A news organization’s website and social media should be ADA accessible.*️⃣
Place news coverage in context
Provide the full picture of all aspects of a story.
Give credit where it is due, especially to other news organizations.
Acknowledge relevant communities, perspectives and historical background.
Provide needed follow-up for the audience.
Balance empathy and professionalism
Show respect for sources and subjects of coverage.
Create a relationship that enables your source to trust your intentions.
Clarify to your source the scope of the article and how they might be affected after publication.
If you maintain relationships with sources, limit that to professional contacts rather than personal friendships.
*️⃣ There are, in fact, resources for ensuring that a website is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. As for social media, users are often encouraged to add text to images so that people with visual impairments can understand what an image represents. Hashtags should use upper- and lower-case in instances where confusion might result — for instance, screen-readers might trip up on the hashtag #firstamendment, so use #FirstAmendment instead.
Media notes
• Post journos petition Bezos. Since Jeff Bezos has clearly lost interest in The Washington Post, you have to wonder if he might disentangle himself from a property that he has clumsily described as a “complexifier” for him. The latest, according to NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, is that some 400 Post journalists have signed a letter asking that Bezos meet with them. The letter says in part: “We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave.”
• Muzzle Award follow-up. An order to the police chief in Burlington, Vermont, that he route all communications through the mayor’s office came at the instigation of Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, reports Colin Flanders of Seven Days. I gave Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak a New England Muzzle Award for silencing Police Chief Jon Murad and, more seriously, for following up by scheduling a press availability but failing to invite all of the city’s news organizations. George was concerned about Murad’s public statements disparaging a notorious repeat offender, calling one statement “unnecessary and performative” and saying that he “really needs to knock it off.”
• Judge gets access to BoMag notes. Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone has received off-the-record notes from Boston magazine reporter Gretchen Voss’ July 2023 interview with murder suspect Karen Read, who will soon return to court following a mistrial last year, reports Travis Andersen in The Boston Globe. Judge Cannone will privately review the notes before ruling on whether to grant the prosecution’s request for access to Voss’ reporting materials. BoMag has fought that effort on freedom-of-the-press grounds; more background here.
Perhaps no city has benefited from a forceful response to the depredations of Alden Global Capital more than Baltimore. In 2021, the slash-and-burn hedge fund purchased Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers, including such storied titles as the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant.
Now Angela Fu of Poynter Online has written a deep dive into the Baltimore media scene on what happened after Alden’s subsequent sale of the Sun a year ago to David Smith, the head of Sinclair Broadcast Group, infamous for imposing his right-wing views on newscasts at the company’s national empire of television stations (in New England, Sinclair has stations in Portland and Providence).
The other principal subject of Fu’s article is The Baltimore Banner, a digital nonprofit begun in 2022 by wealthy hotelier Stewart Bainum after his efforts to purchase the Sun — and then the entire Tribune chain — were spurned by Tribune’s board. Unlike most nonprofits, even some of the larger ones that Ellen Clegg and I included in our book, “What Works in Community News,” the Banner is what you might call a full-service news project, with a newsroom staff of about 80. (The Sun now employs just 56.) The Banner offers breaking news, sports, arts and culture in addition to the accountability journalism that is the hallmark of such projects. Fu writes:
While the Sun battles staff attrition, the Banner continues to grow. Since June, it has launched an “Education Hub” and expanded business coverage. The Banner is also working to extend its footprint across the state, hiring a number of regional reporters to cover counties that lack local news sources and starting region-specific newsletters. Ongoing experiments include live blogs, vertical video on the site’s homepage and comment sections on certain stories for subscribers.
Fu’s reporting is detailed and even-handed. At the Sun, she reports that there has been a wave of departures since the Smith takeover and widespread angst over his forcing the paper to run second-rate stories from the Baltimore television station that he owns. Smith has also ordered up critical reporting on the city council while funding a campaign to shrink the size of the council from 14 members to eight.
But though the Banner has been widely praised for its all-in approach to filling the gap created by the Sun’s decline, Fu writes that it has also come under criticism for taking an outmoded approach to reporting on law enforcement and for covering the city’s opioid crisis (in partnership with The New York Times) in a way that failed to acknowledge the work of grassroots organizations.
Also of note: The Banner’s board of directors includes Brian McGrory, chair of Boston University’s journalism program and a former editor of The Boston Globe. The city is also served by the Baltimore Beat, a nonprofit that covers the Black community.
What I found kind of odd about Fu’s story was the framing. She found that the Sun under Alden did not turn into the fiasco many had predicted, and that the real newsroom exodus didn’t begin until after Smith acquired it. She begins by describing the competition between the Banner and the Sun in covering the catastrophic accident that took out the Francis Scott Key Bridge last March, competition that she says was good for the city, and she wonders whether that brief moment is closing as Smith imposes his will.
Fu’s done the work, so I’m not disagreeing with any of this. Nor do I disagree with her observation that Alden may have held back on budget cuts at the Sun because it didn’t want to fall behind the Banner. But did anyone think it was going to last? In fact, it took Alden less than three years after it bought the Sun to turn around and sell it to a terrible owner who is transforming the paper into something of a right-wing laughingstock. Does it really matter if Alden destroyed the Sun by cutting it or by letting David Smith ruin it? Pick your poison.
The reality is that Baltimore is incredibly lucky to have one news source of record, and that source is now The Baltimore Banner. Bainum tells Fu that the Banner is eventually going to have to break even and survive on its own. Let’s hope the community gives it the support that it needs.
Media notes
• Muzzle follow-up. Last July, I gave a New England Muzzle Award to Waltham Community Access Corp., which claimed a rival had violated its copyright by grabbing clips of government meetings, even though WCAC receives guaranteed funding from licensing fees mandated by state law. That rival, a citizens journalism group known as Channel 781, sued, claiming that WCAC had acted in bad faith. Now a federal judge, Patti Saris, has refused to dismiss the suit and has instead asked the two sides to work out a settlement, Aubrey Hawkes reports in The Waltham Times.
• Going hybrid in New Hampshire. The Keene Sentinel of New Hampshire, one of New England’s feistier independent daily newspapers, is emulating many of its for-profit peers by starting a nonprofit arm that will accept donations to pay for certain types of public interest reporting. According to an announcement, the Local Journalism Fund aims to raise $75,000 in 2025, and will kick it off with a public event on Jan. 21 featuring two journalists from the Uvalde News Leader in Texas, which covered a horrific mass shooting at a local elementary school in 2022.
• The blizzard of Ozy. I never thought anyone could make me care about the decline and fall Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson and his associates. I have to say that I wasn’t even sure what it was, though I have since learned that it published meme-friendly news (and some serious stuff) in the same digital space as BuzzFeed, Mic and Upworthy. At my friend Emily Rooney’s urging, though, I listened to a three-part podcast on Watson’s rise, fall and his criminal trial hosted by the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s little more than a conversation between host Josh Hersh and my former “Beat the Press colleague Susie Banikarim, who covered the trial. That doesn’t sound too exciting, but — as Emily promised — it’s smart and riveting. Highly recommended.
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.
It might be high-handed for a mayor to order her police chief to funnel all public statements through her office, but it isn’t necessarily such an outrage that it warrants a coveted New England Muzzle Award. But to compound that by announcing she would have a press availability to which not all local news organizations were invited — well, come on down and claim your prize, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak.
Mulvaney-Stanak, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and a leader in that state’s Progressive Party, signed an executive order last Wednesday ordering the Burlington Police Department to route all press releases through her office before distributing them to the public. “People need the basic facts of situations for the sake of public safety and nothing more than that,” the mayor was quoted as saying.
According to Colin Flanders, a reporter for the Burlington-based newspaper Seven Days, Mulvaney-Stanak had “raised concerns” with Police Chief Jon Murad “about the content of his department’s public statements in the past. Murad has used press releases in recent years to criticize the court system and a perceived lack of accountability for repeat offenders.”
Murad was silenced after a defense lawyer asked a judge to impose a gag order on the Burlington police in response to statements by the chief concerning a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Murad had accused the man of “violent, incorrigible, antisocial behavior” — and some of Murad’s comments were repeated on the public radio program “On Point,” produced by WBUR in Boston and distributed nationwide. It’s hard to imagine that the mayor was pleased by that.
Meanwhile, Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, writing in the Vermont Daily Chronicle for Vermont News First, reported on Friday that Mulvaney-Stanak would speak to the press at a media availability that afternoon — but that Vermont News First, which had been dogging the mayor over her acceptance of free donated meals, had not been invited. After Donoghue’s story was posted, he added an update reporting that Seven Days hadn’t been invited, either.
“She doesn’t answer her cellphone and actually has asked VNF to stop calling,” Donoghue wrote.
(Update: Donoghue later explained to me that VNF is his own journalism endeavor and that the Vermont Daily Chronicle is one of his clients.)
Well, if Seven Days and Vermont News First were left off the invitation list, who was invited? The city’s daily, the Burlington Free Press, didn’t report on the mayor’s muzzling of Chief Murad until today, and there are no quotes from her in the article. There’s nothing about any sort of press availability in the statewide news organization VTDigger, whose reporter Corey McDonald wrote about Mulvaney-Stanak’s silencing of Murad last Thursday, on the same day as Seven Days. Nor is there anything from Vermont Public Radio.
Chief Murad, who’s leaving his post this April, may or may not have been out of line in disparaging a notorious frequent flier in the criminal justice system. But holding law enforcement to account is difficult enough without the mayor stepping in and lowering the cone of silence.
For Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak to worsen that situation by creating the impression that she would exclude some news outlets from a media availability (it’s not clear whether that availability ever happened) goes beyond acceptable and pushes this story into the Muzzle Zone.
Media notes
• Donald Trump v. Nancy Barnes. Among the journalism organizations Donald Trump has targeted for libel suits is the Pulitzer Board, which awarded a Pulitzer Prize to The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2018 for their reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia. Trump is claiming the award was somehow libelous — and Ben Smith of Semafor reports that he’s is suing not just the board but individual members of that board, including, locally, Boston Globe executive editor Nancy Barnes.
• A liberal counterpart to The Free Press? Another star opinion journalist has fled the rapidly declining Washington Post. Jennifer Rubin, a conservative-turned-centrist-turned-liberal with a strong social media presence, is moving to Substack, where she’ll be the editor-in-chief of a new publication called The Contrarian — which, she tells CNN’s Brian Stelter, will “combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face.” Stelter’s report and Rubin’s introductory post suggest that The Contrarian could serve as a welcome liberal counterpart to the right-leaning Free Press, founded in 2021 by disgruntled New York Times opinion journalist Bari Weiss.
• New Jersey’s post-print future. This past fall I observed that Advance Local was closing its New Jersey print newspapers, the largest of which is The Star-Ledger of Newark, and doubling down on digital with its statewide NJ.com site. Now Marc Pfeiffer, a policy fellow at Rutgers University, has written a commentary for NJ Spotlight News arguing that print is not essential to maintaining a rich media ecosystem. “The future of New Jersey news is primarily digital — and that’s OK,” Pfeiffer writes. “What matters isn’t the delivery method but the quality and accessibility of local journalism. Our democracy depends on having informed citizens who know what’s happening in their State House, county seats, and town halls.”
• An update on that Colorado assault. A couple of weeks ago I noted that a television journalist in Grand Junction, Colorado, had allegedly been assaulted by a Trump supporter who followed his car to the journalist’s television station, tried to choke him, and shouted “This is Trump’s America now.” In his latest newsletter, Corey Hutchins writes that the 22-year-old journalist, Ja’Ronn Alex, is out on paid leave while Patrick Egan, the taxi driver who’s been charged, is out on bail, with his lawyer claiming that he suffers from mental health issues.
When a community has been without a reliable source of local news for some time, government officials can become accustomed to operating without much scrutiny. And when a feisty startup arrives on the scene to report stories that had gone unreported, that can prove to be quite a shock to the powers that be.
Which is as good an explanation as any for what’s unfolding in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The venerable Old Colony Memorial had become virtually a ghost newspaper under the Gannett chain’s ownership, mainly publishing regional coverage from other Gannett papers. Then, in 2023, the Plymouth Independent, a nonprofit digital outlet, arrived on the scene.
The Independent is larger and more ambitious than many such projects; the editor and CEO is Mark Pothier, a former Globe journalist and, before that, editor of the Old Colony Memorial back when it was still covering local news. One of the Independent’s directors is Walter Robinson, a Plymouth resident who’s best known for leading the Globe’s Spotlight Team when it was exposing the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
One Plymouth official who is taking particular umbrage at the increased scrutiny being brought by the Independent is the town manager, Derek Brindisi. According to a message to readers that Pothier published today, Brindisi has ordered “all appointed town officials to cease all communication with the PI.” The only exception is that town officials will be permitted to respond to public-records requests from the Independent, which, after all, they are required to do under state law.
For his unwarranted attempts to prevent the Independent from holding local government accountable, Brindisi is receiving a New England Muzzle Award. “In my decades as a journalist, Brindisi’s blanket edict is like nothing I have ever encountered,” writes Pothier, who also says:
Our job as journalists is to hold government officials accountable and to provide readers with the reliable information they need to foster a functioning democracy. In that respect, the relationship between governments and journalists is necessarily adversarial. We’re supposed to be skeptical of people in power.
Officials, paid public professionals, and Town Meeting members make decisions involving policies and spending that inevitably spark debate. They serve in the public’s interest. The Independent reports on them in the public’s interest.
Before the PI arrived, most Plymouth residents — including myself — had a hard time finding out what was going on in town. Perhaps naively, I figured officials would welcome the chance to present the town’s perspective on important issues. Some have — or did until this latest order to stop talking to us. Brindisi, however, has only reached out to express displeasure with our coverage.
Pothier goes into some detail about a couple of routine stories that upset Brindisi. One was written by Andrea Estes, a former investigative reporter for the Globe. (Estes’ career at the Globe came to a bad end for reasons that have never been adequately explained, but there is no question that she’s an experienced and accomplished journalist.) The other was written by Fred Thys, a former reporter for WBUR Radio in Boston and VTDigger, a leading investigative news outlet in Vermont.
Brindisi, for his part, childishly refers to the Independent as the “Plymouth Enquirer” and has complained about the Independent’s “distasteful reporting” and efforts to “humiliate town officials.”
This isn’t the first Muzzle to be awarded to Plymouth officials in recent months. Back in July, I gave one to select board member Kevin Canty for suggesting that an unnamed person was risking prison for recording the audio of a board meeting without informing those present. Canty was referring to Thys, who had made no effort to hide the fact that he was recording the meeting, which was also being live-streamed on YouTube.
Thys may have been in technical violation of the law, but seriously? “Canty and I later spoke about the incident,” Pothier writes. “We both agreed it could have been handled better, perhaps with a simple request that Thys announce he was recording.”
Pothier also credits Canty with working to mend the rift between Brindisi and the Independent, but that those efforts have come to naught.
Photo (cc) 2015 by Tom Woodward. Digitally edited to remove license plate number.
In 2020, Massachusetts took what was billed as a major step forward in holding police officers accountable. Following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the state created the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission “to improve policing and enhance public confidence in law enforcement by implementing a fair process for mandatory certification, discipline, and training for all peace officers in the Commonwealth.”
But according to an investigation by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, the POST Commission has not collected the employment data it needs to do its job. The story, by BINJ editorial director Chris Faraone and Sam Stecklow, an investigative journalist currently on a fellowship with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Invisible Institute of Chicago, found that Mass. POST and its director, Enrique Zuniga, made a series of decisions that experts say undermine the agency’s mission. Faraone and Stecklow write:
Despite passing regulations that instruct it otherwise, POST’s database does not include the full employment history of all of the officers that are going through the state’s recertification process — only for officers who have had discipline sustained against them. This prevents the press and public from analyzing data about what are often known as “wandering cops,” who transfer between departments after committing misconduct.
Employment history data are basic information that 27 other states around the country, including Vermont, have released to a national reporting project.
“It doesn’t make any sense that the previous employment of these officers wouldn’t be tracked and recorded if the ultimate goal was to prevent police misconduct from occurring,” Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition,” is quoted as saying. “We’re only getting half the story without this information.”
Over the course of 3,500 words, Faraone and Stecklow go into great detail in explaining what data are missing and what the implications might be. As for the POST Commission, it has earned a New England Muzzle Award for only partially lifting the veil of secrecy that protects police officers who’ve been accused of misconduct.
The story, by the way, is the product of a partnership between BINJ and the Invisible Institute that Faraone explains here. Their investigation is being published not just by BINJ’s HorizonMass affiliate but also by The Shoestring in Western Massachusetts, Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World newsletter, and about a half-dozen hyperlocal weeklies and other publications.
And lest we overlook the mutual backscratching opportunities here, I’ve interviewed BINJ and HorizonMass co-founder Jason Pramas on “What Works,” our podcast about the future of local news, while Faraone and Stecklow give a shoutout to the Muzzle Awards in their article.
As Dominic Coletti wrote for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which took up Shieh’s cause, Shieh was accused of misrepresenting himself by claiming that he was a reporter for The Brown Spectator, a conservative student publication — except that he was telling the truth. (The Spectator had gone on hiatus but was revived recently, so it’s possible that particular accusation was technically accurate. Not that it matters. You don’t need a news outlet to exercise your First Amendment rights.)
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