The Washington Post blows the whistle on a dubious investigative website

The Washington Post published a story of paramount importance last Friday. According to reporter Elahe Izadi, a website called the Checks and Balances Project is offering the sort of deep investigative reporting that most local news outlets no longer have the resources to carry out.

But there is a huge catch. There have been some prominent instances of pay-to-play, with organzations making donations that are followed by stories that will either make them look good or their enemies or competitors look bad. Izadi writes:

When it investigated the hotel industry, it was after it had received a grant from Airbnb. A high-profile investigation into Arizona utility regulators came after Checks and Balances received money from a solar power company, the company disclosed in 2015.

Now Checks and Balances is investigating a massive hospital system in Virginia named Sentara, publishing regular stories and asking patients and employees to send tips that might reveal how the nonprofit hospital “piled up $6 billion in liquid assets,” among other issues.

These stories started appearing the same month that a medical school in a complex dispute with Sentara hired a public relations firm that happens to share a founder and financial ties with Checks and Balances.

Communities are vulnerable to a site like Checks and Balances, of course, because of the demise of local news over the past generation. If your local newspaper shut down or has been so decimated that it can’t offer more than cursory news coverage, then you’re going to be vulnerable to arrangements like this.

The Checks and Balances website touts itself as an “Investigative Watchdog Blog
Holding Government Officials, Lobbyists and Corporate Management Accountable to the Public.” Izadi is careful to point out that the project has done good work over the years, some of which has been picked up by larger media outlets. Its editor was formerly employed by USA Today. Scott Peterson, the executive director, told the Post that funders do not influence the site’s journalism — but Izadi writes that those sources are not always disclosed to readers, either. Moreover, most of its funding comes from an organization called Renew American Prosperity, which does not reveal its donors. From the organization’s website:

We encourage you to be public about your identity as a donor. We’re proud to have the support of such notable funders as philanthropist Lucy Rockefeller Waletzky, legendary entrepreneur Brad Mattson of Siva Power, Silicon Valley attorney Mike Danaher, and communicator extraordinaire Matthew Lewis.

Should you want to keep your support for Renew American Prosperity private, as do others, we also welcome your donations. Private donor support will remain strictly private, out of respect for 501(c)4 tax law that allows donors who wish to be private to remain so. We will never sell or make available to other organizations our supporter lists.

Peterson pushed back on the notion that Checks and Balances isn’t transparent, arguing that what he’s doing is no different from what mainstream outlets do when they accept advertising or, in the case of nonprofits, grants and donations. And of course these things have to be seen on a continuum. When news executives decline to report an important story because they don’t want to offend an advertiser, that’s a scandal — if the public ever learns about it. Ethical nonprofit news outlets are scrupulous about disclosing the sources of their funding, and in making it clear to funders that they will have no influence over coverage. Checks and Balances, at least as described by the Post, appears to go beyond that.

The Post’s story comes at a time when we’re also dealing with the scourge of “pink slime” journalism — community websites set up in areas that are unserved or underserved by local news outlets and that are actually controlled by partisan political interests. As I wrote last fall, most of these sites are Republican, but some are Democratic as well. What they’re not is independent, which is a key part of ethical journalism.

Coming up with funding for investigative projects, especially at the local and regional level, is incredibly difficult, and the Checks and Balances folks may have believed they could cut ethical corners without it harming the integrity of their work. But it looks like dangerous business to me, and I hope it’s not the start of a trend.

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(Not) the Weekly World News

At the same time that Gannett is taking a principled stand by refusing to turn over IP data to the FBI, its executives are also making fools of themselves. I tend to be fairly relaxed about front-page ads on the grounds that the money’s got to come from somewhere. But get a load of this:

Reporting by DigBoston and BINJ helps delay snooping by surveillance cameras

Reporting by DigBoston and the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism helped stave off a serious violation of civil liberties — at least for now.

Dan Atkinson reported on March 25 that “city officials are quietly looking to hire consultants to maintain a linked network of more than 1,000 video cameras across the Metro Boston area, with remote access shared across nine cities.”

The move came, Atkinson noted, even as Boston City Council members were pushing for greater oversight of surveillance technology.

On Friday, The Boston Globe reported that Acting Mayor Kim Janey will not move forward with the plan, though she declined to kill the proposal altogether. The Globe’s Danny McDonald quoted a Janey spokeswoman as saying that she “is directing her staff to take a fresh look at this request…. Mayor Janey remains committed to strengthening public safety, transparency and accountability for the City of Boston.”

So kudos to DigBoston, the city’s last alternative weekly, and BINJ. And if you’d like to get a better sense of how the two organizations work together, check out this story from November 2019 by Adrian Ma at WBUR.org.

Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker promoted to an associate editor’s position

Adrian Walker

Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker has been promoted to associate editor, according to an email sent to the staff by editor Brian McGrory, managing editor Jennifer Peter and managing editor for digital Jason Tuohey. I obtained a copy of the email from a trusted source a little while ago.

Walker, a longtime state and local government reporter and editor, has been a columnist since 1998, when the Globe’s star metro columnists, Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith, were forced out after they were caught fabricating and, in Barnicle’s case, plagiarizing as well. (McGrory himself was the other reporter who became a columnist at that time.)

As one of the more prominent Black journalists at the Globe, Walker’s increased clout should help with ongoing efforts to diversify the newsroom.

Walker has brought a reporter’s sensibility to his column, deftly combining news and opinion. According to the memo, he’ll continue to write his column. The full memo follows:

We’re delighted to share the news that Adrian Walker will ascend to the role of associate editor at the Globe.

Adrian is obviously an enduring voice in this community, having helmed a metro column for 22 years and running. More importantly, he’s a vital voice. Few columnists face the test of time with the spectacular success of Adrian. These days, he is at the peak of his relevance, with deeply reported pieces that time and again offer an authoritative look at what was, what is, and what needs to be. He knows Boston like few others — the people, the places, the problems, the possibilities. And he is at once logical, unpredictable, and fearless in his approach. When Adrian speaks, people listen. Before he speaks, they await his thoughts.

Same goes for inside the Globe. Adrian has been a valuable source of counsel to many staffers, including us, ever since he arrived here from Miami in 1989. He’s covered City Hall and the State House, served as a deputy political editor, written about four different Boston mayors and six governors, and was, of course, a key part of the Pulitzer-finalist team on the race project in 2017. He’s been a thoughtful colleague and an important mentor to hundreds of people over the years.

We look forward to many more columns from Adrian, with an even broader impact within our newsroom.

Brian, Jen, and Jason

Nikole Hannah-Jones update: It depends on what the definition of ‘pressure’ is

Walter Hussman Jr.

The latest installment in the Nikole Hannah-Jones saga is absolutely wild. Walter Hussman Jr., the University of North Carolina alumnus who endowed the journalism school to the tune of $25 million, is fighting back against reports that he exerted pressure on school officials and the board of trustees not to hire Hannah-Jones, who’s also an alum.

A quick recap: Hannah-Jones was offered the Knight Chair at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman (yes, it was named after him) School of Journalism and Media, a position that customarily comes with tenure. But after her appointment ran into trouble with the board of trustees, she was instead offered a five-year non-tenured appointment, an action that school officials can take without any involvement by the trustees. Hannah-Jones is the Pulitzer Prize-winning force behind The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which re-centers American history around slavery.

I’m not going to try to summarize this detailed piece by Joe Killian in NC Policy Watch. But this here is an eye-opening sentence regarding Hussman’s $25 million pledge: “Most of that money hasn’t yet been delivered, leading some to speculate Hussman felt he had leverage with which to pressure the school to abandon its plan to hire Hannah-Jones.”

Hussman, the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, insists he did not try to pressure anyone and that he never suggested he wouldn’t come through with the money if he didn’t get his way. And there this classic back-and-forth involving an anonymous board member and Hussman:

“He’s completely outside this process and he’s contacting the people who are involved with financial giving over his concerns about university hires,” the board member said. “That’s throwing your weight around because you know you can exercise your influence, based on your gifts to the school. It is a threat. I don’t see how you can see that any other way.”

Hussman denies that. “That could have been inferred, but it was never implied,” he said.

Hannah-Jones is considering legal action. She has set today as the deadline for the trustees to vote on her tenure case. Otherwise, her lawyers say, she’ll move ahead with a lawsuit. Let’s hope the trustees take the opportunity to put this embarrassment behind them.

Finally: Three cheers for independent media. NC Policy Watch and The Assembly have been driving this story and deserve a lot of credit.

Previous coverage.

The Globe adds a R.I. podcast; the union pleads its case in a full-page ad

A couple of yin and yang notes about The Boston Globe this morning.

First, the paper has expanded its Rhode Island coverage by adding a podcast, “Rhode Island Report.” The guest for the debut is former Gov. Gina Raimondo, now the U.S. secretary of commerce.

It’s good to see the Globe doubling down on Rhode Island, which has really been underserved by Gannett’s Providence Journal. But I’ve been noticing more and more Rhode Island coverage making its way into the Globe’s print edition. I thought the idea was to leverage digital. If this continues, I hope there will be some consideration given to replating so that there are separate print editions for Greater Boston and Rhode Island.

I also hope John and Linda Henry are giving some consideration to expanding in Worcester, which is a virtual news desert these days. You may recall that employees at the city’s daily, the Telegram & Gazette, said John Henry promised to sell it to local interests or keep the paper after he acquired it from the New York Times Co. as part of the Globe deal. Instead, he sold it to a Florida chain, and it eventually was passed off to GateHouse Media, now Gannett. (When I asked Henry about it several years ago, he told me he believed he had only promised not to sell to GateHouse.)

Second, the Greater Boston Labor Council, the Greater Boston Building Trades Union and the Communication Workers of America have purchased a full-page ad in today’s Globe in support of the Boston Newspaper Guild’s long quest for a new contract. You can see the ad here.

A Northeastern study shows how animation can enhance local TV news

My Northeastern colleagues Mike Beaudet and John Wihbey, along with some amazing students, have been studying ways to improve local television news. Their latest installment looks at how animation can increase viewer interest, attract younger viewers and make it easier to understand the essential facts of a story.

According to a summary of their findings that they wrote along with graduate student Anna Campbell for RTNDA.org:

After viewing the local news stories that took a fresh approach to animation and graphics, viewers preferred that style across the board, with audiences more likely to rate the animated stories as clear, compelling, and memorable. The graphically-enhanced stories were generally perceived both as more relevant in content and resonant in tone. Animation also captured positive descriptions in the open-ended questions we posed.

As you’ll see if you watch the video presentation above, animation essentially takes the place of irrelevant and boring B-roll. And when Beaudet, Campbell and Wihbey refer to animation, they don’t mean something you might see on “Adult Swim.” Rather, they’re talking about presenting visualizations that help viewers understand what they’re watching.

Media observers like me don’t always pay much attention to local TV news. But it’s incredibly important — it’s the second-most popular news medium that we have (the internet comes in first), and it’s more trusted than other forms of news. So congratulations to my colleagues and their students for finding ways to make it better.

You can find more of their work at Storybench, a School of Journalism web publication that covers media innovation.

Why it matters: Tracking the media’s dismissal of the Wuhan lab theory

Illustration by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Previously published at GBH News.

Howard Kurtz was in high dudgeon. The Fox News media critic opened his Sunday program, “Media Buzz,” this past weekend by blasting the press for dismissing the possibility that COVID-19 had its origins in a leak from a lab in Wuhan, China. That possibility is suddenly very much on the table, and President Joe Biden has ordered an investigation.

“It was a whack-job theory, right? It was Looney Tunes. It was trashy Trump talk, surely not worthy of serious journalistic attention,” Kurtz said. He added: “If President Trump said it, the media dismissed it. If conservatives embraced it, liberal pundits mocked it. This just speaks volumes about our media establishment. Now, nothing’s been proven, but the circumstantial evidence is growing. Will there be any soul-searching about what amounted to media malpractice? Don’t hold your breath.”

Kurtz’s monologue oversimplified what we know, but he was largely correct. In fact, the media sloppily mashed together two different stories about Wuhan — a legitimate line of inquiry that the virus had accidentally escaped from the lab and a conspiracy theory that Chinese scientists at the lab were developing COVID-19 as a bioweapon.

As a result, with just a few lonely exceptions, the mainstream press over the course of the past 15 months has dismissed any suggestion that COVID-19 came from the lab as so ludicrous that it was unworthy of coverage. The media’s credibility is taking yet another hit — this one entirely legitimate — at a moment when it is already at an all-time low. And their “shameful dereliction of duty,” as conservative Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen put it, may make it that much harder to persuade Trump supporters to get over their skepticism about vaccinations.

The media’s dismissive attitude toward the lab-leak theory was grounded in their distrust — often warranted — of anything that came out of President Donald Trump’s mouth. After all, during the course of the pandemic Trump dismissed the seriousness of COVID-19 repeatedly, pushed unproven, potentially dangerous remedies like hydroxychloroquine, and even suggested at one memorable press briefing that injecting bleach might help.

So when Trump would use racist terms like the “China virus” in referring to COVID-19, the media were already primed to accept the consensus view touted by Dr. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization that the disease had, in fact, jumped from bats to humans in China and from there spread throughout the world.

Indeed, the possibility that COVID-19 had its origins in a Wuhan lab came to be seen as so thoroughly discredited that Facebook began taking down posts about it on the grounds that it was misinformation. The social-media giant reversed itself recently.

A few journalists, including Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, kept the lab-leak theory alive. Rogin exploded on Saturday with a bitter tweet complaining that most mainstream reporters “actively crapped all over it for over a year while pretending to be objective.”

The tide finally started to turn when a pair of former New York Times reporters, first Nicholas Wade and then Don McNeil, wrote several weeks ago that they had come to regard the possibility of a lab leak as being as plausible as the bats-to-humans theory.

“I now agree with Nick’s central conclusion: We still do not know the source of this awful pandemic. We may never know,” McNeil wrote. “But the argument that it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.”

Matthew Yglesias, a prominent member of the Substackerati, has offered what I think is the most useful and detailed analysis of what went wrong from a journalistic point of view. He traces much of it to inept reporting about U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, who made some provocative statements early on about the possibility of a lab leak. Cotton is well-known as a China hawk, and pretty soon the media were falsely claiming that Cotton had touted the bioweapons fantasy, starting with a sensationalized account in Business Insider and then spreading from Politico and into the mainstream.

“At this point,” Yglesias wrote, “Cotton had achieved what’s really the greatest achievement possible for a Republican Party politician — he was unfairly maligned by the MSM.”

Also getting at an important part of what went wrong is Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, who points to Twitter as the place where mainstream journalists reinforced their views, making it that much harder to re-examine the lab-leak theory.

“Media coverage of the lab-leak hypothesis was a debacle, and a major source of that failure was groupthink cultivated on Twitter,” Chait said, calling the platform “a petri dish of tribalism and confirmation bias.”

So where does all this leave us? I’ll end where I began — with Howard Kurtz. Yes, he’s a conservative, and yes, he’s on Fox News. But he’s also a serious observer of the media who spent years at The Washington Post and CNN. His analysis can’t be easily dismissed. And I think he’s correct that animus toward Trump played a huge role in the media’s consensus that the lab-leak explanation for COVID was propaganda put out by the Trumpist right to deflect attention away from Trump’s numerous failures.

There’s a context that can’t be ignored, of course. Trump lied constantly. His horrendous mismanagement of the pandemic might go down as the greatest failure of any American president — unless you want to count his failure to abide by the results of a democratic election. It’s not difficult to see why journalists decided to accept Fauci’s word on the origins of the pandemic.

But they were wrong. The reality is that we don’t know where COVID-19 came from. The bats-to-humans explanation might be right. The lab possibility might be right. There’s a good chance that we’ll never know.

The whole point of journalism is to seek truth and report it. We failed to do that in this instance. And it ought to remind us of why we need to go about our jobs with humility and an open mind.