Ann Telnaes is a worthy recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting and commentary; after all, she previously won in 2001, and she was a finalist in 2022. Her winning portfolio is trademark Telnaes, portraying Donald Trump as a dumpy, orange-faced gnome who somehow manages to be simultaneously menacing and pathetic.
At the same time, I think it’s unavoidable to conclude that the Pulitzer judges, in recognizing Telnaes, were sending a message to Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes quit in January after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Bezos.
Shipley later followed Telnaes out the door after Bezos decreed that the Post’s opinion pages would henceforth be dedicated exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets.”
As Poynter media columnist Tom Jones observes, the Pulitzer board took note of Telnaes’ departure earlier this year by hailing her “fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”
The Portland Press Herald’s offices and printing facilities in South Portland, Maine. Photo (cc) 2018 by Molladams.
The National Trust for Local News, which is dealing with a leadership transition (see the last item) and business woes, got some good news recently. Three weekly papers in Maine have reached an agreement to be printed at the Trust’s presses in South Portland.
According to a story by Cyndi Wood in The Ellsworth American, whose presses will cease operations, the papers will include not just the American but also the Mount Desert Islander and the Midcoast Villager, which is based in Camden. All three papers are owned by Reade Brower, and therein lies an interesting tale.
Sen. John Fetterman. Photo (cc) 2022 by the office of Gov. Tom Wolf.
New York magazine has published an incredibly disturbing story (paywalled, but see below) about U.S. Sen John Fetterman, the hoodie-wearing Pennsylvania Democrat who was elected in 2022 while recovering from a serious stroke.
Reporter Ben Terris portrays Fetterman as suffering from what sounds like serious mental-health issues. We knew about his struggles with depression, but this goes much deeper than that, veering into what at times seems like a disconnection from reality, compounded by a refusal to take his medications.
Adding to its power is that much of the story is based on the on-the-record comments of Fetterman’s former chief of staff, Adam Jentleson, as well as a 1,600-word email that Jentleson wrote to Fetterman’s doctor. “I believed in John’s ability to work through struggles that lots of Americans share,” he told Terris. “He’s not locked into a downward trajectory; he could get back in treatment at any time, and for a long time I held out hope that he would. But it’s just been too long now, and things keep getting worse.”
This is an important piece of journalism, but unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall. So I’m going to tell you something you may or may not know: There’s a service that lets people save paywalled articles at publications they subscribe to so that others can read them for free. It’s at archive.is. You can search by keywords or URL. That’s how I found the Fetterman article.
I’m going to be a hypocrite and tell you that I’m uncomfortable sharing free links from archive.is, but that I’m not adverse at telling you how you can do it yourself. So if you want to read the Fetterman story, you know what to do.
Much of what President Trump is doing, or at least flapping his gums about, is illegal. An example would be his demand that Harvard be stripped of its tax exemption. Such a move would not only be illegal but Trump also arguably broke the law just by saying it, since, as Rachel Leingang reports in The Guardian, “Federal law prohibits the president from directing or influencing the Internal Revenue Service to investigate or audit an organization.” Paging Pam Bondi!
With that as context, I want to discuss Trump’s executive order that PBS and NPR be defunded. I certainly don’t think we should dismiss the threat. The authoritarian era has now fully descended upon us, and Trump may be able to get away with his lawbreaking if no one will stop him. Still, there’s reason to think that public media are in a better position to withstand his assault than are some other institutions.
As all of us should know by now, executive orders are not laws, and Trump’s ability to impose his will through them is limited. Last Monday, Trump tried to fire three of the five board members at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It didn’t go well. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik reported that the CPB filed a lawsuit to stop the firings, arguing that it was specifically set up to be free from White House interference.
Folkenflik wrote that “the law specifically states that the CPB ‘will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government’ and sets up a series of measures intended to ‘afford the maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.’” The CPB itself said:
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is not a government entity, and its board members are not government officers. Because CPB is not a federal agency subject to the President’s authority, but rather a private corporation, we have filed a lawsuit to block these firings.
Reporting for the “PBS NewsHour,” William Brangham said that the heads of the CPB, NPR and PBS have all pointed out that the CPB reports to Congress, not to the president.
Moreover, the CPB’s budget is set two years ahead, and is already funded through 2027. The agency describes it this way: “The two-year advance funding underscores Congress’ intention that CPB have operational independence, that public media could better leverage other funding sources, and that producers have essential lead time to develop high-quality programming and services.”
So what would a cutoff of government funding mean for NPR and PBS? As Folkenflik writes, the CPB distributes more than $500 million every year, with most of that money going to local television and radio stations. PBS and its stations are actually quite dependent on these funds, getting about 15% of their revenues from the CPB.
NPR depends on the CPB for just 1% of its budget. But that oft-cited 1% figure is poorly understood, because NPR-affiliated stations get about 10% of their revenues from the CPB. According to NPR, the network receives about 30% of its revenues from fees paid by local affiliates so they can broadcast “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and other programs. In other words, a cutoff would actually affect NPR quite a bit.
By most accounts, large public radio stations that serve affluent communities, such as WBUR and GBH in Boston, would be less affected by the cuts than small outlets and those that serve rural areas and communities of color. Writing in The Washington Post (gift link), Scott Nover, Herb Scribner and Frances Vinall report that stations like WWNO in New Orleans say a cutoff of funding would hamper their ability to cover natural disasters such as Hurricane Ida in 2021.
In fact, public media are a lifeline in less affluent areas across the country, which is why even Republican members of Congress have blocked efforts to cut the CPB, as Republican presidents have tried to do going back to Ronald Reagan.
Although public media asks for viewer and listener donations, they are available for free to those who can’t (or won’t) pay, making NPR as well as PBS shows such as the “NewsHour” and “Frontline” our most vital sources of free, reliable news.
In the short run, public radio and television are probably safe. In the long run, who knows? As with so many of our institutions right now, we need to withstand the authoritarian gale and hope that it blows itself out.
Ellen Clegg and I are thrilled to announce that our book, “What Works in Community News,” has been longlisted for a Mass Book Award by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. We’re one of 12 in the nonfiction category. Winners will be announced this fall.
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.
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.”
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.
Tom Breen in downtown New Haven. Photos (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
For our 100th “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Tom Breen, the editor of the New Haven Independent. Tom joined the staff of the Independent in 2018 and then became managing editor. Last November, he stepped up to succeed founding editor Paul Bass, who launched the Independent in 2005 and is still very much involved.
Paul is executive director of the Online Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization he set up to oversee the Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel in New Haven’s northwest suburbs and WNHH, a low-power community radio station. He continues to report the news for the Independent and hosts a show on WNHH, and he started another nonprofit, Midbrow, which publishes arts reviews in New Haven and several other cities across the country.
We spoke with Tom about his own vision for the Independent and why he thinks it has been successful enough to still be going strong after 20 years. He also reminisces about a harrowing encounter he once had with a pitbull while he was out knocking on doors for a story on mortgage foreclosures. I interviewed Tom for our book, “What Works in Community News.”
New Haven Independent reporter Maya McFadden interviews Victor Joshua, director of a youth basketball program called RespeCT Hoops.
Listeners will also hear from Alexa Coultoff, a Northeastern student who wrote an in-depth report on the local news ecosystem in Fall River, Massachusetts, a blue-collar community south of Boston that flipped to Donald Trump in the last election after many decades of being a solidly Democratic city. We recently published Alexa’s story, so please give it a read.
Ellen has a Quick Take on two big moves on the local news front. The National Trust for Local News has named a new CEO to replace Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, who resigned earlier this year. The new leader is Tom Wiley, who is now president and publisher of The Buffalo News. And in the heartland, The Minnesota Star Tribune has named a new editor to replace Suki Dardarian, who is retiring. The nod goes to Kathleen Hennessey, the deputy politics editor of the New York Times and a former Associated Press reporter.
My Quick Take examines a recent court decision ruling that Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior in the way it controls the technology for digital advertising. This was the result of a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and a number of states, but it’s also the subject of lawsuits brought by the news business, which argues that Google has destroyed the value of online ads. It’s potentially good news. It’s also complicated, and its effect may be way off in the future.
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.
Moon over the Zakim Bridge. Photo (cc) 2025 by Dan Kennedy.
Since 2005, I’ve been writing Media Nation as a free source of news and commentary about the media, politics, the First Amendment and, occasionally, other topics as well. I have never put up a paywall, nor will I.
But I do believe that writers should be paid for their work. And, so, a few years ago I set up a Patreon account for readers who wish to become voluntary supporters of Media Nation. Supporters receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content — additional commentary, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and a song of the week.
Still, I don’t regard the newsletter as a premium product that I’m trying to sell. Rather, it’s an extra for readers who understand the value of paying for the media they use. I hope you’ll join those readers by signing up today for just $5 a month. All you need to do is click here.
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.
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.