The 2018 New England Muzzle Awards: Spotlighting 10 who diminish free speech

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

It’s all about Trump. And so it should come as no surprise that the 2018 New England Muzzle Awards have taken on a distinctly orange hue, singling out — among other offenses — thuggish attempts by President Donald Trump and his minions to suppress speech they found embarrassing.

One of those coveted Muzzles is being presented to the president himself, who, through his lawyer, Michael Cohen, threatened a member of the Harvard Lampoon with expulsion over a harmless prank. The other goes to former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who raised the specter of a libel suit against a student who’d written a critical op-ed piece about The Mooch in the Tufts campus newspaper.

On a considerably lesser scale, former president Barack Obama should be on the lookout for a golden Muzzle in his mailbox as well. Earlier this year, Obama (or someone he was associated with) demanded that his remarks to several thousand people at a Boston conference on sports statistics, of all things, be kept off the record. Team Obama’s action was as absurd as it was inappropriate — and, as they learned, unenforceable as well.

Also: The 2018 Campus Muzzle Awards:
Four Institutions that Dishonored Freedom

Of course, the Muzzles encompass far more than presidential politics. This year’s winners range from Boston Police Commissioner Bill Evans, who expressed unseemly pleasure that right-wing activists couldn’t be heard at a “Free Speech Rally” they had organized last August, to Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, whose oft-stated commitment to open government is contradicted by her censorious interpretation of the state’s public-records law. For good measure, we single out two Rhode Island legislators who are pushing a priggish piece of legislation that has become known as the “internet porn tax.”

This year’s Muzzles are being awarded against a backdrop of fear and hatred whipped up by President Trump, whose cries of “fake news” have served to delegitimize the press among his followers and to undermine the First Amendment. Earlier this year it was learned that the White House had obtained the phone and email records of a New York Times journalist in secret, which denied her an opportunity to fight that order in court. More broadly, Trump triggered a humanitarian catastrophe with his policy of separating the families of undocumented immigrants when they try to enter the United States, calling into question the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. He eventually backed down, but the fate of the children who were taken away from their parents is still unclear — especially given his subsequent remark that undocumented immigrants should be turned away at the border without due process.

The Muzzle Awards, launched in 1998, were published for many years by the late, great Boston Phoenix, which ceased publication in 2013. This is the sixth year they have been hosted by WGBH News. They take their name from the Jefferson Muzzles, begun in 1992 by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

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Eagle-Tribune and affiliated papers north of Boston put up for sale

The CNHI newspaper chain is up for sale. The company, with newspapers in 22 states, owns several properties in Massachusetts, including The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, The Daily News of Newburyport, The Salem News and the Gloucester Daily Times. CNHI merged with Raycom Media last September. What prompts the sale, apparently, is that Raycom is being acquired by a television company that wants to be rid of its newspapers.

CNHI, based in Montgomery, Alabama, is owned by public employee pension funds in that state. Its papers have been operated on the cheap, with staff members being subjected to unpaid furloughs over the years. But we are now in an era of defining deviancy down with respect to chain newspaper owners, which means that the pending sale is nothing to celebrate. The alternatives are likely to be bad or worse.

The logical buyers would be either of two national chains: GateHouse Media, which owns more than 100 papers in Eastern Massachusetts, or Digital First Media, which owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg. GateHouse, at least, has been getting some favorable attention lately. Not so much for Digital First.

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38 years down the road

Now here’s something sobering to think about. Recently I had a chance to talk about “The Return of the Moguls” with Phil Gallagher of “BNews,” part of Burlington Cable Access Television. And Phil informed me that the first time I was on his show was 38 years ago, when he was a Burlington selectman and I was a reporter for The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn. I guess we should both be grateful that we’re still upright.

Herald cuts continue as Digital First outsources design jobs to Colorado

Jack Sullivan of CommonWealth Magazine has the latest on cutbacks at the Boston Herald. Digital First Media, which bought the Herald earlier this year, is centralizing the paper’s advertising design and news layout operations at its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.

It’s a rare instance of Digital First making cuts that don’t directly affect news coverage, and it’s become standard operating procedure at newspaper chains. For instance, GateHouse Media, which owns more than 100 newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts, outsources much of its design work to a facility it owns in Austin, Texas. Still, it’s terrible for the people who are losing their jobs — estimated at 10 to 15 in news design alone.

Then again, there’s not much in the way of reporting resources at the Herald that Digital First can still cut. Sullivan writes writes that there are now fewer than a dozen reporters at the once-robust tabloid. Wow.

More details in this Twitter thread from Herald sports copy editor Jon Courture. Click here to read the whole thing.

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Media roundup: The EPA’s toxic proposal; getting readers to pay; and Danny Schechter’s activist legacy

John Travolta as the lawyer Jan Schlichtmann in “A Civil Action.”

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The overwhelming crush of news emanating from the Trump administration makes it all but impossible to give more than passing attention to some of its worst and most damaging acts.

It can’t be helped. Though you could argue that the media pay too much attention to the president’s sociopathic Twitter feed, you certainly can’t fault journalists for focusing on the childish insults he has directed at Justin Trudeau and his embrace of the murderous dictator Kim Jong Un. To its credit, the press has also managed to provide reasonably comprehensive coverage of the administration’s inhumane treatment of refugee families.

But when you get down to wonkish issues like industry-backed changes in the way that the Environmental Protection Agency regulates toxic substances, well, good luck finding the sort of coverage that truly commands attention and sparks outrage. And yes, I’m going to recount some information I learned from a story that appeared on the front page of The New York Times last week, so this is not exactly a secret. But we all know that without amplification from the media echo chamber in the form of follow-up stories, cable news chatter, and the like, important stories tend to fade away pretty quickly.

The Times article, by Eric Lipton, grabbed my attention for a very specific reason: During the 1980s I was a reporter for The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, where I reported on families whose children became sick with leukemia — some fatally so — after the city water supply was contaminated with industrial solvents. The families sued the likely polluters, leading to a federal trial that was featured in Jonathan Harr’s riveting book “A Civil Action.” (The book was made into a less-than-riveting movie of the same name.)

A variety of chemicals were at issue in the Woburn case, but the two most important were trichloroethylene (a degreaser) and tetrachloroethylene (also known as perchloroethylene, used in dry cleaning) — both of which are now on the list of substances the EPA wants to ease up on. According to Lipton’s story, the EPA, acting at the behest of the chemical industry, may abandon an Obama-era initiative to measure the effect of these hazardous chemicals in the ground, water, and air, focusing instead on workplace exposure. Yet contaminated drinking water was precisely what was at issue in Woburn.

“The approach is a big victory for the chemical industry, which has repeatedly pressed the EPA to narrow the scope of its risk evaluations,” writes Lipton, who notes that Nancy Beck, the Trump appointee in charge of the initiative, “previously worked as an executive at the American Chemistry Council, one of the industry’s main lobbying groups.”

The 1986 federal case did not end well for the Woburn families — they settled out of court for short money after the trial ended in a muddle. But they left a legacy regarding what can happen when industry is allowed to dispose of toxic waste without regard for safety or health. Now that legacy is under attack. The media need to shine a light on this story — and to keep shining it until the EPA backs down.

An ambitious challenge

There was a time not too many years ago when newspaper owners hoped they would develop an advertising-based business model for online content that would allow them to earn profits while giving away their journalism. Craigslist, Google, and Facebook put an end to those dreams. In recent years, the emphasis has been on persuading readers to pay for digital news.

Now The Sacramento Bee has issued a challenge to its readers. Editor Lauren Gustus has written a note calling for digital subscriptions to quadruple, from 15,000 to 60,000. “We could fully fund our newsrooms — from salaries and benefits to notepads and pens — if we had 60,000 people supporting us through digital subscriptions,” she says.

Needless to say, that is a hugely ambitious goal. Though national newspapers such as The New York Times (3 million-plus) and The Washington Post (1 million-plus) have had some real success with digital subscriptions, regional papers have struggled. The Boston Globe, with nearly 100,000 digital-only subscriptions, has done as well as anyone. But though Globe executives say the paper could become sustainable if they double that number, that will likely prove to be an exceedingly difficult task.

Still, the Bee has some factors in its favor. According to Gustus’ message, the paper is bolstering its coverage with more accountability journalism and an audio newscast. Its owner, McClatchy, is widely regarded as one of the better corporate chains. And the price of a digital subscription — $130 a year — is affordable, especially compared with the Globe’s $360.

The best part about reader-funded journalism is that, if it works, owners will be wary of slashing their news coverage. People will pay more for more; they might even pay more for the same. But they’re not going to pay more for less.

Honoring Parkland’s student journalists

The third annual Danny — an honor named for the late, great progressive journalist Danny Schechter — has been awarded to The Eagle Eye, the student newspaper at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The award was announced by Rory O’Connor, Schechter’s friend and longtime business partner.

O’Connor writes in AlterNet that The Eagle Eye was singled out for comments by its student journalists that they sought to combine journalism with activism aimed at preventing mass shootings such as the one that took place at their school. Although some observers criticized the students for not embracing objectivity, O’Connor says that activist journalism is in the best tradition of the work performed by Schechter, “The News Dissector,” starting in the early 1970s at WBCN Radio in Boston and continuing until his death in 2015.

The award comes with a $3,000 donation to the paper’s journalism scholarship fund.

“Increasingly,” O’Connor writes, “it is becoming understood that journalists with strong, transparent points of view are giving us news and insights we truly need and can use.”

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A new study measures the cost of corruption when the local newspaper dies

Illustration by Thomas Nast.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

As local newspapers shrink or disappear, opportunities increase for politicians and public employees to reach into the cookie jar and help themselves. After all, one of journalism’s most important functions is to act as a watchdog on government. As far back as 2009, the internet scholar Clay Shirky said that he expected to see an explosion of “casual endemic corruption” as more and more small papers shut down.

But how to quantify that? According to a new study, the lack of oversight can be measured by a rise in the cost of government in communities that lose their newspapers. Kriston Capps writes in CityLab that researchers at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Chicago found that a municipality’s borrowing costs increase in statistically significant ways in “news deserts” — that is, in places where there is no longer a news outlet that reports on important local issues.

“A local newspaper provides an ideal monitoring agent,” the researchers write in their as-yet-unpublished paper. “Mismanaged projects can be exposed by investigative reporters employed by the local newspaper. When a newspaper closes, this monitoring mechanism also ceases to exist, leading to a greater risk that the cash flows generated by these projects will be mismanaged.”

The ongoing shrinkage of the newspaper business provided the researchers with plenty of data. According to Capps, the study looked at 1,596 papers and found that there were 296 “exits,” a term used to describe newspapers that went out of business, were acquired by competitors, or otherwise lost their relevance.

Although the map that accompanies Capps’ story shows that several newspapers have gone out of business in Massachusetts, the real problem in Greater Boston is depleted resources rather than a shutdown of newspapers altogether. The Boston Globe has gotten smaller as publisher John Henry tries to figure out a path to sustainability. The Boston Herald, an important check on the Globe, is being decimated by its new chain owner, Digital First Media. And GateHouse Media runs the more than 100 community papers it owns in Eastern Massachusetts on a shoestring.

I tend to be skeptical of social science that tries to craft a narrative out of data that could be background noise. But the Notre Dame-Illinois findings appear to be fairly robust. There’s no doubt that government officials — especially those who are corrupt — fear the scrutiny of tough, independent journalism. We already knew we were paying a cost for the decline of the news business. This is one of the first indications that there may be a way of measuring that cost.

***

Unfortunately, the desertification of the news ecosystem continues apace. Another study, scheduled to be released later this month, will show that about 900 communities nationally have lost news coverage since 2004, with the hardest-hit areas tending to be the least affluent.

This new research is being put together by the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, based at the University of North Carolina. Veteran journalist Tom Stites, who helped popularize the term “news deserts,” writes about the study for the Poynter Institute. The data will be released in the form of a searchable database and will include demographic information such as household income and poverty rates.

One of the study’s findings, Stites says, is particularly distressing: many of the online-only news projects that have arisen over the past decade-plus to replace or supplement the local newspaper are serving affluent areas rather than poorer communities. Indeed, robust news projects serving low-income cities such as the New Haven Independent, which I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Wired City,” appear to be the exception rather than the rule.

Stites, a former editor with papers such as The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, is the founder of the Banyan Project, an ambitious effort to bring cooperatively owned news sites to lower-income communities. Banyan’s first site, Haverhill Matters, is still not fully operational despite many years in the making, though fundraising and planning for a full-fledged launch continue.

***

For a long time, Facebook loomed as the force that news organizations couldn’t live with and couldn’t live without. On the one hand, Facebook and Google were hoovering up more than 90 percent of all new digital ad revenues. On the other hand, publishers were dependent on Facebook for much of their traffic.

Now there are signs that is changing. According to Lucia Moses of Digiday, new statistics from the web analytics firm Chartbeat show that Facebook referrals to news sites are down while direct traffic to news sites is up. Part of the reason is that Facebook in January decided to give a boost to posts from users’ family and friends. But though that may help to explain the decline in referrals, it doesn’t explain the rise in direct traffic.

“The increase in direct traffic matters because it enables publishers to control their own destiny,” Moses writes. “They have more data on reader behavior, which enables them to better target readers with more content and offers for subscriptions and other revenue drivers.”

This is pure speculation on my part, but I think the rise in direct traffic may also be part of the flight to quality we’ve seen since the 2016 election. Digital subscriptions are up at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and regional papers like The Boston Globe, donations have increased to nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica, and listenership has risen at NPR. Word may finally be getting out that social media in general, and Facebook in particular, is awash in fake and unreliable news.

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Hilary Sargent responds to the Globe’s demand that she produce records

The lawyer for Hilary Sargent, the former top editor of Boston.com who recently accused Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory of sexual harassment in several tweets two weeks ago, has filed documents in Suffolk Superior Court in response to the Globe’s demand that she turn over records about her claim. A judge has scheduled a hearing on the Globe’s case for this Thursday at 2 p.m.

Here is the case laying out her opposition to the Globe’s motion. And here is her affidavit.

I recently wrote a backgrounder for WGBH News that you may find useful.

Friday update

Poynter features ‘Moguls’ — and some upcoming events locally and in D.C.

The Poynter Institute, a leading journalism-education organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida, has published a doubleheader on “The Return of the Moguls”: an essay about how the book came together and an excerpt on the newspaper business’ bumpy transition to the digital age. Here are some upcoming events:

From ‘The Wired City’ to the rise of the media moguls

Last Wednesday I had a chance to catch up with Paul Bass, founder and editor of the New Haven Independent and the principal subject of my last book, “The Wired City.” Paul and I talked about my new book, “The Return of the Moguls,” at the Book Trader Café in downtown New Haven. It was a lot of fun — and, as you’ll see from the Facebook Live video (just click on the image), Paul asked some tough questions.