I had a rare light day, so I hiked the Reservoir Trail in the Middlesex Fells. It was unusually dry for early to mid-March. No washed-out sections of the trail and very little mud. A beautiful day for a six-mile walk, but I managed to take a header near the end. I was able to pick myself up hike out, but we’ll see if I can walk tomorrow.
The western part of the loop was much better marked than it’s been in the past. I only had to slow down and look for the next orange blaze a few times. I’m guessing the new blazes were put up by the Friends of the Fells, so I felt like my dues were well spent.
Also interesting to see that there was some slushy ice on all three reservoirs. The Mystic Lakes are completely clear, so I’m not sure what the explanation would be.
Ruth Marcus. 2017 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
I don’t necessarily feel obliged to chronicle every rung that The Washington Post hits on the way down to wherever it ultimately lands. But there were three developments this week that I thought were worth taking note of as we ponder owner Jeff Bezos’ strange, dispiriting journey into MAGA-land.
1. Another resignation. Ruth Marcus resigned from the opinion section following publisher Will Lewis’ cancellation of a column she wrote criticizing Bezos’ edict that the section will henceforth be devoted to “personal liberties and free markets.”
Marcus, a moderate who is a former deputy editor of the section, is a lifer, unflashy and unpretentious. In a way, for such a core member of the Post to decide she’d had enough is even more disturbing than it is to lose someone with more of a following who can easily slide over to The New York Times, The Atlantic or Substack.
Writing in The New Yorker, she confirms something I suspected — that she’d already pretty much decided to resign and wrote her column with an eye toward leaving in a blaze of glory. She includes the text of the column, and, as she notes, it is mild and restrained. She knew it would likely be killed, but she says she wrote it with an eye toward having it appear in the Post.
She also tells us that Bezos, despite compiling a stellar record of strength and independence from the time he bought the Post until a little more than a year ago, nevertheless gave off some warning signals along the way. Even as he was publicly standing up to Donald Trump during Trump’s first term, he was also pushing the opinion section to find a few good things to say about him. Not a big deal at the time, but ominous in retrospect.
“I wish we could return to the newspaper of a not so distant past,” Marcus writes. “But that is not to be, and here is the unavoidable truth: The Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not The Washington Post I left.”
2. Titanic, deck chairs, etc. Even as Bezos transforms the Post into a laughingstock (not the news section, I should point out, though few readers draw that distinction), Lewis and executive editor Matt Murray continue to make plans that they hope will connect with readers more effectively than the current product. I wish I could think of a more original metaphor than rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic, but that’s what comes to mind.
Axios media reporter Sara Fischer writes that the paper will divide its national desk in two. One part of it will focus on non-political national reporting, and the other will be devoted exclusively to politics and government. The Post has struggled for years to appeal to readers whose primary interest is something other than politics, and that has a lot to do with its circulation slide and mounting losses following Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
By contrast, the Times continues to grow and prosper, largely on the strength of its lifestyle brands. The Post is stuck not just with a politics-centric audience, but with an audience that it’s alienated through Bezos’ high-handed moves, starting with his cancellation of a Kamala Harris endorsement just before the election.
“I want to make sure there are a few areas that are equally staffed and strong to make sure we’re always putting a strong foot forward and that we’re not just the politics paper, even though that’s important to who we are,” Murray told Fischer.
Frankly, I doubt it will work. What might work is an idea that Lewis floated some months back to publish local newsletters for an extra subscription fee that would serve the chronically undercovered metro Washington area. But now you have to wonder how well that would be received with The Washington Post brand on it.
3. Uncomfortable praise. Bezos must have been so proud Tuesday when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went out of her way to praise the Post.
“It appears that the mainstream media, including the Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this president does not help you sell newspapers,” Leavitt was quoted as saying. “It’s not a very good business model.”
As media reporter Oliver Darcy noted, it’s not likely that Leavitt had the newsroom restructing in mind. “Instead,” he wrote, “one imagines she was probably applauding Bezos’ push to shift the opinion section to the right.”
When the Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that news organizations need no longer fear ruinous libel judgments over small, inadvertent errors, it sparked an explosion of investigative reporting. A direct line connects the court’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan — inevitably described as a “landmark” — and journalism that exposes government secrecy and corruption at the national, state and local levels.
Under Times v. Sullivan, a public official who sues for libel must show that a defamatory statement was made with “actual malice,” a term of art that means the statement was published “with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.” Later rulings extended actual malice to public figures.
But though Times v. Sullivan freed the press to uncover government lying in the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, the backlash began almost immediately. That backlash is the subject of a new book by New York Times reporter David Enrich called “Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.”
“Murder the Truth” also prompts a look back at two earlier books that examine the historical and legal significance of the Sullivan decision — “Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan” (2023), by Samantha Barbas, and “Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment” (1991), by Anthony Lewis. It is Enrich’s book, though, that speaks to the urgency of this calamitous moment, as well as the fate of the free press during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Illustration based on a photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore
Today I’m using my gift links to share two important stories from The New York Times. Amid the torrent of news about Donald Trump, I think these two articles rise above the din and underscore the menace he represents both to our democracy and to world peace.
People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.
“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”
He [Trump] told Mr. Trudeau [Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada] that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.
The border treaty Mr. Trump referred to was established in 1908 and finalized the international boundary between Canada, then a British dominion, and the United States.
Mr. Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past.
Canadian officials took Mr. Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees. In a news conference on Jan. 7, before being inaugurated, Mr. Trump, responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about whether he was planning to use military force to annex Canada, said he planned to use “economic force.”
On Thursday morning, I posted our latest “What Works” podcast, in which my Northeastern University colleague Mike Beaudet of WCVB-TV (Channel 5) explained to Ellen Clegg and me why the folks running local television news need to transition to a digital-first, mobile-first mentality if they hope to attract a younger generation of viewers.
The pixels were barely dry before I started hearing from The Boston Globe newsroom that the paper was canceling its four-days-a-week 5 p.m. newscast, “Boston Globe Today.” I was able to break that news before anyone else, so thanks as always to my sources. The program, launched in February 2023, appeared Monday through Thursday on New England Sports Network, of which Globe owners John and Linda Henry are part-owners.
I’m getting multiple messages that The Boston Globe is shutting down its TV/digital newscast, “Boston Globe Today.” There’s also a bit of an uproar from the newsroom that a message from a staff member who’s been laid off was removed from the Globe’s Slack channel. More later, I’m sure.
Here is the somewhat skeptical post I wrote when the newscast made its debut a little more than two years ago. As I said at the time, the producers needed to find ways of breaking the newscast down into stories that could be consumed by younger viewers on their phones.
And here’s what I wrote last fall when newscast host Segun Oduolowu popped up on a Kamala Harris fundraising call and explicitly endorsed her presidential campaign, creating an ethical dilemma for Globe management.
Mike Beaudet on a student reporting trip to Peru that he helped lead in 2024.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Mike Beaudet, longtime investigative reporter for WCVB-TV (Channel 5) in Boston and a multimedia professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.
Mike has won many awards for his hard-hitting investigations and runs a project aimed at reinventing television news. On March 21-22, he’ll lead a conference at Northeastern called “Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit.” Mike’s students are producing content for everything from Instagram and YouTube to TikTok. As he explains, local television news, still among the most trusted and popular forms of journalism, must transition from linear TV in order to reach younger audiences who’d prefer to watch video on their phones.
I’ve got a Quick Take about the National Trust for Local News. Co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro exited the nonprofit suddenly last month. That came amid reports that the Portland Press Herald and other papers that the Trust owns in the state of Maine might soon announce budget cuts.
(Cuts were announced at the Maine papers after this podcast was recorded. Although the newsrooms were spared, Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe reports that 49 employees will lose their jobs and that print will be pared back significantly in favor of digital.)
Now comes more bad news. Colorado Community Media, a group of 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs, is closing two papers and is losing money, writes Corey Hutchins in his newsletter, Inside the News in Colorado. Those papers were the National Trust’s first acquisitions in 2021. The Trust’s mission is to buy papers that are in danger of falling into the clutches of corporate chain ownership. It’s a worthy goal, but the Trust has obviously hit some significant obstacles.
Ellen has a Quick Take noting that Harvard University is shutting down Harvard Public Health, the digital home to stellar longform journalism about public health. At a time when the very facts of science are challenged on social media every day, this is disheartening news.
My evening began at church with a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. From there, it was all downhill.
The early moments of Donald Trump’s endless address to Congress (is he still talking?) made me think about Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address last March. It was, perhaps, Biden’s last really good public moment. Seated behind him, Kamala Harris was thoroughly enjoying herself while Mike Johnson looked glum.
Now we are in the midst of chaos, all of it self-inflicted by Trump and his prime minister, Elon Musk. Authoritarianism, Three Stooges-style (who is the third Stooge?), is on the rise.
I don’t really have a coherent take on Tuesday night’s ugly proceedings, but here are a few thoughts. I’m curious to know what you thought, too.
Former Washington Post (and Boston Globe) top editor Marty Baron, left, with his old Globe colleague Matt Carroll, now a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
It’s been nearly a week since Jeff Bezos issued his edict that The Washington Post’s opinion section would henceforth be devoted exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets,” and it’s still not clear what that is going to mean in practice.
Many observers, including me, have assumed that Bezos was using coded language — that, in fact, what he meant was that the Post would go all-in on Trumpism. That would seem logical given his earlier order to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris and his overall sucking up to Donald Trump.
So far, though, not much has happened other than the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley. Liberal opinion journalists like Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus and Perry Bacon Jr. are still there. Another liberal, Dana Milbank, responded to Bezos’ edict by tweaking the owner (gift link), writing:
If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend Bezos’s twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to “personal liberties and free markets” in the United States today: President Donald Trump.
Given that Bezos’ agenda has yet to be clearly articulated, let me suggest another possibility: rather than Trumpism, he intends to embrace libertarianism, which was thought to be his guiding political philosophy before he bought the Post in 2013.
The Boston Globe is losing one of its top editors, Mark Morrow, who’s retiring after nearly 30 years at the paper. Before that, he worked for 12 years as a reporter and editor at The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, giving him a career trajectory that would be difficult to replicate these days.
Morrow, 71, the Globe’s editor-at-large, has been involved in some of the paper’s most noteworthy journalism over the years, including the pedophile-priest story that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and was the subject of the movie “Spotlight.” According to a memo to the staff from executive editor Nancy Barnes, which was shared with me by a trusted source, Morrow “played a significant editing role garnered the Globe three Pulitzers and seven Pulitzers finalists among myriad other recognitions.”
Barnes’ full memo to the staff follows.
When I first arrived at the Globe, more than two years ago now, I looked across the long conference table where the morning news meeting is held every day, and saw a rare editor. He carried no laptop. His arms were folded across his chest. He was just listening and thinking — at least until it came around to his turn to share his deep thoughts. And share, he did in the manner of a grand poobah.
You all know who I am talking about, the inimitable, and yes, irreplaceable, Mark Morrow, our editor-at-large and editor extraordinaire. And yet, somehow, after nearly 30 years, this newsroom will have to learn to do without him. Mark is retiring, at 71, after a lifetime of dedication to journalism and other journalists. God knows he deserves it, but we will all miss him, and me especially, as he has served as a thought partner in editing when I most needed one here. Mark will leave at the end of the month, exact date to be determined.
Mark once told me that it was initially hard to get a foothold at the Globe, but he was determined, and he finally got his chance in the summer of 1995 when then metro editor, Walter V. Robinson, and Editor Matt Storin, took a chance on him. Since then, he has served in myriad roles, as political editor, overseeing the state house and city hall teams, and as national editor during the Clinton impeachment years, the first wave of mass shootings, and the 2000 national election that brought us all hanging chads. The national operation, in those days, included a DC bureau of about a dozen or so people, a roving national reporter, and correspondents in three national bureaus: New York, LA, and New Orleans.
After the Bush-Gore election, Mark moved on to something completely different. He took over the Living/Arts department for 18 months before Marty Baron promoted him to AME [assistant managing editor] for projects in the summer of 2002, when the Globe’s investigation into the Catholic Church clergy scandal was roaring along. He succeeded Ben Bradlee Jr. as the senior editor overseeing the Spotlight Team for the balance of that singular investigation, shared in the Public Service Pulitzer it earned, and has guided and served as final editor on all Spotlight Team work in the 22 years since.
He has also been instrumental in most of the Globe’s other noteworthy and impactful projects and enterprise, in his other role as Sunday editor, for the past 12 years. Projects in which he played a significant editing role garnered the Globe three Pulitzers and seven Pulitzers finalists among myriad other recognitions. But most importantly, it was work that made a difference in the life of our community, our state, and the journalists who worked with Mark.
Be kind to him today, as it’s sure to be a difficult one. We will share details of how to celebrate him before too long.
