Media notes: Marco’s meltdown, Trump’s triumph, and more

The late Hunter Thompson exercising his Second Amendment Rights. Photo (cc) by Gustavo Medde.
The late Hunter Thompson exercising his Second Amendment rights. Photo (cc) by Gustavo Medde.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

ROSSLYN, Virginia—I am writing this in a Best Western, wondering how I’m going to get to downtown Washington later today given that the Metro—shut down lest it burst into flames yet again—makes the MBTA look like a model of competence and efficiency.

Hunter Thompson used to grab the Gideons Bible at moments like this and try to find something appropriately apocalyptic he could quote from the Book of Revelations. But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

I’ve got Gideons propping up the back of my laptop. A different kind of apocalypse was playing out Tuesday night on television, as racist demagogue Donald Trump all but wrapped up the Republican nomination. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton won big while Bernie Sanders’s increasingly implausible campaign reached the end of the line, though he’ll trudge on.

So how did we get here? And what comes next? A few thoughts.

1. Why Rubio lost. The smart money was with Marco Rubio from the beginning. On Tuesday, as it became clear that Rubio would be crushed in his home state of Florida, a 2013 Time magazine cover proclaiming Rubio “The Republican Savior” started making the rounds on Twitter. So did a tweet by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat from last September: “The entire commentariat is going to feel a little silly when Marco Rubio wins every Republican primary.”

The problem was that Rubio’s sunny optimism (which he abandoned at the first sign of trouble) and credibility with both the establishment and Tea Party wings of his party were out of step with the populist Trump insurgency.

“Rubio was prepared, much like Jeb Bush, for a reasonable dialogue in Washington policy language, offering positions that reflect 40 years of national security and foreign-policy experts,” former House Speaker (and former presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich said in a Washington Post article by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. “All of that disappeared. The market didn’t care.”

But Rubio brought his own problems to the table as well. There was, of course, his robotic debate meltdown in the face of a withering assault from Chris Christie. But there is also evidence that Rubio and the people around him were so smitten with his essential Marco-ness that they became lazy and arrogant.

In National Review, an anti-Trump conservative outlet, Tim Alberta writes of Rubio: “He campaigned on the ground so infrequently for much of the campaign that even some supporters questioned how hard he was willing to work to get elected.” Eli Stokols and Shane Goldmacher pile on at Politico in a piece headlined “Inside Marco’s Hollow Campaign.” The subhead tells the story: “Rubio’s overconfident team refused to invest. Voters returned the favor.”

2. What’s next for Kasich and Sanders? Although Rubio might differ, winning your home state is not a big deal. John Kasich won Ohio, where he is governor, on Tuesday night, just as Bernie Sanders won Vermont a few weeks ago. Yet there is talk in the media today that Kasich and Ted Cruz (remember him?) might be able to stop Trump by denying him an outright majority at the Republican National Convention.

Boston Globe political reporter James Pindell notes that “Trump will need to win 59 percent of all the remaining GOP delegates to win a majority.” And Five Thirty Eight’s Nate Silver writes that Trump is still winning just 37 percent of the Republican vote. “Since primaries became widespread in 1972, only George McGovern won his party’s nomination with a smaller share of the vote—just 25.3 percent,” Silver writes.

At this point, it seems unlikely that Republicans will be any more successful at stopping Trump than Democrats were at stopping McGovern.

The case for Sanders seems considerably more desperate. John Nichols of The Nation, a left-liberal magazine that endorsed Sanders earlier this year, asserts that “Sanders has every reason to keep running a primary and caucus race where most of the delegates have yet to be chosen—and where his ability to influence the character and content of the competition remains one of that race’s most significant dynamics.”

Sanders has performed a real service for Democrats by holding Clinton to account and forcing her to clarify her positions. But his insurgency played out pretty much the way all left-wing insurgencies do.

3. Trump and the media. Earlier this week The Upshot, an analytics project that’s part of The New York Times, showed that Trump has received far more media coverage than Clinton, the runner-up, with everyone else far off the pace. The value of that free media in February: $400 million.

The Trump media dynamic will be fascinating to watch from here on out. A former reporter for the Trump-friendly site Breitbart.com said she was assaulted by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—and Trump gave Lewandowski a nice shout-out Tuesday night, when he also called the press “disgusting.” Certain unfriendly reporters are banned from Trump events, as Politico media reporter Hadas Gold writes.

Then, too, there’s the whole dynamic of what journalists will do given that they’ve been accused of enabling Trump by not pushing him hard enough on the Breitbart matter or at the thuggish violence directed at protesters—violence that began to be returned in kind last weekend.

As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen observes, there is a “purposelessness” to much campaign coverage with its relentless focus on the horse race. “Campaign journalists have a system for determining who gets the most coverage,” Rosen writes. “They have no system for determining who deserves the most coverage.”

There has been plenty of harsh coverage of Trump right from the beginning, as Politico’s Jack Shafer recently observed. So it’s hard to say whether a tougher tone will make any difference.

4. Trump and the Jews. My friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate passed this on—an essay by James Kirchick in Tablet on why Jewish conservatives such as him despise Trump. It’s a long read that defies summary, but this should give you a taste: “To those Jews who contemplate making peace with a President Donald Trump: He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.”

I don’t agree with everything Kirchick writes. In fact, I think the Republicans’ neoconservative wing—which is not exclusively Jewish (ahem: Dick Cheney) despite Kirchick’s attempt to turn the term into an anti-Semitic slur—really does hate Trump in part because of his non-interventionist tendencies on foreign policy.

Still, if you’re going to read one lengthy piece on Trump this week, it should be Kirchick’s.

5. Obama’s continued relevance. Remember him? The president remains enormously popular with the Democratic base. And he’s doing everything he can to help Democrats retain the White House.

His choice of a Supreme Court nominee—which we may know by the time you read this—will almost certainly be a respected moderate, thus casting the Republicans as even more dysfunctional and obstructionist than they already are if they stick to their pledge and refuse to hold confirmation hearings.

And that is something Clinton will be able to exploit this fall.

The Globe will shutter Crux and reposition BetaBoston

Screen Shot 2016-03-11 at 12.49.00 PMCrux, a standalone website “Covering all things Catholic” that was launched by the Boston Globe in the fall of 2014 (see my WGBHNews.org piece from that time), is shutting down, according to a memo I obtained a little while ago that was written by Globe editor Brian McGrory and managing editor/vice president for digital David Skok. BetaBoston, a vertical that covers the local innovation economy, will be incorporated into the Globe‘s regular offerings and will no longer be a free, standalone site.

I can’t say I’ve been a regular reader of Crux, but as a lifelong non-Catholic I’ve found it to offer interesting insights into the Catholic Church—especially John Allen’s column. (Allen will acquire the site, as McGrory and Skok explain below.) My WGBH News colleague Margery Eagan recently won an award for her spirituality column. Overall, the quality—under the direction of editor Teresa Hanafin, who’ll return to the Globe newsroom—has struck me as consistently excellent.

Although you might think the problem was a lack of readers, I’ve been told that Globe executives were not unhappy with the size of the audience. (You could look up the numbers on Compete.com, but they’re probably not very accurate.) Rather, as McGrory and Skok note, the real problem has been finding advertisers.

In any case, it’s a shame that the Globe couldn’t find a way to make Crux work. It was a noble effort. I hope Stat, a far more ambitious Globe-affiliated vertical covering life sciences, is able to avoid a similar fate.

We’ll be talking about this tonight on Beat the Press. And below is the full text of McGrory and Skok’s memo.

We want to bring everyone up to date on a couple of digital fronts.

First, Crux. We’ve made the deeply difficult decision to shut it down as of April 1—difficult because we’re beyond proud of the journalism and the journalists who have produced it, day after day, month over month, for the past year and a half. At any given moment on the site, you’ll find textured analysis by John Allen, the foremost reporter of Catholicism in the world. You’ll find an entertaining advice column, near Margery Eagan’s provocative insights on spirituality. You’ll find Ines San Martin’s dispatches from the Vatican, alongside Michael O’Loughlin’s sophisticated coverage of theology across America, as well as the intelligent work of ace freelancer Kathleen Hirsch. All of it is overseen, morning to night, by editor Teresa Hanafin, who poured herself into the site, developed and edited consistently fascinating stories, and created a mix of journalism that was at once enlightening and enjoyable. Readers and industry colleagues have certainly taken note with strong traffic and awards.

The problem is the business. We simply haven’t been able to develop the financial model of big-ticket, Catholic-based advertisers that was envisioned when we launched Crux back in September 2014.

Let’s be clear that this absolutely can’t and won’t inhibit any future innovations. We in this newsroom and all around the building need to be ever more creative and willing to take risks. We also need to be able to cut our losses when we’ve reached the conclusion that specific projects won’t pay off.

There will be several layoffs involved in the closing of Crux, which is our biggest regret. To the good, we plan to turn the site over to John Allen, who is exploring the possibility of continuing it in some modified form, absent any contribution from the Globe. Teresa will be redeployed in the newsroom, most likely in an exciting new position as an early morning writer for Bostonglobe.com, setting up the day with a look at what’s going on around the region and the web.

The second front is BetaBoston. We’re planning to bring it behind the Globe paywall, making it part of bostonglobe.com, in what amounts to the next logical step in the natural evolution of the site. It began as a standalone destination, and with this move, it will become a fully integrated part of the Globe’s business coverage in practice and presentation.

Beta’s been a key part of our vastly more comprehensive business report. It has allowed us to dramatically expand our reporting on the region’s burgeoning tech scene, with a fresh team of reporters devoted to the news and culture of Kendall Square, the Seaport, and elsewhere. None of that will change. The only thing that will be different is their material will appear on the Globe site, with clicks working against the meter. And we’ll save more than a few dollars on the maintenance of the external URL. We’ll set a date soon.

The reality is, we can’t merely be accepting of change in this environment, we have to seek it out. As always, we’re available for questions, insights, and ideas.

Brian and David

Maybe now they’ll revive the slogan ‘The Globe’s here’

$_35If only the delivery folks at The Boston Globe could turn the clock back to December 27, 2015. That’s the last day that Publishers Circulation Fulfillment delivered the print edition. It’s also the last day that Globe customers could be reasonably sure the paper would show up on their doorstep as promised.

Well, the Globe is going to try to do just that. After a disastrous debut by a new vendor, ACI Media, followed by an emergency move to bring back PCF to handle many of the routes, the Globe is ditching ACI and going back to PCF exclusively, according to this report by Mark Arsenault.

In the early weeks, the region was in an uproar. Improvement appeared to be around the corner on the weekend of January 2 and 3, when hundreds of Globe staffers helped assemble and deliver the Sunday paper. But then the Globe itself ran a devastating story by Arsenault and Dan Adams reporting that delivery would not return to normal for four to six months. That, in turn, led to the partial restoration of PCF and an apology by publisher and owner John Henry.

Even though the delivery situation had partly recovered from the initial disaster, I’ve continued to hear complaints from readers right up through last week. It is mind-boggling that ACI was never able to get it right. You have to wonder what kind of promises they made that convinced Globe executives they could handle the job, and why those executives believed them.

No word on how much pain was inflicted on the Globe in terms of lost circulation or financial setbacks.

Two tales from the heart of Trump University

9596679453_4f88697d69_oI want to call your attention to two terrific pieces about Trump University—both published by Politico, both by people I know. As you are no doubt aware, Trump University, a dubious venture that dispensed real-estate tips and that is under investigation by the New York attorney general’s office, has become a major issue in Trump’s presidential campaign.

The first article, “I Survived Trump University,” is by my old Boston Phoenix friend Seth Gitell. Seth describes attending a 2008 session of what was then known as Trump Wealth Institute in Boston while he was working for the New York Sun. The nation’s financial system was collapsing. Seth writes:

I’d read Trump’s The Art of the Deal in college, so when I spotted an internet ad for the Trump “way to wealth” seminar, I thought it might be an interesting vantage point from which to capture the feelings of regular people at a terrible time. I was also intrigued by the idea of what strategies a figure as rich and famous as Trump could bring to the public, in the midst of a crisis to which few had any solutions.

The second piece is by Marilyn Thompson, an editor at Politico who’s currently a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as am I. Marilyn reports on an online advice column for students of Trump U that was published under his name. “How much of ‘Ask Mr. Trump’ was written by Trump himself is, of course, open to further examination,” she writes.

Marilyn proceeds to recount what Trump told a 13-year-old boy (“Sounds like you’re a hard-working young person!”), what drives him (“I don’t have to work, I don’t have to make deals, but it’s what I enjoy”), and how he coped with the stress of being $1 billion in debt (“I started describing to everyone all of my plans for future projects and developments, and how fantastic they were going to be”).

These days, no doubt, he relieves the stress by telling his campaign officials how great that wall is going to be once he’s been elected president.

Illustration (cc) by Mike Licht.

A polite debate over Apple, the FBI, and encryption

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

I had expected fireworks—or at least strong disagreements—when Internet privacy advocate Jonathan Zittrain and former CIA director John Deutsch debated the impasse between Apple and the FBI over a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

Instead, the two men offered nuance and a rough if imperfect consensus over how much access we should have to technologies that allow us to encrypt our personal data in ways that place it beyond the government’s reach.

“Many other paths to data are available. We are exuding data all over the place,” said Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. “The FBI has chosen this case … in large part, I think, because there is so little privacy interest on the other side.”

Deutsch, an emeritus professor at MIT, sought to draw a distinction between law enforcement and terrorism investigations such as the San Bernardino case. Authorities say they need to know what was on the phone used by the late Syed Rizwan Farook because it might reveal the identities of accomplices who are planning future attacks.

“There’s a big difference between law enforcement and national security,” Deutsch said. Law enforcement, he explained, is about “catching bad people,” whereas the aim of national security is “to avoid a catastrophe.” There is a public interest in requiring cooperation from companies such as Apple in a national-security investigation, he said, with the courts setting boundaries for when such cooperation should be compelled.

If that sounds like disagreement, it was so polite and mildly worded as to create barely a stir. Indeed, people in the packed hall at Harvard’s Kennedy School on Monday evening—most of them Apple partisans, I suspect—seemed to appreciate a discussion that focused more on the fine points of technology and the law rather than on broad proclamations about Internet freedom versus the threat of terrorism.

Then, too, technology is changing so rapidly that the points raised during the debate may soon be obsolete.

Apple has been ordered to write software that will enable government investigators to gain access to Farook’s data; the company has filed an appeal seeking to overturn that order. But as Zittrain noted, Apple executives say they will soon offer encryption software to consumers that will make it impossible for anyone—even Apple itself—to break in. Such software, Zittrain added, is already available from various sources, which means that even if it were legally banned, it could still be used.

And that changes the nature of what’s at stake. As the San Bernardino case has played out, I’ve been more sympathetic to the government than to Apple. Why shouldn’t a corporation be required to comply with a court order to provide information in a terrorism investigation? And if it’s extraordinary to demand that Apple to write software so that the phone can be accessed, what of it? That’s simply a consequence of Apple’s engineering decisions.

As Deutsch put it: “That’s not really the essential point. It’s a minor part of the issue.”

On the other hand, I’m as uncomfortable as anyone with the idea that Apple and other companies could be forbidden to offer encryption so strong that even they would lack the means to bypass it. Requiring companies to build in a so-called back door would open the way not just to legitimate investigations but to privacy breaches and fraud, and would hand yet another tool to authoritarian governments seeking to repress dissent.

Zittrain and Deutsch talked about what role Congress and the courts might play in finding the proper balance between privacy and security. I asked them whether those institutions could have any role at all in a world in which no one but the end user would be able to bypass the encryption settings.

Zittrain responded that we have never lived in an era when every bit of data is accessible to a government investigator with a warrant. Even so, he said, there will continue to be vast amounts of personal data available to investigators despite the existence of strong encryption. “There’s a whole constellation of data points out there,” he said, calling it “an embarrassment of riches.”

I found Deutsch’s response more intriguing, reflecting as it did his both cloak-and-dagger days at the CIA and his long career in science.

“I don’t believe that phones irrevocably go dark,” he said, explaining that he believes Apple and other companies will retain the ability to unlock encrypted devices regardless of what they publicly proclaim. He also offered what he called “a suspicious paranoid point: all of these phones are made in China.” Would the Chinese government really allow the manufacture of technology that it couldn’t somehow access?

With technology changing so rapidly, Zittrain said, the current dispute between Apple and the FBI is “a bellwether rather than the case of the century.”

This time, in other words, Apple says that it won’t. Next time, it may say that it can’t.

Goldsmith Award winner, finalists talk about their craft

b_kirtzBy Bill Kirtz

Top investigative journalists used databases, graphics, video, and good old-fashioned shoe leather to reveal slave labor, expose unfair arbitration practices, and detail police shootings and school funding flaws.

Winners and finalists discussed their reporting challenges during last week’s Goldsmith Awards ceremonies at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The awards are administered by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

The Associated Press series uncovering the use of slave labor in the Thai seafood industry won the top $25,000 award. Robin McDowell, a member of the four-member team that spent 18 months exposing abusive practices in the AP’s “Seafood from Slaves,” faced the problem of getting victims to talk on the record. “We had to honor them but not to use their names, or they’d be killed,” she said. “How do we hold on to the power of the story with anonymous sources?”

The Guardian US in “The Counted” and The Washington Post in “Fatal Shooting by Police” tackled a similar subject: underreported fatal shootings by police.

The Post’s Kimberly Kindy called the job “ugly and messy”—and unprecedented. “Nobody had done it before,” she said. “There was no model. Going into this, we had no notion of how hard it was going to be to cover every fatal shooting in real time.… The information didn’t rush out. We had to keep going back to get more details.”

She said The Guardian’s competitive efforts helped the Post because “it made it harder for authorities to look the other way.”

Jon Swaine, part of the five-member Guardian team whose findings—along with the Post’s—led the FBI and the Department of Justice to revise their system for counting killings by police, said his biggest challenge was the small staff. Like the Post reporters, they worked nights and weekends keeping up with the constant flow of reports. The Guardian will combine reporting and verified crowd-sourced information to continue building a database of the killings.

Lisa Song, one of the four-member InsideClimate News team that disclosed that Exxon documented but buried climate change research in “Exxon: The Road Not Taken,” said they initially thought it would be impossible to prove the cover-up.

“The main challenge was finding people willing to talk,” she said, but with a lot of “shoe leather reporting,” including door-to-door visits, they induced ex-employees to tell their stories. And finally, they unearthed thousands of internal memos that revealed what and when Exxon knew.

Michael LaForgia said the three-person Tampa Bay Times team that produced “Failure Factories” had to overcome editors’ and educators’ mindset that student underachievement was “inevitable, ignoring the basic question—why does this condition exist?”

The Times’s 18-month investigation used an extensive database along with graphics and video—as well as traditional storytelling methods—to show how resegregation transformed five once-average schools into the state’s worst.

For “Beware the Fine Print,” Jessica Silver-Greenberg and her two New York Times colleagues faced the challenge of knowing the arcane subject of arbitration clauses as well as the high-priced lawyers who used them to prevent people from suing credit card companies and retailers.

“A huge challenge was [detailing] ‘How did they do it?’” she said. To gain corporate lawyers’ trust, she added, the reporters needed to know the law. Then, she said, they could flatter attorneys by saying, “‘I understand the genius of what you did.’ That helped us gain their respect One lawyer was thrilled to talk about it.

“It wasn’t drama on the high seas or the battlefield, but in Park Avenue boardrooms.”

Bill Kirtz is a retired Northeastern University journalism professor and a Media Nation contributor.

Romney’s message captivates wealthy Manhattanites

Immediately after Mitt Romney finished his Trump-bashing speech on Thursday, I posted this:

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/705434541662535680

And now here comes the New York Times with a front-page story reporting that Republican voters are unimpressed with Mitt’s importunings. The most entertaining part of the story, though, recounts Romney’s belief that it’s working:

In an interview conducted inside the headquarters of Bloomberg News in Manhattan, far from the crucial primary voting states that could decide Mr. Trump’s fate, he observed that Midtown office workers had offered their gratitude as he rode up to the studio.

“Just coming up the escalator,” Mr. Romney said, people said, “‘Thanks for what you did yesterday.’”

Poor Mitt. Done in by skewed polls once again.

A few quick thoughts on Mitt Romney’s Trump speech

I just watched Mitt Romney’s speech in which he lacerated Donald Trump. A few quick thoughts:

1. Romney has many admirable qualities, but he’s the worst possible leader of an anti-Trump movement. He’s the very symbol of what Trump supporters despise.

2. The quick consensus on Twitter seems to be that Romney made a mistake by not apologizing for the endorsement he received from Trump in 2012. It wouldn’t have been a big deal. At that time, Trump wasn’t spouting the hateful nonsense that he is today (or at least not as much of it). So why not just say it?

3. Is Romney a candidate? He says no, but of course he is. He essentially called for a brokered convention. If there’s a Draft Romney movement, do you really think he’d walk away? If there’s anything we’ve learned about Mitt over the past dozen years, it’s that he desperately wants to be president.

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Jack Shafer: Don’t blame the media for Donald Trump

Jack Shafer of Politico puts into words what I’ve been inchoately thinking: Though the media surely have not covered themselves in glory by showering so much attention upon the candidacy of racist demagogue Donald Trump, it’s really not their fault that he’s leading the Republican field. Taking note of the epic negative coverage Trump has received, Shafer concludes:

If you were a conventional media observer, you might say that the Trump candidacy demonstrates not the power of the press, but—overwhelmingly, and to our chagrin—its relative powerlessness. But maybe that’s just what we want you to think.

Trump is a creation of the media, of course—but not of the news media. As Shafer observes, he’s been a fixture in the entertainment media for years on the strength of The Apprentice and his bestselling books.

I’d dial Shafer’s take back a bit. I do think the media are to blame for giving Trump way too many column inches (look it up, kids) and too much air time at the expense of the other candidates, and I don’t think the coverage has been as tough as it should have been until recently. But neither do I think the media had it within their power to derail the Trump Express.

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