Almost from the beginning of the social-media age, I’ve been too deeply immersed for my own good. So I appreciated this recent essay (gift link) in The New York Times Magazine by J Worthen, who tells us that Bluesky might look like the better, kinder place at the moment but that it’s probably destined to turn into a vortex of sociopathy like all the rest. Here’s the nut:
We have officially arrived in late-stage social media. The services and platforms that delighted us and reshaped our lives when they began appearing a few decades ago have now reached total saturation and maturation. Call it malaise. Call it Stockholm syndrome. Call it whatever. But each time a new platform debuts, promising something better — to help us connect better, share photos better, manage our lives better — many of us enthusiastically trek on over, only to be disappointed in the end.
As someone who used to get into fights on Usenet back in the 1990s (look it up), long before anyone had ever thought of using algorithms to drive content that engages and enrages, I agree that it’s hopeless. Bluesky might prove to be the exception. Among other things, you get to choose your own algorithm, or none at all. But it really doesn’t matter. The real problem is that, no, you can’t have meaningful conversations with strangers, and social media is inimical to the way we’ve evolved.
The post-Musk social-media landscape has also been defined by the incredibly annoying practice of platform-shaming — a hopeless chase after the least-evil alternative, accompanied by bitter criticism of anyone who would dare keep using those platforms that are deemed insufficiently free of harmful entanglements.
E. Jean Carroll in 2006. Photo (cc) 2006 by julieannesmo.
Like most observers, I figured that ABC News’ decision to settle a libel suit with Donald Trump for a total of $16 million had more to do with the network’s desire to make a public relations problem disappear than it did with any chance that the network would actually lose the case.
After all, when anchor George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll, he was merely quoting a federal judge, who said a civil-court jury had indeed found that Trump “raped her” [Carroll] using the everyday meaning of the word rather than the strict legal definition.
But CNN media reporter Brian Stelter raises another intriguing possibility: that ABC’s lawyers wanted to avoid pre-trial discovery. As Stelter reports, ABC didn’t even wait for the judge to rule on whether to grant summary judgment in the case — a routine proceeding in which the defendant asks the judge to find that the plaintiff’s case is so lacking in substance that it ought to be immediately dismissed. Stelter quotes Ken Turkel, a trial lawyer who is representing Sarah Palin in her revived libel case against The New York Times:
“In my experience, when media defendants are unsuccessful at the dismissal stage,” which was in July, “they focus on preparing for summary judgment to challenge the legal sufficiency of a plaintiff’s claim,” he said. “It begs the question as to why ABC settled before the summary judgment stage.”
Turkel also said “you would have to consider” whether the discovery process unearthed emails or other internal ABC data that damaged the network’s case.
Stelter also observes that right-wing media figure Erick Erickson, who’s a lawyer, wrote on Twitter: “No, a $15 million settlement is not the cost of doing business. It is avoiding discovery.”
This makes a great deal of sense. Based on what Stephanopoulos said on the air, his comments were clearly not delivered with actual malice (that is, they were not knowingly false nor reckless), and they were arguably not even false given the judge’s comments. The judge, Lewis Kaplan, went so far as to say that the verdict “establishes against him [Trump] the substantial truth of Ms. Carroll’s ‘rape’ accusations.”
But pre-trial discovery may have revealed internal animus toward Trump from Stephanopoulos and/or others, which Trump’s lawyers might have been able to conflate into actual malice. Combined with Stephanopoulos’ failure to describe the verdict against Trump with 100% precision, ABC’s lawyers may have genuinely feared that Trump had a case he could win in front of sympathetic jury that loathes the media.
Did Stephanopoulos libel Trump? Based on facts that are on the record, the answer is “no.” And I still wish ABC had fought back. But the settlement may have been for a more complicated reason than ABC’s and parent company Disney’s desire to toady to the once and future president.
George Stephanopoulos earlier this year. Official White House photo by Carlos Fyfe.
For this morning, a tale of two libel suits, one national, one local. The national case threatens to undermine protections for journalism that have been in place since 1964. The local case will result in the closure of a weekly newspaper that started publishing 139 years ago.
First, the national lawsuit. On Saturday, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump in order to settle a libel claim over repeated on-air assertions by anchor George Stephanopolous that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape” against the writer E. Jean Carroll. The money will be paid to Trump’s presidential library and foundation, Paula Reid and Katelyn Polantz report for CNN. ABC will also pay $1 million for Trump’s legal fees and issue an apology.
The problem is that what Stephanopoulos said was substantially true. The CNN story put it this way: “In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll, sufficient to hold him liable for battery, though it did not find that Carroll proved he raped her.” And here’s the big “but”: In August 2023, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found that Trump had, in fact, raped Carroll under the everyday meaning of the word if not under the legal definition. Here’s what Lewis said at the time in the course of ruling on one of Carroll’s defamation proceedings against Trump:
Indeed, the jury’s verdict in Carroll II establishes, as against Mr. Trump, the fact that Mr. Trump “raped her,” albeit digitally rather than with his penis. Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms. Carroll’s “rape” accusations.
I’ll give you a moment to throw up. Now, then, let’s parse this, shall we? A jury found Trump liable for “sexual abuse,” which Judge Lewis ruled was tantamount to being found liable for rape. What Stephanopoulos said was inaccurate only under the most hypertechnical interpretation of what actually happened — and, as I said, Stephanopoulos’ assertions were substantially true, which is supposed to be the standard in libel law. But ABC and its parent company, Disney, decided to appease Trump rather than continue to fight.
And what’s with Stephanopoulos? At 63, he has made many millions of dollars. If he had resigned and continued to fight rather than go along with his corporate overlords, he could have been a hero. Who knows what opportunities would have opened up for him? Instead, he’s content to continue as a highly compensated apparatchik. It’s sad.
By settling with Trump, ABC is following in the path of other corporate titans, a number of whom have donated $1 million apiece to Trump’s inauguration festivities. The donors include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.
Under the 1964 Supreme Court ruling of Times v. Sullivan and subsequent refinements, public officials and public figures like Trump need to show that statements they find harmful are false, defamatory and made with actual malice — that is, with knowing falsehood or with reckless disregard for the truth — in order to win a libel suit.
What Stephanopoulos said arguably wasn’t even false, and surely it didn’t amount to actual malice. A deep-pockets defendant like Disney ought to stand up for the First Amendment lest its cowardly capitulation to Trump harm other media outlets without the wherewithal to fight back.
Coming at a time when two of the Supreme Court’s justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have publicly signaled that they would like to weaken Times v. Sullivan, ABC’s behavior is shockingly irresponsible.
Local paper to close
Now for the local case. On several occasions I’ve written about an explosive libel suit brought against the weekly Everett Leader Herald by that city’s mayor, Carlo DeMaria.
Unlike the matter of Trump and ABC, you will not find a clearer example of actual malice, as Leader Herald publisher and editor Joshua Resnek testified in a deposition that he’d made up facts and quotes in a campaign aimed at impugning DeMaria’s integrity. That news was broken in January 2023 by Boston magazine’s Gretchen Voss. Indeed, eight months later, Middlesex Superior Court Judge William Bloomer froze assets belonging to Resnek and one of the paper’s owners, Matthew Philbin, because he believed DeMaria was likely to win his case.
The denouement came Sunday when The Boston Globe reported that the suit would be settled for $1.1 million and that the Leader Herald would be shut down as part of the settlement. Globe reporter Maddie Khaw writes:
Resnek, who writes and edits most of the Leader Herald’s articles, has frequently used the nickname “Kickback Carlo” to refer to DeMaria, a moniker representing Resnek’s claims that DeMaria had received illegal payments in real estate deals.
Records show that Resnek has admitted to knowingly reporting falsehoods and fabricating quotes.
“Mr. Resnek wrote what he wrote because he believed Mr. DeMaria was bad for the City of Everett and he was motivated by the fanciful notion that he could bring about Mr. DeMaria’s defeat in the [2021] election for Mayor,” the defendants’ lawyers wrote in court documents.
DeMaria and his lawyers will hold a news conference later today. Meanwhile, there is nothing up at the Leader Herald’s website about the settlement, which features several stories that were posted as recently as this month.
Incredibly, Everett is also the home of two other weekly newspapers, the Everett Independent and the Everett Advocate, both of which are part of small, locally owned chains; neither of them has anything on the settlement, either.
Map of Plymouth, Mass., in 1882. Via the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.
Mark Caro of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School has taken a deep dive into the media ecosystem of Eastern Massachusetts — the wreckage left behind by Gannett’s closing and merging many of its weekly papers, and the rise of independent startups, many of them digital nonprofits.
As Caro observes, the Gannett weeklies and websites that still exist are “ghost newspapers,” containing little in the way of local content.
What’s happening in New England is being echoed across the country as the local news crisis deepens. While the nation’s ever-widening news deserts have drawn much attention, the ghost papers represent another dire threat to a well-informed citizenry. Many areas don’t meet the definition of a news desert, but residents have been left with newspapers so hollowed out that they’re bereft of original local news reporting.
I was especially interested to see that Caro interviewed K. Prescott Low, whose family sold off The Patriot Ledger of Quincy and its affiliated papers in 1998 only to see their legacy torn apart in less than a generation. The Ledger was once regarded as being among the best medium-size dailies in the U.S.; today it limps along with a skeleton staff and no newsroom.
As Low tells it, he thought he had found a trustworthy buyer, but his former papers soon ended up in the hands of GateHouse Media, a cost-cutting chain that in 2019 merged with Gannett. “Conceptually it was a good idea,” Low told Caro. “Practically it didn’t work out because of the subsequent purchase by GateHouse and what has happened across the media.”
Caro and I talked about the lack of news coverage in Medford, where I live, after Gannett merged the Medford Transcript and Somerville Journal. He also interviewed my “What Works” partner, Ellen Clegg, about Brookline.News, the digital nonprofit she helped launch after Gannett closed its Brookline Tab.
As I told Caro, there are reasons to be optimistic, but affluent suburban communities are doing better at meeting their own news needs than are urban areas, and there’s a certain random quality to all of it. “You can have a community that has something really good,” I told him, “and right next door is a community that has nothing.”
Caro has written a good and important article, and I hope you’ll take a look.
WBUR cancels ‘Radio Boston’
There was some sad news on the local public radio front earlier today. WBUR is ending “Radio Boston,” a locally oriented program that airs on weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon and is repeated from 3 to 4 p.m.
It is WBUR’s only local news show and follows cuts at both of Boston’s major public broadcasters this years, as well as downsizing across the country. Earlier this year GBH News canceled three local television shows, “Greater Boston,” “Talking Politics” and “Basic Black.” That last program will return next month, possibly as a digital offering.
GBH Radio continues to offer four hours of local programming each weekday — “Boston Public Radio,” a talk and interview show hosted by Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and “The Culture Show” from 2 to 3 p.m.
The end of “Radio Boston” won’t result in any layoffs, according to the station, as the folks who worked on that show will be reassigned to pumping up the local segments on NPR’s two national drive-time programs, “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
Alden’s tin cup
Alden Global Capital, the hedge-fund newspaper owner that has decimated community journalism from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Denver to San Jose, is trying something new: asking readers to give them money in order to offset some of the newsroom cuts they’ve made.
An alert Media Nation reader passed along an appeal sent to readers of Alden’s South Florida Sun Sentinel, asking for tax-deductible gifts to the nonprofit Florida Press Foundation‘s Community News Fund. The foundation appears to be legit, but it’s hard to imagine why they would agree to help prop up a paper that’s been slashed by its hedge-fund owner.
“Alden Capital is surrounded by small independents that continue to eat into their circulation area,” my informant says. “Key Biscayne Independent, the Bulldog Reporter, Florida Phoenix, Coastal Star … are just a few of the ‘independents’ started by former journalists to fill the news desert. Everyone competes for donations. So when a Wall Street PE [private equity] firm solicits for limited resources, they are actually starving their competition. I think this is sad and something that may be a harbinger of what’s to come under the new transactional administration.”
If you see any other examples of rattling the tin cup at papers owned by corporate chains, please let me know.
Cardinal News executive editor Jeffrey Schwaner with education reporter Lisa Rowan
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk withJeffrey Schwaner, executive editor of Cardinal News, a nonprofit digital news outlet covering Southwest Virginia. It also covers something called Southside Virginia, which is an area south of the James River, near Richmond. Since we taped this in Boston, we asked him to explain their coverage area in more detail.
JeffjoinedCardinal News in September after nine years as a storytelling and watchdog coach — including five years as editor — of Gannett’s two Virginia newsrooms,the News Leaderin Staunton andThe Progress-Indexin Petersburg.
I’ve got a Quick Take that explores a key question: Does a lack of local news correlate with support for Donald Trump? A newstudyby the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School finds that it does, although they caution that correlation is not causation. I discuss what the study found — and why it matters even if you don’t believe that the role of local news ought to include persuading people to change their voting patterns.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on a mysterious website that popped up in Oregon after a 147-year-old paper called the Ashland Tidings folded. Called theDaily Tidings,it recently published story after story by a reporter named Joe Minihane, who supposedly skiied, hiked and ate his way through Southern Oregon. Except Minihane is based in the U.K., visited Oregon for a week on vacation, and doesn’t know how his byline got hijacked. The stories are made up, perhaps by AI. Ryan Haas of Oregon Public Broadcasting has the story.
This post will no doubt have limited appeal, but a few readers might find it interesting. I’ve been thinking about how to produce summaries and news stories based on the podcast that Ellen Clegg and I host, “What Works: The Future of Local News.” The best way would be to pay a student to write it up. But is it also a task that could be turned over to AI?
Purely as an experiment, I took our most recent podcast — an interview with Scott Brodbeck, founder and CEO of Local News Now, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. — and turned it over to the robots.
I started by downloading the audio and feeding it into Otter, a web-based transcription service that uses AI to guess at what the speaker might actually be saying. Once I had a transcript, I took a part of it — our conversation with Brodbeck, eliminating the introduction and other features — and fed it into ChatGPT twice, once asking it to produce a 600-word summary and then again to produce a 600-word news story. Important caveat: I did very little to clean up the transcript and did not edit what ChatGPT spit out.
The results were pretty good. I’m guessing it would have been better if I had been using a paid version of ChatGPT, but that would require, you know, money. I’d say that what AI produced would be publishable if some human-powered editing were employed to fix it up. Anyway, here are the results.
The transcript
Q: Scott, so many of the projects that we have looked at are nonprofit, and that trend seems to be accelerating. In fact, we love nonprofit news, but we also worry that there are limits to how much community journalism can be supported by philanthropy. So your project is for profit. How have you made that work? Dan, do you think for profit? Digital only, local news can thrive in other parts of the country as well. Continue reading “Playing with AI: Can Otter and ChatGPT produce a good-enough account of a podcast interview?”
Sen. Tom Cotton. Photo (cc) 2016 by Michael Vadon.
The PRESS Act, which would protect reporters from being forced to identify their anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents, appears to be dead despite passing the House on a unanimous vote earlier this year.
Clare Foran and Brian Stelter report for CNN that the bill died Tuesday after Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas objected to an attempt to pass it by unanimous consent. Cotton said that passage would turn senators “into the active accomplice of deep-state leakers, traitors and criminals, along with the America-hating and fame-hungry journalists who help them out.” President-elect Donald Trump has demanded that Republicans defeat the measure, so that would appear to be the end of the road.
Meanwhile, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a staunch supporter of the bill, noted that the U.S. Justice Department’s Inspector General’s office released a report Tuesday finding that journalists’ records had been sought during Trump’s first term in violation of internal guidelines. CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post were targeted along with members of Congress and congressional staffers.
In a statement, RCFP executive director Bruce Brown said:
The government seizure of reporters’ records hurts the public and raises serious First Amendment concerns. This investigation highlights the need for a reasonable, common-sense law to protect reporters and their sources. It’s time for Congress to pass the PRESS Act, which has overwhelming bipartisan support, to prevent government interference with the free flow of information to the public.
The PRESS Act, which stands for Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying, would add the federal government to the 49 states that already have some form of shield protection for journalism. The sole exception is Wyoming.
Trump is hardly alone in his contempt for the importance of journalistic anonymity in holding government accountable. Former President Barack Obama was so aggressive in demanding that reporters identify leakers that I once wrote a commentary for The Huffington Post headlined “Obama’s War on Journalism.”
Under President Biden, though, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued guidance prohibiting federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ records except in a few narrow cases involving terrorist investigations or emergencies — the same exceptions that are spelled out in the PRESS Act. Now it seems virtual certain that Trump will return to his previous repressive practices, with Tom Cotton cheering him on.
Media notes
• Peeling back The Onion. The internet exploded in celebration recently when The Onion won a bid to purchase Infowars from right-wing conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who was sued into bankruptcy by the families of children who were killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012. Jones had spread false stories that the shootings were somehow faked. Now, though, a bankruptcy judge has ruled the Infowars auction was improperly conducted in secret and may have resulted in less money for the families than an open process, David Ingram reports for NBC News.
• Krugman’s awkward farewell. Longtime New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, surely the only opinion journalist to have won a Nobel Prize, wrote a heartfelt farewell column (gift link) on Monday. But though all was sweetness and light publicly, independent media reporter Oliver Darcy writes that Krugman may have left earlier than he would have liked because he regarded opinion editor Katie Kingsbury as heavy-handed, demanding a “far more thorough edit” (including the vetting of pitches) of all Times columnists than had previously been the case.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Krugman does next. I thought his column had become somewhat repetitive in recent years, but I’d welcome longer pieces from him published less frequently. He remains one of our most vital public intellectuals.
Update: Well, that didn’t take long. Krugman started a Substack newsletter in 2021, let it wither, and has now revived it.
In the latest sign that The Washington Post has lost its way, the paper’s acting executive editor killed a story reporting that managing editor Matea Gold had left to take a job at The New York Times.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that Matt Murray intervened and ordered that a story on Gold’s departure be deep-sixed. Now, this is all very complicated. Murray, who was brought in earlier this year by the Post’s ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, replaced Sally Buzbee after she quit rather than move over to head a “third newsroom” initiative that Lewis has talked about but has not really explained. (Buzbee recently was named to a top editing job at Reuters.)
Murray, in turn, is supposed to run the third newsroom after the Post chooses a new, permanent executive editor — and Gold, a respected insider, was thought to be a candidate for that position. But now Murray himself, who’s proved to be popular inside the newsroom (at least until this week), may want to stay right where he is; independent media reporter Oliver Darcy wonders if Murray killed the story about Gold’s departure in order to curry favor with Lewis. Adding to the intrigue is that Lewis was also Murray’s boss when they both worked at The Wall Street Journal. Continue reading “At The Washington Post, silence is Gold; plus, a bad day for Rupe and Lachlan, and cuts at Stat News”
One of the most important animating principles in the work that Ellen Clegg and I have done on the future of local news is that civic engagement isn’t really possible in its absence. People naturally seek out news, and if there’s no local source, they’re more likely to spend too much time gorging on partisan talk shows on Fox News and MSNBC.
We are not especially concerned about how that might affect national elections because democracy needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that folks who are relearning the arts of community and cooperation will vote differently from those sit at home watching TV (if they’re older) or spending way too much time on social media.
So I was intrigued that a new study from the Local News Initiative (LNI) at Northwestern’s Medill School showed Donald Trump ran up some of his biggest margins over Kamala Harris in news deserts. Medill defines a news desert as a county that lacks a professional news source. It turns out that even though Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the national popular vote by the slimmest of margins, just 1.5%, he beat her by 54% in the news-desert counties that he won. Harris won a few news-desert counties as well, but her margin was 18%. Moreover, Trump won 91% of the 193 news-desert counties that LNI tracked.
There is, needless to say, a chicken-and-egg problem here, and LNI’s Paul Farhi and John Volk acknowledge it. Did Trump run up such an overwhelming victory in those counties because its residents lack local news sources? Or are people who live in those counties paradigmatic Trump voters regardless of whether they have a local news outlet? Farhi and Volk write:
Trump’s dominance of news deserts doesn’t imply a cause and effect. That is, people didn’t necessarily vote for Trump because they lack local news. Instead, a simpler and more obvious correlation may be at work: News deserts are concentrated in counties that tend to be rural and have populations that are less educated and poorer than the national average — exactly the kind of places that went strongly for Trump in 2024 and in 2020.
As Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, tells Farhi and Volk, “The wrong way to interpret this is ‘Oh, the rubes voted for Trump because they’re uninformed.’” Nevertheless, Waldman adds, the findings underscore the reality that Trump supporters are “some of the most common victims of the collapse of local news.”
The findings translate to Massachusetts as well. Despite beating Trump here 61% to 30%, Trump won a number of communities and performed better than he did against Joe Biden in 2020. If you take a look at the map, Harris was very strong in media-rich Eastern Massachusetts and weak in the southeast, central and southwest parts of the state.
Some of those Trump communities are well served by local news outlets, and here I want to give a shoutout to Nemasket Week, which was launched a few years ago and covers my hometown of Middleborough, where Trump won by 52% to 46%. Still, you see the same correlation that LNI found: big margins for Harris in affluent areas that are the home of quite a few independent local news projects; and smaller margins for Harris, or even Trump victories, in less affluent and more rural areas, which also tend to be less well covered.
To repeat what Waldman says, what we need isn’t to figure out how we can flip Trump voters to support Democrats. Rather, we need to foster a renewed sense of community life — and reliable sources of local news is an indispensable starting point.
Ellen Clegg and I were thrilled to have a chance to speak with Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr on her podcast, “Justice by Design.” We talked about our book, “What Works in Community News,” as well as the importance of community journalism and how it’s being revived in hundreds of places across the country. You can watch us on YouTube, listen here or subscribe using your favorite podcast app.
