“NJ Spotlight News” anchor Briana Vannozzi, right, interviews U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N.J. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.
NJ PBS chair Scott Kobler has issued a statement in which he criticizes New Jersey government officials for “intransigence or maybe even apathy” over the public broadcasting funding crisis.
As I noted Wednesday, NJ PBS may shut down in June 2026 following a breakdown in negotiations between the state and WNET of New York, the public media organization that runs the New Jersey operation. In addition to losing some $1.5 million in federal funds, NJ PBS’s allotment of state funds has been cut from $1 million for the coming year to just $250,000.
The cuts are likely to affect NJ Spotlight News, a website covering statewide politics and public policy as well as the name of NJ PBS’s daily half-hour newscast. The two operations merged in 2019. Although WNET has pledged to keep the news operation alive online and on its New York-based station, Thirteen, regardless of what happens, its reporting capacity is likely to be reduced unless a well-heeled benefactor or two steps up.
The MAGA right’s war on public broadcasting has come for an innovative statewide news collaboration in New Jersey, leaving its ultimate fate uncertain.
NJ PBS, the state’s public television outlet, may shut down in June 2026 following massive budget cuts at both the federal and state levels. The Republican Congress, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, eliminated $1.1 billion in funding for public television and radio over the next two years — including about $1.5 million for New Jersey’s TV station, according to Daniel Han of Politico. Meanwhile, the New Jersey state legislature, facing its own pressure from Trump cuts, reduced funding to NJ PBS by $750,000, reports Victoria Gladstone of NJ.com.
The upshot is that WNET of New York, the nonprofit umbrella organization for NJ PBS, was unable to reach an agreement with the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority to continue operating the station beyond June 2026. WNET says it will look for a new partner to keep NJ PBS on the air.
For news consumers, the effect could be considerable. NJ PBS is one of a tiny handful of public television stations that offers a daily evening newscast. Since 2019, that newscast has been produced in conjunction with NJ Spotlight News, a 15-year-old digital news outlet covering state politics and public policy. It’s a true collaboration, with the newscast and video clips posted on the website and with Spotlight reporters frequently popping up on the air. The story of how Spotlight and NJ PBS merged is told in “What Works in Community News,” the book that Ellen Clegg and I wrote.
John Mooney, the co-founder and executive director of NJ Spotlight News, declined to comment when I contacted him this morning. We interviewed John last spring on our “What Works” podcast.
Lucas Frau of NorthJersey.com reports that two Democratic state senators, John Burzichelli and Andrew Zwicker, are hoping to find a solution to save NJ PBS. According to their statement:
The shutdown of public TV in New Jersey will have real-life consequences, depriving the state’s residents of invaluable news and educational programming. The television network has played a pivotal role in New Jersey, bridging the divide between New York and Philadelphia with trusted information relevant to the lives and civic activities of the state’s residents.
Even if WNET is unable to find a partner, it will continue to offer the daily Spotlight newscast on Thirteen, its New York-based television station, which reaches a large segment of New Jersey viewers, and on a variety of digital platforms. Anchor Brianna Vannozzi shared all this with viewers on Tuesday.
In other words, coverage will continue, both on the newscast and on the website. The question is whether NJ Spotlight News will be able to continue offering the same in-depth reporting that has been its hallmark. As is too often the case these days, the answer is probably “no” — unless wealthy benefactors step up.
A network of more than 1,200 websites better known for publishing so-called pink slime designed to look like legitimate local news is now branching out.
Kirk Carapezza reports for GBH News that Metric Media is flooding public colleges and universities in Massachusetts with public-records requests in order to find what its founder, Brian Timpone, calls “anti-American” classroom materials. The company is also seeking to learn the number of Chinese nationals enrolled as students at those institutions.
“There’s great public interest in what public universities are teaching students,” Timpone told Carapezza. “We want to see what they’re teaching and why.” Among the institutions that Metric Media has targeted are Salem State University, UMass Boston and Bridgewater State University.
I was one of the people who Kirk interviewed, and as I told him, I was surprised to see Metric Media taking such a pro-active role. Timpone’s various media ventures over the years have been involved in passive, money-making operations such as publishing alleged local news produced by distant employees, some in the Philippines, as the public radio program “This American Life” reported way back in 2012.
In recent years, Metric Media pink-slime sites such as North Boston News (a travel tip for those of you who aren’t from around here: North Boston is not a place that actually exists) have been publishing weirdly irrelevant slop, perhaps produced by AI. If you look right now, for instance, North Boston News features repetitive pseudo-stories on school test scores, high school sports and gas prices.
In 2021, the Columbia Journalism Review published the results of an investigation that showed Metric Media has ties to a variety of right-wing interests.
The public-records law in Massachusetts is notoriously weak, yet teaching materials such as syllabuses and reading lists at public institutions are arguably covered by it. Since I teach at Northeastern University, a private institution, it’s not something I have to be concerned about. On the face of it, I’m not sure why the two should be treated differently.
In any case, it will be interesting to see what Metric Media does with this material. And by “interesting,” I don’t mean to suggest that it will be anything good.
First, though I’m deeply skeptical about the power of boycotts and protests, this one seems to have worked. A combination of cancellations, petitions, announcements by creatives that they would no longer work for Disney, and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s trash-talking his successor, Bob Iger (though not by name), apparently had a lot to do with the lifting of Kimmel’s suspension.
Second, there are a few factors that have yet to play out. FCC chair Brendan Carr, whose threat to Disney and to broadcasters that continued to carry Kimmel’s show is what started all this, lied on Monday by saying he had not threatened anyone. Well, if that’s what he’s claiming now and he’s sticking to it, then that’s good news.
But though Kimmel may be coming back to ABC, we have not yet heard a final decision from Nexstar or Sinclair, two giant broadcasting companies that together own about 25% of the country’s ABC affiliates. Nexstar is trying to pull off a merger with another media company and needs FCC approval.
Sinclair is controlled by right-wing interests, and the company went so far last week as to demand that Kimmel apologize for his mildly offensive monologue about Donald Trump and the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and make a sizable donation to Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Kirk.
George W. Bush in 2001. Public domain photo via the U.S. National Archives.
FCC chair Brendan Carr’s thuggish threat to crack down on media companies following late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk differed from past instances only in that he said it out loud.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an appearance on a right-wing podcaster’s show. And Disney, Nexstar and Sinclair, all of which have significant regulatory issues before the FCC, wasted no time in making sure that Kimmel was banished from ABC’s airwaves.
Trump himself put it even more bluntly, saying that broadcasters who are “against me” should lose their licenses, reported Zoë Richards of NBC News.
The first comparison that comes to mind, naturally, is Richard Nixon’s threat in 1973 to take away the licenses of two Florida television stations owned by The Washington Post amid the paper’s dogged reporting on the Watergate scandal. “The difference here is that Nixon talked about the scheme only privately,” the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote about the scheme many years later.
Two departures from The Boston Globe to take note of: Teresa Hanafin, a longtime veteran of the newsroom, is retiring, and Melissa Taboada is moving to Texas in order to run a local news initiative for The Texas Tribune.
Hanafin ran the Globe’s local news operation as metro editor in the late ’90s and later became one of the paper’s digital pioneers at Boston.com and with some of the Globe’s newsletter initiatives. The email to the staff, provided to me by a trusted source, is from senior editorial director for newsletters Jacqué Palmer and deputy managing editor for audience Heather Ciras.
Globe Opinion’s original headline. It was later changed to “Charlie Kirk murder: America needs dialogue, not bullets” online and “An attack on democracy” in print.
Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham has quit the paper’s editorial board in protest over last week’s editorial (sub. req.) praising the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s commitment to free speech — an editorial that was widely derided by critics who objected to Kirk’s often hateful rhetoric. Graham will remain as a columnist and will continue to write her Globe newsletter, Outtakes.
Graham confirmed those developments in an email exchange but would not offer any further comment.
A Globe spokesperson said of Graham’s decision: “We are grateful to Renée Graham for her valuable contributions to our team and to the editorial board. We respect her decision to resign from the board and are pleased that she will continue in her role as a Globe Opinion associate editor, columnist, and newsletter writer.”
Kirk was murdered during an appearance at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. It’s been the top story in the news ever since given the public nature of his death (including a graphic video), the devotion of his millions of followers (Donald Trump and JD Vance among them), and his comments targeting Black women, members of the LGBTQ community, immigrants and others.
As best as I can determine, in the 11 months since The Washington Post’s opinion section descended into Jeff Bezos-imposed turmoil, no one had been fired — until now. Some people quit in protest, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, or because they disagreed with Bezos’ mandate to focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets,” such as opinion editor David Shipley. But Karen Attiah is the first to lose her job.
Attiah, who had been a columnist for the Post, took to her Substack newsletter on Monday to announce that she had been sacked for a series of posts on Bluesky in which she condemned gun violence following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday. By her own account, her only post even mentioning Kirk was this one, quoting Kirk’s own words:
“Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot”. -Charlie Kirk
Some have argued that Kirk’s quote had been taken out of context because he was referring to specific Black women and was characterizing what others were saying, as David Gilmour writes at Mediaite. To which I would observe that Kirk’s quotes and what he meant are sometimes difficult to parse. Attiah is hardly the only journalist who may have misconstrued something that he said.
Attiah, noting that she was the Post’s last remaining full-time Black columnist, wrote:
My commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.
And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation — claiming disparagement on race. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.
Media reporter Oliver Darcy obtained (sub. req.) a copy of the letter in which Attiah was fired, from human resources head Wayne Connell, who claimed that she had disparaged white men. Connell’s letter begins with this:
I am writing to inform you that The Post is terminating your employment effective immediately for gross misconduct. Your public comments on social media regarding the death of Charlie Kirk violate The Post’s social media policies, harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff.
Of course, taking to social media in the immediate aftermath of a tragic event such as the Kirk assassination is fraught with danger. Opinion journalists, though, should be able to post freely as long as they maintain the same tone they would be expected to adhere to in their day job. Attiah’s posts on Bluesky were certainly provocative, but they strike me as being well within the bounds of what is acceptable.
Then again, this may have amounted to a convenient excuse to get rid of a troublesome internal critic. Darcy reported last month (sub. req.) that Attiah had a tense meeting with the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, and declined to take a buyout that was being offered even though O’Neal was trying to push out anyone whose work “work didn’t align with his vision for the section.”
Poynter Online media columnist Tom Jones reports that the Post’s union issued a statement condemning Attiah’s firing “and will continue to support her and defend her rights.” What form that support may take is not specified.
Meanwhile, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter writes that Attiah’s newsletter, The Golden Hour, gained 10,000 new subscribers in the immediate aftermath of her post about having been fired. Then, too, Matthew Dowd, fired by MSNBC last week after he said “hateful words lead to hateful thoughts lead to hateful actions” while commenting on Kirk’s murder, is also promoting his Substack newsletter, Lighthouse Sentinel.
We are in the midst of a right-wing backlash, led by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are using Kirk’s tragic death as an opportunity to punish their critics. As the BBC notes, “Pilots, medical professionals, teachers and one Secret Service employee are among those who have been suspended or sacked for social media posts that were deemed inappropriate about Kirk’s death.”
Of course, no one should be celebrating Kirk’s death, which was a tragedy for his family and friends. But for the MAGA movement to use it as an opportunity to unleash a witch hunt against their opponents is as sickening as it is predictable. I don’t think this is going to blow over any time soon.
Bill Marx at the Climate Crisis Cabaret, reading the Ted Hughes poem “How Water Began to Play.” The artwork is by Phyllis Ewen.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I are back from summer break and talk with Bill Marx, the editor-in-chief and founder of the The Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast and online outlets, most notably at The Boston Phoenix. He has regularly reviewed theater for public radio station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He is a co-founder of Viva la Book Review, a new organization that aims to foster thoughtful, well-crafted book criticism in community news media across the country.
Bill also created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. Until recently, he taught a class on writing arts criticism at Boston University.
I’ve got a Quick Take about the funding crisis in public media and how that relates to the need to fund reliable sources of local news and information. It’s not just a matter of your local public television and radio station needing more support from its audience than ever before. It’s also a matter of the limits of philanthropy. Can we find the money to support hyperlocal nonprofits too? I wrote more about this dilemma recently for CommonWealth Beacon.
Ellen dives into a recent update from Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab on The Republican in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the MassLive website, which has become a web traffic powerhouse as it expands. A previous podcast discussion we had with MassLive’s president, Joshua Macht, and editor Ronnie Ramos can be found here.
Following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday, non-MAGA commentators who have felt compelled to weigh in have struggled to find the right balance between expressing their loathing for what Kirk stood for without making it seem like they were celebrating his death.
Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as someone embracing the reasoned debate central to democracy, although he became famous by establishing a database designed to dox professors who expressed opinions he disliked so they would be silenced (I am included on this list).
Indeed, she wrote about her inclusion on Kirk’s Professor Watchlist shortly after it was established in 2016, saying, “I am dangerous not to America but to the people soon to be in charge of it, people like the youngster who wrote this list.” She closed with this: “No, I will not shut up. America is still worth fighting for.”
