By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Great hike in the Blue Hills today led by Marc Hurwitz, our intrepid Appalachian Mountain Club guide. I hadn’t been there since I was a Cub Scout leader, and trust me, that was a very long time ago.
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Two weekly newspapers in Rhode Island are shutting their doors, citing a decline in advertising revenue, according to Boston Globe reporter Amanda Milkovits (I’m quoted). The Coventry Courier and The Chariho Times are both owned by Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers, which also owns several dailies in the state — including The Call of Woonsocket, which I wrote about earlier this week.
Absolutely fantastic concert Thursday evening in the MFA courtyard by George W. Russell Jr. and his band. The music ranged from Ellington and Coltrane to Russell’s own compositions and showed impressive range and depth. The musicians were all first-rate; bassist Wes Wirth was particularly impressive. All except Wirth are on the faculty at the Berklee Colege of Music. And what a great venue for music.
Earlier this year I shared an astonishing story from Boston magazine about the Everett Leader Herald, which is being sued for libel by Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria. According to Boston reporter Gretchen Voss, the paper’s editor and publisher, Josh Resnick, admitted in a deposition that he’d faked key interviews and concocted evidence in accusing DeMaria of corruption and sexual abuse.
Now Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub writes that Middlesex Superior Court Judge William Bloomer is so certain DeMaria will win that he’s frozen properties belonging to Resnek and the paper’s owners, Matthew and Andrew Philbin, so that the mayor will be able to collect damages estimated at $850,000. Bloomer wrote that DeMaria “has demonstrated a likelihood that he will recover judgment, including interest and costs.”
Entertainment was hard to come by at Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate. But to the extent that there was anything to savor, it came in the form of the attacks on Vivek Ramaswamy at the hands of Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie. What they needed to accomplish was to bury what was left of Ron DeSantis. Instead, they were so enraged by Ramaswamy that they focused their fire on him.
Ramaswamy was glib, smug, rude and arrogant. He also mouthed far-right talking points in a way that would do Donald Trump proud, coming out foursquare for everything bad, from coal to Russia. Although all eight candidates tried to duck a question about climate change (Haley was a wishy-washy exception), only Ramaswamy declared it to be a “hoax.” He alone would cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine, though DeSantis was heading in that direction.
Did Ramaswamy help or hurt himself? Who knows? I thought New York Times columnist David French put it well: “Everything I dislike about him, MAGA loves, and he looked more like Trump’s heir than DeSantis did.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo called Ramaswamy a “cocky little shit,” which wasn’t quite accurate: he’s actually pretty tall.
In case Ramaswamy is new to you, you might want to check out this profile in The New Yorker, written by Sheelah Kolhatkar. Ramaswamy, who made his fortune in biotech, has moved to the extreme right in recent years, something that hasn’t exactly endeared him to those who were once close to him. Kolhatkar writes:
I asked Ramaswamy if his burgeoning reputation as a conservative firebrand had taken a personal toll. He chose his words carefully. A family member no longer spoke to him, and he’d been ghosted by a close friend. Although he’d forged new relationships with conservatives, none of the connections had turned into friendships. “I feel like the public advocacy, or whatever you call what I’ve been doing in the last couple of years, has eroded more friendships than new friendships made up for it,” he said.
Being shunned because of your principles is one thing. Being shunned because of ambition is something else.
So who won? I thought the big winner was President Biden. Trump, too, I imagine, since he continues to dominate the Republican field and did not take part in Wednesday’s free-for-all. Other than that, I’d say Pence was the winner, sort of; he managed to get credit for standing up to Trump on Jan. 6 without being booed too loudly, as Chris Christie was, and he came across as a normal candidate — that is, if your idea of normal is an extremist who wants a nationwide ban on abortion. Another Times columnist, Ross Douthat, said of Pence’s performance: “Moral clarity, debating chops, a message frozen in amber in 1985 and a visceral hatred for Vivek Ramaswamy: It won’t get him the nomination but it made for some of the better theater of the night.” James Pindell of The Boston Globe gave Pence an A-plus.
A lot of people thought Haley did well, too. She projected as independent and even somewhat moderate, criticizing Trump for running up the debt. You’d think might hurt her chances of being chosen as Trump’s running mate, but she’s proven over and over that she’ll be whatever she thinks she needs to be.
Elon Musk gets the Ronan Farrow treatment in the current issue of The New Yorker. Although much of the ground covered in Farrow’s 5,500-word profile is familiar, the cumulative effect is devastating. Musk comes across as an out-of-control egomaniac with scant regard for safety at SpaceX and Tesla, his grandiosity fed by what may be his overindulgence in ketamine, described by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as “a dissociative anesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects.” Emotionally abused by his father, Musk has now been disowned by his daughter, who’s come out as transgender even as Elon has indulged anti-trans hate-mongering on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter.
Farrow also offers new details about the U.S. government’s utter dependence on Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet network, which powers the Ukrainian military’s communications in its war with Russia (as well as Musk’s sucking up to Russian President Vladimir Putin), and on his rocket company, which is the sole means NASA has at the moment for launching its own satellites. The overarching picture that emerges is not just a portrait of a multi-billionaire who has way too much power, but of a culture so enamored of unfettered capitalism that it has forfeited the means to rein him in.
“There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told Farrow. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.” The same could be said of Starlink’s role in Ukraine’s war for survival or, for that matter, Musk’s opening up Twitter to disinformation about everything from COVID to election denialism.
As I was listening to the audio version of Farrow’s story, I was also thinking back to a podcast I heard a few months ago in which tech journalist Kara Swisher interviewed Walter Isaacson, who is writing a biography of Musk. Isaacson is widely respected, and I admired his biography of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Yet he came across as weirdly obsequious in talking about Musk, even going so far as to take seriously Musk’s ambitions to turn Twitter into an “everything app” that would handle your financial transactions and who knows what else. Swisher, to her credit, wasn’t having any of it.
Maybe Isaacson was bluffing so that Musk wouldn’t cut off access or trash his book before it comes out (it’s scheduled for Sept. 12). I hope it turns out to be as tough-minded as his Jobs bio. In any event, Farrow has set a high bar.
The Marion County Record has dropped the bomb on Police Chief Gideon Cody, whose officers recently raided the newspaper’s office and two private homes. The Record’s Deb Gruver writes that the paper had held off from publication because it couldn’t get anyone to go on the record — but that decision was reversed after other news organizations began to report similar stories, also based on anonymous sources.
Cody left the Kansas City Police Department, where he was a captain, after he was demoted for harassing and demeaning his subordinates. Perhaps the most explosive section in Gruber’s story involves Cody’s unhappiness at having been transferred while he was under investigation:
Multiple sources recalled a conversation in which Cody was talking about his career and mentioned how much he loathed working in communications, or dispatch.
Cody said that if they hadn’t transferred him when they did, he would have found “the skinniest and prettiest girl down there and f*cked her” to force a move.
“I was quite flabbergasted and didn’t know how to respond to that,” a source said. “All respect that was there was lost.”
One source later transferred to another unit.
“As soon as I left his command, I was happy. It felt like a great weight had been lifted off of me,” he said.
Gruver added that one source called Cody “the absolute worst commander I ever experienced” and quoted him as saying: “His ego would not allow him to listen to what anyone below his rank said … a common characteristic of toxic/ego-centric commanders.”
The Record has also posted about a minute and a half of security video (above) showing the officers in the midst of illegally (that is, without the required subpoena) searching the home of Joan and Eric Meyer, the publishers of the Record. Joan Meyer, who was Eric’s 98-year-old mother, died the next day. She comes across as pretty feisty in the video, but she was no match for Cody’s heavily armed men.
At no point have I believed the cover story for the raid — that police were searching for evidence that the Record had illegally obtained documents about a local restaurateur’s history of drunken driving. It has seemed clear from the beginning that Cody was looking to intimidate the Meyers to stop their reporters from probing into his sleazy past in Kansas City. And now it’s all starting to come out.
From 1976 to ’78, I was a Northeastern co-op student at The Woonsocket Call in Rhode Island, working full-time for about a year in three- and six-month stints. It was a great place to learn how to be a reporter. Managing editor Bill Crouse, city editor Ed Berman and assistant city editor Jim Anagnostos (whose family published The Hellenic Chronicle in Boston) were all first-rate journalists, and the Palmer family, who owned the paper, took their responsibilities seriously.
Late Monday afternoon, I was driving home from the Providence area and decided on a whim to head up Route 146 to see what The Call’s building and the city looked like these days. The building, at 75 Main St., was apparently closed during COVID and has not been reopened. But the outside was very much as I remembered it.
I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning Samuel S. Foss, who was, according to the plaque in the third photo, the “Father of Woonsocket Journalism.” But in the second photo you can just make out that the paper’s headquarters, built in 1922, was known as the Buell Building. According to Wikipedia, The Call was founded in 1892 by Samuel E. Hudson and Andrew J. McConnell, and among their descendants was Buell W. Hudson.
Today the paper is owned by RISN Operations, a small chain that was launched in Rhode Island in 2007 and that today operates eight small dailies across the country as well as a number of weeklies.
We’re starting to learn more about why police in Marion, Kansas, raided a newspaper office and two private homes, possibly leading to the death of the newspaper’s 98-year-old co-publisher, Joan Meyer. It’s pretty thin gruel, and it certainly doesn’t justify the police department’s violation of federal law in not seeking a subpoena before making off with the Marion County Record’s computers, cellphones and other materials.
According to Jonathan O’Connell and Jon Swaine of The Washington Post (free link), Phyllis Zorn, a reporter for the Record, may have broken privacy laws by downloading documents pertaining to a local restaurateur’s history of drunken driving and driving without a license. She obtained those records from a state database, possibly by claiming to be the restaurant owner or by lying about her reasons for seeking the documents. (Jim Salter of The Associated Press has a similar story.)
This story has been convoluted from the start, and I’m not going to try to parse all of it here. You can read the Post’s article if you’re interested in the details, but here is some pertinent information: Zorn already had a copy of the documents, given to her by an enemy of the restaurant owner, Kari Newell, and was using the state database to confirm their authenticity. The Record’s publisher, Eric Meyer, reportedly told Newell the paper would not use the records for a story because of the way Zorn had obtained them — although some of the details were published anyway because they came out at a city council meeting. Meyer and Zorn have both denied that the Record broke any laws.
The local prosecutor has ordered that the materials seized by police be returned to the Record.
State authorities are said to be investigating the newspaper’s actions but not those of the police department. That’s fine, but the U.S. Justice Department needs to undertake its own investigation.
In other developments:
• Danielle Kaye of NPR reports that the Record has compiled an admirable record over the years for its tough watchdog journalism. “Founded in 1869,” she writes, “the paper is known for its hard-hitting coverage of local government decisions and holding people in positions of power accountable.”
• In The New York Times, Kevin Draper writes (free link) that the Record’s scrappy brand of local journalism is controversial among some local residents — especially since Eric Meyer came home several years ago from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he had been a reporter and editor, to take charge of the family business. Draper asks: “What is the appropriate relationship between a community and a local news organization, and what duty, if any, does it have to be a booster for the places it covers?”
• Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, who signed the search warrant used to in the raid, has her own history of drunken driving, reports Chance Swaim of The Wichita Eagle. Viar “was arrested at least twice for DUI in two different Kansas counties in 2012, a Wichita Eagle investigation found.”
• The Kansas City Star has confirmed earlier reporting by Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket that Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody left his previous job at the Kansas City Police Department after being accused of sexual misconduct. The Star’s paywall appears to be impenetrable, but Kabas writes that the Star found Cody was demoted after he allegedly disparaged a female officer and made sexist comments. Rather than accept the demotion, Cody took the job in Marion. Eric Meyer says the Record was reporting on Cody’s past at the time of the raid.
Earlier:
Correction: Phyllis Zorn contacted me on Dec. 13 and informed me that Eric Meyer has not filed a lawsuit. I’ve updated my story accordingly.
Heather Cox Richardson agrees with the argument that the 14th Amendment prohibits Donald Trump from seeking election because he directed and took part in an insurrection. There is, however, a problem with this argument, which neither she nor others have addressed: there first needs to be a determination that Trump did, in fact, engage in “insurrection or rebellion.”
He did. Of course he did. But he and his partisans deny it, even though it all took place in plain sight. So how would you actually get the 14th Amendment to kick in? It seems to me that a guilty verdict in either the Jan. 6 federal case or the Georgia case would do it. So would a congressional resolution (good luck with that).
So yes, if Trump is found guilty, he could be banned from running for office. Short of that, this strikes me as a pointless exercise.
Update: David French thinks the Supreme Court could intervene and declare Trump ineligible to run. Of course, that’s not going to happen, either.
