In today’s New York Times, we learn what Donald Trump is really up to with his nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general: he’s trying to shove open the Overton Window, choosing someone so far outside the norms that other terrible appointments he’s made (and will make) can slide through the Senate.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report (gift link):
He [Trump] is making calls on Mr. Gaetz’s behalf, and he remains confident that even if Mr. Gaetz does not make it, the standard for an acceptable candidate will have shifted so much that the Senate may simply approve his other nominees who have appalled much of Washington.
In other words, Senate Republicans will have a chance to assert their prerogatives by rejecting Gaetz, who, among other things, has been accused of taking part in drug-fueled orgies and having sex with a 17-year-old girl — a minor in the state of Florida.
Meanwhile, Trump’s unqualified choices for secretary of defense, accused rapist Pete Hegseth, and for secretary of health and human services, all-around loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will win confirmation, according to Trump’s theory of the case, because Republicans will content themselves with rejecting his most egregious appointment rather than all of them.
The Overton Window is generally a term used to describe crazy policy ideas that are put forth in order to make other, slightly less crazy ideas appear to be more plausible. But it works for people as well. The only way Hegseth and Kennedy look good is by standing in contrast to Gaetz. And so it goes.
Massachusetts is one of eight states with the weakest level of protection for journalists’ confidential sources and materials
Prosecutors in the Karen Read murder trial are asking that a judge order Boston magazine to turn over unredacted audio recordings, notes and other materials stemming from a story about the case written by reporter Gretchen Voss that was published in September 2023.
The request raises some uncomfortable questions about freedom of the press. Kirsten Glavin, reporting for NBC10 Boston, writes that the magazine’s lawyer has argued previously that journalists have a right to protect off-the-record information. But that right — known as the journalist’s privilege — is tenuous in Massachusetts.
According to Glavin, Judge Beverly Cannone had previously granted access to audio of Read’s on-the-record interviews with Voss. Now the prosecution is seeking the full, unredacted recordings, which would include off-the-record statements by Read.
Michael Coyne, NBC10’s legal analyst, is quoted as saying that the prosecution’s strategy appears to be aimed at finding contradictions in what Read has said about the circumstances surrounding the death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe. “The more information they gather, the more likely they’re going to start to uncover inconsistencies in the story and the like, and that’s all going to help them ultimately prove their case at trial,” Coyne said.
Read is accused of driving over O’Keefe while drunk and leaving him in a snowbank to die. She and her supporters contend that O’Keefe was beaten up in a nearby house and then dragged outside. Her first trial ended in a mistrial, and she is expected to be retried early next year.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1972 case of Branzburg v. Hayes that the First Amendment does not provide for a journalist’s privilege and that reporters, like ordinary citizens, must provide testimony in court if ordered to do so.
At the state level, 49 states recognize some form of a journalist’s privilege, either through a shield law or judicial rulings. In Massachusetts, the privilege is based on the latter, as efforts to enact a shield law over the years have not gone anywhere. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, that places the Bay State among the eight states with the weakest protections for reporters seeking to guard their anonymous sources and off-the-record materials.
Not even shield laws provide absolute protection for the press. Nevertheless, such a law in Massachusetts is long overdue.
That will be $176k, please
In another case that raises concerns about freedom of the press in Massachusetts, Kerry Kavanaugh of Boston 25 News reports that the State Police have told the station it will have to fork over some $176,000 for records about the State Police Training Academy — and that’s just so the scandal-ridden agency can review those records to determine if they are public or not.
“Again, please note that the majority of the responsive records may be exempt in their entirety from disclosure,” the agency told her in a response to her public records request.
Kavanaugh, an investigative reporter and anchor for Boston 25, writes that the station began seeking the records following the sudden death of Enrique Delgado Garcia, a recruit who collapsed while taking part in a boxing match that was part of his training.
She also quoted Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, as saying:
We shouldn’t have to pay almost $200,000 to get this information. These are our tax dollars that are being spent on the state police training program. And we have a right to know whether or not that program is operating safely or whether it’s just teeing up another tragedy to occur somewhere down the road.
The state’s public records law is notoriously weak. In 2017, though, Gov. Charlies Baker signed into law a reform measure that, according to the ACLU of Massachusetts, “set clear limits on how much money government agencies can charge for public records.”
By demanding nearly $200,000 merely to screen its records to make its own determination as to whether they are public or not, the State Police may be in violation of that provision.
Kavanaugh writes that rather than paying the outrageous fee, her station is working with the State Police and has filed an appeal with the secretary of state’s office.
Journalism in the Age of Trump II
What will be the fate of journalism in the Age of Trump II? Poynter Online media columnist Tom Jones asked several folks (including me) what role the press played in Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris and what the next four years may look like. I think this observation from NPR TV critic Eric Deggans is especially on point:
The bubble of conservative-oriented media has distorted what many people even believe is fair news coverage and increased the amount of misinformation and disinformation in the public space. But I think one of the biggest problems facing mainstream news outlets now is the belief among nonconservative consumers that coverage of this election cycle let them down by “sanewashing” and normalizing Trump’s excesses. Traditional journalists who have already lost the confidence of conservative consumers are now facing diminishing trust from the news consumers who are left, which is not a great combination.
Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos raised eyebrows, and hackles, when he logged on to Twitter/X on Wednesday and posted a congratulatory note to Donald Trump:
Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
The tweet immediately angered Trump critics, who were quick to point out that it came shortly after Bezos killed a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris that had been already written and was ready to go. Bezos claimed that decision was nothing more than a reflection of his belief that the paper should stop endorsing candidates, but the timing was suspicious, to say the least.
It didn’t help that Bezos failed to offer similar congratulations on Twitter to Joe Biden in 2020. One Twitter user, @WhiteHouseAMA, pulled up Bezos’ 2016 congrats to Trump and commented: “Jeff tweeted congratulations to Trump in 2016 and 2024. No tweet exists for Biden in 2020. He didn’t kill the WaPo endorsement of Harris because he wanted to be non-partisan, he did it because he is a partisan.”
But wait.
Writing in Newsweek, Alex Gonzales reported that Bezos did, in fact, congratulate Biden in 2020, except that he did it on Instagram rather than Twitter — and he did so rather fulsomely: “Unity, empathy, and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era. Congratulations President-elect @JoeBiden and Vice President-elect @KamalaHarris. By voting in record numbers, the American people proved again that our democracy is strong.” The message is accompanied by a black-and-white photo of Biden and Harris celebrating.
Newsweek added the Instagram update in a correction, showing how widely it was believed that Bezos had not congratulated Biden four years ago.
The immediate outrage among anti-Trump forces demonstrates the impossible dilemma that Washington Post journalists now face in proving to their audience that they remain independent. Though Bezos was within his rights to cancel the Harris endorsement, it was an unspeakably bad look for him to do so in the final days of the campaign, making it seem like he was truckling under in the event of a Trump victory — which now, of course, has come to pass.
It hasn’t helped that the cancellation followed months of controversy over the Post’s ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. If Trump is the first convicted felon to be elected president, then surely Lewis is the first Post publisher to be under investigation by Scotland Yard. I continue to trust the independence of the Post’s newsroom, but I’m watching for any signs that I shouldn’t.
Meanwhile, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took to Threads on Wednesday to offer his own cheery greetings to Trump, writing, “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
Threads is just one of the many platforms Zuckerberg controls; the most prominent are Facebook and Instagram. Threads has also been by far the most successful of the would-be alternatives to Twitter that sprang up after Trump uber-influencer Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, acquired it and started taking a wrecking ball to it in late 2022.
Threads has proved to be especially popular with liberals fleeing the extreme right-wingers and white nationalists whom Musk enabled on Twitter. And yet Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive who runs Threads and Instagram, has gone out of his way to play down political news in Threads’ algorithm, leading to frustration and anger among a number of users. Messages have been removed for no reason, too, as Washington Post technology reporter Will Oremus has noted.
Even before Zuckerberg’s congratulatory post, some Threads users were leaving and setting up shop on Bluesky, the most prominent short-form platform after Twitter and Threads. Bluesky is owned by a public-benefit corporation and as such is not subject to the whims of a billionaire owner. It also has much better personalization tools than either Twitter or Threads.
Bluesky, though, has only a fraction of the users that its larger rivals have — about 12 million total versus more than 600 million active monthly users at Twitter and 175 million at Threads. Personally, I’m trying to give equal attention to Threads and Bluesky, but it’s hard to know whether Bluesky will ever break through.
After all, it’s a billionaires’ world, and we’re just living in it.
I got up early this morning after a restless night to see that our fears had become reality. There is no sugar-coating this. Democracy was on the ballot, and democracy lost. The rule of law is giving way to an era of authoritarianism.
No recriminations. As I wrote Tuesday, Kamala Harris proved to be a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. Do I have quibbles? Sure. I was surprised and disappointed that her running mate, Tim Walz, proved not to be an asset. After he performed poorly in his debate with JD Vance, he pretty much disappeared. But no one votes for running mates. I also thought Harris spent a bit too much time with Liz Cheney and not enough with actual Democrats.
But every candidate has to make choices; some work out, some don’t. It wouldn’t have mattered. Voters who ultimately went with Trump decided they want a racist, insurrectionist strongman who hates who they hate. I could go on, but not this morning.
By far the highlight of my Election Day was spending time with our Northeastern journalism students involved in producing a half-hour newscast as part of a national project organized by Student News Live. The students were either part of our fledgling Society of Professional Journalists student chapter, NUTV or both.
Also doing a great job were Northeastern students who covered Election Day for The Scope, our digital social justice publication, and for The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper. I expect their coverage will keep rolling in throughout today.
Northeastern students after Tuesday’s newscast at NUTV
A few other observations:
• It was a big night for poll aggregators like FiveThirtyEight and its founder, Nate Silver, who has moved on and now runs a similar project. For the past month, they’ve had the race in a dead heat with Trump given slightly better odds of winning most of the time. Also: That Iowa poll meant nothing.
• Too early to tell how big a factor the Electoral College played in this. In 2016 it carried Trump to victory even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. Four years ago Joe Biden barely squeaked through despite a decisive victory in the popular vote. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time, but we just don’t know yet.
• Living in Massachusetts, or in any Deep Blue state, will give us some protection from what’s to come. But my heart goes out to people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, immigrants, the people of Ukraine and anyone else who is going to be hit with the full force of what’s to come.
No matter how this apocalyptic election turns out, I think it’s important for all of us to recognize that Kamala Harris has been a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. If Donald Trump somehow manages to pull out a victory, that won’t be on Harris; rather, it will be on voters who’ve decided they’d like to give authoritarianism a try, decency and the rule of law be damned.
I hope that by tonight, or at least within a day or two, we can call her Madam President-elect. If that doesn’t happen, I fear for the future of our country. But we’ll also know that Harris did everything she possibly could. We owe her a debt of gratitude.
A huge and encouraging outlier for Kamala Harris on Saturday night. Some more sobering numbers today.
First, the encouraging news. As you may already know, the new Iowa Poll from Ann Selzer, which gets high marks from FiveThirtyEight, shows Harris with a three-point lead over Donald Trump. It’s hard to know what to make of this. But Iowa has gone deep red in recent elections, and virtually every other survey has put Trump well in the lead — including earlier samples taken by the same poll.
The margin, 47% for Harris and 44% for Trump, is being driven by voters over 65, especially women, who say they are supporting Harris by 63% to 28%. But Harris also has a slight edge among older men, 47% to 45%.
What does this mean? I’m not a polling expert. I can tell you that the latest Emerson Poll, which also gets very high marks, continues to show Trump with a nine-point lead in Iowa. On the other hand, a new Miami University poll shows Trump with just a three-point lead in deep-red Ohio, and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown with a two-point lead over his Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno. I should add that FiveThirtyEight does not rate this poll.
If the Iowa and Ohio results are picking up something real, then Harris may be headed not just for a victory, but for one larger than anyone expects. My own totally unscientific, vibe-based sense of the race is that there are three possible outcomes: (1) a narrow Trump win; (2) a narrow Harris win; (3) a surprisingly substantial Harris win. I’m going for somewhere between (2) and (3). Needless to say, Harris will win the popular vote with ease.
Finally, The New York Times this morning came out with its last poll before Election Day, and it is simultaneously worrying for Harris yet showing some unexpected opportunities. The Times-Siena poll sits atop the FiveThirtyEight rankings, so we can’t ignore it — although, as Josh Marshall has observed, it also relies on a different understanding of the electorate from what most other pollsters are using, and that understanding may be right or wrong.
*Based on the barest of margins in the Times poll (something you really can’t do given that all these numbers are well within the margin of error), Harris would lose the Blue Wall state of Michigan and win Pennsylvania. Wisconsin seems a little safer. But she also has small leads in North Carolina and Georgia.
One other possible good sign for Harris: the Times-Siena poll goes all the way back to Oct. 24 (through Nov. 2), and Harris seems to have built momentum in recent days. In any case, I played around with the map, above, and awarded Harris every state in which the Times poll has her ahead, even by less than 1% (again: don’t try this at home) It shows Harris with 293 electoral votes, 21 more than the 270 needed. I also flipped Pennsylvania to Trump, and Harris would still win, with 274 electoral votes.
Corrections: My map is an accurate reflection of the Times-Siena poll, but an earlier version of this post said that Harris was ahead in Arizona. She’s not. I’ve also corrected the number of Electoral College votes needed to win.
Cherry-picking the data while trying to maintain my sanity: With Election Day looming, I want to share four sets of numbers suggesting that Kamala Harris really will dispatch the Orange Menace once and for all.
First, The Economist’s election model, which has showed Donald Trump with slight edge in recent days, has flipped again, giving Harris a 52% chance of winning and Trump 48%.
The model is similar to what FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver do: it’s based on some high-level math that takes into account polls, poll quality and other measures and then runs multiple computerized simulations. You may recall that similar models gave Hillary Clinton a 70% to 95% chance of winning in 2016, so obviously this needs to be taken with several truckloads of salt. Still, it’s better to be at 52% than 48%.
Second, the latest Marist Poll, which FiveThirtyEight judges to be of high quality, gives Harris a lead of between 2% and 3% in the all-important Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Again, that’s not much, and it’s well within the margin of error. But it’s better to be ahead than behind.
Third, The Washington Post’s polling average —that is, an actual average of polls rather than a FiveThirtyEight-style simulation — also has Harris slightly ahead in Wisconsin and Michigan (by 2%) and in Pennsylvania (by less than 1%). The Post’s averages have consistently tilted more toward Harris than The New York Times’, but there’s no reason to think that the Times is doing a better job with these than the Post.
Finally, the Gallup Poll shows a 10-point enthusiasm gap favoring Harris, with 77% of Democrats and voters who lean Democrat saying they are “more enthusiastic than usual” about voting and 67% of Republicans and Republican leaners saying the same. As with all these numbers, it’s impossible to say exactly how that’s going to play out, but it’s better to be at the higher rather than the lower number.
The newspaper world was rocked last week when two billionaire owners, Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times followed by Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post, killed endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris against the wishes of their editorial boards.
Harris supporters erupted in outrage, with many of them vowing to cancel their subscriptions and demanding to know how two wealthy men could be allowed to interfere with the sanctity of the editorial process. Aren’t media moguls supposed to be rarely seen and never heard?
Now, it’s true that Bezos’s and Soon-Shiong’s actions were outrageous, but that’s because of the high-handed, disrespectful manner in which they handled the endorsements. In fact, it is perfectly acceptable for newspaper owners to involve themselves in the editorial pages. The problem is that we journalists are not very good at explaining the ethics of our trade, and we too often act arrogantly toward the public we purportedly serve. As a result, endorsements are poorly understood.
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.
The fallout over Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to kill his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris has been widespread and withering, according to Hadas Gold and Brian Stelter of CNN.
Internally, 15 Post opinion writers signed a piece calling the decision (gift link) a “terrible mistake.” (The tease says 16, so perhaps the number is still growing.) Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty have weighed in separately. Ann Telnaes has a gray-wash cartoon headlined, inevitably, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned. The legendary Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a statement called the decision not to endorse “surprising and disappointing.”
Externally, Max Tani of Semafor reports that some 2,000 Post subscribers had canceled by Friday afternoon.
If Bezos is still capable of shame, then the most wounding reaction had to be that of his former executive editor, Marty Baron, who took to Twitter and posted:
This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.
An increasing number of news organizations are becoming fearful in the face of a rising tide of fascism. The Washington Post today joined the Los Angeles Times in deciding not to endorse in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. David Folkenflik of NPR reports:
The editorial page editor, David Shipley, told colleagues that the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, would publish a note to readers online early Friday afternoon.
Shipley told colleagues the editorial board was told yesterday by management that there would not be an endorsement. He added that he “owns” this decision. The reason he cited was to create “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.
As with the LA Times, there has been no change in ownership at the Post, and both papers routinely have endorsed Democratic candidates in the past. The Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, courageously stood up to Trump in the face of threats during Trump’s rise in 2015 and ’16 and throughout his presidency. But the Post has been adrift in recent years, and the Bezos of 2018 is clearly not the Bezos of 2024.
In CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter, Brian Stelter cites the historian Timothy Snyder’s warning about “anticipatory obedience,” quoting Snyder as writing that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” That appears to be what has happened with Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.
Now, it’s true that the very notion of newspaper endorsements may have had their day. Newspaper chains such as Alden Global Capital and Gannett have moved away from them. The New York Times, weirdly, has given up on state and local endorsements, where the editorial board’s views might be welcome, while continuing to endorse in national races. Nonprofit news outlets can’t endorse without losing their tax exemption.
But for the LA Times and the Post to take a pass on the presidential race this late in the campaign smacks of giving in to the punishment they might be subjected to if Trump returns to office. Anticipatory obedience, in other words. A thoughtful, considered explanation months ago as to why they were ending endorsements would be another matter, but this is anything but that.
Meanwhile, the Times Union of Albany, New York, part of the Hearst chain, endorsed Harris today, writing:
For all Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about the weaponization of government, it’s Mr. Trump who has threatened to fire thousands of diligent career civil servants, fill the federal workforce with his loyal minions, use the Justice Department to hound political adversaries, and sic the military on citizens who protest against him.
This is not the talk of a person fit to be president for all Americans. On the issues and on character, it’s Ms. Harris who can be entrusted with the power and responsibility of the presidency.
This has been a shameful week for the LA Times and The Washington Post, and now it’s been punctuated by a much smaller paper’s willingness to step into the breach.
Merchants of death
One of the worst consequences of the local news crisis has been the rise of the oxymoronic paid obituary. Sorry, but obits are news stories with journalistic standards. If someone is paying for it, then it’s not an obit, it’s an ad — a death notice, in other words.
Bill Mitchell has a stunning piece up at Poynter Online about the venerable Hartford Courant, now owned by the cost-slashing hedge fund Alden Global Capital. It seems that a respected former staff reporter named Tom Condon died recently — and the Courant, rather than producing its own obit, picked up the one published in CT Mirror, a nonprofit that makes its journalism available for a fee to other news outlets. What’s more, the Courant has now slipped that obit behind a paywall.
The Courant’s website also carried an obit written by the Condon family for Legacy.com, according to Mitchell, who writes:
Paid obits, often written by and paid for by family members, have been boosting the sagging revenues of newspapers for a couple of decades. (The Courant charges about $1,200 for an obit the length of the one submitted by the Condon family, with an extra charge for a photo.) In 2019, Axios reported that more than a million paid obits were producing $500 million annually for newspapers, a small but significant chunk of overall advertising and circulation revenues then totaling about $25 billion a year.
It’s outrageous, and it’s not because newspapers are profiting from death. Rather, charging for obits is fundamentally no different from charging for any other type of news, and it corrupts what is supposed to be a journalistic endeavor.
The Courant and Alden are hardly alone in this. But for the paper to rely on another news organization to cover the death of one of its own really drives home just how far we’ve traveled down a very bad road.
Lessons from Billy Penn
Ten years ago, the digital journalism pioneer Jim Brady launched Billy Penn, a mobile-first news outlet covering Philadelphia. A few months later, I was in Philly to interview Brady and Chris Krewson, Billy Penn’s first editor, for my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”
Billy Penn was eventually acquired by WHYY, Philly’s public radio station. Brady is now vice president of journalism for the Knight Foundation, and Krewson is executive editor of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers.
Krewson has written an informative and entertaining piece for LION on “10 things I’ve learned about independent publishing since launching Billy Penn in 2014.” Probably the most important of those lessons is that it took longer for Brady and Krewson to make a go of it than they were able to give — the project finally broken even in 2021, but by then WHYY was in charge.
That remains a problem for today’s start-ups, Krewson writes, although he’s hopeful that new philanthropic efforts such as Press Forward will give them the runway they need to build toward sustainability.
Finally, The New York Times this morning came out with its 
