New Jersey Superior Court Judge Thomas McCloskey. Official photo via the New Jersey Globe.
It’s not a good day for the First Amendment, as four New York Times journalists have been subpoenaed in connection with their report (sub. req.) that Donald Trump’s new Air Force One plane — a gift that he corruptly accepted from the Qatari government — lacks important security features.
The journalists have been called to testify before a federal grand jury on Wednesday. Although the exact nature of the inquiry hasn’t been revealed, it’s probably an attempt by the Trump regime to determine who leaked the information to the Times.
This morning, though, I want to call your attention to a more blatant violation of the First Amendment: a judge’s demand that a New Jersey newspaper remove school security footage from its YouTube channel and refrain even from writing about it. On Thursday, the judge softened his order slightly but then extended it to all news outlets.
GBH headquarters in Brighton, Mass. Photo (cc) 2011 by Commonist.
There are some new details today on how Boston’s two news-focused public media stations, GBH and WBUR, are faring a year after Donald Trump and the Republican Congress zeroed out all public funding.
Recently I wrote that GBH chief executive Susan Goldberg had sent a memo to her staff touting new levels of fundraising success, including more than 50,000 new donors and members as well as 3% raises for everyone. Now The Boston Globe’s Aidan Ryan expands on that (sub. req.), reporting, among other things, that GBH has begun a new statewide radio show in collaboration with New England Public Media of Massachusetts, with which it recently merged, and with its Cape Cod operation, CAI. (NEPM had technically been part of GBH since 2019.)
The weekly program, “In Common,” debuted on July 4 and will be broadcast on Saturdays at 2 p.m. It’s also available as a podcast, which is a good thing given that time slot.
As Mike Deehan first reported in Axios, GBH will also receive $500,000 in state money during the next fiscal year, which is a first for public media in Massachusetts. The money comes from the millionaires’ tax, which is restricted to education and transportation. Ryan reports that the money will be spent on children’s television programs.
Fundraising and revenue from events are up at WBUR as well, Ryan writes, noting that WBUR and GBH are fundamentally two different types of entities — although both are committed to digital, GBH has a massive television operation in addition to a local radio station, whereas ’BUR is primarily a radio station. It’s in radio that the two operations compete on local news coverage.
Last August I wrote for CommonWealth Beacon on plans Goldberg and WBUR chief executive Margaret Low were making to negotiate the post-federal-funding era. At a webinar sponsored by the New England chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, they said they planned to emphasize trust and community.
That approach seems to be working so far, with the public responding to the harm done by Trump and his legislative lemmings. The question is whether public media outlets across the country can hang on until January 2029, when the political tides may shift in the White House and in one or both branches of Congress.
Fintan O’Toole’s review in The New York Times of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” includes a perfect summation of the fundamental challenge to journalism in the Age of Trump:
The profession is shaped by an assumption that has been around at least since the Greek tragedians: Revelation is followed by reversal. When Oedipus’ (or Richard Nixon’s) crimes are exposed, he must fall from power. But not so Trump. With a few notable exceptions, he relies on a collective shrug of indifference from those in his support system, and defies exposure. What can journalists do in a world where there is no shame and, apparently, no consequence?
It calls to mind then-Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron’s well-known response to a question about whether the Post was at war with Trump. “We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work,” he replied — a succinct statement of how journalists should approach their coverage.
Bunker Hill Monument. Photo by John S. Moulton, taken between 1860 and 1889, is part of the Boston Public Library Collection.
You could call the Trump regime’s campaign against so-called woke ideology an ongoing effort to muzzle our nation’s history. From the start of his second term, the National Park Service has engaged in a rampage of censorship, targeting historical sites in Philadelphia, Georgia, New York and elsewhere.
Now Trump has come for Boston. On Wednesday, Jake Spring reported in The Washington Post that the park service “has ordered the removal of three quotes” at the Bunker Hill Monument. Thus has the National Park Service earned a New England Muzzle Award. Spring writes:
The site includes panels with quotes from historic figures or writings that reflect on the 200-year-old monument. A visitor at the site complained to park staff about a quote related to women’s suffrage as being “woke” feminist ideology, the people familiar said, and the visitor later sent an email complaint.
The Boston Globe’s Tonya Alanez and Chloe Pisani on Thursday added to (sub. req.) the Post’s reporting, writing that they had confirmed the story with U.S. Sen. Ed Markey’s office. The Globe reported that one of the three quotes to be removed was from an 1846 letter by G.B. Stebbins to The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper:
As we drew near to Boston, there stood Bunker Monument, towering up towards the heavens, as if in silent, bitter mockery of the millions of slaves guarded by the professed lovers of Liberty, who reared its lofty column.
Another, addressed to “Our Irish Societies,” appeared in The Pilot, the newspaper of Boston’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese, in 1875:
Now that a public orator has declared that foreign-born men have no association with the men of the Revolution, it is our duty to show that in love of freedom and loyalty to the republic, the citizens of foreign birth take no second place.
The third quote that was removed was from a letter to the Globe written in 1971 by two members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
It seems significant that the three quotes pertain to the rights of Black people and immigrants as well as an antiwar message — all at odds with Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant, war-mongering administration.
The government’s officially sanctioned vandalism coincides with another act of vandalism at Boston’s Museum of African American History. Malcolm Gay reports (sub. req.) in the Globe that decorations to be used in Juneteenth celebrations had been set on fire.
Ironically, the investigation is being led by the Boston Police Department — and the National Park Service.
I want to call your attention to a bill in the U.S. House that would severely restrict the books that are available to students in public schools, either in the classroom or in school libraries. I don’t know whether there’s a serious chance of its being enacted into law, but it’s bad news, and it needs to be quashed at the earliest opportunity.
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
The proposal, H.R. 7661, is called the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act. It would “prohibit the use of funds provided … to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.” It’s cosponsored by 22 House members, all Republicans.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Photo (cc) 2023 by BruceSchaff.
Donald Trump and his acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, are targeting The Wall Street Journal in an effort to learn the identity of sources who leaked information to its journalists about internal dissent over the war in Iran, according to CNN reporters Hannah Rabinowitz and Kaitlan Collins. Trump himself has reportedly told Blanche that reporters for the Journal and other news organizations committed “treason.” More about that below, but first: How did we get here?
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
In October 2022, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland issued guidelines that severely restricted the conditions under which the Justice Department could seek to force journalists to identify anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents.
Garland’s action was intended as a response to the discovery that Justice had secretly obtained phone records of three Washington Post reporters during Trump’s first term. In fact, though, presidents had been pursuing reporters over leaks for years. Journalists were threatened with jail under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and Garland’s order reversed actions taken during the early months of Joe Biden’s administration as well.
Despite the Trump regime’s ongoing attempts to dismantle the First Amendment, there are important checks that remain in place. Libel protections against frivolous lawsuits remain strong — as long as news organizations use them rather than caving in to Donald Trump’s threats. Prior restraint is almost unheard of.
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
One aspect of press freedom that has been left outside the walls of the First Amendment, though, is a recognition that journalists need to protect their anonymous sources and confidential documents. Forty-nine states, including Massachusetts, provide some protection. But the federal government does not. And one of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first actions after Trump returned to the White House was to weaken Justice Department guidelines put in place by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, to make it easier for the government to demand access to that information.
Portrait of Jeff Bezos (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
By honoring The Washington Post with its most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize Board appeared intent on sending a message to two people: Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos.
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
On Monday, the Post received the Public Service Award for its reporting on the chaos unleashed by Elon Musk and his DOGE assault on the federal government. One of the lead reporters in that effort was Hannah Natanson, the target of an extraordinary raid by the FBI last January.
Every semester, I introduce my media ethics students to the World Press Freedom Index, an annual compilation by Reporters Without Borders that tracks 180 countries.
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
The United States does not do well, and the just-released 2026 update is no exception. We are now 64th, coming in just behind Botswana and just ahead of Panama. As RSF (the French acronym for Reporters Without Borders) puts it, “After a century of gradual expansion of press rights in the United States, the country is experiencing a significant and prolonged decline in press freedom, with Donald Trump’s return to the presidency greatly exacerbating the situation.”
FBI Director Kash Patel’s $250 million libel suit against The Atlantic may prove to be nothing more than bluster. Nevertheless, it’s already raised some interesting issues about ethics and defamation law, and I thought it would be useful to walk through some of them here.
Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.
Patel sued after Sarah Fitzpatrick reported Friday that Patel’s tenure at the FBI has been marred by excessive drinking, lapses in judgment and a shocking lack of discipline. The story, she writes, was based on “more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.” There are no named sources who say they’ve had first-hand knowledge of Patel’s alleged misbehavior. Still, that’s a lot of sources.
The Boston Globe’s Tonya Alanez and Chloe Pisani on Thursday 
