Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has been harshly criticized for his handling of the government shutdown. Photo (cc) 2024 by the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
We’ve been hashing out the pros and cons of ending the government shutdown on Facebook this week. My position has been that the Democrats shouldn’t have caved, but that it was a close call. Certainly the shutdown couldn’t have gone on too much longer, especially with families in danger of going hungry and federal workers not receiving paychecks.
More than anything, I didn’t see any possible way that the Democrats could achieve their stated objective of forcing Donald Trump and the Republican Congress to extend health-care subsidies. The government could have stayed shut for six more months and that wouldn’t have changed.
Even as major media organizations like ABC’s parent company, Disney, and CBS’s, Paramount, were settling bogus lawsuits filed by Donald Trump in order to demonstrate their submissiveness, an unlikely defender of the First Amendment has emerged: USA Today Co., which until earlier this week was known as Gannett.
A federal judge on Thursday threw out a class-action lawsuit charging that Gannett’s Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer committed fraud when they reported days before the 2024 election that Kamala Harris held a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa. As you may recall, the poll results created a sensation, but they turned out to be wrong: Trump won Iowa by 13 points, which was about what you’d expect.
The class-action suit was brought by a resident of West Des Moines named Dennis Donnelly, who claimed that he and other Register subscribers were victims of fraud because the Register acted with “intentional deceit or reckless disregard,” according to Emma Brustkern of WFAA-TV.
The suit is similar to one brought by Trump himself against Gannett, the Register and Selzer (he later dropped Selzer from the claim), calling the poll “brazen election interference.” That is, of course, a ridiculous allegation. More than anything, pollsters want to get it right, but sometimes they get it wrong. And sometimes, as in the case of Selzer in 2024, they get it very wrong. As U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger writes in her decision:
No false representation was made. Defendants conducted a poll using a particular methodology which yielded results that later turned out to be different from the event the poll sought to measure. The results of an opinion poll are not an actionable false represention merely because the anticipated results differ from what eventually occurred.
Trump’s own lawsuit is likely to meet a similar fate. So good for USA Today Co., which has shown a stiffer spine than some other media companies. Rather than allowing itself to be used by the Trump regime as a way of weakening the First Amendment, it is standing up to authoritarianism.
Larry Bushart under arrest. Photo by the Lexington, Tenn., police department via The Intercept.
Larry Bushart is free, but he didn’t win. It was the forces of oppression that won after Bushart spent a month in jail, held on $2 million bail, for publishing a provocative Facebook post about the late Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump that Tennessee authorities decided to conflate into the felony of recklessly threatening mass violence at a school.
Bushart was released from jail Wednesday after public pressure began to build, reports Rick Rojas in The New York Times. A retired law-enforcement officer who obsessively posts liberal memes, Bushart’s offense was to publish a photo of Trump following Kirk’s murder accompanied by the words “We have to get over it,” which was a statement Trump made in 2024 after a fatal school shooting in Iowa. A line under the photo read “Donald Trump, on the Perry High School mass shooting, one day after,” along with “This seems relevant today …”
Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, there were fears that he would position its editorial pages to boost his various business interests and amplify his quirky political philosophy.
Consider, for example, Shel Kaphan, an engineer who was Amazon’s first employee and later had a falling-out with Bezos. “It makes me feel quite nauseous,” Kaphan told the Post immediately after the purchase was announced. “I’d hate to see the newspaper converted into a corporate libertarian mouthpiece.”
Contrary to Kaphan’s fears, Bezos proved to be an exemplary owner for 10 years. Then, in late 2023 he hired the ethically challenged Fleet Street veteran Will Lewis as his publisher, and it’s been all downhill since then.
Particularly damaging has been Bezos’ assault on the Post’s opinion section, which began with his decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 presidential election. That was followed by the exodus of key employees, Bezos’ pronouncement that the opinion section would be reoriented to emphasize “free markets and personal liberties,” and the hiring of the conservative journalist Adam O’Neal to be opinion editor.
Now comes yet another disturbing development in the Post opinion section’s race to the bottom. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that, on three occasions in recent weeks, the Post has editorialized in favor of Bezos’ business interests without making any disclosure — a violation of basic journalistic ethics. As Folkenflik observes:
For the newspaper’s owner to have outside business holdings or activities that might intersect with coverage or commentary is conventionally seen to present at the least a perception of a conflict of interest. Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency.
The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past, whether the Graham family’s holdings, which included the Stanley Kaplan educational company and Slate magazine, or, since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper’s reporters do so as a matter of routine.
The three undisclosed conflicts, by the way, involved a rousing endorsement of Donald Trump’s hideous ballroom, for which Amazon was a major corporate donor; support for the military’s bid to build nuclear reactors, which could bolster another Amazon investment; and a piece urging local officials in Washington to approve self-driving cars. Amazon’s autonomous car company, Zoox, had just announced that it would be moving into the nation’s capital.
Folkenflik noted that in the case of the ballroom to replace the now-demolished East Wing, the Post added a disclosure after its initial publication — but only after being called on it by Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin.
It’s not at all unusual for media moguls to have a variety of entangling business interests. The solution, without exception, is to disclose those conflicts whenever they are being reported on or editorialized about. The Boston Globe, for instance, rarely fails to disclose John and Linda Henry’s ownership of the Red Sox and their other sports-related interests when reporting on them as business enterprises.
To borrow Shel Kaphan’s description, it is nauseating to watch Bezos destroy his legacy as a first-rate newspaper owner by turning the Post’s opinion section into a pathetic joke. It has cost the Post tens of thousands of readers, and media reporter Natalie Korach of Status reports writes the staff is preparing for a painful round of cuts just before the holidays.
But Bezos doesn’t care. His interests are elsewhere. I just wish the world’s fourth-richest person would donate the Post to a nonprofit foundation so that he can cease being, as he’s put it, “not an ideal owner” of one of our great newspapers.
Donald Trump is wreaking so much havoc and engaging in so much corruption that it’s hard to stay focused. But I urge all of us to keep our eye on this: He is killing civilians from Venezuela and Colombia in the Caribbean and, now, in the Pacific. The number is up to 43 victims.
Charlie Savage, who is one of The New York Times’ most perceptive reporters, has written a news analysis that places Trump’s actions in perspective. With Trump’s apologists perpetually engaging in whatabout-whatabout-whatabout, Savage notes that Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush went out of their way to come up with legal justifications for drone strikes against Al Qaeda (in Obama’s case) and for torturing terrorism suspects (in Bush’s).
You may not like what Obama and Bush did (I certainly don’t), but the point is that they understood the rule of law had to be asserted, even if they were paying it little more than lip service. By contrast, Trump is just killing people who may or may not be drug smugglers and who have the right to be arrested and tried, not “blown apart, burned alive or drowned,” as Savage puts it. He writes:
Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.
Savage adds: “In peacetime, targeting civilians — even suspected criminals — who pose no threat of imminent violence is considered murder. In an armed conflict, it is a war crime.”
Trump might ponder that one of his favorite former dictators, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, is on trial before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for accusations that he was involved in dozens of killings in an attempt to crack down on illegal drugs.
You don’t have to draw a convoluted analogy. Trump is doing exactly the same thing that Duterte is accused of doing, and he’s reveling in it publicly. It is the worst thing he’s done as president, and that’s saying a lot.
Map via “The State of Local News 2025.” Click here for the interactive version.
Finding news in the annual State of Local News report from Northwestern University’ Medill School can be a challenge because, frankly, it’s always the same depressing thing: newspapers keep closing; digital startups are rising, but not by enough to fill the gap; and be sure to tune in again next year, when the situation is likely to be even worse.
Still, there are a few interesting nuggets in the latest update, which was released Monday. In particular, I was drawn to some observations in the report about rural areas, which is where news deserts tend to be concentrated. News deserts, as defined by the project’s now-retired founder, Penny Abernathy, are counties without any locally based news organizations.
As newspapers continue to close, independent startups are filling the gap. But it’s uneven at best, with most startups concentrated in urban and suburban areas. The report puts it this way:
Over the past five years, we have tracked more than 300 startups that have emerged across the country. Support for both these new startups, which have opened in almost every state, as well as existing legacy outlets has come from a surge in philanthropic investment as well as public policy initiatives. Over the past year, such efforts have boosted a wide variety of news outlets. Overall, however, philanthropic grants remain highly centralized in urban areas, and state legislation has not been widely adopted throughout the nation, leaving many outlets in more rural or less affluent areas still vulnerable.
The report also finds that fewer than 10% of digital-only news organizations are in rural counties, and that the demographics of counties that do support digital projects “tend to be more affluent, with lower rates of poverty and higher rates of educational attainment.” Of course, internet connectivity tends to lag in rural areas as well.
Photo taken from the George Santos for Congress Facebook page via Talking Points Memo.
Weeks after the 2022 congressional elections, The New York Times exposed George Santos as a world-class fraudster, documenting a trail of deceit that eventually led to prison. The Times is still bragging about it today, and the Santos saga is sometimes held up as an example of the rot that can fester when local journalism fails.
But as I wrote in December 2022, it was the Times that failed — and, to an even greater extent, Newsday, a daily newspaper that purportedly covers Long Island, including Santos’ district. Both papers ignored reporting by a local news outlet, The North Shore Leader, showing that there were massive plumes of smoke emanating from Santos’ campaign headquarters and that maybe someone ought to take a look and see if there were any flames coming out as well.
Did Donald Trump get excited about sending troops into Portland, Oregon, because he was watching 5-year-old footage on Fox News depicting violence in the streets? It would appear that the answer is yes.
Independent journalist Philip Bump, part of the Washington Post diaspora, reported that Fox ran B-roll from Portland during segments with Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sept. 27 showing a violent protest in Portland that included fires, what appears to be tear gas, and demonstrators squaring off with law enforcement. But the footage is dated June 2020. Who knows if Trump was paying attention?
Bump offers this as well:
In an interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor, he described a conversation he’d had with Oregon’s governor.
“I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different,’” Trump said of the conversation. “They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place … it looks like terrible.”
Well, yes, Man Who Has Access to the Breadth of Federal Intelligence Gathering. What you saw on TV was in fact not what was happening at the moment in Portland.
Mike Masnick writes at TechDirt, “The President of the United States — who has access to better intelligence than anyone on Earth — is moving to deploy military forces against American citizens based on what he saw on TV and what his ‘people’ told him, without bothering to verify whether any of it was real.” Masnick adds:
So half of this story is that we have a mad king who will fall for anything he sees on Fox News without bothering to first find out whether it’s true or not.
That’s terrifying!
But the other part is that his “people” around him are clearly abusing the senile President to take advantage of the situation to play out their own violent fantasies.
Alicia Victoria Lozano of NBC News reports that Trump activated 200 National Guard troops on Friday in order to respond to the non-existent violence. City and state officials sued to stop the deployment, and a ruling is expected later today.
Google appears to be throttling AI searches related to Donald Trump’s obviously addled mental state. Jay Peters reports (sub. req.) in The Verge:
There’s been a lot of coverage of the mental acuity of both President Trump and President Biden, who are the two oldest presidents ever, so it’s reasonable to expect that people might query Google about it. The company may be worried about accurately presenting information on a sensitive subject, as AI overviews remain susceptible to delivering incorrect information. But in this case, it may also be worried about the president’s response to such information. Google agreed this week to pay $24.5 million to settle a highly questionable lawsuit about Trump’s account being banned from YouTube.
I wanted to see if I could reproduce Peters’ results, and sure enough, Google is still giving Trump special treatment, even though Peters’ embarrassing story was published two days ago. I searched “is trump showing signs of dementia” in Google’s “All” tab, which these days will generally give you an AI-generated summary before getting to the links. Instead, you get nothing but links. The same thing happened when I switched to “AI Mode.”
Next I searched for “is biden showing signs of dementia” at the “All” tab. As with Trump, I got nothing but links — no AI summary at the top. But when I switched to “AI Mode,” I got a detailed AI summary that begins:
In response to concerns and observations about President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities, a range of opinions and reports have emerged. It’s important to note that diagnosing dementia or cognitive decline requires a formal medical assessment by qualified professionals.
I have mixed feelings about AI searches, though, like many people, I make use of them — always checking the citations to make sure I’m getting accurate information. But as Peters observes, it looks like Google is flinching.
Jill Lepore at the 2023 Kentucky Author Forum. Photo (cc) by uoflphoto3.
Over the weekend I finished the audio version of Jill Lepore’s monumental survey of American history, “These Truths,” published in 2018. At 960 pages or, in my case, 29 hours, the book is a major commitment, but it’s well worth it.
That said, one thing I learned was that I already knew a lot about American history, so much of “These Truths” was familiar to me. There’s nothing startlingly revisionistic about it, but it nevertheless works as a skillfully executed and gracefully written overview of the past 500 years, from Columbus to Trump. I especially appreciated her extensive treatment of Black and women’s history.
