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.
Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.
News that the Los Angeles Times would not endorse a candidate for president has quickly ballooned into yet another crisis for Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s feckless and irresponsible owner.
Mariel Garza, the Times’ editorials editor, quit on Wednesday, reports Sewell Chan in the Columbia Journalism Review. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told Chan. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”
Chan, by the way, is a former editorial-page editor at the Times. He was recently named editor of the CJR after previously working as editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune.
Soon-Shiong, a billionaire surgeon, responded to the criticism with a post on Twitter suggesting that he wanted to publish a side-by-side analysis of Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s strengths and weaknesses, but that the editorial board refused to comply:
In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision. Please #vote.
Needless to say, the purpose of a newspaper’s opinion pages is to express opinions, not to offer “non-partisan information.”
Now, let’s back up a bit and look at the role of owners at large metropolitan newspapers like the LA Times. Ethically, owners should stay clear of news coverage, but Soon-Shiong reportedly violated that edict by interfering with a story about a friend whose dog had bitten someone, of all things. Natalie Korach reported in The Wrap earlier this year that the incident played a role (along with deep cuts in the newsroom) in executive editor Kevin Merida’s decision to quit in January of this year.
On the other hand, owners are free to exert their influence on the editorial pages. Indeed, at one time the lure of exercising political influence was one of the main reasons that rich people bought newspapers. So Soon-Shiong did not act unethically in killing an editorial endorsing Harris for president. Even so, his actions were high-handed and disrespectful, and by acting as he did at the last minute — instead of, say, announcing a no-endorsement policy earlier this year — he precipitated a crisis. In fact, as Max Tani noted in Semafor on Tuesday, the Times had endorsed in state and local races just last week.
Another consideration is the effect that endorsements actually have on political campaigns. A good rule of thumb is that the smaller and more obscure the race, the more that a newspaper’s opinion might actually influence the outcome. A presidential endorsement is the opposite of that, which Garza acknowledged in her resignation letter:
I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many “Trump is unfit” editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her.
But the reality hit me like cold water Tuesday when the news rippled out about the decision not to endorse without so much as a comment from the LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris rip.
Of course it matters that the largest newspaper in the state — and one of the largest in the nation still — declined to endorse in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.
Garza gets at something that is at least as important as influencing voters. An endorsement is how a news organization expresses its values. And what Soon-Shiong has expressed is that his newspaper is going to remain neutral at a time when a fascist (according to two generals who served under Trump, John Kelly and Mark Milley, language that Harris herself has now adopted) is seeking to return to office.
Newspapers like The New York Times and The Boston Globe have endorsed Harris. Yet, in a potentially ominous sign, The Washington Post so far has not.
Unlike the public manner in which the LA Times’ non-endorsement has played out, there’s no indication of what’s going on at the Post. Independent media reporter Oliver Darcy writes that the Post’s silence is starting to raise eyebrows, as well as new questions about its ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. Darcy writes that the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, “has repeatedly been targeted by Donald Trump over the years” and “is not alone amongst the rich and powerful who may prefer to stay as far away from politics as possible this election cycle.”
Let’s hope the Post is heard from soon.
The Sun is shining
A little over a year ago, The Colorado Sun announced it was switching from a hybrid for-profit/nonprofit ownership model to nonprofit governance. At the time, co-founder and editor Larry Ryckman (now the publisher) said that whatever misgivings he might have about the nonprofit model, it gave the Sun an easier story to tell to prospective funders.
“Whether I agree with it or not, whether I even like it or not, the reality is that many individuals, many institutions and philanthropic groups, have concluded that journalism should be nonprofit,” Ryckman told me in an interview for Nieman Lab. “I have my own thoughts on that, but that is reality.”
Well, now the switch has paid off. Ryckman announced earlier this week:
The Colorado Sun has been awarded a $1.4 million grant from the American Journalism Project. AJP is a national nonprofit whose purpose is to boost nonprofit journalism around the country, and it has thus far committed $62.7 million to 49 news organizations across 35 states.
The grant will be spread over three years, and the funds will be used to strengthen the long-term sustainability and future expansion of The Sun. This will include growing our fund development efforts and bolstering our business operations to allow us to deepen our impact in Colorado, while laying the foundation for the next era of high-quality, nonprofit journalism in our state — ensuring that Coloradans have the news they deserve for generations to come.
Before becoming a nonprofit, the Sun was a public benefit corporation, a for-profit that operates under certain restrictions and requirements. It also had a relationship with a nonprofit organization, which allowed donors to support the Sun’s journalism with tax-deductible contributions.
The Colorado Sun’s good news notwithstanding, the local news crisis continues unabated and may be getting worse. That was the message at a webinar Wednesday to mark the release of the third annual State of Local News report from the Medill School at Northwestern University.
“The crisis in local news is snowballing,” said Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill. Franklin said that more than 3,000 newspapers have closed since 2005, about a third of the total, with a concomitant decline in newspaper jobs, which he called “a staggering loss.”
Zach Metzger, who runs the project now that founder Penelope Abernathy has retired, added: “News deserts are continuing to expand.”
I plan to look more closely at the data and write a follow-up at some point in the near future. Meanwhile, Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab has a thorough overview of the new report.
Jill Stein is back, running for president for the third consecutive election — and this time members of her own family don’t even want her to run, according to a profile (gift link) by Matt Flegenheimer in The New York Times.
Stein’s Green Party candidacy in 2016 may have cost Hillary Clinton the presidency, and in 2024 it could happen again given how close the margin is between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. “Forget the lesser evil,” Stein told the Times. “Fight for the greater good.” I guess she sees the greater good as Trump’s return to the White House.
Eight years ago I wrote a piece for GBH News on my encounter with Stein during her third-party run for governor in 2002, which I was reporting on for CommonWealth Magazine (now CommonWealth Beacon). With Stein once again in the news, I’m recyling that 2016 column.
Jill Stein In 2002: Passionate, Independent, And ‘Yelling On The Mountaintop’
GBH News | Sept. 13, 2016
To the extent that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is known at all, it’s mainly for her ambiguous semi-embrace of the anti-vaccine movement, her Harambe tweet (and her subsequent criticism of how the media covered it), and her video confrontation with my WGBH News colleague Adam Reilly at the Democratic National Convention.
But long before Stein began her quadrennial, quixotic campaigns for president, she was a quixotic candidate for governor of Massachusetts. And I was there.
In April 2002, I was working on a story for CommonWealth Magazine about how much attention the media should give to that year’s third-party candidates for governor: Stein, a Lexington physician making her first run, and Carla Howell, whose respectable showing in her campaign for the US Senate two years earlier had given the Libertarians “major party” status under Massachusetts law.
In 2000, while I was on staff at The Boston Phoenix, I had spent a pleasant day on the campaign trail with Howell as she barnstormed through Western Massachusetts. In 2002, though, she refused to speak with me, even running away at a campaign rally outside the Park Street MBTA station. Her complaint was that I shouldn’t be lumping her with a newcomer like Stein.
By contrast, I found Stein to be charming — warm, sincere, intelligent, and, though far to the left, no more so than any number of state legislators. What she couldn’t explain (at least not to my satisfaction) was why she wouldn’t work within the Democratic Party, where she might have had some hope of success. That’s the calculation that the independent socialist Bernie Sanders eventually made. Stein has remained the perpetual outsider; to this day, the only elected governmental office she lists on her website is her stint as a member of Lexington’s town meeting.
I recently found my notes from my interview with Stein. I found nothing earth-shattering. But I thought anyone who is intrigued by her candidacy might be interested in what kind of a politician she was back then.
Our day began with her giving an Earth Day talk to about 60 people at Simmons College that she had titled “The Hijacking of Environmental Health Care in America: A Doctor’s Call for Reclaiming Our Democracy.” Her address, complete with PowerPoint, touched on subjects such as the skyrocketing rate of asthma, the effects of environmental dioxins on breast milk, and the benefits of wind power.
Looking back, some of her remarks seem strikingly similar to her current talking points. For instance, she told the audience about her efforts to lobby government officials as an activist with organizations such as Physicians for Social Responsibility only to discover that those officials were in thrall to special interests. “The system ties their hands,” she said. “In order to get into office you’ve got to cut the backroom deals.”
More shades of Stein’s 2016 rhetoric: At one point a member of the audience told her, “Ralph Nader gave us the gift of George Bush,” and asked why she wasn’t running instead for a seat in the legislature. Her response: “It’s not as though we’re looking at markedly different agendas between the two parties.”
After her talk, I interviewed Stein in the Simmons cafeteria and asked her what she saw as the media’s responsibility to cover her campaign.
“It would be absurd to think of the media as a gatekeeper,” she told me. “The media is people, and responsible and thinking people. They ought to be able to use their judgment to engage the democratic process, and that means to open up dialogue to candidates that they think are serious.” She added that she’d had a “very good experience” with the media in her work as an activist, saying, “I’ve had great relationships with a lot of press.”
Stein also favored reforms to give non-major-party candidates a chance to have more of an impact. We discussed the instant runoff, which she still supports. The way it works is that a voter can designate her first, second, and third (or more) choices—allowing her to pick, say, the most left-wing candidate first and then a mainstream liberal second.
“It’s very hard to get beyond the two-party system, because any challenger stands to split the progressive party and bounce the election to the third-favored candidate,” Stein said. The instant runoff, she added, “would be an enormous breakthrough, and it could allow us to really open up the dialogue.”
It all sounded very reasonable, if unlikely to become a reality. But it was when I asked her why she chose a campaign for governor that was almost certain to end in defeat rather than continue her work as an activist that I got some insight into what would be driving her all these years later.
“I jumped because I felt there was no choice,” she said. “Personally I’m looking at the irreparable unraveling of the fabric of society and the globe and the planet. And I know too much to do anything but stand up and yell on the highest mountaintop that I can get on. So I didn’t have a choice. When the offer was made [by the Green Party], I could not in good conscience say no, come hell or high water.”
The Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mitt Romney, defeated Democrat Shannon O’Brien that fall, with three others trailing far behind: Stein, Howell, and an independent candidate, Barbara Johnson. Stein did considerably better than Howell or Johnson, and her 3.5 percent was good enough to establish the Greens (now the Green-Rainbow Party) as a major party in Massachusetts. Since then she has attracted a devoted following. But I don’t see how that translates into any actual effect on government policies.
The first presidential debate of 2016 will be held on September 26. Stein won’t be on stage, and neither, we may assume, will the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, since both are currently well short of the 15 percent margin in the polls that they need to earn an invitation.
If it were up to me, I’d let Stein and Johnson participate in the first debate and only then use polling to decide whether they should be allowed into subsequent debates. That’s not going to happen, though. Stein is still yelling from the mountaintop. But she’s no closer to breaking through than she was 14 years ago.
The Boston Herald Traveler plant sometime in the 1950s. Photo (cc) 2013 by City of Boston Archives.
Paid print circulation continues to fall at the city’s second daily newspaper, the Boston Herald, while paid digital subscriptions are essentially unchanged over the past year. That information was gleaned from published statements that the Herald filed with the U.S. Postal Service this past September as well as the previous September.
Last week I reported that the dominant daily, The Boston Globe, is losing print customers more quickly than it’s adding digital subscribers — a departure from previous years, when digital was growing rapidly. The paper is predicting a return to faster growth in 2025.
I’m reporting on the Herald’s numbers with less information than I would like, but I believe I have enough to make some accurate apples-to-apples comparisons.
Unlike the Globe, and unlike virtually every daily newspaper I’ve ever looked at, the Herald’s postal statements include Sunday numbers in its average circulation totals. If I had access to the Alliance for Audited Media’s reports, I could find separate totals for Sundays and weekdays. Last October, for instance, Mark Pickering, writing for Contrarian Boston, found that the Herald’s average paid weekday print circulation was 16,043, a decline of more than 20% over 2022. Sunday circulation, he reported, was 19,799 last year, a drop of more than 16%.
Pickering was relying on numbers that the Herald had reported to AAN. Unfortunately, AAN ended free log-ins for journalists and researchers a couple of years ago. And when I asked for four reports last week regarding the Herald and the Globe, I was told that it would cost me $200. No thank you.
So that brings us to the seven-day print numbers that the Herald reported to the Postal Service. According to reports filed on Sept. 20, 2024, the Herald’s average print circulation during the preceding 12 months was 13,092 — a substantial drop of 2,566, or more than 16% over the previous year.
Now for digital circulation. As I wrote last week, the digital numbers that newspapers report to AAN and the Postal Service involve some double-counting and are actually higher than the internal numbers. Globe spokeswoman Carla Kath told me that the paper’s paid digital circulation is currently 261,000, an increase of 6.5% over the previous year but substantially below what’s on the postal (and AAN) statements.
Given that, I’d like to know what the Herald’s internal count of digital circulation shows. But publisher Kevin Corrado did not respond to an email seeking clarification, so I’m going to go with the postal statement. And according to that statement, the Herald’s average seven-day digital paid circulation is now 27,894, just 655 more than it was a year ago.
For some reason, the 2023 number is slightly lower than what Pickering reported at Contrarian Boston a year ago for both weekdays and Sundays, which suggests an unexplained discrepancy between what the Herald reported to the postal service and to AAN.
All told, the Herald’s average paid circulation as reported to the postal service, print plus digital, is now 40,978, a decline of 1,919, or about 4.5%.
Media notes
• Media critic Margaret Sullivan, whose lengthy résumé includes a stint as The New York Times’ public edtior, weighs in with some thoughts on a bizarro juxtaposition of Times headlines about presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The headlines: “In interviews, Kamala Harris continues to bob and weave” and “In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics,” which is another way of saying that the Orange Authoritarian is a fan of eugenics.
As Sullivan writes, the Harris head is “unnecessarily negative, over a story that probably doesn’t need to exist,” while the Trump head “takes a hate-filled trope and treats it like some sort of lofty intellectual interest.” Liberals and progressives on social media, especially on Threads, have been up in arms at what they see as the Times’ soft treatment of Trump. Though I think much (OK, some) of that criticism is overwrought, there’s no disputing that the paper blew it with the two headlines Sullivan cites.
• Speaking of the Times, executive editor Joseph Kahn was interviewed on NPR in recent days by “Morning Edition” co-host Steve Inskeep. Kahn was asked to address criticism from the left, including the Times’ obsessive coverage of President Biden’s age and its weird both-sidesy treatment of the candidates’ housing plans. (Harris: Build more; Trump: Deport the occupants.)
“In people’s minds, there’s very little neutral middle ground. In our mind, it is the ground that we are determined to occupy,” Kahn said. He added: “It’s not about implying that both sides have absolutely equal policies on all the issues. It’s about providing well-rounded coverage of each of the two political parties and their leading candidates.” Read or listen what Kahn has to say and see if you agree.
• This blog is built on WordPress, open-source software that powers many news websites. Unlike Twitter, Meta or Substack, WordPress has always seemed like a non-evil alternative. You can set up your blog at WordPress.com, a commercial hosting service, or do it yourself using the free WordPress.org software. I’ve done both, and currently Media Nation uses dot-org.
Now all that is being threatened. Longtime digital journalist Mathew Ingram, who’s gone independent, has a terrific post up about the battle between Matt Mullenweg, a wealthy entrepreneur who controls both dot-com and dot-org, and WP Engine, a major third-party hosting service that I don’t use. “In a word, it’s a godawful mess,” Ingram writes. “And every user of WordPress has effectively been dragged into it, whether they wanted to be part of it or not.”
• The PRESS Act, which would create a federal shield law to protect journalists from being forced to identify their anonymous sources except in rare cases, has been endorsed by The New York Times. I’ve written more about it here.
Storm damage in Henderson County, North Carolina. Photo (cc) 2024 by NCDOTcommunications.
Here’s some good advice to prepare for a natural disaster: Get yourself a radio, preferably one that you can crank up by hand. I’m looking at a few on Google, and I see a some models that also come with a built-in flashlight and a port for charging your cellphone.
What brings this home is a story by Tony Elkins, a Poynter Institute faculty member who lives in Asheland, North Carolina, and who was stranded along with his wife and their dog after Hurricane Helene hit. He writes:
I spoke to Poynter’s Angela Fu about how important the radio was in getting out information. We had zero cell signal. No phone, no text, no data. In the mornings and afternoons, the radio was set to Blue Ridge Public Media for the 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Buncombe County update. That’s how we learned just how massive this event was.
In the evenings we tuned into 99.9 FM. The station hosts and iHeart support from around the country were running nonstop. People were calling in with updates, where to get supplies, reports on what was still standing and what was gone. People called in to beg for information on family or just hear another person’s voice.
It’s been a terrible week for the victims of Helene. While Donald Trump and his allies are spreading lies about hurricane assistance being diverted to undocumented immigrants, as Heather Cox Richardson writes, news organizations on the ground are doing their best to serve their community.
As Elkins observes, radio is a crucial lifeline given that it’s not dependent on internet or cellphone service. For people who have at least a little cell connectivity, some news organizations have put together text-only websites that will work even with slow and limited connections. Melody Kramer, a longtime journalist who’s interested in democracy and public participation, put together a short list of such outlets on Threads:
The dominant daily paper in the area, Gannett’s Asheville Citizen Times, has been using its Instagram feed to provide survivors with vital information. Elkins says that’s where he learned how to send SOS text messages and where to find nearby gas stations that were open. Reddit has been useful, too, he adds.
Hayley Milloy of LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers wrote a newsletter item hailing LION members for the innovative approaches they were taking to keeping their communities connected and safe:
For example, Asheville Watchdog presciently looked at the elevated risk of flooding due to development in the days before the storm struck; Oviedo Community News published a local disaster resource guide; Enlace Latino NC devoted an entire editorial section to storm coverage; The Assembly is putting storm coverage outside its paywall and providing it free for any local or regional outlet to republish; The Charlotte Ledger launched Mountain Updates, a pop-up newsletter featuring important developments on flood recovery; and Carolina Public Press is raising awareness about misinformation around the disaster.
Sadly, one platform that had been a go-to for emergency news and information has become a don’t-go, according to Poynter’s Elkins. “I used to be a heavy Twitter user,” he writes. “When I finally opened X, it was full of horrible artificial intelligence-generated images and conspiracy theories. I’ll probably never go back.”
A special report by the Committee to Protect Journalists warns that the anti-media animus that characterized the Trump presidency has continued unabated, and that it will continue to pose an ongoing threat to the safety of journalists regardless of who wins the presidential election.
Produced by CPJ journalist Katherine Jacobsen, the report, titled “On Edge: What the U.S. election could mean for journalists and global press freedom,” is chilling in its details and frightening in its broader implications. She writes:
Trump’s presidency has been widely seen as bad for press freedom. A 2020 CPJ report found that his administration escalated prosecution of news sources, interfered in the business of media owners, harassed journalists crossing U.S. borders, and used the Espionage Act — a law that has raised grave concerns about its potential to restrict reporting on national security issues — to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. At the same time, Trump undermined the credibility of news outlets by lashing out at reporters, often on the president’s social media feeds, as “corrupt,” “dishonest,” and “enemies of the people.”
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump has threatened to further his anti-press agenda by strengthening libel laws; weakening First Amendment protections; prosecuting reporters for critical coverage; and investigating the parent company of NBC and MSNBC for the channels’ “vicious” news coverage. He has also called for National Public Radio (NPR) to be defunded. “They are a liberal disinformation machine,” he wrote of the public broadcasting organization on his Truth Social platform in an all-cap post. “Not one dollar!!!”
The denigration of U.S. media, coming at a time when shrinking newsroom budgets, the shuttering of local news publications, and record public mistrust of mainstream outlets have hampered their ability to counter the anti-press narrative, has continued to resonate in the years since Trump lost the 2020 election, helping to fuel extremist and fringe ideas on both the left and the right. The result is an increasingly precarious safety environment for reporters.
Much of the report comprises an overview of threats and violence directed against journalists starting with the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, and continuing to the present. At least 18 journalists were assaulted during the rioting at the Capitol, and nine people have been charged.
Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, a freelance photographer who was on assignment for The Washington Post that day, was injured in the melee and rioters threatened to shoot her.
“Generally speaking, I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing,” she told CPJ. “But hearing the audio of January 6th while covering the committee meetings, that’s still frankly very difficult for me. There was a moment during the hearings where they played a piece of footage where you can see a very close friend of mine running down the hallway … having to hide for her life.”
Other incidents covered by the report include:
The murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German by a public official who was angered by his reporting and the frightening online abuse directed at another Review-Journal reporter, Sabrina Schnur, after Twitter’s sociopath-in-chief, Elon Musk, unleashed his mob against her.
The harassment and vandalism experienced by New Hampshire Public Radio reporter Lauren Chooljian, her parents and her editor following her reporting on allegations of sexual misconduct against a local business owner. Four men have been charged under federal law and one has been sentenced to prison.
A dramatic increase in lawsuits against journalists and news organizations, including Anna Wolfe of Mississippi Today, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting is the subject of a libel suit by the state’s former governor, Phil Bryant. The news organization is fighting an effort by Bryant to force it to turn over internal notes and other records.
Unprovoked attacks by police officers against journalists, including three photographers in Detroit who were injured by rubber bullets shot by an officer at a Black Lives Matter protest.
What happens in the U.S. affects press freedom globally, the CPJ report argues: “Over the past three decades, CPJ has documented how major policy shifts and the curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S. have been used to justify similar measures curbing press freedoms for journalists in other countries.” Examples cited include Morocco, Russia, Haiti, Palestinian journalists caught up in the Israel-Gaza war, and Brazil under former president (and Donald Trump ally) Jair Bolsonaro.
The report concludes with a letter sent to the two presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, asking that they sign a pledge to adopt a “respectful” tone with journalists, to take action when journalists are threatened with or subjected to violence, to support a federal shield law known as the PRESS Act that would protect reporters from the prying eyes of the government, and to promote press freedom around the world.
“The Harris campaign acknowledged receipt of CPJ’s letter,” CPJ says, “but neither candidate had signed the pledge by CPJ’s requested deadline of September 16.”
There was a key moment in last night’s vice presidential debate between Democratic candidate Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance, and I’ll get to it. But first I want to deal with the fact-checking, since that was the biggest issue going in.
Before the debate, word was that the CBS News moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, would not attempt to fact-check the candidates in real time, as David Muir and Linsey Davis did in last month’s encounter between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — much to Trump’s detriment. Instead, television viewers who watched the debate on CBS would see a QR code on the screen that would take them to a fact-checking site where some 20 journalists were beavering away. Continue reading “Vance was styling and lying while Walz stumbled. But it all came apart for JD in the closing moments.”
