Donald Trump – Page 11

A tale of two libel suits: ABC News’ shocking abdication, and the end of the line in Everett, Mass.

George Stephanopoulos earlier this year. Official White House photo by Carlos Fyfe.

For this morning, a tale of two libel suits, one national, one local. The national case threatens to undermine protections for journalism that have been in place since 1964. The local case will result in the closure of a weekly newspaper that started publishing 139 years ago.

First, the national lawsuit. On Saturday, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump in order to settle a libel claim over repeated on-air assertions by anchor George Stephanopolous that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape” against the writer E. Jean Carroll. The money will be paid to Trump’s presidential library and foundation, Paula Reid and Katelyn Polantz report for CNN. ABC will also pay $1 million for Trump’s legal fees and issue an apology.

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The problem is that what Stephanopoulos said was substantially true. The CNN story put it this way: “In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll, sufficient to hold him liable for battery, though it did not find that Carroll proved he raped her.” And here’s the big “but”: In August 2023, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found that Trump had, in fact, raped Carroll under the everyday meaning of the word if not under the legal definition. Here’s what Lewis said at the time in the course of ruling on one of Carroll’s defamation proceedings against Trump:

Indeed, the jury’s verdict in Carroll II establishes, as against Mr. Trump, the fact that Mr. Trump “raped her,” albeit digitally rather than with his penis. Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms. Carroll’s “rape” accusations.

I’ll give you a moment to throw up. Now, then, let’s parse this, shall we? A jury found Trump liable for “sexual abuse,” which Judge Lewis ruled was tantamount to being found liable for rape. What Stephanopoulos said was inaccurate only under the most hypertechnical interpretation of what actually happened — and, as I said, Stephanopoulos’ assertions were substantially true, which is supposed to be the standard in libel law. But ABC and its parent company, Disney, decided to appease Trump rather than continue to fight.

And what’s with Stephanopoulos? At 63, he has made many millions of dollars. If he had resigned and continued to fight rather than go along with his corporate overlords, he could have been a hero. Who knows what opportunities would have opened up for him? Instead, he’s content to continue as a highly compensated apparatchik. It’s sad.

By settling with Trump, ABC is following in the path of other corporate titans, a number of whom have donated $1 million apiece to Trump’s inauguration festivities. The donors include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.

Under the 1964 Supreme Court ruling of Times v. Sullivan and subsequent refinements, public officials and public figures like Trump need to show that statements they find harmful are false, defamatory and made with actual malice — that is, with knowing falsehood or with reckless disregard for the truth — in order to win a libel suit.

What Stephanopoulos said arguably wasn’t even false, and surely it didn’t amount to actual malice. A deep-pockets defendant like Disney ought to stand up for the First Amendment lest its cowardly capitulation to Trump harm other media outlets without the wherewithal to fight back.

Coming at a time when two of the Supreme Court’s justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have publicly signaled that they would like to weaken Times v. Sullivan, ABC’s behavior is shockingly irresponsible.

Local paper to close

Now for the local case. On several occasions I’ve written about an explosive libel suit brought against the weekly Everett Leader Herald by that city’s mayor, Carlo DeMaria.

Unlike the matter of Trump and ABC, you will not find a clearer example of actual malice, as Leader Herald publisher and editor Joshua Resnek testified in a deposition that he’d made up facts and quotes in a campaign aimed at impugning DeMaria’s integrity. That news was broken in January 2023 by Boston magazine’s Gretchen Voss. Indeed, eight months later, Middlesex Superior Court Judge William Bloomer froze assets belonging to Resnek and one of the paper’s owners, Matthew Philbin, because he believed DeMaria was likely to win his case.

The denouement came Sunday when The Boston Globe reported that the suit would be settled for $1.1 million and that the Leader Herald would be shut down as part of the settlement. Globe reporter Maddie Khaw writes:

Resnek, who writes and edits most of the Leader Herald’s articles, has frequently used the nickname “Kickback Carlo” to refer to DeMaria, a moniker representing Resnek’s claims that DeMaria had received illegal payments in real estate deals.

Records show that Resnek has admitted to knowingly reporting falsehoods and fabricating quotes.

“Mr. Resnek wrote what he wrote because he believed Mr. DeMaria was bad for the City of Everett and he was motivated by the fanciful notion that he could bring about Mr. DeMaria’s defeat in the [2021] election for Mayor,” the defendants’ lawyers wrote in court documents.

In fact, DeMaria was re-elected in 2021.

DeMaria and his lawyers will hold a news conference later today. Meanwhile, there is nothing up at the Leader Herald’s website about the settlement, which features several stories that were posted as recently as this month.

Incredibly, Everett is also the home of two other weekly newspapers, the Everett Independent and the Everett Advocate, both of which are part of small, locally owned chains; neither of them has anything on the settlement, either.

A proposed federal shield law dies; plus, The Onion v. Alex Jones, and Krugman’s awkward farewell

Sen. Tom Cotton. Photo (cc) 2016 by Michael Vadon.

The PRESS Act, which would protect reporters from being forced to identify their anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents, appears to be dead despite passing the House on a unanimous vote earlier this year.

Clare Foran and Brian Stelter report for CNN that the bill died Tuesday after Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas objected to an attempt to pass it by unanimous consent. Cotton said that passage would turn senators “into the active accomplice of deep-state leakers, traitors and criminals, along with the America-hating and fame-hungry journalists who help them out.” President-elect Donald Trump has demanded that Republicans defeat the measure, so that would appear to be the end of the road.

Meanwhile, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a staunch supporter of the bill, noted that the U.S. Justice Department’s Inspector General’s office released a report Tuesday finding that journalists’ records had been sought during Trump’s first term in violation of internal guidelines. CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post were targeted along with members of Congress and congressional staffers.

In a statement, RCFP executive director Bruce Brown said:

The government seizure of reporters’ records hurts the public and raises serious First Amendment concerns. This investigation highlights the need for a reasonable, common-sense law to protect reporters and their sources. It’s time for Congress to pass the PRESS Act, which has overwhelming bipartisan support, to prevent government interference with the free flow of information to the public.

The PRESS Act, which stands for Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying, would add the federal government to the 49 states that already have some form of shield protection for journalism. The sole exception is Wyoming.

Trump is hardly alone in his contempt for the importance of journalistic anonymity in holding government accountable. Former President Barack Obama was so aggressive in demanding that reporters identify leakers that I once wrote a commentary for The Huffington Post headlined “Obama’s War on Journalism.”

Under President Biden, though, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued guidance prohibiting federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ records except in a few narrow cases involving terrorist investigations or emergencies — the same exceptions that are spelled out in the PRESS Act. Now it seems virtual certain that Trump will return to his previous repressive practices, with Tom Cotton cheering him on.

Media notes

• Peeling back The Onion. The internet exploded in celebration recently when The Onion won a bid to purchase Infowars from right-wing conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who was sued into bankruptcy by the families of children who were killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012. Jones had spread false stories that the shootings were somehow faked. Now, though, a bankruptcy judge has ruled the Infowars auction was improperly conducted in secret and may have resulted in less money for the families than an open process, David Ingram reports for NBC News.

• Krugman’s awkward farewell. Longtime New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, surely the only opinion journalist to have won a Nobel Prize, wrote a heartfelt farewell column (gift link) on Monday. But though all was sweetness and light publicly, independent media reporter Oliver Darcy writes that Krugman may have left earlier than he would have liked because he regarded opinion editor Katie Kingsbury as heavy-handed, demanding a “far more thorough edit” (including the vetting of pitches) of all Times columnists than had previously been the case.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Krugman does next. I thought his column had become somewhat repetitive in recent years, but I’d welcome longer pieces from him published less frequently. He remains one of our most vital public intellectuals.

Update: Well, that didn’t take long. Krugman started a Substack newsletter in 2021, let it wither, and has now revived it.

A new study finds that Trump swamped Harris in news deserts

One of the most important animating principles in the work that Ellen Clegg and I have done on the future of local news is that civic engagement isn’t really possible in its absence. People naturally seek out news, and if there’s no local source, they’re more likely to spend too much time gorging on partisan talk shows on Fox News and MSNBC.

We are not especially concerned about how that might affect national elections because democracy needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that folks who are relearning the arts of community and cooperation will vote differently from those sit at home watching TV (if they’re older) or spending way too much time on social media.

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So I was intrigued that a new study from the Local News Initiative (LNI) at Northwestern’s Medill School showed Donald Trump ran up some of his biggest margins over Kamala Harris in news deserts. Medill defines a news desert as a county that lacks a professional news source. It turns out that even though Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the national popular vote by the slimmest of margins, just 1.5%, he beat her by 54% in the news-desert counties that he won. Harris won a few news-desert counties as well, but her margin was 18%. Moreover, Trump won 91% of the 193 news-desert counties that LNI tracked.

There is, needless to say, a chicken-and-egg problem here, and LNI’s Paul Farhi and John Volk acknowledge it. Did Trump run up such an overwhelming victory in those counties because its residents lack local news sources? Or are people who live in those counties paradigmatic Trump voters regardless of whether they have a local news outlet? Farhi and Volk write:

Trump’s dominance of news deserts doesn’t imply a cause and effect. That is, people didn’t necessarily vote for Trump because they lack local news. Instead, a simpler and more obvious correlation may be at work: News deserts are concentrated in counties that tend to be rural and have populations that are less educated and poorer than the national average — exactly the kind of places that went strongly for Trump in 2024 and in 2020.

As Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, tells Farhi and Volk, “The wrong way to interpret this is ‘Oh, the rubes voted for Trump because they’re uninformed.’” Nevertheless, Waldman adds, the findings underscore the reality that Trump supporters are “some of the most common victims of the collapse of local news.”

The findings translate to Massachusetts as well. Despite beating Trump here 61% to 30%, Trump won a number of communities and performed better than he did against Joe Biden in 2020. If you take a look at the map, Harris was very strong in media-rich Eastern Massachusetts and weak in the southeast, central and southwest parts of the state.

Some of those Trump communities are well served by local news outlets, and here I want to give a shoutout to Nemasket Week, which was launched a few years ago and covers my hometown of Middleborough, where Trump won by 52% to 46%. Still, you see the same correlation that LNI found: big margins for Harris in affluent areas that are the home of quite a few independent local news projects; and smaller margins for Harris, or even Trump victories, in less affluent and more rural areas, which also tend to be less well covered.

To repeat what Waldman says, what we need isn’t to figure out how we can flip Trump voters to support Democrats. Rather, we need to foster a renewed sense of community life — and reliable sources of local news is an indispensable starting point.

There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on news; plus, updates from Cambridge and CommonWealth

Ginia Bellafante’s friend has a very odd definition of what it means to tune out the news. In a recent New York Times article on liberals who have decided their mental health would be better if they stopped paying attention to the news (gift link) in the Age of Trump II, Bellafante writes:

When I spoke with a friend in Brooklyn a day or two after Donald Trump won, he told me he had committed to reading only the print paper — and just in the morning, forgoing any possible all-consuming afternoon digression into whatever might be up with Tulsi Gabbard. When I checked with him earlier this week, he was still maintaining the ritual and it felt good, he said.

Someone who reads a newspaper every day, whether in print or in digital, is actually at the high end when it comes to news consumption. Compared to most people, he is extraordinarily well-informed. Although Bellafante doesn’t tell us what he cut out of his news diet, if he’s decided to forego cable news and politically oriented social media, he may be even better informed than he was when he was jacked in to the national conversation for many of his waking hours. As I like to say, friends don’t let friends watch cable news.

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When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 while losing the popular vote by a substantial margin, it set off a frenzy of news consumption and the rise of the #Resistance — hyper-well-informed liberals and progressives who devoted much of their time and emotional energy to opposing Trump through actions such as the 2017 Women’s March. News consumption soared. You can’t stay it didn’t matter; Trump did, after all, lose to Joe Biden in 2020. Continue reading “There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on news; plus, updates from Cambridge and CommonWealth”

Soon-Shiong tries (and fails) to bully Oliver Darcy; plus, Israel and the press, and prison for a harasser

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, in an interview with Oliver Darcy on Tuesday, comes across as an entitled bully who wields disingenuous hyperliteralism as a weapon. The billionaire medical-device entrepreneur answered Darcy’s entirely reasonable questions with absurd variations on the theme of How do you know that?

Example: Soon-Shiong has asked Trump-friendly CNN talking head Scott Jennings to serve on the new editorial board he’s assembling after killing an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election. In response to Darcy’s asking about the wisdom of naming a truth-averse Trump defender to the board, Soon-Shiong replied:

Scott Jennings — you just said his job is to defend Donald Trump. Did you find that in his job description with CNN? I don’t know if you know that as a fact. I love to work with facts. So when you make that statement, just reflect on that. You just made that statement. Did you make that statement based on having Scott Jennings’ employment agreement with CNN?

Then there was this:

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, believes it is an “opinion,” not a matter of fact, that Donald Trump lies at a higher rate than other politicians.

“A lot of politicians lie a lot,” Soon-Shiong declared to me on the phone Tuesday evening, pushing back against the assertion that Trump is an abnormality in American politics.

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning project PolitiFact put it earlier this year: “It’s not unusual for politicians of both parties to mislead, exaggerate or make stuff up. But American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy.”

Then again, Soon-Shiong’s assertions were not meant as genuine answers. They weren’t even meant to obfuscate. Rather, they were intended to establish dominance over Darcy, an independent media reporter. The pattern is clear: Darcy asks a legitimate question; Soon-Shiong responds in a way that’s intended to belittle Darcy; and then Darcy has to choose between pushing back or moving on.

Soon-Shiong has proved to be a mixed blessing for the LA Times since buying it in 2018. At various times he’s both expanded and cut the newsroom, although even the cuts haven’t been as devastating as a corporate chain owner might impose.

But his respected executive editor, Kevin Merida, quit earlier this year amid reports that Soon-Shiong was interfering in news coverage on behalf of a rich friend (or, if you will, a rich friend’s dog). Then he killed the editorial board’s Harris endorsement. That was within his rights as the owner — but he handled it so badly with his last-minute timing and conflicting statements about his reasoning that the decision was greeted with resignations and canceled subscriptions.

Of course, The Washington Post is also dealing with the consequences of a high-handed decision to cancel a Harris endorsement just before the election. But whereas it’s not clear where the Post under billionaire Jeff Bezos is headed, the fate of the LA Times seems depressingly obvious.

Bezos, at least, compiled a solid track record as the Post’s owner from the time he bought it in 2013 until maybe a couple of years ago, when he seemed to lose his way, his interest or both. Soon-Shiong has been erratic from the beginning, and it’s getting worse.

Netanyahu, Trump and the press

In a possible preview of coming attractions, Israel’s government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is cracking down on Haaretz, a liberal newspaper that has been highly critical of the way that Netanyahu has prosecuted the war against Hamas. As CNN reported earlier this week:

Israel’s cabinet unanimously voted to sanction the nation’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, on Sunday citing its critical coverage of the war following the October 7 Hamas attacks and comments by the outlet’s publisher calling for sanctions on senior government officials.

Haaretz, which is widely respected internationally, has provided critical coverage of Israel’s war following the Hamas attacks on October 7, including investigations into abuses allegedly committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as military operations expanded across Gaza and into neighboring Lebanon.

The sanctions include a ban on advertising in Haaretz and the cancellation of subscriptions for government employees and people who work for government-owned companies. Aluff Benn, Haaretz’s editor-in-chief, wrote a defiant piece for The Guardian that concludes:

[W]e will prevail over the recent Netanyahu assault, just as we prevailed over his predecessors’ anger and shunning. Haaretz will stand by its mission to report critically on the war and its dire consequences for all sides. The truth is sometimes hard to protect, but it should never be the casualty of war.

The sanctions represent a considerable ratcheting up of Netanyahu’s campaign against freedom of the press. Earlier this year, his government closed Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, which was bad enough. Punishing a domestic news organization takes that one step beyond.

Don’t think Donald Trump, a Netanyahu ally, isn’t watching.

Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 137 journalists have been killed since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, which began with Hamas’ horrific terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Another 74 have been imprisoned. The CPJ says:

The Israel-Gaza war has killed more journalists over the course of a year than in any other conflict CPJ has documented. Since the beginning of the war, CPJ has stood in solidarity with the affected journalists and their families. Palestinian journalists have continued reporting despite killings, injuries, and arbitrary detention at the hands of Israeli forces, none of whom have been held accountable.

Prison for harassment ‘ringleader’

The long-running saga of a frightening harassment campaign directed at New Hampshire Public Radio journalist Lauren Chooljian and others appears to nearing its end. The U.S. attorney’s office in Boston issued a press release Monday reporting that 46-year-old Eric Labarge, described as the “ringleader,” has been sentenced to 46 months in prison, fined and ordered to pay restitution.

The release quotes U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy:

Mr. Labarge was the ringleader of a targeted, terror campaign that caused the victims — journalists exercising the First Amendment rights and the families — incredible fear and emotional harm. Mr. Labarge’s terror campaign sent ripples of fear throughout the journalism community and violated the bedrock principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Although the release does not name Chooljian or the other victims, all the shocking details are otherwise included. Two other perpetrators were sentenced to prison earlier this year, and a fourth has pleaded guilty and is to be sentenced on Dec. 6.

You can learn more about the background of the case here.

In selecting Gaetz, Trump shoves open the Overton Window for his other terrible nominees

Matt Gaetz. Photo (cc) 2022 by Gage Skidmore.

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.

The Karen Read case shows why we need a shield law; plus, a State Police outrage, and Trump and the press

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.

Yes, Bezos congratulated Biden in 2020; plus, liberals flee from Twitter to Threads — to Bluesky?

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.

It was a dark and metaphorically stormy night; plus, Northeastern students get the job done.

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.

God help us all.

Win or lose, Kamala Harris has been a magnificent candidate

Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.

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.

And if you haven’t voted yet, get out there.