Tag: Donald Trump

More fallout from the LA Times; plus, the Sun shines in Colorado, and news deserts spread

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.”

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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 Sun, by the way, is one of the projects that Ellen Clegg and I feature in our book, “What Works in Community News.” Ryckman has been a guest on our podcast as well.

The crisis continues

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.

With Jill Stein looming over Democratic hopes once again, a look back at our 2002 encounter

When Stein met Putin. 2015 Kremlin pool photo, with names via NBC News.

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 Herald’s print numbers keep dropping while digital holds steady; plus, media notes

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%.

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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.”

Beehiiv, anyone?

• 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.

Radio, text-only websites and dropped paywalls: How local news is helping Helene’s survivors

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.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists warns that violence against the press is an ongoing crisis

Photo (cc) 2021 by TapTheForwardAssist

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.

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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.”

Vance was styling and lying while Walz stumbled. But it all came apart for JD in the closing moments.

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.”

New York City to boost student journalists; plus, listening to voters, and a hacking update

Now here’s a great idea. In New York City, a public-private partnership is spending $3 million to boost journalism in the city’s high schools. The program, called Journalism for All, aims to quadruple the number of Black and Latino students who are studying journalism, according to Claire Fahy of The New York Times (gift link).

High school newspapers, whether in print or digital, have been on the wane in New York and across the country in recent years, although the Student Press Law Center told the Times that the extent of the decline has not been reliably tracked.

Among other things, Journalism for All will help launch student publications by providing them with $15,000 in seed money. In addition, four students from each of the schools that are being served will be able to take part in summer internships at local news organizations.

Fahy reports that California, Illinois and Texas are also providing assistance to high school journalism programs. As I wrote this summer for CommonWealth Beacon, efforts are being made to revive a special commission to study the local news crisis in Massachusetts after the first attempt disappeared down a black hole.

Nurturing high school journalism programs and publications in Massachusetts ought to be something that gets serious consideration.

Listening to Vermont voters

It’s back to the future in Vermont, where the state’s public media operation is covering the election campaign by listening to voters and focusing on the issues they say are important rather than dwelling on the horse race and polls.

Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that journalists for Vermont Public, comprising television, radio and digital, “have spent the year speaking to more than 600 residents at diners, gas stations, and concerts about state and local politics across all 14 Vermont counties.”

It’s an effort known as the Citizens Agenda, but it’s hardly a new idea. Originally known as public journalism or civic journalism, the notion of shaping political coverage around the concerns of actual people was briefly popular in the 1990s. Among other things, the Globe itself engaged in a public journalism effort in covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is advising Vermont Public on implementing the Citizens Agenda; Rosen was also a leader of the public journalism movement in the 1990s, even writing a book about it called “What Are Journalists For?”

It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea today.

Hacked emails, then and now

One of the odder developments in the 2024 campaign is that three news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico — have reportedly received hacked emails from the Donald Trump campaign but have chosen not to publish anything from them, as Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi reported (gift link) in August for the Post.

Obviously this is quite a departure from 2016, when the news media eagerly passed along emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Then as now, the leaks come from a foreign adversary — Russia eight years ago, Iran today. Then as now, the actual content of the emails may be of little interest.

I suppose we shouldn’t complain if news executives learned a lesson from 2016, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the media helped Trump on both occasions.

Then, last week, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared one of the hacked documents on his Substack newsletter — a Trump campaign dossier on all the embarrassing things that JD Vance had said about Trump over the years.

Klippenstein tried to share his newsletter item on Twitter and got blocked and banned. I posted a workaround and got locked out of my account until I deleted the offending post. Meta has been blocking anyone’s attempts to post a link as well, though they haven’t caught up with my Threads post yet.

In any event, you can download the dossier from Klippenstein’s newsletter. I haven’t read it, but I have paged through the table of contents, and it looks highly entertaining though not especially new. (“Vance Wrote That He ‘Loathed’ Trump’s ‘Obvious Personal Character Flaws,’” p. 76).

I assume Tim Walz is boning up ahead of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.

Of elephants, circuses and the Olivia Nuzzi-Robert F. Kennedy Jr. imbroglio

Joe Biden. Photo (cc) 2019 by Matt Johnson.

In the weeks after President Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 presidential debate, there were several crucial data points. His interviews with George Stephanopoulos and Lester Holt, which did little to restore confidence in his abilities to think and communicate clearly. A Wall Street Journal story on how his staff was stage-managing his decline. A New York Times op-ed by the actor George Clooney, a longtime Biden friend and supporter, urging the president to step aside.

So I don’t want to make too much of a story by Olivia Nuzzi, published in early July by New York magazine, which described Biden as increasingly out of it and obviously unfit to stay in the campaign. But I will tell you that it made an impression on me at the time, combining first-hand observation and quotes from people close to Biden. Yes, the quotes were anonymous, a fact that is now being added to the bill of particulars against Nuzzi. But haven’t we all gotten accustomed to that? Did anyone seriously expect Biden’s friends to step forward and attach their names to what they were saying — other than Clooney?

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Here’s an excerpt from Nuzzi’s story that describes — rather compellingly, I think — the rising fears among Biden’s friends and supporters:

When they discussed what they knew, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.

Now we know that Nuzzi’s entire article was corrupt. That is, it’s suffused with a kind of wrongdoing that’s separate from fabulism or plagiarism, two species of journalistic ethics violations that we’re all familiar with. Nuzzi’s piece might be entirely accurate as well as truthful in its judgments and conclusions. But we don’t know. We’ll never know.

You probably have heard that Nuzzi was involved in some sort of sex scandal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was, by turns, a Democratic and then an independent candidate for president before ending his ridiculous campaign and endorsing Trump. The details of the scandal aren’t important; they reportedly involve nude photos, maybe sexting. What matters is Nuzzi was writing that Biden was too infirm to stand for re-election while she was sexually involved with one of his rivals.

The story about Nuzzi and Kennedy was broken last Thursday by independent media reporter Oliver Darcy in his newsletter, Status. Darcy reported that Nuzzi had been placed on leave, and he published this statement from New York magazine:

Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.

Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.

No evidence of bias? I just pointed out massive evidence of bias. You can’t report on one candidate when you’re sexually involved with another. Or as the late New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal once memorably put it: “I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.” Much of what Nuzzi wrote about Biden was obvious to anyone who had watched Biden fumbling and stumbling on TV. But did she lay it on a little thick to help Kennedy? Did she make Biden seem more infirm than he really was? Or was she truly able to separate the personal from the professional? Who knows?

The last Nuzzi story I encountered was just a couple of weeks ago. It was a long interview with Trump that struck me as interesting, offering some insights into Trump’s thinking following the first assassination attempt, but weirdly soft and sympathetic. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now we know that she was involved, or had been involved, with someone who was angling for a high position in a possible Trump administration. Again — no bias? Seriously? By the way, I listened to her Trump profile on The New York Times’ audio app, and I’m sure Times editors are thrilled to have learned that they provided Nuzzi with an additional platform she didn’t deserve.

Unlike some observers who’ve been piling on Nuzzi, I knew nothing about her until last week except that was young (31) and employed by a magazine that I thought had high standards. I remember with relish a story she wrote several years ago about traipsing through New York City with a clearly inebriated Rudy Giuliani. I knew she had a reputation for being extraordinarily talented.

One story of hers I have not read is her profile of Kennedy from last November, which is reportedly what led to whatever it was that came next.

On a personal level, what a mess. The oft-married Kennedy has been caught cheating (I guess?) on his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, while Nuzzi was until recently engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza, who lost a previous job at The New Yorker over some MeToo allegations.

But you can get caught up on all the tabloid details elsewhere. What matters is that Nuzzi, one of our highest-profile political writers, wrote two long profiles this year that were so enmeshed in her undisclosed (at the time) conflict of interest that we now have no way of knowing whether they were on the level — or were instead hopelessly compromised.

Why asking voters who they think will win might be the smarter question

Nate Silver’s current project, the Silver Bulletin, is online at natesilver.net

I freely confess to paying more attention to polls than I should. Multiple times a day I check in with FiveThirtyEight, still going strong under the auspices of ABC News despite founder Nate Silver’s departure, to see what the odds are that Kamala Harris will prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House. (I’m writing this Thursday evening, and the site gives Harris a 61% chance of winning and Trump 39%. Oh, no! Harris was at 64% earlier in the day!)

Silver himself is still at it, and though I don’t pay the subscription fee I’d need to see what his odds are, his analysis of the polls shows that Harris has a 2.7% lead nationally and — more important — small leads in the crucial swing states of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well as a basket of bluer swing states.

What I want to call your attention to here, though, is a fascinating analysis in The Washington Post showing that Harris does much better when voters are asked not who they’re voting for but who they think is going to win. Aaron Blake writes (free link) that academic studies show such a finding can be a good predictor of who is going to win — maybe even better than the direct-question approach:

[S]ome research suggests that this is actually a good measure of where things might end up — possibly even a better measure than merely asking people whom they intend to vote for.

The reason is that it involves people accounting for the preferences of the people around them — turning them into “mini-anthropologists,” in the words of longtime Gallup editor in chief Frank Newport — and possibly even hinting at their own hidden or subconscious preferences.

How pronounced is the effect? The who-do-you-think-will-win question has Harris prevailing by double digits in some recent polls, and similar questions in previous races helped predict President Barack Obama’s re-election victory over Mitt Romney in 2012, Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden’s narrower-than-expected defeat of Trump in 2020.

None of this matters, of course. But for those of us looking for a sign — any sign — that Trump’s existential threat to the country will finally be brought to an end, it’s worth pondering, and savoring.

Amid political violence and threats of violence, the NH Libertarians target Harris

Then-Sen. Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.

No sooner had I uploaded a post about Donald Trump, JD Vance and whether their promotion of lies about pet-eating immigrants amounted to incitement than we were treated to an example of something closer to actual incitement.

On Sunday, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire posted on Twitter/X: “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” According to NBC 10 Boston, they took the post down a short time later — not because they had any second thoughts, mind you, but because “we don’t want to break the terms of this website we agreed to. It’s a shame that even on a ‘free speech’ website that libertarians cannot speak freely. Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority.”

The Boston Globe looked into it as well and reported:

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the state’s Libertarian Party said the organization “believes that the journalists at the Boston Globe are as evil as rapists or murderers.”

“A proper society would exclude Globe Journalists from residing within it entirely,” Jeremy Kauffman wrote in an email.

Good Lord. I was actually aware of all this Sunday morning but refrained from writing anything because I couldn’t be sure if the Libertarians’ Twitter account had been hacked. Now we know that they’re proud of their hateful, dangerous rhetoric. It will be interesting to see whether there are any legal repercussions given that the threat against Harris comes closer to the legal definition of incitement than anything Trump or Vance said. Then again, it may still fall short of the imminent-threat language contained in Brandenburg v. Ohio.

Also on Sunday, a would-be assassin was taken into custody at Trump’s Florida golf course just two months after he was shot at during a rally in Pennsylvania.

And, finally, the U.S. Justice Department has charged two alleged neo-Nazis of publishing an assassination “hit list” whose potential targets included former U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins.

We are living through a terrifying moment, and it’s not going to end on Election Day.