I want to express a contrarian view regarding Jim Acosta’s departure from CNN. As you may know, Costa announced this morning that he’s leaving after CEO Mark Thompson told him he was being moved off his 10 a.m. program, which draws good ratings. Costa decided to leave after rejecting Thompson’s offer to be moved from midnight to 2 a.m.
This is widely being portrayed as another example of a media outlet doing Donald Trump’s bidding. Costa is not one of Trump’s favorites, to put it mildly; his White House press credentials were briefly revoked following a confrontation between him and Trump in 2018, and he has used his morning show to speak truth to power. That’s something we need more of.
Acosta’s admirers have been erupting in outrage on social media. Political commentator Chris Cillizza did not offer a benign interpretation, writing, “Acosta’s removal … is rightly understood as a piece of a broader movement of the legacy media to accommodate Trump — or at least take a far-less adversarial tack in covering his second term.”
Media writer Oliver Darcy, who first broke the news that Acosta might be leaving, wrote that the “move … conspicuously coincided with Donald Trump’s return to power.”
“Just Jack,” who has nearly 435,000 followers on Bluesky, added, “Jim Acosta is leaving CNN. He will not capitulate to his oligarch bosses. He will not kiss the Trump ring.”
Now, I don’t have any insight into what went on behind the scenes at CNN, but I don’t think this is as bad as it sounds. As Darcy observes, Acosta’s midnight special would have run in prime time, from 9 to 11 p.m., on the West Coast, which is traditionally underserved by network television.
About 50 million Americans live in that time zone, which includes major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Portland and Seattle. Moreover, CNN was reportedly willing to pay for Acosta to move to Los Angeles.
I can also understand why Thompson might want to move away from an opinionated show in the morning and replace it with straight news. The 10 a.m.-to-noon slot will now be anchored by Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown.
Could this be an example of CNN caving in to Trump? Yes, it could. As I said, I have no insight into what’s going on behind the scenes. But more news and less opinion in the morning coupled with a capable host like Acosta anchoring during prime time on the West Coast does not strike me as unreasonable. In fact, it seems like it could have been a pretty smart move.
But Acosta said no, leave us to wonder what’s next. In his sign-off, he said he’ll be announcing something soon. MSNBC is a possibility, although its lineup seems to be getting pretty crowded. Maybe he’ll do something completely unexpected.
I find my Northeastern journalism ethics students’ analyses of the news fascinating and insightful, so I want to share with you their latest. I asked them to find a piece of journalism related to the inauguration — straight news, opinion, whatever — and share it along with some commentary of their own. They came up with a great mix of mainstream and alternative sources, and all of the pieces are worthwhile. It’s a small class, so I’m going to present the eight that I received plus one I thought was worth adding to the mix.
On day one, Trump pits his administration against transgender people, by Orion Rummler and Kate Sosin, The 19th. Student comment: “I think a lot of journalists and platforms will have to test the limits of our good friend neutral objectivity over the next four years, especially when it comes to reporting on the trans community. With trans rights being a popular and divisive issue right now, a lot of questions about objectivity come to mind…. If news organizations continue to give a lot of space to this ‘debate’ on trans rights (although trans people represent less than 2% of the US population), it almost validates the idea that there is a debate to be had on whether or not trans people deserve to exist.”
Three ways Democrats are breaking with tradition before inauguration,by James FitzGerald, BBC News. Student comment: “Democrats have emphasized the importance of peaceful transfers of power but are seemingly following in Trump’s footsteps by abandoning the traditions in place…. Democrats following Republicans’ lead in breaking with tradition could further destabilize democracy and the public’s trust in institutions.”
Pomp, Policy, and Pardons, by Jon Allsop, Columbia Journalism Review. Student comment: “I’m still burnt out from the first four years of Trump, to be honest, so I appreciate round-ups like this CJR one.”
Bishop Asks Trump to “Have Mercy” on Immigrants and Gay Children,by Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Tim Balk and Erica L. Green, New York Times. Student comment: “As member of LGBTIAQ+ community, hearing President Trump talk about taking away millions of people’s right, including my own, was dehumanizing…. It was courageous of the Bishop to speak out in that particular enviroment — most of the people invited might have been too afraid to do so — therefore I applaud her for that.”
Welcome Home, by Tom Scocca, Defector. Student comment: “What I enjoyed most from this article was its forthrightness. Scocca understands that getting to a point like this means that almost everyone, whether consciously or not, has played a part. To elide that while laying out ethical issues as they currently stand is itself unethical.”
6 takeaways from Trump’s inaugural address, by Aaron Blake, Washington Post. Student comment: “From the journalist’s perspective, I think fact-checking is a fundamental part of journalism, but it became even more critical under the Trump administration. Given his frequent use of misleading statements and false claims, journalists had a greater responsibility to verify information and contextualize his rhetoric.”
Trump’s Inauguration Speech Threatened New Depths of State Cruelty,by David Renton, Truthout. Student comment: “While I, personally, may not need a terrible amount of convincing to believe Trump’s intentions are cruel, I think this simple and concise piece would do a fine job of leading anyone to understand this underlying connection. That being said, most ardent supporters would likely entirely dismiss every claim. So maybe Renton is preaching to the choir.”
4 takeaways from Trump’s second inaugural address,by Domenico Montanaro, NPR. Student comment: “What caught my eye in the article is that Trump spoke of very specific plans for the next four years during his official address to the country. However, this was all on a script he read off a teleprompter. Later on, he gave a non-scripted speech to supporters to purposely reveal more plans. The questions I, as a journalist have, start with, if journalists have to be transparent with the public, why does the president not have to? Should a president not be held to a higher standard when dealing with the public? Why is Trump not being criticized more for this?”
And, finally, my own find:
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by Oliver Darcy, Status. My comment: “Darcy documents all the national media figures who’ve been highly critical of Donald Trump in the past but who rolled over for him on Monday…. I thought Darcy did a great job of combining reporting, opinion and attitude. By focusing on how the media covered the inauguration rather than the inauguration itself, he provided valuable insights into an aspect of the day that wasn’t center stage.”
Media notes
• Too much Trump? Joshua Benton, writing at Nieman Lab, introduces a daily newsletter from Vox that catches you up on the major Trump news of the day without wallowing in it. The Logoff, produced by a top Vox editor, Patrick Reiss, comprises one short item and then hands you off to something more uplifting at the close. I’ve signed up, and I think it will definitely be useful for some people, though it’s probably not enough for someone who needs to be immersed in the news — like Reiss, for instance. Or me.
• This was CNN. Mark Thompson, the news network’s chief executive, explains his plans to implement cuts on the broadcast side, beef up digital and stave of the apocalypse as the audience for linear TV continues to shrink and age. Thompson may have saved The New York Times in his last job. But based on what he says in his interview with the Times’ Benjamin Mullin (gift link), I’d say his mission to save CNN sounds infinitely more complex, and perhaps undoable.
• The end of social media. It is surely worth noting that all of our major social media platforms are now in thrall to Trump — Twitter/X, TikTok and Meta’s various services, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Bluesky (where I’m most active these days) and Mastodon are barely a blip. Writing at 404 Media, Jason Koebler argues that what we need are decentralization combined with interoperability. It’s a great idea — and firmly rooted in a democratic vision for media that has been receding almost from the moment that the internet evolved into a mass medium.
Washington Post publisher Will Lewis. 2019 public domain photo by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The ongoing implosion of The Washington Post is unfolding at a moment when we’ve never been more in need of tough, independent journalism. The latest, as Sara Fischer reports for Axios, is that Phil Rucker is leaving as the Post’s national editor in order to become senior vice president of editorial strategy and news at CNN.
It seems that anyone who can leave the Post is doing so now that billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has thrown in with Donald Trump. I don’t blame people for staying; after all, jobs in journalism are hard to come by, and there’s still reason to hope the paper’s news reporters will be allowed to do good work. Still, Bezos has done incalculable harm over the past year following a decade of model ownership; I wrote about the first years of his reign in my 2018 book, “The Return of The Moguls.” What’s happening now is depressing.
Before I get back to the Post, a word about CNN, about which there is reason to worry and reason to be hopeful. On the one hand, you have to be concerned about independent media reporter Oliver Darcy’s story Tuesday evening that chief executive Mark Thompson had told his staff before the inauguration that he wanted them not to dwell on the past. Darcy writes:
The next day, the network executed as directed…. CNN’s journalists entirely avoided pointing out during special inauguration coverage various inconvenient truths, such as the fact Trump is the first convicted felon to take office or that he was impeached for his role in inciting an insurrection on the very place he took his second oath. It was a glaring omission, but not one by accident.
On the other hand, Thompson is the guy who, in his previous job, revived The New York Times’ fortunes, transforming the newspaper into a growing, profitable digital powerhouse not just on the strength of its journalism but through ancillary products such as games, consumer advice and food. And he somehow convinced an outstanding news leader like Rucker that CNN is a better place to be right now than The Washington Post.
About which: As I was getting ready to write this item, the Post’s Karla Adam reported (gift link) that Rupert Murdoch’s British publishing empire had settled an invasion-of-privacy suit brought by Prince Harry for more than $10 million and an apology. Adam writes:
As part of the deal, Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) issued a formal apology, which was read out in court by Harry’s lawyer David Sherborne, conceding “unlawful activities” carried out by private investigators working for Murdoch’s newspapers, including “phone hacking, surveillance and misuse of private information.”
Scan down further into the story and you’ll come across this:
An executive summary of the claimants’ arguments, shared with The Washington Post before the settlement, indicated that Harry and [Labour Party politician Tom] Watson’s legal teams planned to allege that “over 30 million emails were deliberately destroyed” as part of a scheme to keep evidence from police investigators. The document asserted that “a pivotal role” in directing the email deletions had been played by former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, still a senior executive for Murdoch, and former NGN general manager William Lewis, now publisher and CEO of The Washington Post.
Both Brooks and Lewis have denied allegations of wrongdoing. NGN has acknowledged that emails were removed, but said that was part of a planned system migration and a new data retention policy, and that additional instructions were given to preserve emails potentially relevant to a police investigation.
The problems at the Post may have come to public attention starting with Bezos’ stunning decision last fall to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris with just days to go before the election. But the downward spiral really began with the appointment of Lewis to replace outgoing publisher Fred Ryan, and with Bezos’ stubborn insistence on sticking with Lewis despite embarrassing revelations about his involvement in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, who broke the news about Lewis’ involvement earlier this year, revisited that issue on Tuesday after reports of a settlement were circulating but before it was consummated. Though Folkenflik was careful to note that Lewis was “not a defendant in the case, and has denied all wrongdoing,” he added:
The plaintiffs allege that Lewis and the other executives orchestrated the deletion of millions of emails and withheld other material from police. According to police notes presented in court filings, Lewis told a police investigation they had to delete the emails to head off a scheme by Watson and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to get materials surreptitiously from Brooks’ computer.
Brown and Watson have denied any such plot; News UK has not to date produced any evidence publicly to support its existence. Brown has demanded a criminal investigation from Scotland Yard, which opened a preliminary review to determine whether a full investigation is warranted.
Former Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, now a contributor to The Guardian, wrote last Friday that Bezos needs to act quickly in order to save the Post. Her recommendations: hold an on-the-record meeting with the staff; make it clear that “he understands the importance of editorial freedom and pledge not to interfere with it”; and fire Lewis.
I wonder if it might be too late, though Sullivan’s advice would at least represent a dramatic break with the way Bezos has run the Post over the past year. My preference, given his unimaginable wealth, is that donate the Post to a nonprofit foundation and endow it, as the late Gerry Lenfest did with The Philadelphia Inquirer did in 2016.
Clearly, though, Bezos has to do something. Actually, let me revise that: He doesn’t have to do a damn thing. But I’m ever hopeful that he will.
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. Public domain photo by the National Park Service.
On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day (I hear something else is going on today, too), it’s worth remembering that strong libel protections the press are grounded in the Civil Rights Movement and, specifically, in Dr. King’s activism in the South.
It began with a full-page ad taken out in The New York Times in 1960 titled “Heed Their Rising Voices.” Sponsored by supporters of Dr. King, the ad was aimed at calling attention to King’s campaign and raising support. It also contained a few inconsequential errors: it claimed that King had been arrested seven times on bogus charges (it was actually four), and it stated that Black student protesters at Alabama State College in Montgomery had been padlocked inside their dining hall “in an attempt to starve them into submission” (not literally true).
The city’s public safety commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, who was not even named in the ad, sued the Times for libel and won a $500,000 judgment in Alabama’s deeply racist court system. Other Southern officials were also suing the Times and other news outlets, which raised fears that the white power structure’s brutal crackdown on the Civil Rights Movement would go uncovered by the Northern press. As Samantha Barbas writes in her 2023 book “Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan”:
[L]ibel suits brought by segregationist officials against Northern news media were emerging as a potent weapon. They were so worrisome that they prompted a lawyer writing in one of journalism’s revered trade publications to comment that such lawsuits were giving the South an opportunity “to reverse the verdict at Appomattox.”
Libel law had always been considered a matter for the states, with no obvious way for the federal courts to intervene. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court of that era decided that it had to get involved. And in the landmark 1964 Times v. Sullivan decision, the court ruled that the First Amendment prohibited public officials from winning a libel case unless they could prove that defamatory falsehoods published about them were deliberate, or close to it. As Justice William Brennan explained in his unanimous decision:
[W]e consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
Brennan wrote that the standard public officials would have to prove was “actual malice,” defining that as “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Later decisions extended the actual malice standard to public figures; defined “reckless disregard” as harboring serious doubts about the truth of what was being published; and ruling that even private figures would at least have to prove negligence.
The Times v. Sullivan decision was crucial to the rise of modern investigative reporting. As Anthony Lewis wrote in his 1991 book about the decision, “Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment,” “The allowance of room for honest mistakes of fact encouraged the press, in particular, to challenge official truth on two subjects so hidden by government secrecy, Vietnam and Watergate, that no unauthorized story could ever have been ‘absolutely confirmable.’”
With the dawn of the second Trump era, though, there are doubts as to whether Times v. Sullivan will survive. Several years ago, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch suggested that the case ought to be revisited. More recently, ABC News’ parent company, Disney, settled what should have been a winnable libel suit brought by Donald Trump for $16 million. And last week, CNN settled a libel suit with a Navy veteran who had set up an operation to evacuate people from Afghanistan after a jury found against the network and awarded $5 million. (As I wrote Jan. 9, there appeared to be some serious problems with CNN’s story, so the decision to settle seems wise.)
In a few hours, we will mark the re-inauguration of Trump, who threatened years ago to “open up libel laws” and make it easier for plaintiffs to win lawsuits against the media. An empowered press that can hold the powerful to account was a vital part of Dr. King’s legacy. It would be sad if we begin rolling back that freedom on a day when we celebrate his life and achievements.
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.
It might be high-handed for a mayor to order her police chief to funnel all public statements through her office, but it isn’t necessarily such an outrage that it warrants a coveted New England Muzzle Award. But to compound that by announcing she would have a press availability to which not all local news organizations were invited — well, come on down and claim your prize, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak.
Mulvaney-Stanak, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and a leader in that state’s Progressive Party, signed an executive order last Wednesday ordering the Burlington Police Department to route all press releases through her office before distributing them to the public. “People need the basic facts of situations for the sake of public safety and nothing more than that,” the mayor was quoted as saying.
According to Colin Flanders, a reporter for the Burlington-based newspaper Seven Days, Mulvaney-Stanak had “raised concerns” with Police Chief Jon Murad “about the content of his department’s public statements in the past. Murad has used press releases in recent years to criticize the court system and a perceived lack of accountability for repeat offenders.”
Murad was silenced after a defense lawyer asked a judge to impose a gag order on the Burlington police in response to statements by the chief concerning a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Murad had accused the man of “violent, incorrigible, antisocial behavior” — and some of Murad’s comments were repeated on the public radio program “On Point,” produced by WBUR in Boston and distributed nationwide. It’s hard to imagine that the mayor was pleased by that.
Meanwhile, Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, writing in the Vermont Daily Chronicle for Vermont News First, reported on Friday that Mulvaney-Stanak would speak to the press at a media availability that afternoon — but that Vermont News First, which had been dogging the mayor over her acceptance of free donated meals, had not been invited. After Donoghue’s story was posted, he added an update reporting that Seven Days hadn’t been invited, either.
“She doesn’t answer her cellphone and actually has asked VNF to stop calling,” Donoghue wrote.
(Update: Donoghue later explained to me that VNF is his own journalism endeavor and that the Vermont Daily Chronicle is one of his clients.)
Well, if Seven Days and Vermont News First were left off the invitation list, who was invited? The city’s daily, the Burlington Free Press, didn’t report on the mayor’s muzzling of Chief Murad until today, and there are no quotes from her in the article. There’s nothing about any sort of press availability in the statewide news organization VTDigger, whose reporter Corey McDonald wrote about Mulvaney-Stanak’s silencing of Murad last Thursday, on the same day as Seven Days. Nor is there anything from Vermont Public Radio.
Chief Murad, who’s leaving his post this April, may or may not have been out of line in disparaging a notorious frequent flier in the criminal justice system. But holding law enforcement to account is difficult enough without the mayor stepping in and lowering the cone of silence.
For Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak to worsen that situation by creating the impression that she would exclude some news outlets from a media availability (it’s not clear whether that availability ever happened) goes beyond acceptable and pushes this story into the Muzzle Zone.
Media notes
• Donald Trump v. Nancy Barnes. Among the journalism organizations Donald Trump has targeted for libel suits is the Pulitzer Board, which awarded a Pulitzer Prize to The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2018 for their reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign’s entanglements with Russia. Trump is claiming the award was somehow libelous — and Ben Smith of Semafor reports that he’s is suing not just the board but individual members of that board, including, locally, Boston Globe executive editor Nancy Barnes.
• A liberal counterpart to The Free Press? Another star opinion journalist has fled the rapidly declining Washington Post. Jennifer Rubin, a conservative-turned-centrist-turned-liberal with a strong social media presence, is moving to Substack, where she’ll be the editor-in-chief of a new publication called The Contrarian — which, she tells CNN’s Brian Stelter, will “combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face.” Stelter’s report and Rubin’s introductory post suggest that The Contrarian could serve as a welcome liberal counterpart to the right-leaning Free Press, founded in 2021 by disgruntled New York Times opinion journalist Bari Weiss.
• New Jersey’s post-print future. This past fall I observed that Advance Local was closing its New Jersey print newspapers, the largest of which is The Star-Ledger of Newark, and doubling down on digital with its statewide NJ.com site. Now Marc Pfeiffer, a policy fellow at Rutgers University, has written a commentary for NJ Spotlight News arguing that print is not essential to maintaining a rich media ecosystem. “The future of New Jersey news is primarily digital — and that’s OK,” Pfeiffer writes. “What matters isn’t the delivery method but the quality and accessibility of local journalism. Our democracy depends on having informed citizens who know what’s happening in their State House, county seats, and town halls.”
• An update on that Colorado assault. A couple of weeks ago I noted that a television journalist in Grand Junction, Colorado, had allegedly been assaulted by a Trump supporter who followed his car to the journalist’s television station, tried to choke him, and shouted “This is Trump’s America now.” In his latest newsletter, Corey Hutchins writes that the 22-year-old journalist, Ja’Ronn Alex, is out on paid leave while Patrick Egan, the taxi driver who’s been charged, is out on bail, with his lawyer claiming that he suffers from mental health issues.
Mark Zuckerberg. Photo (cc) 2019 by Billionaires Success.
On Tuesday I spoke with Jon Keller of Boston’s WBZ-TV (Channel 4) about Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to eliminate independent fact-checking and tone down the moderation on Meta’s social-media various platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
Among other things, Zuckerberg said he’s going to let pretty much anything go on immigration and gender on the grounds that stamping out hate speech is “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He’s also copying the Community Notes feature from Elon Musk, who has turned over fact-checking to users at his Twitter/X platform.
Jon and I were only able to hit a few points in our conversation, so I want to say a bit more. What Zuckerberg is doing amounts to unconditional surrender to Donald Trump. Four and five years ago, Facebook struggled to clamp down on dangerous misinformation about COVID and suspended Trump from the platform after he fomented the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Now Zuckerberg is giving in completely.
Essentially we have three billionaire tech moguls who are doing everything they can to enable Trump. Musk, of course, isn’t just enabling Trump; he’s moved in with him, and his bizarre pronouncements about everything from the alleged criminality of the British government to the size of newborns’ heads now carry with them the imprimatur of our authoritarian president-elect.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is systematically destroying The Washington Post, one of our four national newspapers, for no discernible reason other than to curry favor with Trump. And now Zuckerberg has signaled his willingness to surrender unconditionally.
The dispiriting reality is that Zuckerberg has placed profit above all other values for many years, no matter what the human cost. According to Amnesty International, Facebook was complicit in genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. His products have been linked to depression and suicide among teenagers. If Zuckerberg cared about any of this, he would have taken steps to make his platforms safer even at the expense of some of his profit margin. To be clear, Zuckerberg obviously doesn’t support genocide or suicide, and he has taken some steps — but those measures have been inadequate.
We should always keep in mind what the business model is for social media, whether it be Facebook, Threads, Twitter or TikTok. All of them employ opaque algorithms to show users more of the content that keeps them engaged so that they can sell them more stuff. And studies have demonstrated that what keeps users engaged is what makes them angry and upset. This is protected by Section 230, a federal law that holds internet publishers legally harmless for any content posted by third-party users.
As Twitter has continued its descent into the right-wing fever swamps, two platforms have emerged as alternatives — Threads and the much-smaller Bluesky. The latter has received several big bumps since the election, and is likely to get another one now that Zuckerberg has harmed the Threads brand. Bluesky doesn’t use a centralized algorithm — you’re free to use one designed by other users or none at all. (That’s also the case with Mastodon, but Bluesky has zoomed well ahead in the public consciousness.)
Unfortunately, Bluesky also lacks the capacity to engage in the kind of fact-checking and moderation that Meta once used. And with growth comes toxicity.
I’ve seen a number of folks on Threads saying on Tuesday that they’re leaving for Bluesky, just as many others said last year that they were leaving Twitter for Threads. It’s all futile. What we need is less social media and more real human connection. What Zuckerberg did Tuesday didn’t destroy something great. Rather, he made something that was already bad considerably worse.
Washington, D.C., on Jan. 10, 2021. Photo (cc) 2021 by Mike Maguire.
Four years ago today, Donald Trump staged a violent attempted coup so that he could remain in the White House rather than turn over the presidency to Joe Biden. And today, he’s returning to the office that he disgraced. Here is something I wrote on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. My closing sentence, unfortunately, is even more apt today than it was in 2021.
The media are filled with one-year retrospectives about the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. I can’t say I’m paying much attention to them. We’ve had a firehose of coverage from the moment it happened, and appropriately so. An anniversary doesn’t add anything to what we already know, and to what we still need to know.
Will we remember Jan. 6 the way we remember Sept. 11, 2001, or the way our parents and grandparents remembered Dec. 7, 1941? Probably not, though neither will it soon be forgotten. And one of the acts of remembering is recalling what we were doing on that day.
I was hiking in the Middlesex Fells, as I often do. I took a photo of two signs on a tree because I thought they were funny: one said “Keep Out”; the other urged hikers to maintain social distancing, which seemed like an odd admonition if you weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.
I emerged from the woods around 3 p.m. and turned on the car radio. NPR was carrying audio from the “PBS NewsHour,” and Judy Woodruff was freaking out. At first I figured the Republicans were trying to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes to delay Joe Biden’s being declared the official winner of the presidential election. That, after all, had been predicted.
Within a few moments, though, I learned the truth: that a mob of rioters had descended on the Capitol, had broken inside and were rampaging through the halls of Congress. It was our first attempted coup, aided and abetted by Donald Trump, and it may not be the last.
These are dark times, and I’m not optimistic about what the next few years will bring.
The rough draft of the Ann Telnaes cartoon that was killed by her editor. Via Telnaes’ newsletter, Open Windows.
The latest self-inflicted blow to The Washington Post has been rocketing around the internet since Friday. Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose wickedly funny editorial cartoons have graced the Post’s opinion section since 2008, quit after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes writes in her newsletter, Open Windows:
As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
She’s wrong about one thing: Her resignation has created an enormous stir. Right now it’s trending at The New York Times and is No. 7 on The Boston Globe‘s most-read list. It’s all over social media as well.
The rough draft of Telnaes’ cartoon (above) shows Bezos and fellow billionaires Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of Open AI and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong kneeling before a giant statue of Trump. Three are holding bags of money in supplication. I’m not sure what Soon-Shiong is doing, though he appears to be wielding a container of lipstick. Mickey Mouse somehow figures into it as well.
Shipley, who was hired in 2022, is trying to do damage control, saying in a statement reported by New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin that he was simply engaged in normal editing and believed that the Post was running too much commentary about Trump’s billionaire courtiers:
Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.
I’m going to take Shipley at his word. Opinion editors should assert themselves from time to time and insist on less repetition. But not in this particular instance. Given the fraught nature of Bezos’ recent Trump-friendly moves, including his decision to kill the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund (which is what Telnaes was mocking in her cartoon), Shipley should have left this one go. By killing Telnaes cartoon, he acted in a deeply irresponsible manner at the worst possible time. And he lost one of his brightest stars.
I’ve enjoyed Telnaes’ work for years. During the Trump presidency, she often drew animated cartoons that were published on the Post’s digital platforms. Under her skillful pen, Trump was a grotesque figure, covered with makeup with his long red tie often reaching the floor.
Sadly, we are at a moment when editorial cartooning in general is on the decline, and it’s not a given that Telnaes will be picked up by another paper. The Times, which has been scooping up disaffected Posties, famously does not run editorial cartoons. Shipley says he hopes Telnaes will reconsider, but that seems unlikely.
No doubt Telnaes won’t come cheap. But several papers distinguished themselves with tough anti-Trump opinionating during the 2024 campaign, including The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I hope one of them sees fit to open up their checkbook and bring her on. The Atlantic, which like the Times has been hiring former Post staffers, is a possible landing spot as well.
“This is Trump’s America now.” Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.
This story has been slowly building since Dec. 18 and finally broke through over the weekend. A Colorado television journalist who’s a person of color was reportedly attacked by a taxi driver who attempted to choke him, demanded to know whether he was a U.S. citizen, and taunted him by shouting, “This is Trump’s America now.”
No doubt we can expect to see more of this as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House on Jan. 20. Trump has normalized attacks on the media, and we shouldn’t be surprised that some of his more unhinged supporters would escalate that hatred into actual physical assaults.
On this penultimate day of 2024, I hope you’ll consider becoming a supporter of Media Nation. For just $5 a week, you’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and music. Please click here.
I learned about the incident from Corey Hutchins, who writes Inside the News in Colorado, a weekly newsletter. He wrote about it on Dec. 27 and decided not to name either the alleged assailant or the journalist, though both had been previously identified by CBS Colorado. Hutchins explained:
I haven’t yet seen the victim say anything publicly beyond what he told police, though I’ve reached out, and you can imagine what kind of hate and harassment might come his way these days with his name widely known. As for the accused, I haven’t seen him reached for comment yet, either. A Mesa County Court official said on Thursday he is represented by a public defender; her voicemail stated she is out of the office until after the new year.
That was a smart ethical decision on Hutchins’ part, though it didn’t hold for very long. As he notes, the story was picked up by The Associated Press on Dec. 28 and has since been reported by a number of news outlets including CNN, Axios and The Guardian.
According to the AP account, the taxi driver, 39-year-old Patrick Thomas Egan, was arrested on Dec. 18 in Grand Junction after police say he followed reporter Ja’Ronn Alex for about 40 miles. Egan pulled up next to Alex at a stoplight and, according to police, said something like “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”
Alex is a native of Detroit with a Pacific Islands background, according to news accounts.
Alex drove his news vehicle back to his station, KKCO/KJCT and, after he got out, was reportedly chased by Egan, who demanded to see his ID. Egan is accused of then tackling Alex, putting him in a headlock and attempting “to strangle him,” police said. Coworkers and others came to Alex’s rescue and said he was starting to lose his ability to breathe.
Egan has not yet been formally charged but is being held on $20,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday.
Hutchins also quotes from a recent study finding that 37% of white respondents thought it was acceptable for political leaders to target journalists and news outlets. As the authors of the study, Julie Posetti and Waqas Ejaz, wrote for The Conversation: “It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face…. Trump has effectively licensed attacks on American journalists through anti-press rhetoric and undermined respect for press freedom.”
Media notes
• Through a glass, darkly. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is slow-walking a pledge she made during her 2022 campaign to bring the governor’s office under the purview of the state’s public-records laws, according to Matt Stout of The Boston Globe. Healey says she still supports “transparency,” and would like to extend the law to the legislative and judicial branches as well — but she now says the governor needs to be able to invoke unspecified “exceptions.” The public-records law is one of the most restrictive in the country.
• Battle of the MAGAs. In case you missed it over the holidays, Heather Cox Richardson has a good overview of the battle that broke out online last week between Tech Bro MAGA and White Racist Twitter. The fight is between newly minted Trumpers like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who don’t want immigration restrictions to apply to highly educated tech workers, and classic haters like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon, who really, really want to prevent anyone who doesn’t look like from them entering the country. “Now, with Trump not even in office yet, the two factions of Trump’s MAGA base — which, indeed, have opposing interests — are at war,” Richardson writes.
• Coming attractions. Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry’s year-end message, published as a full-page ad in Sunday’s print edition and emailed to subscribers (you can read it here), lays out a number of goals for 2025. I found two especially worthy of note. The morning newsletter, Starting Point, will be expanded, which I hope means it will be come out every weekday instead of just on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Earlier would be better, too. By 7 a.m., most of us are off and running for the day.
Another smart goal: “Enhancing our high school sports coverage to further local engagement.” The region’s legacy newspapers are barely covering school sports these days, and many of the nonprofit startups don’t see it as part of their mission. More Globe sports coverage would fill a real need.
• Remembering Jimmy Carter. The late, great Jimmy Carter lived so long that several of the journalists who wrote his obituary years ago were no longer with us by the time their work was published. At The New York Times (gift link), Peter Baker shares a byline with Roy Reed, who died in 2017. The Washington Post’s obit (gift link) was written by Kevin Sullivan and Edward Walsh, the latter of whom died in 2014. Carter left office 43 years ago. For perspective, Franklin Roosevelt was in the midst of his second term 43 years before that.
An idyllic scene in Lancaster, Penn. Photo (cc) 2018 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Reliable and comprehensive local news can help ease the polarization that has infected our national discourse. But it’s not a guarantee — and when MAGA-drenched politics pervades community life, the result can be that the press is attacked in a manner that’s similar to the cries of “fake news” from Trump supporters.
Which is exactly what is happening right now in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In a lengthy article for The Washington Post, Erik Wemple tells the story of Tom Lisi, a reporter for the newspaper LNP who’s become the focus of relentless attacks (gift link) from the Republican chairman of the county commission.
That chairman, Joshua Parsons, has his eye on a state senate seat, and he is evidently using his crusade against Lisi in order to build support for his campaign. Among other things, Parsons has accused Lisi of lying about harassment he’s been subjected to, making up stories “out of whole cloth,” and of having “skulked around waiting to ambush County staff.” As Wemple wryly observes: “‘Reporter’ is an appropriate term for someone who skulks around ‘waiting to ambush County staff.’” Wemple adds:
[T]he events in Lancaster County bear … on a question that has vexed leaders in journalism in recent decades: Just how should they respond to the frequent, strident and often flimsy attacks from Republican politicians? Should they stick to the industry’s default mode of turning the other cheek? Or should they speak up to challenge the gripes?
LNP and its associated website, Lancaster Online, are not part of a corporate chain or owned by a hedge fund. Rather, the media outlet was saved in 2023 by public radio station WITF and has a newsroom of 70 journalists — impressive for a medium-size daily. That transaction, though, has resulted in an enormously complex ownership structure involving three separate nonprofit boards along with all the potential conflicts of interest that entails.
As for Lisi, Wemple writes that he has started to push back publicly on Parson’s falsehoods and exaggerations about his reporting, and that on one occasion he left his tormenter momentarily speechless. The lesson, according to Wemple: “Confront the media bashers wherever they practice their profession.”
Biden’s fitness
The Wall Street Journal today published an investigative report (gift link) on attempts by President Biden’s inner circle to control access not just throughout the past four years but during the campaign that preceded it as well.
There are some harrowing details but also some problems with the reporting, including this, in which an anonymous aide quotes an anonymous official:
If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.
Despite such hazy sourcing, the Journal’s story is a valuable addition to what we are learning about Biden’s age-related problems during the past half-dozen years. In retrospect, a Journal story (gift link) in early June of this year was the big breakthrough, although it was marred by its overreliance on Republican sources. A few weeks later, Biden met Donald Trump on the debate stage, and that was the beginning of the end of his re-election campaign.
A few points are now obvious: First, Biden’s inner circle covered up the president’s fading mental acuity for years — which makes you wonder why they went along with the June debate, which led directly to Kamala Harris’ candidacy and at least gave Democrats a fighting chance of holding on to the White House. Second, Biden should have pledged to serve just one term when he ran in 2020; at the very least, he should have declared victory and pulled out after Democrats did unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterms.
That we still don’t know exactly how impaired Biden was and is speaks to how difficult it is for reporters to pierce the veil. As the Journal’s story makes clear, members of Congress and even Cabinet secretaries were kept in the dark. This was not a failure of journalism so much as it was a failure of the president and the people around him to level with the public.
Everett update
Earlier this week, I noted that neither of Everett’s two remaining weekly newspapers had published anything about the demise of the Everett Leader Herald, which shut down and agree to pay Mayor Carlo DeMaria $1.1 million in order to settle a libel suit. Publisher and editor Joshua Resnek had previously admitted he fabricated stories and quotes aimed at making DeMaria appear to be corrupt.
Well, now both papers, which are owned by small independent chains, have been heard from. The Everett Advocate has an especially tough headline, “A Victory Over Journalistic Dishonesty,” with reporter Mark E. Vogler detailing the Advocate’s own role in exposing the Leader Herald’s fictions about DeMaria.
One aspect of the settlement that I was wondering about is clarified in Vogler’s story. He quotes a lawyer for DeMaria, Jeffrey Robbins, as saying that the demise of the Leader Herald was in fact a stipulation of the settlement rather than simply a side effect of suddenly having to come up with $1.1 million. “All a jury would have decided to do in this case would be to decide whether to award damages and how much in damages,” Robbins told Vogler. “But a jury could not have ordered a newspaper to close down. That was one of the things that made the settlement unusual.”
The Everett Independent has a shorter article, written by reporter Cary Shuman, headlined simply “DeMaria Vindicated.”
Finally, the Leader Herald’s former website now consists of a WordPress page that says, “You need to be logged in as a user who has permission to view this site.”
.jpg){kind=link}