FBI Director Kash Patel’s $250 million libel suit against The Atlantic may prove to be nothing more than bluster. Nevertheless, it’s already raised some interesting issues about ethics and defamation law, and I thought it would be useful to walk through some of them here.
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Patel sued after Sarah Fitzpatrick reported Friday that Patel’s tenure at the FBI has been marred by excessive drinking, lapses in judgment and a shocking lack of discipline. The story, she writes, was based on “more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.” There are no named sources who say they’ve had first-hand knowledge of Patel’s alleged misbehavior. Still, that’s a lot of sources.
Eleven months ago, I handed a New England Muzzle Award to Donald Trump’s thuggish immigration czar, Stephen Miller, for the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk. The Tufts University Ph.D. student’s only offense was to help write an op-ed piece in The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel and sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian cause.
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Now Roopal Patel, the Boston immigration judge who ended deportation proceedings against Öztürk, has been fired. And thus I’m awarding another New England Muzzle, this one to Teresa Riley, the chief immigration judge who was appointed to her position by the Trump regime. I don’t know whether she was involved in Patel’s firing. What I do know is that Riley has neither resigned in protest nor raised her voice in outrage since Patel was dismissed on Friday.
Patel was actually one of two immigration judges fired Friday who had been involved in high-profile immigration cases. The other, Nina Froes, had ruled similarly that Trump officials had no right to detain Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who’d been involved in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. There’s another New England angle as well — Froes’ court is based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. The New York Times reports:
Ms. Patel, like many immigration judges interviewed by The Times, said the Trump administration had made it clear that it wanted more immigrants ordered deported.
“It was a pressure I at least tried to actively resist,” she said in an interview. “All people in the United States are entitled to due process, and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly.”
According to The Boston Globe (sub. req.), Patel “was nearing the end of her two-year probationary period” when she was fired. “Even though I was expecting it, it was still sort of shocking,” Patel told the Globe. “The consequences are immediate.”
The Globe reports that 113 immigration judges out of more than 700 have been fired since January 2025. The paper quoted Patel as saying:
It’s creating this climate of fear where judges are worried that if they misstep and do something that’s out of line with what the administration wants, they’re more subject to firing. That can erode judicial independence, it can erode due process, and it can make people more likely to be ordered removed from this country.
Unlike most judges, who are part of the independent judiciary, immigration judges are considered members of the executive branch and are appointed by the attorney general. “The judges there need more judicial independence,” Patel told the Times in speaking about her former colleagues.
This is the way repression works. Just as international students learned from the Öztürk and Mahdawi cases that the price of avoiding arrest and detention is to refrain from their First Amendment-protected rights to write and to protest, immigration judges have learned from Patel and Froes that they should place Trump’s agenda above the law if they want to hold onto their jobs.
Like Hillary and Bernie in 2016, or Grady Little’s decision to send Pedro Martinez back out for the eighth, the media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s decline in 2024 is going to be litigated forever.
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The latest example came Friday night on the “PBS NewsHour,” when Geoff Bennett asked Jonathan Capehart why coverage of Donald Trump’s mental state hasn’t matched similar coverage of Biden’s decline two years ago. Here’s how it went down:
If you’ve canceled your subscription to The Washington Post because of the rightward lurch of its opinion section, the decimation of the newsroom or both, I have news that might surprise you: The paper is involved in a vitally important First Amendment battle over its right to report on the Pentagon.
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Erik Wemple, himself a Post alumnus, reports in The New York Times that the Trump regime’s objection to a tip box the Post has been publishing has emerged as an issue in a lawsuit brought by the Times over the Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists.
Public domain Illustration of Jeffrey Epstein, left, and Donald Trump by Michael Gode.
The Jeffrey Epstein story is getting weirder, more disturbing and is moving ever closer to Donald Trump. The latest details come from Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who has done more to expose Epstein’s depravity than any other journalist.
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Brown’s latest comes in the form of two articles. The first, published on Friday, advances earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and NPR that the Justice Department had withheld some of the Epstein files regarding a woman who told the FBI that Trump sexually assaulted her around 1983, when she was about 13 years old. Those files have now been produced. Brown writes that in one of the interviews:
She said he unzipped his pants and forced her head to his penis. She said she immediately bit him and Trump struck her, the report said. She told the FBI agents that she bit him because he “disgusted” her.
In a follow-up interview, she said that after she rebuffed him, he “pulled her hair and punched her on the side of the head.”
On the brand-new edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze media coverage of the war against Iran.
In other topics, we examine the implications of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly executives Larry and David Ellison, and the failure of Bari Weiss — who may soon be running CNN in addition to CBS News — to hang on to a Jeffrey Epstein associate. We also give the hairy eyeball to AI’s ongoing encroachment into journalism and weigh in with our Rants and Raves.
Fox News anchor Will Caine, left, with retired Lt. Col. Allen West.
With Donald Trump plunging us into a new war in the Middle East, I was curious about how it was being covered on MAGA-TV, also known as Fox News. I decided to watch the 8 p.m. hour on Sunday.
Overall, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The real problems weren’t what was said so much as what wasn’t. But since I spent the weekend keeping up on developments primarily with The New York Times, I’m not sure whether other television news outlets were doing a better job.
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If I’d tuned in Fox at 8 p.m. on a weekday, I’d have encountered the loathsome Jesse Watters, a racist misogynist who once “joked” about killing Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead, the hour was hosted by Dallas-based Will Caine, about whom I know nothing, but who came across as a fairly conventional anchor. Apparently that was a last-minute switch; the hour is normally given over to “Life, Liberty & Levin,” helmed by right-wing zealot Mark Levin.
I’ve written about Jeff Bezos’ defenestration of The Washington Post multiple times over the past two-plus years, and I’m not going to rehash it in any great detail today.
Suffice to say that today’s gutting of the Post, reported here by NPR’s David Folkenflik, is just the latest outrage that began when Bezos refused to do anything after his hand-chosen publisher, Will Lewis, turned out to be a terrible choice. Lewis was enmeshed in ethics scandals stemming from his time as a Murdoch lieutenant in the U.K., but Bezos remained silent. Later came the most visible sign that Bezos had turned — his decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 election.
Retired Post executive editor Marty Baron has a withering essay up on Facebook that you should read in full. After acknowledging the very real challenges facing the Post, Baron writes:
The Post’s challenges … were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top — from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity. Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands.
The owner, in a note to readers, wrote that he aimed to boost trust in The Post. The effect was something else entirely: Subscribers lost trust in his stewardship and, notwithstanding the newsroom’s stellar journalism, The Post overall. Similarly, many leading journalists at The Post lost confidence in Bezos, and jumped to other news organizations. They also, in effect, were driven away. Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.
It seems like a lifetime ago that I was at the Post interviewing Baron and others for my book “The Return of the Moguls.” In those days the Post was profitable and growing, and Bezos had developed a reputation for standing up to Donald Trump’s threats and bullying. Bezos has since transformed into a Trump toady, spending $75 million to make that ridiculous Melania Trump biopic for — for what? I guess to get the White House on board with his ambitions for the Blue Origin rocket company that he owns.
I can’t imagine why Bezos would want to be associated with what the Post has become — what he’s turned it into. He certainly shows no sign of interest in it. From 2013-23, he was a model owner. But people change. Bezos has changed, much for the worse. If there’s any chance that he might donate it to a nonprofit foundation, as the late billionaire Gerry Lenfest did with The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016, I hope he’ll do it sooner rather than later.
The Trump regime has taken direct aim at the First Amendment, arresting four people — including two journalists — for their role in a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month. The journalists are Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor who’s now independent, and Georgia Fort, an independent reporter based in the Twin Cities who recorded her thoughts just before she was arrested and posted a video on Facebook.
Lemon and Fort accompanied protesters as they made their way inside a church to protest what they claimed were the pastor’s ties to ICE. They were there to live-stream and report on what happened, and the Department of Justice hasn’t produced a scintilla of evidence that their activities went beyond that. This is a grotesque violation of the First Amendment. I’m tempted to say that it’s shocking, but it’s not. Stunning?
Here is yet another independent journalist, former Washington Post reporter Philip Bump, on Bluesky:
The thing about this is that I don’t know a single journalist who will be intimidated by Don Lemon being arrested? But, then, that’s not why the administration is doing this. The founders couldn’t have imagined a president violating core freedoms for the purposes of social-media accolades.
The Committee to Protect Journalists weighed in earlier today.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) strongly condemns the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for their reporting on a protest in Minnesota, arrests which mark a serious escalation of attacks on the press in the United States.
“This is an egregious attack on the First Amendment and on journalists’ ability to do their work,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “As an international organization, we know that the treatment of journalists is a leading indicator of the condition of a country’s democracy. These arrests are just the latest in a string of egregious and escalating threats to the press in the United States — and an attack on people’s right to know.”
Lemon, who formerly reported for CNN and now publishes on Substack, was arrested Thursday night; Fort, an Emmy-winning filmmaker, was arrested Friday morning. Both arrests were in relation to their coverage of a protest at a Minnesota church led by local activists against immigration enforcement operations in the state.
Lemon was arrested in Los Angeles, where he was reporting on the Grammy Awards. Here is what his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, had to say:
Don has been a journalist for 30 years, and his constitutionally protected work in Minneapolis was no different than what he has always done. The First Amendment exists to protect journalists whose role it is to shine light on the truth and hold those in power accountable.
Instead of investigating the federal agents who killed two peaceful Minnesota protesters, the Trump Justice Department is devoting its time, attention and resources to this arrest, and that is the real indictment of wrongdoing in this case. This unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and transparent attempt to distract attention from the many crises facing this administration will not stand. Don will fight these charges vigorously and thoroughly in court.
Update, Jan. 31. The Washington Post has published a visual investigation of Lemon’s activities at the church. As you’ll see, it’s pretty unremarkable — Lemon enters, interviews people and leaves.
If you scan the top headlines, it might seem like the only stories in the news right now are ICE’s war against Minnesota and Donald Trump’s meltdown over Greenland. Venezuela is disappearing in the rearview mirror, but look out: here comes Snowmaggedon 2026.
But my media ethics students — yes, the same students who brought you their thoughts and suggestions earlier this week about practicing journalism in the AI era — have some different ideas. As I have in previous semesters, I asked them to identify stories that have been undercovered.
These stories have received some media attention or we wouldn’t know about them. But for one reason or another they haven’t broken through to the mainstream. Here is what they chose.
► Electoral unrest in Uganda, Reuters, Jan. 16. Amid accusations of election fraud, Ugandan opposition leader Bobi Wine was removed by the army from his house and taken to an unknown location, with President Yoweri Museveni claiming victory. The electoral campaign was marred by deadly violence, with the official count showing that Yoweri had been re-elected with nearly 74% of the vote, and Wine far behind at 23%.
► Data tallies ICE arrests in Boston, GBH News, Jan. 14. Reporter Sarah Betancourt found that at least 54 immigration-related arrests took place at Boston courthouses in 2025, with one so far in 2026. “We’re seeing ICE in the courthouses on an incredibly regular basis,” Jennifer Klein, director of the state’s Immigration Impact Unit told GBH News.
► How Florida is helping the feds, Tallahassee Democrat, Jan. 5. Using quickly thrown-together detention centers with names like Deportation Depot and Alligator Alcatraz, the state has detained about 20,000 people and turned them over to federal officials as part of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ policy of assisting the Trump administration in its immigration crackdown.
► ACLU sues on behalf of federal arrestees, ACLU, Jan. 15. The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of three community members who are challenging “the administration’s policy of racially profiling, unlawfully seizing, and unlawfully arresting,people without a warrant and without probable cause.”
► Climate change’s non-virtuous circle, Environmental Defense Fund, Jan. 20. Global warming caused by humans is speeding the release of greenhouse gas emissions from natural ecosystems. “These greenhouse gasses are a result of manmade climate change — they are indirect human emissions,” said Brian Buma, senior climate scientist at EDF.
► ICE List Wiki. This interactive database “documents incidents, agencies, individuals, facilities, vehicles, and legal authorities involved in enforcement operations.” According to The Daily Beast, the list — created by Crust News — is based on a leak of information about some 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol employees, provided by a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower following the shooting death of Renee Good in Minneapolis at the hands of ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
Now, I listed these stories in the order that I did deliberately. You’ll note that the first three come from mainstream news sources. The next two are press releases issued by respected advocacy organizations, the ACLU and the Environmental Defense Fund. The last isn’t a news story at all; rather, it’s a project put together by activists aimed at exposing the identities of federal agents involved in Trump’s crackdown on immigration.
Critics call this “doxxing,” but the ICE List doesn’t appear to contain any personal information beyond what you could look up about your local police department — whose officers, unlike ICE agents, do their jobs unmasked, with their badge numbers clearly displayed.
Essentially the first three are examples of traditional journalism while the last three are hybrids that combine advocacy with acts of journalism. I trust groups like the ACLU and the Environmental Defense Fund to offer accurate, truthful information, but it’s fair to wonder what relevant information they might have omitted.
As for Crust News and the ICE List Wiki, it’s an interesting idea, but it seems aimed more at news organizations that might make use of the data than it is at the general public. The site says that it “is designed for public use. Journalists, researchers, and advocacy groups use the data to track enforcement patterns, identify repeat agencies or jurisdictions, and contextualise individual incidents. Pages may be cited with attribution.”
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Now Roopal Patel, the Boston immigration judge who ended deportation proceedings against Öztürk, has been fired. And thus I’m awarding another New England Muzzle, this one to 
