Even as major media organizations like ABC’s parent company, Disney, and CBS’s, Paramount, were settling bogus lawsuits filed by Donald Trump in order to demonstrate their submissiveness, an unlikely defender of the First Amendment has emerged: USA Today Co., which until earlier this week was known as Gannett.
A federal judge on Thursday threw out a class-action lawsuit charging that Gannett’s Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer committed fraud when they reported days before the 2024 election that Kamala Harris held a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa. As you may recall, the poll results created a sensation, but they turned out to be wrong: Trump won Iowa by 13 points, which was about what you’d expect.
The class-action suit was brought by a resident of West Des Moines named Dennis Donnelly, who claimed that he and other Register subscribers were victims of fraud because the Register acted with “intentional deceit or reckless disregard,” according to Emma Brustkern of WFAA-TV.
The suit is similar to one brought by Trump himself against Gannett, the Register and Selzer (he later dropped Selzer from the claim), calling the poll “brazen election interference.” That is, of course, a ridiculous allegation. More than anything, pollsters want to get it right, but sometimes they get it wrong. And sometimes, as in the case of Selzer in 2024, they get it very wrong. As U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger writes in her decision:
No false representation was made. Defendants conducted a poll using a particular methodology which yielded results that later turned out to be different from the event the poll sought to measure. The results of an opinion poll are not an actionable false represention merely because the anticipated results differ from what eventually occurred.
Trump’s own lawsuit is likely to meet a similar fate. So good for USA Today Co., which has shown a stiffer spine than some other media companies. Rather than allowing itself to be used by the Trump regime as a way of weakening the First Amendment, it is standing up to authoritarianism.
In the world of independent local news startups, 10 years is an eon. That’s how long John and Kristen Muldoon published The Local News, a nonprofit print weekly that covers Ipswich, on Boston’s North Shore, as well as several surrounding communities.
Now they’re moving on. Fortunately, they’ve worked out a succession plan. Trevor Meek, who’s worked as a reporter for the paper since 2023, is the new editor, and Eric Gedstad, who has a background in communications, marketing and government, will be the executive director (that’s nonprofit-speak for publisher).
“Yes, they’ll still be contributing to the paper,” Meek writes of the Muldoons. “And no, they’ll never be able to escape my desperate texts and panicked emails. But their day-to-day presence — their gallows humor, sharp instincts, and steady hands — will be sorely missed.”
As Kris Olson, a co-founder and consulting editor at the Marblehead Current, put it in an email to me, “John is essentially being replaced by two people…. That gives you a sense of how much John was doing.”
John Muldoon has written that The Local News began to find its stride in 2019, when Bill Wasserman, a North Shore journalism legend, became a supporter by donating $100,000 and by helping the paper with advertising, which enabled the operation to have a regular print edition.
Wasserman had previously owned The Ipswich Chronicle and a string of other weeklies only to watch them wither under a series of corporate chain owners that culminated in their acquisition by GateHouse Media, now Gannett. (I worked briefly for North Shore Weeklies under one of those chain owners way back in 1990.) Wasserman died in 2021 at the age of 94.
Somewhere along the line, the Muldoons decided to turn their paper into a nonprofit, with John explaining, “The key reason there was to protect the paper for the public from the depredations of any future corporate owner.”
The Boston Globe’s Billy Baker wrote about The Local News in 2024, reporting that the print edition was being sent to 9,300 homes in Ipswich and neighboring Rowley without charge.
John and I have corresponded over the years, and I got to meet him and Kristen last November at a local-news panel at an Ipswich brewpub, where all such events ought to be held. The Muldoons have made an enormous contribution to the North Shore, bringing real news coverage back to places that had largely been ignored for years.
Best wishes to both of them on their well-deserved retirement.
The nonprofit Cambridge Day is beefing up, hiring veteran journalist Michael Fitzgerald as its editor. Founding editor Marc Levy will remain on board as well.
For many years the Day operated as pretty much a one-person shop, but now it’s got a board of directors and regular contributors. It also offers a weekly print edition and offers some coverage of Somerville as well as Cambridge.
This is yet another example of a community stepping up to fill the gap left by the newspaper chain Gannett’s abandonment of its weekly newspapers in Eastern Massachusetts. Gannett shut down the venerable Cambridge Chronicle in 2022, ending its print edition and replacing local news on its Wicked Local website with irrelevant filler from around the region.
The full announcement of Fitzgerald’s hiring follows.
Marblehead Light from Fort Sewell. Photo (cc) 2009 by mygiraffe.
The town of Marblehead, an affluent community of about 20,000 residents on Boston’s North Shore, is proving to be a hotbed for hyperlocal journalism.
Just a few years ago, its only newspaper was the Gannett-owned Marblehead Reporter. Then, after the chain dumped virtually all of its weeklies’ local coverage in favor of regional content, three different independent news projects moved in to fill the void. One eventually ceased operations, leaving the town with two. Soon, though, the count will return to three.
What’s fueling the latest startup is the departure last month of Will Dowd from the Marblehead Current. Dowd, the community editor as well as a co-founder, had been with the Current from its launch in 2022. But the Current, a nonprofit print weekly with a robust website, is dealing with some financial challenges, which led to the elimination of Dowd’s full-time job.
Now Dowd is starting The Marblehead Independent, built on the increasingly popular Ghost newsletter platform. He expects to debut later this month. Dowd told me by email that he decided to go solo rather than accept the Current’s offer to continue as a paid freelancer for much less money. “I don’t hold any animosity over it; the board had to do what it had to do,” he said.
The Current recently published an editorial thanking Dowd for his work but adding that its nonprofit status “does not relieve the Current of its obligation to balance its books.” An uncertain financial environment, the editorial said, led it to impose “drastic temporary measures, like 25% across-the-board pay cuts,” adding: “We, of course, will continue to work for brighter days, as we turn over every rock in search of funding.”
The town is also served by the Marblehead Weekly News, a for-profit print weekly mailed to every home in town and owned by The Daily Item of nearby Lynn. For a time, a for-profit digital project known as the Marblehead Beacon operated as well. The Beacon suspended publication in late 2023, although its website is still live.
At a time when many communities don’t have a single reliable local news source, Marblehead is served by a plethora of outlets, the Current’s challenges notwithstanding. The median household income in Marblehead is about $166,000, which is about 64% higher than the statewide median of $101,000.
But that only proves a point that my research partner Ellen Clegg and I often make. Affluent suburban communities are finding ways to overcome the local news crisis while rural areas and urban communities of color are often being left behind.
Meanwhile, I hope both the Current and the Independent — and, yes, the Weekly News, too — are able to survive and thrive.
Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, Vt. Photo (cc) 2017 by Kenneth C. Zirkel.
The mayor of Burlington, Vermont, has rescinded a gag order that had prevented the city’s police department from issuing press releases without the approval of her office. The contentious order was one of two reasons that the mayor, Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, was given a New England Muzzle Award earlier this year.
The original, restrictive executive order was enacted on January 10, under former Police Chief Jon Murad, who did not seek reappointment. It required all BPD press releases, including emergency alerts, to be submitted to the mayor’s office for approval before public dissemination.
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
What sealed the Muzzle, though, was that the mayor then called an invitation-only news conference without letting at least two outlets that had been critical of her know about it. Those outlets were Seven Days and Vermont News First. Vermont First Amendment legend Michael Donoghue, who writes for Vermont News First, told me last winter that he believed only local television newscasts had been invited.
• Good/bad/good news in Dallas. Last week I wrote that the notorious cost-cutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital was ready to swoop in and upset the pending sale of The Dallas Morning News to the Hearst chain, a privately held company known for quality regional and statewide journalism. Now Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab that the sale to Hearst is back on track. “This morning,” Benton wrote Monday, “the DallasNews Corporation (formerly A.H. Belo) announced that its board had ‘reviewed and rejected’ Alden’s offer. (It also added a ‘poison pill’ shareholder rights plan, just in case Alden tries anything funny.)”
• An overdue Globe update. Last week The Boston Guardian and Contrarian Boston reported that two Boston Globe journalists, along with two South End residents who were accompanying them, had been attacked while on assignment as they were reporting in the notorious Mass and Cass area of Boston. The story was subsequently picked up by Universal Hub, Hub Blog and Media Nation. But there was no mention of it in the Globe until this morning, as part of a larger story by the two journalists, reporter Niki Griswold and Barry Chin. Griswold wrote:
While reporting this story, two Globe journalists were confronted by at least three men on the Melnea Cass bike path as they toured the area on a July afternoon with [Brian] McCarter and another longtime South End resident. The men approached and threatened the group after spotting the Globephotographer taking pictures from a distance. The men, two holding hammer-like tools, followed the group, which took shelter in a nearby building.
The incident prompted Globe editor Nancy Barnes to issue a memo to the newsroom about security precautions.
• The wages of sin. Paramount wasted no time in making up for some of the $16 million it paid to Donald Trump in order to settle a bogus lawsuit the president had brought against “60 Minutes” — a settlement widely believed to pave the way for a merger with Trump-friendly Skydance Media. Last week WBZ-TV (Channel 4) in Boston announced that a number of employees had been offered buyouts, while longtime reporter Beth Germano said she’d retire and health reporter Dr. Mallika Marshall said she’d been laid off, according to Ross Cristantiello of Boston.com. “I gotta believe it has something to do with the merger,” union official Fletcher Fischer was quoted as saying. At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low, local television news stands out as an exception. Moves like this, though, erode that trust.
• Here’s some fresh AI hell. Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain as well as a steady source of terrible news about layoffs, closures and other cuts, is offering buyouts to many of its journalists so that it can replace them with artificial intelligence. Sean Burch of The Verge quotes a memo from Mike Reed, who writes in his characteristically inimitable style: “Given our static revenue trends, we need to adjust our organization to effectively meet the needs of our business today and position ourselves for sustainable growth in the future as we continue to use AI and leverage automation to realize efficiencies.”
Gannett’s weeklies are pretty much gone, but it still publishes several dailies in New England, most notably The Providence Journal and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, as well as about 200 dailies across the country, anchored by USA Today.
Correction: Sorry for rushing this. I’ve fixed a few botched names.
Shari Redstone speaking at a Committee to Protect Journalists event. Photo (cc) 2022 by CPJ photos.
Given how long negotiations were dragged out, there was some reason to hope that Paramount Global wouldn’t give in and settle Donald Trump’s bogus lawsuit claiming that “60 Minutes” had deceptively edited an interview with Kamala Harris last October.
In the end, Trump got what he wanted. Paramount, CBS’s parent company, will settle the suit for $16 million. If you’re looking for one tiny reason to be hopeful, the settlement did not come with an apology. In agreeing to pay off Trump, Paramount’s major owner, Shari Redstone, will now presumably find smooth sailing through the regulatory waters in selling her company to Skydance Media. Skydance, in turn, is headed by David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a friend of Trump’s.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik has all the details. What’s clear is that this may well be the end of CBS News as a serious news organization. Just the possibility of a settlement has brought about the resignations of top executives as well as criticism from “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley. As recently as Monday, media reporter Oliver Darcy revealed that all seven “60 Minutes” correspondents had sent a message to their corporate overlords demanding that it stand firm. Murrow weeps, etc.
What I want to note, briefly, is that there are still two complications that Paramount and Skyline must contend with before wedded bliss can ensue.
The first is a threat by U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to launch an investigation into whether the payoff amounts to an illegal bribe. Given that every legal and journalistic expert who’s looked at the case believes the editing of the Harris interview was ordinary and unremarkable (among other things, “60 Minutes” edited out a clip of Harris complaining about her hay fever), that investigation might yield some headlines at least.
“Paramount appears to be attempting to appease the Administration in order to secure merger approval,” the three said in a May press release issued by Warren’s office. They added: “If Paramount officials make these concessions in a quid pro quo arrangement to influence President Trump or other Administration officials, they may be breaking the law.”
The second is a threatened shareholder lawsuit by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. In a May statement, the organization’s director of advocacy, Seth Stern, cited the three senators’ possible investigation and said this:
Corporations that own news outlets should not be in the business of settling baseless lawsuits that clearly violate the First Amendment and put other media outlets at risk. A settlement of Trump’s meritless lawsuit may well be a thinly veiled effort to launder bribes through the court system.
In this morning’s newsletter from CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, the foundation is reported to be moving ahead with its plans: “The group’s lawyers are huddling today, I’m told. A spokesperson said ‘Paramount’s spineless decision to settle Trump’s patently unconstitutional lawsuit is an insult to the First Amendment and to the journalists and viewers of “60 Minutes.” It’s a dark day for Paramount and for press freedom.’”
The Paramount settlement follows Disney’s disastrous and unnecessary $15 million settlement of a suit brought by Trump over a minor wording error by ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos in describing the verdict against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll civil case. Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found to have “raped” Carroll, whereas the technical legal term was “sexual abuse.”
Trump’s claim failed on two grounds: What Stephanopoulos said was substantially true, and there was no evidence that the anchor had deliberately or recklessly mischaracterized the outcome of the case. But no matter. Disney settled anyway.
So far, at least, Gannett is holding firm in Trump’s suit against The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer over a survey that showed Trump trailing Harris in the Buckeye Hawkeye State (which he ended up winning easily) several days before the 2024 election.
Correction: Like the great Boston Brahmin writer Cleveland Amory, I regarded “the West” as anything west of Dedham. So, yes, Iowa is the Hawkeye State. I’m fixing that here and in Tuesday’s item as well.
For a brief moment Monday, it looked like Donald Trump had given up on his ridiculous lawsuit against The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer.
You may recall that Trump claimed they had committed consumer fraud because of a poll taken just before Election Day showing Kamala Harris with a 3-point lead in the Hawkeye State. Notwithstanding Selzer’s sterling reputation, Harris ended up losing Iowa by 13 points, which is about what you’d expect. She was wrong, and the error may have hastened her retirement, but the notion that she put out a false poll to help Harris is transparently ludicrous.
Well, Monday’s good news didn’t last. It turns out that Trump withdrew his suit from the federal courts and refiled it in state court one day before an Iowa anti-SLAPP law was scheduled to take effect, William Morris reports for the Register. SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuits against political participation,” and it’s designed to give judges a reason to throw out garbage suits such as Trump’s. No such luck since Trump beat the deadline.
This isn’t the first time Trump has sought to have his Iowa case heard in state court. Apparently his lawyers believe the federal courts are unlikely to tolerate his foolishness. To its credit, the Register’s corporate owner, Gannett, has hung tough. A spokesperson for the paper, Lark-Marie Anton, said in a statement:
After losing his first attempt to send his case back to Iowa state court, and apparently recognizing that his appeal will be unsuccessful, President Trump is attempting to unilaterally dismiss his lawsuit from federal court and refile it in Iowa state court. Although such a procedural maneuver is improper, and may not be permitted by the court, it is clearly intended to avoid the inevitable outcome of the Des Moines Register’s motion to dismiss President Trump’s amended complaint currently pending in federal court.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is representing Selzer, said on social media that Trump’s attempt to move the case to state court was “a transparent attempt to avoid federal court review of the president’s transparently frivolous claims,” according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, there have been some developments in one of Trump’s other legal attempts to intimidate the press. According to media reporter Oliver Darcy, all seven correspondents at CBS News’ “60 Minutes” have sent a message to their corporate owner, Paramount, demanding that it stand firm in fighting Trump’s lawsuit over the way the program edited an interview with Harris last October. Darcy writes:
They pointedly expressed concern that Paramount is failing to put up a fierce and unrelenting fight in the face of Trump’s lawsuit over the program’s Kamala Harris interview, which has been widely denounced by the legal community as baseless, according to the people familiar with the matter. They said Trump’s allegations against the storied program are false and ripped his lawsuit as baseless. And they warned in no uncertain terms that if Paramount were to settle with Trump, it will stain the reputation of the company and undermine the First Amendment.
Trump is claiming consumer fraud in a Texas federal court under the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, alleging that “60 Minutes” edited its interview with Harris to make her appear more coherent, thus helping her campaign. “60 Minutes” has defended the editing as normal and routine. The interview has been nominated for an Emmy in the editing category, no doubt to send a message to the White House.
Unfortunately, Darcy reports that Paramount continues to lurch toward a settlement with Trump in order to pave the way for federal approval of a merger with Skydance Media.
Something I stress with my journalism students is the importance of having your own home on the internet, either in the form of a newsletter or a blog, so that you have a repository for your work.
But you’ll notice I didn’t say “permanent” repository. Probably the two most widely used platforms, Medium and Substack, are owned by corporate entities that could disappear or change their terms in various onerous ways.
For Media Nation I use WordPress software with a hosting service, GoDaddy, which at least in theory is a safer bet. But something could go wrong with WordPress so that there would no longer be anyone to provide critical security updates. Or GoDaddy could Go Out of Business. The Internet Archive is invaluable, but it doesn’t scrape everything. The bottom line is that you have to stay on top of things if you want to keep the tumbleweeds from blowing into your digital homestead.
Which is why I was interested to read this interview with Brandon Tauszik, a fellow with the Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford, who is involved in designing low-cost ways for journalists to preserve their work.
Judge Crystal Wise Martin is sworn in by her mother, retired Judge Patricia Wise, in 2019. Photo via the Mississippi Office of the Courts.
In 1971, after a federal court stopped The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court was so alarmed at that naked act of censorship that it took up the case in a matter of weeks. On a 6-3 vote, the court ruled that the Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and others could resume publishing, though they might face prosecution for revealing classified information. (They didn’t.)
In 1979, after a small magazine in Wisconsin called The Progressive said it intended to publish an article revealing some details about how to manufacture an atomic bomb, a federal judge stepped in and said no — but so agonized over his censorious act that he all but begged the magazine and the government to reach a compromise.
Then there’s Judge Crystal Wise Martin of Mississippi. On Wednesday, Martin issued a temporary restraining order requiring The Clarksdale Press Register to take down an editorial from its website. According to Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press, the editorial, headlined “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” took city officials to task “for not sending the newspaper notice about a meeting the City Council held regarding a proposed tax on alcohol, marijuana and tobacco.”
The city had sued the Press Register, claiming that the editorial was libelous and that it “chilled and hindered” the council’s work. Mayor Chuck Espy was quoted in the AP story as saying the editorial had unfairly implied that officials had violated the law. He cited a section of the editorial that asked, “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kick-back [see update below] from the community?”
The Huffington Post’s “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” headline has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.” 2016 photo via the Voice of America.
Recently a source in The Boston Globe newsroom forwarded to me a memo sent to the staff about the paper’s performance in Google search during 2024. “We get 25%-27% of our traffic from Google; it’s a significant way we reach people who don’t come to the Globe on their own,” wrote Ronke Idowu Reeves, the paper’s SEO editor. (SEO stands for search-engine optimization.)
As you might imagine, the big SEO winners in 2024 were the Karen Read trial, the phrase “who won the debate” (perhaps a reference to both presidential debates), the Celtics victory parade and Steward Health Care.
The memo, though, prompted another thought: What is the purpose of SEO in the age of paywalls? As you probably know, the Globe has an especially strict paywall, with no quota of gift links for the month. I emailed Reeves and asked her whether SEO was successful in getting casual visitors to sign up for a digital subscription given that they couldn’t read even the one story they’d searched for. She forwarded my email to spokeswoman Carla Kath, who told me by email: “Yes, a good number of people do read and subscribe to our stories that they encounter on search. But, because the scope of search is constantly changing, we are always adjusting how we approach it.”
It’s something I’d like to dig into more deeply at some point since it’s fundamental to the economics of digital news. Twenty years ago, paywalls were rare, and the idea behind SEO was to drive massive audiences to your stories so that they’d see the ads that accompanied them. The first iteration of The Huffington Post stressed SEO heavily, and its infamous 2011 headline “What Time Is the Super Bowl?” has been called “the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever.”
As LaMarche observes, the gag order was aimed more at Murad than at the police department as a whole, and with Murad gone, there wasn’t much incentive for Mulvaney-Stanak to keep the cone of silence in place. The mayor targeted Murad for speaking out about a local man who’d had nearly 2,000 encounters with police. Among other things, Murad’s lament was reported on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) in Boston, which couldn’t have endeared him to Mulvaney-Stanak.
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