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For five years, Trump outrage has fueled media profits. So now what?

Trump supporter in North Carolina last September. Photo (cc) 2020 by Anthony Crider.

Last Friday, The New York Times published the sort of story we’ve become quite familiar with — a blockbuster about Donald Trump. Times reporter Katie Benner revealed that, during Trump’s final days as president, he’d considered removing the acting attorney general as part of a plot to overturn the election results in Georgia.

For the past five years, such reporting has been very, very good for national news organizations. Trump outrage has provided elite newspapers, cable news stations and other prominent outlets with a jolt they hadn’t seen since the internet began eating away at their audience and revenue several decades earlier. But now it’s coming to an end.

The question is whether the Trump-era boost can outlast Trump.

In an interview with the public radio program “On The Media” over the weekend, co-host Brooke Gladstone asked McKay Coppins of The Atlantic — a news organization that has done especially well during the Trump years — if “Trump was good for the journalism business or bad?”

Coppins’ answer: “Well, from a bottom-line perspective, almost certainly good.”

The numbers tell quite a story. Consider The Times and The Washington Post, the two national newspapers that became most closely associated with covering the chaos and corruption of the Trump presidency. Between early 2017 and November 2020, The Times’ digital circulation grew from about 2 million to more than 7 million; 4.7 million are paying for the core news product, with the rest signed up for cheaper extras such as the crossword puzzle and the cooking app.

Growth has been equally impressive at The Post — from perhaps 100,000 to 200,000 in early 2016, according to an estimate by the newspaper industry analyst Ken Doctor, to 1 million at the end of 2017, to 3 million in November 2020, Axios reported.

Or consider cable news, which has experienced an enormous upsurge in audience throughout the Trump years. Figures compiled by Heidi Legg, a journalist and a research fellow at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, show that the combined prime-time audience of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News rose from about 3.1 million in 2015 to nearly 7.2 million in 2020, with the Trump-friendly Fox far ahead of the pack for most of that period.

In a similar vein, it’s instructive to look at what happened last February after NPR journalist Mary Louise Kelly conducted a contentious interview with Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who falsely claimed that Kelly had broken ground rules and angrily brought the proceedings to an abrupt end. The Post’s Erik Wemple reported that donations to NPR and member stations soared immediately afterward, though no numbers were available.

With Trump giving way to President Joe Biden, a far more low-key and disciplined politician, many journalists are breathing a massive sigh of relief as they contemplate returning to something like a normal life. But will audience and revenue resume the downward track they had been on for years before Trump demanded everyone’s unwavering attention?

There are reasons for hope. Following the November election, CNN — the highest quality of the three cable outlets, flawed though it is by the same talk-show mentality as its competitors — moved solidly into first place following years of ratings dominance by Fox News. And there are signs that it may stay there.

As CNN media reporter Brian Stelter wrote in his “Reliable Sources” newsletter, only a portion of the Fox audience has gravitated to the even Trumpier outlets Newsmax and OANN. More have given up on cable news altogether, most likely shifting to entertainment programming. If a larger share of the viewing public is watching CNN and its liberal counterpart, MSNBC, then that’s a boost for factual information.

Moreover, when Trump was running for president in 2015 and 2016, the public was still getting used to the idea that everything on the internet wasn’t free. Five years later, we are becoming accustomed to paying not just for news but for video services like Netflix and music apps like Spotify. Even with Biden slowing down the metabolism of the news cycle, media habits developed during the Trump years may be ingrained at this point. And it’s not as though there’s a shortage of crises to stay informed about, from COVID-19 and the economy to racial justice and the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Trumpist insurrection.

One last point: The Trump era may have been good for the business of journalism, at least on the national level (the local news crisis grows worse and worse). But it may not have been so good for the practice of journalism. In his interview with Brooke Gladstone, McKay Coppins spoke ruefully about how easy it was for reporters like him to gain a national following simply by trashing Trump.

“How do we move forward when you don’t have a president who’s shattering norms and breaking precedent and doing outlandish things every day?,” he asked, adding: “It’s really important that we not have our business models depend on that being the case. Because if they are, all of us are going to be pushed to insert artificial drama into every story we do, and that’s not good for anyone.”

The real story in Washington is dramatic enough. A Democratic president with razor-thin margins in Congress will attempt to govern while many of the most prominent members of the Republican opposition appear to favor authoritarianism over democracy — and who, like Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., continue to spout lies about election fraud. Trump aside, we may be moving through the country’s most dangerous moment since the Civil War.

That ought to be enough to hold anyone’s interest — and to keep the revenues flowing so that we can pay for the journalism that we need.

Cruel and unusual: Trump’s death penalty rampage demeans us all

Previously published at GBH News.

Donald Trump’s presidency has been defined by shocking cruelty. Sometimes it’s been deliberate, as with his practice of taking children from the families of undocumented immigrants. Sometimes it’s the result of wanton neglect and cynical blame-shifting, as with his deadly handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There’s been such a never-ending torrent or horrors for the past four years that some of his misdeeds are in danger of being overlooked. One that we should be focused on, though, is the spree of federal executions he’s ordered during his final months in office.

Starting last July, 13 people were executed — six of them since the election, when Trump was defeated by Joe Biden, who has said he will not use the death penalty once he becomes president. By contrast, there had been only three federal executions since the presidency of John F. Kennedy, all presided over by George W. Bush.

Trump was in such a rush to kill that the final execution, of Dustin John Higgs, was carried out just a few days before Biden’s inauguration. And in a textbook illustration of how inequitably the ultimate punishment is used, Higgs was put to death for killing three women even though it was an associate, Willis Haynes, who shot them to death. Haynes received a 45-year sentence.

Capital punishment is a relic of the past — a barbaric measure not worthy of a decent society. Western Europe, Canada, Australia, South Africa and all of South America have either abolished it or no longer use it. Our peers are repressive regimes such as China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and a handful of others (including, oddly enough, Japan).

And despite our ignominious status as a country that still executes people, capital punishment has been waning even in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

“At the end of the year,” the center said in a recent report, “more states had abolished the death penalty or gone ten years without an execution, more counties had elected reform prosecutors who pledged never to seek the death penalty or to use it more sparingly; fewer new death sentences were imposed than in any prior year since the Supreme Court struck down U.S. death penalty laws in 1972; and despite a six-month spree of federal executions without parallel in the 20th or 21st centuries, fewer executions were carried out than in any year in nearly three decades.”

Trump, lest you forget, called for New York to reinstate the death penalty following the conviction of five young men in a violent assault against a female jogger in Central Park a generation ago; they were later exonerated. Not much has changed. Trump’s current spate of executions, according to ProPublica, has been marked by stunning breaches of protocol and procedure.

“Officials gave public explanations for their choice of which prisoners should die that misstated key facts from the cases,” ProPublica reported. “They moved ahead with executions in the middle of the night. They left one prisoner strapped to the gurney while lawyers worked to remove a court order. They executed a second prisoner while an appeal was still pending, leaving the court to then dismiss the appeal as ‘moot’ because the man was already dead. They bought drugs from a secret pharmacy that failed a quality test. They hired private executioners and paid them in cash.”

Those who are sentenced to die for their crimes have generally done terrible things. They tend not to inspire much sympathy even from those who oppose capital punishment in the abstract. Yet, occasionally, innocent people are put to death. And even those who are guilty often have complicated backstories.

The New York Times opinion section recently wrote about two especially harrowing cases. One was that of Lisa Montgomery, who was executed on Jan. 13, becoming the first woman to die at the hands of the federal government in 70 years. In 2004, Montgomery cut a baby out of the belly of a pregnant woman who was left to die. It was a horrific murder, the sort of act for which the death penalty would seem to be designed. (Incredibly, the baby lived.)

Yet Rachel Louise Snyder of American University, writing in The Times, painted a picture of Montgomery that was itself so horrendous that it’s hard to accept that justice required her execution. Repeatedly abused sexually by her father and his friends, brain-damaged by repeated blows to the head, Montgomery was a profoundly damaged woman who should have been allowed to live out her life in the custody of federal authorities.

The other case was more typical. Alfred Bourgeois was a Black man, as are a disproportionate share of those who are put to death. He was the subject of a long profile by The Times’ Elizabeth Bruenig, who witnessed his execution on Dec. 11. Bourgeois, too, had done something unimaginably awful — he slammed his 2-year-old daughter’s head repeatedly into the cab of his truck in 2002, killing her.

Yet, according to Bruenig, the reason Bourgeois was sentenced to death rather than life in prison was that he was also accused of having sexually abused his daughter. “Mr. Bourgeois’s lawyers — and there were many over time — were ultimately unable to overcome the lurid accusation,” Bruenig wrote. “Media reports inevitably focused on the appalling notion of a father raping his own toddler.” But according to Bruenig, there was good reason to believe that it never happened.

The Trump nightmare is nearly over. But it didn’t end soon enough for Lisa Montgomery, Dustin John Higgs, Alfred Bourgeois and the 10 other victims of Trump’s bloodlust. Few will mourn them. Yet their deaths in our name are an indelible stain on all of us. Let’s hope the Biden presidency represents real progress toward decency and justice — and not merely a four-year interregnum before we embrace our darker natures once again.

With Trump gone and his allies in revolt, what’s next for the media?

Previously published at GBH News.

Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, his detractors have complained bitterly that he was being enabled, or “normalized,” by the mainstream media. For the extremely online Resistance in particular, Twitter became a place to rail against the press for failing to point out that Trump’s every utterance, gesture and action was an outrage against decency and a threat to the republic.

“Trump has been at war with an unraveling America for years,” wrote the liberal press critic Eric Boehlert a day after Trump supporters staged a deadly riot inside the Capitol. “The parallel reality has been that the American press corps has not figured out how to deal with that frightening scenario. It hasn’t properly grappled with the idea that our commander-in-chief would purposefully try to harm America’s security and undo its democratic traditions.”

Boehlert’s not wrong. A year into Trump’s presidency, I took The New York Times to task for what I saw as its overly passive, both-sides approach, which I contrasted with The Washington Post’s sure-footedness.

And yet I find that I’ve grown impatient with these complaints, mainly because I can’t see how a different, harsher approach would have changed the course of the last four years. Never mind the 2016 campaign, which was a travesty of anti-Hillary Clinton bias that helped propel Trump into office. Overall, mainstream coverage of Trump’s time in the White House has been good enough, which is the most we can expect of a diverse, flawed institution.

Trump has been historically unpopular, yet a weirdly large minority continues to say he’s doing a good job no matter what. Take FiveThirtyEight’s average of approval ratings. The Battle of Capitol Hill sent Trump’s ratings sharply downward. But as of Tuesday afternoon, he was still at nearly 41% — pretty much where he always is.

Politically, at least, the story of the Trump years has been simple: He’s detested by a majority of the public, and they voted him out by a decisive margin the first chance they got. Explaining this isn’t rocket science.

Does anyone really believe that the mainstream media haven’t been largely negative in their coverage? Yes, there have been moments when The Times has been overly deferential, as befits a news organization that still thinks of itself as the nation’s paper of record and the presidency as an august institution. But investigative reporting by The Times, The Post and The Wall Street Journal have kept Trump back on his heels continuously for the past four years.

There have been a few exceptions — The Times on occasion and, sadly, NPR consistently. All too often I’ve turned on NPR and thought President George H.W. Bush was still in office and that the Democrats were working to stymie his legislative agenda. Last fall, NPR’s mild-mannered public editor, Kelly McBride, went so far as to complain that “there are moments, like the coverage of the first presidential debate, when NPR’s presentation is so understated that some in the audience feel they’ve been handed a distorted picture.” No kidding.

And yet another public media outlet that I had long criticized as a bastion of false equivalence, the “PBS NewsHour,” somehow managed to find its voice during the Trump presidency. Anchor Judy Woodruff, White House reporter Yamiche Alcindor and congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins rose to the moment, chronicling each day’s events with a calm but pointed devotion to seeking the truth and reporting it.

Through the Mueller investigation, Ukraine, impeachment, COVID-19, Trump’s blizzard of lies about the election results and now what looks very much like a failed coup attempt, mainstream coverage has, for the most part, been appropriately critical.

The one massive media failure has been something the mainstream can’t do anything about — the weaponized pro-Trump propaganda put out every day and night by Fox News, which more than anything has kept Trump’s approval rating from cratering. Fox now seems determined to get its mojo back after losing some of its audience to the likes of Newsmax and OANN, as it has switched from news to opinion at 7 p.m.

And let’s not overlook the role of Facebook and Twitter in amplifying Trumpist lies — a role with which the social-media giants are now rather ineptly coming to grips.

Longtime media observer Jay Rosen of New York University recently gave the media some credit for asserting themselves in recent months and warned that a slide back into the old paradigm of giving weight and authority to both political parties would prove disastrous.

“Trump screwed with the ‘both sides’ system by busting norms and lying all the time, but that has only increased the longing to have the old constructs back,” he wrote, adding that the press “will have to find a way to become pro-truth, pro-voting, anti-racist and aggressively pro-democracy. It will have to cast its lot with those in both parties who are reality-based. It will have to learn to distinguish bad actors with propagandistic intent from normal speakers making their case.”

The rise of what may become a sustained right-wing resistance — a Tea Party armed with guns and brainwashed by QAnon — pretty much guarantees that the media won’t be able to slide back into their old habits once Trump is gone and the exceedingly normal President-elect Joe Biden takes his place.

As for whether the media are up to the challenge, I think we ought to take heart from the Trump era. Much of the press did what it could to hold Trump accountable and to shine a light on his repulsive words and actions. I’m hopeful that they’ll bring the same energy and sense of mission to covering whatever is coming next.

Georgia signals some hope, but Trump madness remains vigorous

The Proud Boys in Washington last month. Photo (cc) 2020 by Geoff Livingston.

Previously published at GBH News.

And so today, at least for a few hours, we descend once again into the madness.

The past four days have been as dizzying as anything we’ve experienced as a nation, and would be seen as such if we hadn’t been dealing for the past four years with the terrible consequences of electing Donald Trump as president in 2016.

On Sunday, we learned that Trump had tried to muscle Georgia’s top election officials into awarding him the state in his ongoing efforts to overturn the results of the November election — surely an impeachable offense, and most likely a federal and state crime as well.

But life as we have come to know it during the Trump era rolled on. Republicans on Capitol Hill continued with their seditious plot to supersede the Electoral College, a tragicomedy upon which the curtain will rise later today. Thousands of MAGA protesters are arriving in Washington to urge them on. Meanwhile, the COVID pandemic is out of control, the economy remains in shambles and we learned once again that police officers can shoot a Black man in the back without much in the way of consequences.

And yet.

On Tuesday evening, not long after the polls had closed in Georgia, it started becoming clear that we may be in for a period of — what? Not normality. The radical right, as Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan has properly suggested we label the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, won’t allow for that. But relative calm at least.

It may be no exaggeration to say that the outcome of the George Senate runoff elections was as crucial to our survival as a constitutional republic as the outcome of the presidential election two months ago. As of early this morning, the Rev. Raphael Warnock has defeated the Republican incumbent, Kelly Loeffler, for one of the seats, and the other Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, appears likely to be declared the winner in his race against Sen. David Perdue.

With Warnock’s and Ossoff’s victories comes control (barely) of the Senate. Though each party will hold 50 seats, the incoming vice president, Kamala Harris, will be able to break tie votes. That would be a big deal in any case, but it looms even larger given the dangerous abyss into which the Republican Party has fallen.

At the liberal website Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall writes that “it allows Joe Biden to assemble a government. I think people have been underestimating the likelihood that a Republican senate would simply refuse to confirm major Biden appointees, forcing the President to try to wing stuff together with recess and vacancies act appointments that would themselves become tied up in the courts.”

We can’t underestimate what Biden will be up against once he’s sworn in. On Tuesday night I spent about an hour and a half watching Newsmax, which, along with OANN, has stolen a large chunk of the MAGA audience from Fox News because the journalists at Fox have remained at least somewhat tethered to reality.

Not long after the polls closed, Newsmax analyst Mark Halperin (remember him?) said that if the exit polls were “close to accurate,” then the Republicans would win. But an hour or so later, as it started to become clear that Republican turnout in Georgia wasn’t going to be enough to keep Perdue and Loeffler in office, the talking heads started to lay out the case that the results would be illegitimate.

For instance, Dick Morris (remember him?) took solace in figures that showed about 2 million early voters in Georgia had done so in person whereas just 1 million had voted by mail. “It’s a lot easier to fake mail-in voting than in-person voting,” he said, dumping a few buckets of poison into the well.

Another guest, U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., a leader of today’s rebellion against reality, actually called on the Senate not to seat Warnock and Ossoff even if they won. “It’s one thing for those ballots to be accurately counted; it’s another thing as to whether those ballots are legal,” he said, claiming without any evidence that there were “a massive number of illegal ballots in the system.”

Former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka (remember him?) tied the Senate race and the presidential election together by claiming “election fraud and quote unquote irregularities” and citing disproven allegations of votes being “pulled out from under tables.” Gorka also demonstrated a Trumpian facility for childish insults, calling Ossoff a “milquetoast Beto” and a “Justin Trudreau knockoff” and Warnock an “utter, utter radical.”

We can’t underestimate the effect of all this on the 40% of the public that remains in thrall to Trump and Trumpism. Whereas elite conservatives like Rich Lowry (“Republicans have likely lost control of the Senate, but will have the consolation prize of being able to marinate for hours tomorrow in delusional schemes”) and Tom Nichols (“the majority of the Republican Party and its apologists are advocating for the overthrow of an American election and the continued rule of a sociopathic autocrat”) rage against the president, Trump’s supporters have directed their own rage at the legitimately elected government of the United States.

Or as the pro-Trump conspiracy site Gateway Pundit puts it: “Pray for Vice President Pence to make the correct decision and save our nation from corrupt banana-republic elections that will undoubtedly be our future if this election is allowed to stand.”

Today’s attempted coup will end in failure. According to most reports, there will be more than enough Republican senators who’ll join with their Democratic colleagues to stop the madness. And if that doesn’t work, the Democratic House will put an end to it. But even with Republicans out of power in the House, the Senate and the presidency, we remain in a dangerous moment.

“America is in a precarious spot,” writes Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson. “But Americans have finally woken up. Democracy is not a spectator sport, and people are now speaking up, demanding that our leaders listen to us, and insisting that officials as well as ordinary Americans answer to the law.”

Crucial to navigating that future will be the role of the media. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that much of the press would like nothing better than a return to the good old days — Democrats versus Republicans, balance and a retreat from the activism it embraced during the worst of the Trump presidency.

“Powerful forces favor a restoration,” Rosen writes. “It is by far the most likely outcome. After coping with an avalanche of news, an excess of controversy, and a hate campaign against them for five years, journalists would no doubt welcome a return to regular order, and a more human pace.” He adds: “Trump screwed with the ‘both sides’ system by busting norms and lying all the time, but that has only increased the longing to have the old constructs back.”

In theory, I agree with Rosen that the media can’t go back to the way things were. In practice, I’m not sure what that looks like. Already, I’ve seen pushback against normal journalistic vetting such as Politico’s recent story about the millions of dollars in corporate speaking fees earned by Biden’s choice for treasury secretary, Janet Yellen. I’m sorry, but that’s a perfectly fine story as long as we don’t make too much of it.

What I’d like to see is a refusal to take the Republicans’ bait on phony Democratic scandals (Hunter Biden, anyone?); a willingness to cover the Republicans in good faith when they act in good faith, but an equal willingness to denounce radical measures not based in reality; and an unwavering defense of democracy.

Fourteen more days.

Poynter shines a light on GBH News series about minority businesses and state spending

Gov. Charlie Baker. Photo (cc) 2020 by Josh Qualls / Governor’s Press office.

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Poynter has rounded up some of the highest impact local stories of 2020 — and among them is “The Color of Public Money,” a series produced by my friends at GBH. Paul Singer, investigations editor for the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting, recounts his work revealing that the state had failed to live up to its promises in helping minority-owned businesses. Singer writes:

We first established that the value of state spending with minority-owned businesses has DECLINED over the past 20 years (adjusted for inflation). We then established that during Baker’s administration, the state began padding those numbers, taking credit for a bunch of stuff that is not actually “spending” by state agencies.

As a result of Singer’s work, Gov. Charlie Baker created a new state agency and has promised improvements.

Other stories in the Poynter roundup include secrecy over inmate deaths in Montana, a foundation in Miami that provides bloodhounds to law-enforcement agencies, a motorcycle gang that incited violence at a Black Lives Matter rally in Ohio, child hunger in West Virginia, and fake news about a bus in Columbus, Ohio, that was falsely claimed to have been used by rioters.

The Poynter roundup underscores the importance of local and regional journlism. National news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal are doing well, but community news is shrinking. During these final two days of 2020, I hope you’ll consider a donation to NewsMatch, which will double what you give to support nonprofit news. I gave earlier this week.

This year, NewsMatch added a new feature — rather than trying to figure out which nonprofits you want to support, you can just give to NewsMatch and let them figure out where your dollars can be put to the best use.

A wary but grateful look back at 2020, the worst year ever

COVID-19 testing. 2020 photo via U.S. Air Force.

Previously published at GBH News.

If we’re lucky, we’ll never encounter another time as awful as 2020. A raging pandemic, economic collapse, white racism in the face of a long-overdue reckoning with racial justice and an authoritarian-minded president who is still plotting to overturn his decisive defeat have all conspired to make this a year to put behind us.

Then there were the personal tragedies. “I remember that first Thanksgiving, the empty chair,” said President-elect Joe Biden, a man who knows tragedy in his bones and in his soul. The lost job. The lost business. The lost hope.

During the past year, I’ve tried to capture some of that — the lows as well as a few reasons for optimism. Below are 10 of my GBH News columns. They’re in chronological order, starting with the world we lost and ending with a glimpse of better days to come.

• The strangling of local radio, Jan. 21. The New Year had barely begun when we learned that iHeartMedia, a conglomerate that owns some 850 stations, was gutting its properties. Among them: Boston’s venerable WBZ (AM 1030), the city’s last remaining commercial news station, which laid off several longtime journalists. For-profit radio has been sliding downhill since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which effectively removed caps on how many stations a company can own. As with newspapers, a few giant corporations took on massive amounts of debt to build empires, slashing costs so they could pay their creditors. Employees and listeners were the losers.

• The last normal week, March 4. I spent Super Tuesday in Ukiah, California, covering a packed event in a bar (imagine that) hosted by The Mendocino Voice, a small website that was transitioning from for-profit to cooperative ownership. “We are going to be owned by our readers and our staff,” publisher Kate Maxwell told those on hand. “We think that’s the best way to be sustainable and locally owned.” By the end of the week, I found myself accompanying Maxwell and managing editor Adrian Fernandez Baumann to Mendocino County’s first news conference about what was then called “the novel coronavirus.” A day later I returned home on a half-empty flight wondering what was coming next.

• A campus empties out, March 17. Northeastern University, where I’m a journalism professor, takes its spring break the first week of March. Despite the increasingly ominous news, we actually resumed classes the following week. All of us, though, had the sense that a shutdown was imminent — and it was, as we all had to scramble quickly to move our classes online. This fall, like most of my colleagues, I taught partly in person, partly online, getting tested twice a week. And I am filled with gratitude every day to be one of the lucky few who is still employed and working in a relatively safe environment.

• Fox News endangers lives, April 22. Rupert Murdoch’s cable news station has become a dangerous behemoth, promulgating all manner of misinformation and disinformation about climate change, Hillary Clinton and the awesome wonderfulness of President Donald Trump. Never, though, was Fox News more of a menace than it was in the spring of 2020, when prime-time hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham promoted the toxic idea that COVID-19 (it finally had a name) was a “hoax.” They disdained mask-wearing and cheered on the armed right-wingers who protested the shutdown, falsely claiming that COVID was nothing to worry about. “The question is why are our leaders hurting us on purpose,” Carlson told his viewers. “And the answer is: Because they can.”

• Avoiding a 2016 repeat, May 27. With Biden having vanquished his Democratic primary opponents and building a solid polling lead over Trump, I asked whether the media could avoid the mistakes they made in 2016 — obsessing over Hillary Clinton’s emails and elevating her minor transgressions so that they appeared to be as serious as Trump’s. In fact, the media appeared to have learned some lessons. Sexual assault charges brought against Biden by Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, and, later in the year, Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to make some sort of criminal connection between Biden and his son Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine were both quickly dismissed as lacking any evidence. The next question: How will the press cover the Biden presidency?

• A newspaper laid low by racism, June 17. Alexis Johnson, a young Black reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, had been covering the Black Lives Matter protests that broke out following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others. Then she tweeted out a humorous but pointed observation comparing the damage caused by looters to the mess left behind by tailgaters at a Kenny Chesney concert. She was taken off the protest beat for supposedly failing to maintain her objectivity — a ludicrous overreaction met with protests by her fellow journalists and the community. Before long, Johnson had left for Vice News and the Post-Gazette had a new executive editor: Stan Wischnowski, who’d just left as executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer after he approved an insensitive “Buildings Matter, Too” headline. Wischnowski was actually an upgrade over his predecessor, Keith Burris, who continues to run the editorial pages. But he was hardly the sort of change that was called for under the circumstances.

• In the dark on Beacon Hill, July 16. Massachusetts is just one of four states whose legislatures are exempt from public-records laws. Cities, towns, counties and state executive agencies must turn over payroll records, contracts, internal communications and other documents when asked to do so by journalists or ordinary citizens. But not the Legislature. “The Legislature has no interest in changing the status quo,” said Robert Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association. And so it remains. In the fall, Northeastern journalism students asked every legislative candidate whether they favored ending the exemption. Most of those who answered said they did — but only 71 of the 257 candidates bothered to respond despite repeated email and phone requests.

• Local news, saner views, Nov. 11. With the election over and the Trump era drawing to an end, I explored the idea of whether a renewed focus on community life could help overcome the hyperpolarization that has ripped the culture apart at the national level. Before that can happen, though, we need to find ways to revive local journalism. One modest solution would be to create a special state commission to study the problem in Massachusetts and make some recommendations. As 2020 draws to a close, the legislation that would create that commission remains in limbo.

• Linda Henry takes charge, Nov. 18. Some five months after Vinay Mehra exited as president of Boston Globe Media Partners, managing director Linda Pizzuti Henry got a title enhancement: she was named chief executive of the company, which comprises The Boston Globe, Stat News and Boston.com. Although the COVID-related advertising meltdown hurt the Globe as it did every other media company, 2020 turned out to be a good year for owners John and Linda Henry. The Globe’s paid digital circulation passed the long-sought 200,000 mark, and Stat News emerged as a national leader on COVID coverage. Moreover, the company employs about 300 full-time journalists across its three platforms — a far higher number than would be expected under chain ownership. That said, the company continues its unseemly battle against its union employees, a situation that should have been resolved long ago.

• Back to a better future, Dec. 2. Are there reasons to be optimistic? We all hope so. President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will restore civility to the White House. A COVID vaccine has brought the end of the pandemic within sight. But what about beyond that? In a new book, “The Upswing,” Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett argue that the selfishness that led to the original Gilded Age eventually gave way to the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement — and that it can happen again.

We are entering what is likely to be a devastating winter — what Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, predicted could be “the most difficult in the public health history of this nation.” We need to take care of each other and get beyond the sickness and fear that have come to dominate our lives. And we have to tell ourselves that things will get better — and work to make it come true. What alternative do we have?

Finally, my thanks to GBH News for the privilege of having this platform and to you for reading. Best wishes to everyone for a great 2021.

We can leverage Section 230 to limit algorithmically driven disinformation

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo (cc) 2012 by JD Lasica.

Josh Bernoff responds.

How can we limit the damage that social media — and especially Facebook — are doing to democracy? We all know what the problem is. The platforms make money by keeping you logged on and engaged. And they keep you engaged by feeding you content that their algorithms have determined makes you angry and upset. How do we break that chain?

Josh Bernoff, writing in The Boston Globe, offers an idea similar to one I suggested a few months ago: leverage Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which holds digital publishers harmless for any content posted by third-party users. Under Section 230, publishers can’t be sued if a commenter libels someone, which amounts to a huge benefit not available in other contexts. For instance, a newspaper publisher is liable for every piece of content that it runs, from news articles to ads and letters to the editor — but not for comments posted on the newspaper’s website.

Bernoff suggests what strikes me as a rather convoluted system that would require Facebook (that is, if Mark Zuckerberg wants to continue benefiting from Section 230) to run ads calling attention to ideologically diverse content. Using the same algorithms that got us into trouble in the first place, Facebook would serve up conservative content to liberal users and liberal content to conservative users.

There are, I think, some problems with Bernoff’s proposal, starting with this: He writes that Facebook and the other platforms “would be required to show free ads for mainstream liberal news sources to conservatives, and ads for mainstream conservative news sites to liberals.”

But that elides dealing the reality of what has happened to political discourse over the past several decades, accelerated by the Trump era. Liberals and Democrats haven’t changed all that much. Conservatives and Republicans, on the other hand, have become deeply radical, supporting the overturning of a landslide presidential election and espousing dangerous conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Given that, what is a “mainstream conservative news site”?

Bernoff goes so far as to suggest that MSNBC and Fox News are liberal and conservative equivalents. In their prime-time programming, though, the liberal MSNBC — despite its annoyingly doctrinaire, hectoring tone — remains tethered to reality, whereas Fox’s right-wing prime-time hosts are moving ever closer to QAnon territory. The latest is Tucker Carlson’s anti-vax outburst. Who knew that he would think killing his viewers was a good business strategy?

Moving away from the fish-in-a-barrel examples of MSNBC and Fox, what about The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal? Well, the Times’ editorial pages are liberal and the Journal’s are conservative. But if we’re talking about news coverage, they’re really not all that different. So that doesn’t work, either.

I’m not sure that my alternative, which I wrote about for GBH News back in June, is workable, but it does have the advantage of being simple: eliminate Section 230 protections for any platform that uses algorithms to boost engagement. Facebook would have to comply; if it didn’t, it would be sued into oblivion in a matter of weeks or months. As I wrote at the time:

But wouldn’t this amount to heavy-handed government regulation? Not at all. In fact, loosening Section 230 protections would push us in the opposite direction, toward deregulation. After all, holding publishers responsible for libel, invasions of privacy, threats of violence and the like is the default in our legal system. Section 230 was a regulatory gift, and it turns out that we were too generous.

Unlike Bernoff’s proposal, mine wouldn’t attempt to regulate speech by identifying the news sites that are worthy of putting in front of users so that they’ll be exposed to views they disagree with. I would let it rip as long as artificial intelligence isn’t being used to boost the most harmful content.

Needless to say, Zuckerberg and his fellow Big Tech executives can be expected to fight like crazed weasels in order to keep using algorithms, which are incredibly valuable to their bottom line. Just this week The New York Times reported that Facebook temporarily tweaked its algorithms to emphasize quality news in the runup to the election and its aftermath — but it has now quietly reverted to boosting divisive slime, because that’s what keeps the ad money rolling in.

Donald Trump has been crusading against 230 during the final days of his presidency, even though he doesn’t seem to understand that he would be permanently banned from Twitter and every other platform — even Parler — if they had to worry about being held legally responsible for what he posts.

Still, that’s no reason not to do something about Section 230, which was approved in the earliest days of the commercial web and has warped digital discourse in ways we couldn’t have imagined back then. Hate speech and disinformation driven by algorithms have become the bane of our time. Why not modify 230 in order to do something about it?

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How our partisan media divide is fueling Republican radicalism

Previously published at GBH News.

Distrust of the media is nothing new. The percentage of Americans who say they have faith in news organizations has been falling for at least a generation. But the widening partisan nature of that distrust has left Republicans increasingly uninformed. And that, in turn, helps explain why the Trumpist right espouses conspiracy theories on topics ranging from COVID-19 to QAnon.

Over the weekend, the Pew Research Center published a roundup of “20 striking findings from 2020.” Checking in at No. 13 was a survey from earlier this year showing that Republicans lack faith in the media to a far greater extent than Democrats.

There are many layers to the survey, but here’s a particularly telling data point: 60% of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents cited a “desire to mislead” as one of the principal reasons that news outlets make mistakes, compared to just 32% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Overall, 78% of Democrats and Democratic leaners who strongly disapprove of President Donald Trump “expect that the news they get will largely be accurate” compared to just 39% of strong Trump supporters on the Republican side.

Such findings have to be seen in the context of what media sources people rely on for their news and information. The evidence shows that Trump supporters have isolated themselves from mainstream discourse.

As far back as 2014, Pew found that “consistent conservatives” were “tightly clustered around a single news source,” with “47% citing Fox News as their main source for news about government and politics.” Other studies, such as a 2017 MIT-Harvard Law School effort, showed that liberals consumed a far more varied media diet than did conservatives. The power and influence of Fox News has only grown since then, notwithstanding the recent success of Newsmax and OANN, which are more willing to indulge Trump’s lies about the election.

Mainstream outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR are hardly perfect, of course. The Times and the Post, in particular, often cater more than they should to the liberal sensibilities of their subscribers. But, however flawed they may be, they are guided by journalistic principles such as truth-seeking and verification, whereas their counterparts on the right, such as Fox’s prime-time hosts, the Gateway Pundit and Rush Limbaugh, engage in little other than right-wing propaganda.

The effect of this asymmetric polarization in media consumption is clear enough in politics, as we are currently witnessing an unprecedented assault on the outcome of a presidential election that wasn’t even close. But it manifests itself in other ways as well.

Take, for instance, No. 19 on Pew’s list — a survey showing that 41% of Republicans and Republican leaners who’ve heard of the QAnon conspiracy theory believe that it’s either good or very good for the country, compared to just 7% on the Democratic side.

QAnon, in case you haven’t heard, is based on the belief that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats are involved in an international pedophile ring and that Trump is secretly working to defeat them. Pew notes that, incredibly, more than a dozen candidates for the House and Senate last fall, all Republicans, were QAnon supporters, or at least Q-curious. Two of them actually won election to the House.

Or consider Pew’s No. 1 finding, which is as unsurprising as it is enraging: “Since the very beginning of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, Democrats have been far more likely than Republicans to see COVID-19 as a ‘major threat’ to public health.” How wide is the split? According to a November survey, 84% of Democrats and Democratic leaners see it was major threat but just 43% on the Republican side.

“The partisan gap on this measure,” Pew said, “remains about as wide as at any point during the outbreak and stands in contrast to the large shares of both Republicans (83%) and Democrats (86%) who say the outbreak is a major threat to the U.S. economy.”

Those two findings explain a lot. With the exception of a few GOP officials like Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, Republicans — starting with Trump himself — have led the charge against shutdowns and mask-wearing. Though Democrats and Republicans are roughly equal in their view that COVID-19 threatens the economy, Democrats see those public-health measures as necessary for getting the pandemic under control while Republicans see them as assaults on freedom.

Which is why many Trump supporters are willing to engage in behavior that puts both themselves and the rest of us at risk. Or as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News host Tucker Carlson last spring: “There are more important things than living, and that’s saving this country for our children and our grandchildren.” No wonder we’ve now lost more than 300,000 American lives to COVID-19.

Pew’s No. 20 could be a bad omen for Mark Zuckerberg. A majority of Democrats and Republicans said they believe social-media companies are censoring political views — although that belief was more pronounced among Republicans.

Many of Pew’s other findings documented the misery we’re all experiencing during this terrible year. International travel is down. For the first time since the Great Depression, a majority of young adults are living with their parents. Four in 10 people surveyed said either they or someone in their household had been laid off or taken a pay cut. More than half know someone who has died or been hospitalized because of COVID.

This past weekend, violence broke out as Trump supporters rallied in support of their false belief that President-elect Joe Biden stole the election. In Michigan, electors needed a police escort to the state capitol so that they could cast their ballots for Biden. A group of House Republicans are threatening chaos next month. Trump shows no signs of backing down, raising the prospect of unrest for months to come.

We all sense that the hyperpolarization that has torn the country apart in recent years and that has accelerated under Trump has reached a tipping point. What the Pew list shows more than anything is that this split is a consequence of the Republican Party becoming increasingly radical, violent and undemocratic.

A lot of that can be traced back to our media habits. Most of us rely on journalism to stay informed. And a sizable minority has gotten sucked down a bottomless hole of falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

We’re all looking forward to 2021. We’ll get vaccinated. COVID-19 will slowly begin to recede. The Biden White House will restore some sense of normality.

In the long run, though, we remain in a very dark place.

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Blogging is dead. Long live blogging. Or, why the Substack hype is much ado about very little.

Same as it ever was. Photo (cc) 2006 by Sofia Gk.

Previously published at GBH News.

I have nothing against Substack.

The newsletter platform seems like a clean, simple tool aimed at helping independent writers charge subscription fees for their work.

But please spare me the hype. Substack has been the subject of recent stories by NPR, the Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times, among others. And though most of the coverage has come with a few caveats, the impression that’s left is that Substack, at long last, has created a workable business model to support journalism at a time when COVID, Google and Facebook are destroying more traditional forms of media.

Substack, Ben Smith wrote in the Times earlier this year, holds out the promise of “reversing the dynamic of the old top-down media company and producing something more like a talent agency, where the individual journalist is the star and the boss, and the editor is merely on call.” Now where have we heard that before?

With celebrity journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Iglesias giving up their institutional gigs and going it alone, Substack has emerged as the hot new media thing of 2021, even though it’s not new and it’s unlikely to pay off for more than a few writers who had a substantial audience even before they switched to Substack.

“The Substack model works really well for some people who already have prestige and a following,” New York University journalism professor Meredith Broussard told NPR. “And it doesn’t work that well for everybody else.”

Back when I was a graduate student in the 1980s, I remember coming across an aphorism that there are two schools of thought about the unfolding of history. The first is that it’s one damn thing after another. The second is that it’s the same damn thing over and over.

Substack is clearly an example of the second. Because what is the newsletter model if it’s not blogging revisited? Remember blogs? I’ve been writing one since 2002. I also teach a workshop on “Blogging for Journalists” once or twice a year at the Harvard Kennedy School. Over the years, my message has morphed from “this is a cool new thing” to “everyone is doing it, so you should too” to “blogging may be dead, but it’s still got a lot of value.”

I guess my revised message should be “blogging is alive and well, except now we call it Substack.” After all, you can subscribe to my blog and get an email every time I post — so it’s a newsletter, right? And Substack archives your past newsletters in an attractive list kept in reverse-chronological order — so it’s a blog, right? Does this sound like a revolution to you?

There is one important difference: Substack has better, more flexible tools for payment than blogging ever had. We could put out a virtual tip jar back in the day (I never did) or run ads (I experimented with them but decided they weren’’t worth the bother). For the most part, though, charging subscription fees for access to a blog is difficult, and very few bloggers tried it. Substack makes it simple and, as the coverage enthusiastically notes, a small number of writers at the top of the heap are earning six-figure incomes. That’s pretty impressive.

At the same time, though, the paid-subscription model itself may be heading for the bubble-bursting stratosphere sometime in 2021. National news organizations have returned to something like financial health through reader revenue, which is no small accomplishment after years of wondering if The New York Times would survive. But how many news subscriptions are readers going to pay for? My guess: one or two digital newspapers; a magazine or two; and that’s just about it. Writers charging $6 a month on Substack are going to be frozen out — again, except for the celebrities.

“If Substack is successful, it will remind news consumers that paying for good journalism is worth it,” wrote the University of Maine’s Michael Socolow for The Conversation. “But if Substack’s pricing precludes widespread distribution of its news and commentary, its value as a public service won’t be fully realized.”

Moreover, there are some problems with Substack that sound exactly like the laments you used to hear from bloggers.

For instance, when Andrew Sullivan gave up his blog a few years ago and went to work for New York magazine, he said the grind had gotten to be too much. This past summer, when he announced he was leaving the magazine for Substack, he was still whining about the workload.

“Since I closed down the Dish, my bloggy website, five years ago, after 15 years of daily blogging,” he wrote, “I have not missed the insane work hours that all but broke my health.”

Somehow Sullivan has convinced himself that things will be different at Substack. Maybe he should have checked in with Patrice Peck, a journalist who publishes a Substack newsletter in relative obscurity called Coronavirus News for Black Folks. According to an article by Clio Chang in the Columbia Journalism Review, Peck has discovered that overwork and burnout are just as real for newsletter writers as they are for bloggers. (And why would we think otherwise?)

“I’m creating graphics on Instagram to promote it, tweeting it, doing everything,” Peck told Chang. “It’s a one-woman show. That gets exhausting. I don’t put it out as frequently as I’d like to.”

As for Substack’s corporate priorities, well, look out below. Chang noted that Substack is funded in large measure through $15.3 million in venture capital that it received in 2018. Among other things, the money has enabled Substack to recruit well-known writers. But at some point the investors will insist on their payday, as they always do. That’s when Substack writers will realize they’re not working on their own but are, rather, cogs in someone else’s machine.

After the initial excitement of the early to mid-2000s, blogging settled into a valuable but small niche in the digital media world. Some of us are still at it. Many others moved on.

The same is likely to be true of Substack as well. Because Substack isn’t merely similar to blogging. It is blogging, and it’s amazing that so many think that it’s new and different. Like Blogspot, WordPress, Medium (an earlier cautionary tale for journalists) and others, Substack will take its place as just another platform for self-publishing — better than some, but evolutionary, not revolutionary.

And the hard work of finding ways to pay for journalism in the digital age will continue.

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Today’s America is more broken than our parents’. But a new book gives us reason to hope.

Previously published at GBH News.

Life in the 21st century is defined by certain toxic realities. Extreme income inequality, political polarization, the breakdown of community life and the rise of narcissistic individualism have all helped create a meaner, more narrow-minded America than the one we — or, depending on your age, your parents — grew up in.

This fall from grace didn’t occur overnight. Our devolution from hope and idealism to anger and existential dread took many decades. It didn’t end with the defeat of Donald Trump, nor will it end with a vaccine for COVID. But it can end. We know it can, because it’s happened before.

That’s the optimistic thesis of Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s book “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again” (Simon & Schuster). Their argument, in brief, is that the Gilded Age of the late 19th century looked very much like today. Or as they put it: “Inequality, political polarization, social dislocation, and cultural narcissism prevailed — all accompanied, as they are now, by unprecedented technological advances, prosperity, and material well-being.”

Starting in the Progressive Era, we began moving toward greater equality, political comity and community-mindedness. And despite a few blips along the way, these trends continued into the mid-1960s before beginning their long slide into the abyss.

Putnam and Garrett’s grand theory is based on deep statistical analysis encompassing such disparate data points as party votes in Congress, attendance at religious services and Googling how often words like “responsibility” and “rights” appear in books over time. Each of the four markers they measure have moved almost in unison in an upside-down “U” curve — uphill in a positive direction until just past mid-century and then downhill to the present.

The authors do not fall into the trap of nostalgia, as they point out that the “U” curves played out very differently for African Americans and women. Based on statistics alone, for example, it’s clear that Black Americans’ economic and political prospects improved in the decades before the civil-rights movement just as they did for white people — but with a significant caveat.

Putnam and Garrett are careful to note that a lot of the progress that Black people made in income, education and voting was the result not of a general improvement in social conditions but, rather, of the Great Migration, in which some 70 million Blacks moved from the racist South to the somewhat less racist North. And while the downward trend that affected society as a whole starting in the late ’60s affected Black people as well, the authors point out that white backlash was a significant contributing factor.

“The Upswing” complements another recent book on our downward slide, Kurt Andersen’s “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America” (Random House). Putnam and Garrett’s work is built upon a sturdy mountain of quantitative research. “Evil Geniuses,” by contrast, is a morality play, the story of how political figures such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, the economist Milton Friedman and the conservative activist Lewis Powell (later named to the Supreme Court), supercharged with money from the Koch brothers, conspired to degrade the environment, deregulate business and make the rich richer.

But whereas Andersen is aware of the parallels between Trump’s America and the Gilded Age, Putnam and Garrett’s unique contribution is to show exactly how similar the two eras are, and to chart the forces that, for a time, created a fairer, more equal country — among them the reforms of the Progressive and New Deal eras and the leveling effects of World War II. (Not to make too much of that — the authors show the upward swing continued well past what would have been expected if it were only a wartime phenomenon.)

So what went wrong? Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard, and Garrett, a one-time student of Putnam’s who’s now a writer and social entrepreneur, are too careful to ascribe any single cause. As for the most obvious candidate, they note that rising income inequality is actually a lagging indicator, coming slightly after the other social markers turned south.

Instead, they speculate that it was the chaos the 1960s and mid-’70s that’s to blame. The years between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the economic malaise of Jimmy Carter’s presidency were defined by war, racial unrest, a violent protest movement, more assassinations and a general sense of dislocation and confusion. They describe the 125-year arc they trace as “I-we-I.” In the 1970s, the pendulum swung decisively back to “I,” with community giving way to individual pursuits. “The Boomers who had entered the Sixties in idealistic togetherness,” they write, “exited the Seventies in grumpy self-centeredness.”

One omission puzzled me. The media get barely a mention in “The Upswing,” either for the salutary effects of local journalism on community-building or for the harm caused by the rise of influential right-wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News (and now Newsmax and OANN) and the algorithmic, anger-fueled monster that is Facebook.

This was especially surprising given Putnam’s past work linking civic life and local news. In his 2000 book, “Bowling Alone,” he found a strong correlation between activities such as voting, coaching youth sports and attending religious services and with the desire to keep up on community affairs. “Newspaper readers,” he wrote, “are machers and schmoozers.”

Putnam and Garrett acknowledge that the political polarization they decry in mainly a right-wing phenomenon, as they write that “bipartisanship has disappeared from American politics over the last half century largely because the Republican Party has become steadily more extreme.” The media’s role in sparking this asymmetric polarization would have been worth exploring.

The omission becomes all the more glaring in Putnam and Garrett’s final chapter, on possible solutions that might start bending the curve upward again. Mainly it consists of vignettes about Progressive Era and New Deal heroes such as Frances Perkins, Paul Harris (a creator of the Rotary Club) and Ida B. Wells. Articulating a vision for how to get back to “we” may be beyond anyone’s ability. But surely media reform needs to be part of that vision.

“The story of the American experiment in the twentieth century,” Putnam and Garrett write, “is one of a long upswing toward increasing solidarity, followed by a steep downturn into increasing individualism. From ‘I’ to ‘we,’ and back again to ‘I.’”

They have written a valuable, fascinating overview of how we got here. By following the story to well back before the beginning of the slide, they’ve revealed a cyclical nature to the dysfunction that now pervades the national landscape. We live in a time when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos increased his fortune by $48 billion during the first few months of the pandemic while millions lost their jobs and went hungry; when wearing a mask to prevent the spread of COVID and simply acknowledging the outcome of the election are seen as partisan acts.

The promise of “The Upswing” is that we’ve been here before and got out of it through goodwill and hard work. Can we do it again? Even with decency and normality returning to the White House, it’s hard to see how that’s going to happen.

Then again, maybe the most important message that Putnam and Garrett have to offer is that, ultimately, it’s up to us.

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