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Emily Rooney talks about local TV news, ‘Beat the Press’ and holding the media to account

Emily Rooney. Photo via the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

On our latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Emily Rooney, the longtime host of “Beat the Press,” an award-winning program on WGBH-TV (Channel 2). I was a panelist on the show, a weekly roundtable that offered local and national media criticism. It had a 22-year run but was canceled in 2021. You can watch the 20th-anniversary episode here. The show, which is much missed by many former viewers, had a brief second life as a podcast.

Emily has got serious television news cred. She arrived at WGBH from the Fox Network in New York, where she oversaw political coverage, including the 1996 presidential primaries, national conventions, and presidential election. Before that, she was executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight” with Peter Jennings. She also worked at WCVB-TV in Boston for 15 years, from 1979–’93, as news director and as assistant news director — a time when WCVB was regularly hailed as the home of the best local newscast in the U.S.

“Beat the Press” may be no more, but there’s a revival of interest in responsible media criticism from inside the newsroom. Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr recently wrote an op-ed calling for the restoration of a public editor position at The New York Times, The Boston Globe and other news outlets.

In our Quick Takes, I’ve got an update on one of our favorite topics — pink slime. Wired has a wild story out of rural Iowa involving a Linux server in Germany, a Polish website and a Chinese operation called “the Propaganda Department of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”

Ellen recounts a legal saga in Southeastern Minnesota involving the sale of a newspaper group and allegations of intellectual property theft. It’s all about a single used computer and its role in creating a media startup.”

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

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WBUR’s funding woes are part of a larger challenge facing public radio

If any form of media were well-positioned to respond to the decline of large daily newspapers, it was — seemingly — public radio.

For one thing, the business model wasn’t broken. Many people were still commuting to work in their cars. For another, public radio stations, unlike nearly all newspapers, are nonprofits, meaning they can attract funding from a more diverse range of sources: tax-deductible listener donations, large grants and even (in some states, anyway) direct government funding. (Public radio also receives a small amount of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which disburses federal money.)

When I was reporting on the Denver media environment for “What Works in Community News,” I learned that Colorado Public Radio was perhaps the largest news organization in the state — larger than any newspaper or digital source and on a par with the city’s TV news operations.

But things have changed. Post-pandemic, people are commuting fewer days each week. They also have more choices, and may be listening to a podcast while driving rather than public radio. Of course, public radio has a lot of podcasts, but they’re operating in a more competitive environment than they are on the radio dial. In Washington, WAMU Radio recently announced deep cuts and the closure of its DCist website. NPR itself is downsizing its workforce by about 10%, citing a drop in ad revenues.

And now that difficult environment has come to Boston, with WBUR Radio (90.9 FM) telling listeners that it may impose a hiring freeze or even cut jobs if listeners don’t increase their giving in order to offset a decline in advertising. The station’s chief executive, Margaret Low, told Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe that income from on-air sponsorships has dropped by 40% over the past five years, even as its audience has continued to grow. (Here is a different version of that story from Boston.com, the Globe’s free sister site.)

“The business has never been harder, full stop,” Low told Ryan.

Low laid out the challenges facing WBUR in some detail in a letter sent to members, which is online at CommonWealth Beacon. She says in part, “At WBUR we’ve seen a dramatic loss of sponsorship support. In the digital age, almost all that money now goes to the big platforms — like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Spotify,” adding: “Sponsorship dollars won’t return to previous levels. These are not temporary ups and downs. They’re long-term shifts.”

Boston is in the unusual position of having two large news-oriented public radio stations. In 2009, WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) switched to an all-news format and has competed head to head with WBUR ever since. WBUR has a larger news operation and has generally led in the ratings, but both operations have carved out their own niche, with WBUR focusing more on news and GBH, as it is now known, taking a lighter, more talk-oriented approach.

I haven’t heard anything about possible cuts at GBH News, as the outlet’s local operation is known and that comprises radio, television (Channels 2 and 44) and digital. Last month, though, the Globe’s Mark Shanahan reported on workplace tumult at the organization, which included a three-month investigation into allegations of bullying and intimidation. So all is not well at either of the city’s public radio outlets.

Together, WBUR and GBH News function as the city’s No. 2 news outlet after the Globe. The local television stations do a good job and outlets like the Boston Herald, Universal Hub, CommonWealth Beacon and neighborhood papers make a contribution as well. But the WBUR-GBH combine is vitally important to the civic health of the city, providing a free alternative to the Globe. Their continued viability is something that ought to concern all of us.

(Disclosures: I was a paid contributor at GBH News from 1998 to 2023, and I’m currently a member of CommonWealth Beacon’s unpaid Editorial Advisory Board.)

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The Globe portrays GBH News as an operation beset by turmoil and toxicity

Early this morning, The Boston Globe published an in-depth story documenting turmoil at GBH News, the local operation at the public media giant that encompasses television, radio and digital. The article, by Mark Shanahan, largely focuses on what some (but not all) employees describe as a toxic workplace culture and hostility toward “old white men.”

The leaders who come under criticism in Shanahan’s reporting are general manager Pam Johnston and executive editor Lee Hill, both of whom apologized to the staff after an internal investigation found, as Shanahan writes, that “senior managers made inappropriate comments about employees’ race, age, and gender by referring to ‘old white men’ when discussing newsroom diversity.” (Johnston turned down Shanahan’s request for an interview, but Ellen Clegg and I hosted her on our “What Works” podcast back in March 2022.)

The two most outspoken voices in the story belong to Jim Braude, co-host of GBH Radio’s “Boston Public Radio,” and Callie Crossley, host of “Under the Radar with Callie Crossley” and cohost of “The Culture Show,” both of which are radio programs.

“People fear for their jobs,” Braude, who’s white, told the Globe, adding: “People testified about mistreatment. Much of it was confirmed. No one was held responsible. Now people have to report to the same person they testified against and pray their supervisor doesn’t know they did.”

Crossley, who’s Black, has a very different view. “Bias, bullying, and intimidation cannot be tolerated, that’s absolutely correct,” she’s quoted as saying. “But I want to be clear: That. Did. Not. Happen. Here.” She also offers some context, saying, “People assume there’s a higher level of civility at public media stations, but I want to correct that. People may assume that based on ‘Masterpiece Theater,’ but newsrooms in public radio are exactly the same as they are anyplace else.”

There’s much more to the story, including angst over falling ratings, some good news on the digital side, and quotes from GBH’s newish chief executive, Susan Goldberg, that everyone is “moving on.” If you care about GBH and public media in general, I urge you to read it.

Beyond that, I really can’t say much. If you’re reading this, you probably know that I was part of GBH News for many years, mainly as a panelist on “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney” throughout its entire run, from 1998 to 2021, but also as a weekly columnist for the website (a stint I ended in 2022) and an occasional guest on radio. I’m also friends with a number of current and former GBH folks.

Shanahan appears to have done an excellent job of bringing GBH’s internal problems into the open, where they belong (remember, this is public media), and I wish the station well in moving beyond this.

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GBH-TV takes on the Kevin Cullen controversy

Because of a schedule conflict, I had to turn down an invitation to discuss the Kevin Cullen story on GBH-TV’s “Talking Politics” Friday. But I would have agreed with guests Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute and journalist Susie Banikarim of the podcast “In Retrospect” that The Boston Globe made the right call in disclosing that Cullen had signed a document attesting to the mental fitness of Lynda Bluestein, whose quest to die via physician-assisted suicide he was reporting on. I also agree with them that the Globe was on solid ground in running the story anyway along with an editor’s note disclosing Cullen’s ethical breach.

Of note was their response to host Adam Reilly’s question about whether Cullen should have been disciplined. Both said that maybe he was, and that whatever sanction he might have received was handled privately.

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‘The Big Dig,’ from GBH News, is a triumph of long-form audio journalism

The yellow is the path of what would become the Tip O’Neill Tunnel through the city. The red and blue are the Ted Williams Tunnel to Logan Airport. Photo (cc) from the 1990s by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

Over the past few months, news organizations in Boston have unveiled massive projects that dig deeply into traumatic (for very different reasons) historical events — The Boston Globe’s series on the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart at the hands of her husband, Charles, whose claim that the killing was carried out by a Black man turned the city upside-down; and GBH News’ nine-part podcast on the Big Dig.

I approached both projects with some trepidation, wondering what more I could learn about such well-known events. Well, the Globe’s series and podcast were incredibly well done, and we did learn a few things we didn’t previously know; I did not see the Stuart documentary film made in conjunction with the series, but I understand it’s essentially a shortened version of the podcast. “The Big Dig” (that is, the podcast, not the tunnels) was outstanding as well. I just finished listening to it a couple of days ago.

Once I started “The Big Dig,” I got hooked because of the premise. We live at a time when it seems that we’re unable to build great public projects. They come in way over budget, they’re flawed and NIMBYs are able to keep them tied up for years. The way host and co-producer Ian Coss frames the podcast is that the Big Dig is among the earliest and most expensive examples of that phenomenon. As we all know, it cost far more than initial projections, it was years late, it was fatally flawed (literally) and opponents were able to tie it up in red tape.

It’s a dilemma that Ezra Klein of The New York Times has talked about a lot on his own podcast. Rather than liberalism that fetishizes process and empowers stakeholders (and non-stakeholders) in such a way that it makes it too easy to stop progress, he argues, we need a “liberalism that builds.” That will also be the topic of his next book, co-authored with Derek Thompson.

“The Big Dig” begins with an unusually righteous example of process liberalism — the fight to stop the Southwest Corridor, led by a bright young bureaucrat named Fred Salvucci and eventually embraced by Gov. Frank Sargent. Salvucci, whose voice holds together the podcast throughout all nine episodes (he’s now 83), rose to become secretary of transportation under Gov. Michael Dukakis and embraced the two projects that eventually became known as the Big Dig: the Ted Williams Tunnel connecting the city with Logan Airport and the Tip O’Neill Tunnel, which enabled Salvucci’s dream of removing the elevated Central Artery and knitting the city back together.

It makes no sense for me to summarize the podcast except to say that Coss does a masterful job of including a tremendous amount of detail and human-interest stories while keeping it moving. We learn all about Scheme Z, a phrase that I thought I’d never hear out loud again. The greedy parking lot owner who held up the airport tunnel. The soil that was softer than expected. The flaws in the slurry walls. That said, I do have three reservations.

At the end of episode 8, the Big Dig is portrayed as unsafe. Although Coss tells us that the improperly installed ceiling tiles that led to the death of a driver, Milena Delvalle, were fixed, you do not get the impression that the overall project was safe. Yet in episode 9, the epilogue, we learn that the Big Dig finally can be seen as a success story without any indication of how those safety problems — including significant leaks in the slurry walls — were overcome.
A personal pique, but audio clips of my friend and former GBH colleague Emily Rooney, who hosted “Greater Boston” and “Beat the Press” for many years, are heard over and over, especially in episodes 7 and 8 — yet she is never named. Even Howie Carr is identified after one brief snippet of sound. Emily was the face and voice of GBH News for many years, and she should have gotten a mention.
The series closes with the launch of the Green Line Extension, which is presented as a triumphant last piece of the puzzle. “It felt good to feel good about a big project that our city had accomplished,” Coss says. “To put the cynicism away for a day and just enjoy the ride.” Now, I’m sure the lead time for the podcast was long, but, uh.

Overall, though, “The Big Dig” is an extraordinarily well-done overview of a project that kept the city tied up in knots for years, and that has been a success despite the astronomical cost — more than $24 billion by some estimates, or triple the $7.7 billion that was budgeted once the work had started, which was itself far higher than the original $3 billion price tag.

I hope GBH got the bounce they were looking for, because I’d like to see more such podcasts in the future. And if you’re new to Boston, you learn a lot about our city from both the Globe’s reporting on the Stuart case and from “The Big Dig.” Along with J. Anthony Lukas’ book “Common Ground,” the story of Boston’s desegregation crisis, these two works of extended narrative journalism have entered the library of essential Boston reading and listening.

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GBH News creates Equity and Justice unit with $750k grant

GBH News, the local arm of the public broadcasting behemoth GBH, is launching an initiative to cover racial and socioeconomic equity issues with the support of a $750,000 grant from the Barr Foundation. The Boston Globe’s newly created Power, Money, Inequality project is also being funded through a $750,000 Barr grant. The GBH press release follows.

GBH News, the fastest-growing local newsroom in the region, today announced the creation of an ambitious new multiplatform unit that will focus on racial and socioeconomic equity issues in Greater Boston and beyond. The Equity and Justice unit will develop regional and national interest stories around these key topics, expanding its commitment to community events, engaging directly with the audience, and elevating community voices using the GBH News platform.

“Shining a light on inequity — whether around healthcare, housing, income, or other topics — is an important job for our news organization,” said Susan Goldberg, president and CEO of GBH. “As the nation’s largest producer of public media content, we want to ensure awareness of these pressing issues is woven into the stories we tell, the way we work, and the platforms on which we share news and information.”

GBH News has a demonstrated commitment to multi-platform coverage exposing inequities in the region, such as educational disparities, unequal access to public spaces, the dogged fight for affordable housing and equity among city contracts as well as the rise of white supremacist extremism.

Over the next three years, GBH News will produce a number of in-depth, multiplatform series, along with in-person community engagement events throughout Massachusetts. GBH News will deepen and expand its relationships with community-based media of color and with influencers in those communities to foster richer two-way communication.

“Over the past three years, GBH News has worked to become an audience-focused, multiplatform news organization that tells distinctive local stories, informed by the communities we serve,” said Pam Johnston, General Manager for GBH News. “We are creating an inclusive and culturally responsive newsroom committed to trust and collaboration, accessibility and impact. We want to cover both the problems and the solutions to better serve an increasingly diverse and curious population.”

GBH News Executive Editor Lee Hill will oversee the unit, staffed from current reporters, editors, and new hires. The content will be distributed across all GBH News properties, including GBH flagship radio and television shows, YouTube, social and digital platforms, and via partners at New England Public Media (NEPM) in western Massachusetts, the New England News Collaborative (NENC), and CAI, the Cape and Islands NPR station.

“To be successful, we have to change the very nature of how we approach local journalism. We must increase our capacity to report on the systemic barriers disproportionately blocking marginalized communities from thriving,” said Hill. “We’ll deepen our commitment to our audience, listening to them and investing the time and resources needed to better understand what matters most to them while amplifying their voices and life experiences. Ultimately, this will help us connect with an audience that has never fully seen themselves represented in public media.”

This focus on community has already yielded notable successes. A limited-run broadcast of Spanish-language show “Salud” increased listenership among Hispanic audiences on 89.7FM. A similar collaboration with local podcaster James Hills brought his program “Java with Jimmy” to GBH’s Boston Public Library studio space.

The unit is being supported with a $750,000 grant from the Barr Foundation. The grant will help GBH News continue transforming its coverage and newsroom systems to ensure every story includes an awareness of minority experiences.

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GBH News will launch a daily arts and culture program on radio and YouTube

A lot of observers were surprised earlier this year when GBH News canceled its weekly arts and culture television show, “Open Studio,” hosted by Jared Bowen. Even more surprising was a statement from GBH president and CEO Susan Goldberg: “We’ve had the privilege of showcasing the depth and breadth of Boston’s incredible arts and culture scene through Jared’s eyes. We will be building on that strength as well as on GBH’s long legacy as a leader in culture content. GBH continues to be deeply committed to covering the local scene.”

It turns out that Goldberg knew whereof she spoke. Because GBH News is getting ready to launch a daily one-hour radio program devoted to arts and culture, also hosted by Bowen, that will have a video component as well. The program will have rotating co-hosts, including my former “Beat the Press” co-panelist Callie Crossley. Here’s the full press release:

In a major expansion of GBH’s local arts and culture programming, GBH News is launching The Culture Show, a one-hour daily local radio program on 89.7 offering listeners a wide-ranging look at society through art, culture and entertainment. Beginning November 3, The Culture Show will air on Fridays from 2–3 p.m., following Boston Public Radio with Jim Braude and Margery Eagan.

On December 4, The Culture Show will expand to a daily broadcast, Monday through Friday, at the same time slot, adding five hours per week of local arts and culture content to the Greater Boston media market. The show will also air on CAI, the Cape, Coast and Islands NPR station, starting on December 4. Beginning in the new year, the show will also stream on the GBH News YouTube channel, and video clips will be integrated into the daily GBH News program Greater Boston.

“The Culture Show builds on GBH’s deep legacy in the arts and culture space. We are proud of our seven-decade commitment to bringing local audiences vibrant and inspirational culture programming,” said Pam Johnston, general manager of news at GBH. “Culture is the lens through which our audiences experience the world. We’re proud to be expanding our arts and culture team, offering people daily engaging conversations about what we see, watch, taste, hear, feel and talk about.”

GBH Executive Arts Editor Jared Bowen will host The Culture Show. He will be joined by rotating co-hosts Callie Crossley, the host of Under the Radar with Callie Crossley; Edgar B. Herwick III, host of The Curiosity Desk; and James Bennett II, a GBH News arts and culture reporter and CRB Classical 99.5 contributor and a panel of cultural correspondents.

“The arts are vital to articulating and understanding our place in the world. The Culture Show offers an unprecedented opportunity to put the local arts scene front and center for listeners,” said Jared Bowen. “I can’t wait to join Callie, Edgar, James, and our listeners and guests in a shared exploration of our region’s extraordinarily vibrant cultural landscape.”

The Culture Show will drive conversations about how listeners experience culture across music, movies, fashion, TV, art, books, theater, dance, food and more, and help audiences make the most of their leisure time by guiding listeners to the best cultural experiences within a day’s drive from Boston. The show will amplify local creatives, profile the homegrown arts and culture landscape, check in with touring productions and tap into conversations about topics in the national cultural spotlight. The show will introduce a newsletter to expand its offerings in the new year.

The Culture Show will be the first permanent new daily radio show launched by GBH News since the debut of Boston Public Radio in 2013. The Executive Producer of The Culture Show is Chelsea Merz, who has a decade of experience as the executive producer of the market’s most popular midday show, Boston Public Radio. Accomplished radio professional Brian Bell will be the show’s producer and engineer.

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Boehner is to Romney as McCarthy is to — Trump?

In 2015, replacing John Boehner with Mitt Romney seemed like a good, if unlikely, idea. Photo (cc) 2011 by Gage Skidmore.

With the Republican House lunatic caucus once again bringing down a speaker with no clear alternative, I want to recycle this GBH News column I wrote back in 2015, when the crazies pushed out John Boehner. This time around, with extreme right-wingers Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan facing off, the worst of the worst are suggesting Donald Trump as an alternative. Eight years ago, with a nudge from my friend Catherine Tumber, I put forth a kinder, gentler alternative: Mitt Romney.

This column originally appeared on Oct. 16, 2015.

House Republicans appear to have reached their End of Days. David Brooks of The New York Times, a moderate conservative who at one time would have epitomized Establishment Republicanism, has analyzed the situation brilliantly. So has Gene Lyons, a liberal, at The National Memo.

The immediate crisis is that the House of Representatives appears incapable of electing a speaker to succeed John Boehner. The problem is that Republicans on the extreme right vow not to respect the choice of the Republican caucus. That means no one will get a majority once the speakership comes to a full vote in the House, since nearly all of the Democrats will vote for their party’s leader, Nancy Pelosi.

So I have an idea, and I thought I’d toss it out there. We’re already having a good discussion about it on Facebook. How about a moderate Republican who’s not currently a member of the House (yes, it’s allowed) and who would be supported by a majority of Republicans and Democrats. How about — as my friend Catherine Tumber suggested — Mitt Romney?

Please understand that by “moderate” I mean moderate by the standards of 2015. Boehner may be the most conservative House speaker of modern times, but he’s a moderate by comparison with the right-wingers who are holding the House hostage. And so is Romney, who’d finally get the big job in Washington that he’s long lusted for.

Under this scenario, the Republicans would necessarily pay a high price for their inability to govern. House rules would have to be changed to give the Democrats more of a voice and maybe even a few committee chairmanships. The idea is to form a coalition government that cuts out the extreme right wing.

The chief impediment would be that Democrats might not want to throw the Republicans a life preserver under any circumstance, especially with the presidential campaign under way. But it would be the right thing to do, and I hope people of good will consider it. Or as Norman Ornstein, who predicted this mess, so elegantly puts it in an interview with Talking Points Memo: “We’re talking about the fucking country that is at stake here.”

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The nonprofit Worcester Guardian says it will be independent from the local Chamber

Worcester City Hall. Photo (cc) 2015 by Dan Kennedy.

The governance structure of The Worcester Guardian, a fledgling nonprofit begun by the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, is starting to become clearer. A message by consultant Dave Nordman, the former executive editor of the city’s daily, the Telegram & Gazette, says that the Guardian will have an independent board of directors in addition to a community advisory board. The Chamber has committed $50,000 to the launch, but Nordman says the intention is for the Guardian to be a fully independent news organization.

The aim, Nordman told me by email, is “total separation.” He said that Chamber president and CEO Tim Murray will probably have one of nine seats on the board but will not serve as the chair. “The board’s main responsibility,” Nordman said, “will be to rally the community.” The announcement of an editor, he added, is imminent.

The original announcement raised questions about how closely the Chamber would be tied to the Guardian. Nordman’s assurances makes it more likely that the Guardian will be accepted by the Institute for Nonprofit News, or INN, which would be a crucial step for credibility and fundraising. The Guardian’s inaugural governing documents also tracked too closely with the INN’s policies as well as the mission statement of The New Bedford Light, a large nonprofit, as reported by Bill Shaner of the newsletter Worcester Sucks and I Love It. Nordman, though, is a pro, and his involvement suggests that the Guardian will get off to a strong start. (Nordman is also a colleague of mine at Northeastern.) Nordman writes in his message at the Guardian’s website:

I believe free, nonprofit, independent news could provide a dynamic new platform to tell the Central Massachusetts story and report on important issues impacting Worcester and the region.

I believe mistakes will be made and lessons will be learned along the way.

I believe nonprofit, for-profit and independent journalism can co-exist. I believe blogs and social media also provide a forum for healthy discourse.

And I believe Murray when he says he will allow the Guardian to tell the story of Worcester independent of the chamber.

The community will be watching.

The Worcester area is not exactly a news desert, although local residents have lamented deep cuts at the Telegram & Gazette under Gannett’s ownership. MassLive, part of The Republican of Springfield, publishes a fair amount of Worcester news. GBH News has a Worcester bureau. The 016.com aggregates news from the Worcester area as well. Still, a Worcester-based nonprofit, grounded in community values, would be a welcome addition to Central Massachusetts.

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How our weak public records law is enabling a cover-up of school sports harassment

Sports builds character, we are told over and over again. And yet Massachusetts has been hit with multiple cases of racist, homophobic harassment aimed at high school athletes.

🗽The New England Muzzles🗽

The leading journalist tracking those cases is Bob Hohler of The Boston Globe, who’s reported on horrifying cases in Danvers, Woburn, Duxbury and elsewhere. Yet his efforts to dig deeper have been improperly thwarted by the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association. According to Hohler, the MIAA has refused to turn over incident reports in response to a public records request even though the secretary of state’s office has ruled that those records are, indeed, public. Hohler writes:

Details of the alleged misconduct remain untold because the MIAA denied the Globe’s request for copies of the incident reports. The denial follows a ruling by the Secretary of State’s office in November that the MIAA, despite the organization’s objections, is a public entity subject to the state’s public records law.

MIAA executive director Bob Baldwin told Hohler that his organization has chosen to ignore the public’s right to know because officials don’t want to discourage schools from reporting incidents of harassment. Yet the lesson of past incidents is that reforms often don’t occur without exposure. For instance, it was only after Hohler reported that Danvers officials had failed to respond to a “toxic team culture” on the boys’ varsity hockey team that the attorney general’s office investigated and local leaders agreed to a series of reforms centered around policies and training. Hohler’s reporting was also followed by several departures, including the retirement of School Supt. Lisa Dana.

More than anything, Hohler’s report on the MIAA this week underscores the inadequacies of the Massachusetts public records law. There are few consequences for officials who refuse to comply with the law, even when they ignore a direct ruling to turn over public documents, as the MIAA is reportedly doing with Hohler and the Globe.

According to Hohler, the MIAA “has received 50 reports involving discrimination, harassment, or bullying — nearly one a week on average while school has been in session — since the organization began requiring its 380 member schools to file discriminatory incident reports starting with the winter season in late 2021.” The public deserves to know more about those reports.

The future of the New England Muzzle Awards

This is the time of year when I would be putting the finishing touches on the New England Muzzle Awards, an annual Fourth of July feature that highlights outrages against freedom of speech in the six New England states. From 1998 through 2012, the Muzzles were published in The Boston Phoenix. After the Phoenix closed in 2013, they were hosted at GBH News.

The one constant over all those years had been my friend Peter Kadzis’ role as editor at both the Phoenix and GBH. Following Peter’s well-earned retirement, I’ve decided that last year’s 25th anniversary edition will be the last. I’ll still track the kinds of stories that I used to highlight in the Muzzles, and the MIAA story would have been a natural. But rather than an annual round-up, I’m going to write them up in real time for Media Nation. You’ll notice a weak attempt at a logo near the top of this post. I’ll try to come up with something better.

I also want to express my appreciation to GBH News for hosting the Muzzles during the final 10 years of their existence, and to civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, my friend and occasional collaborator, for coming up with the idea all those years ago.