Tag: JD Vance

It was a dark and metaphorically stormy night; plus, Northeastern students get the job done.

I got up early this morning after a restless night to see that our fears had become reality. There is no sugar-coating this. Democracy was on the ballot, and democracy lost. The rule of law is giving way to an era of authoritarianism.

No recriminations. As I wrote Tuesday, Kamala Harris proved to be a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. Do I have quibbles? Sure. I was surprised and disappointed that her running mate, Tim Walz, proved not to be an asset. After he performed poorly in his debate with JD Vance, he pretty much disappeared. But no one votes for running mates. I also thought Harris spent a bit too much time with Liz Cheney and not enough with actual Democrats.

But every candidate has to make choices; some work out, some don’t. It wouldn’t have mattered. Voters who ultimately went with Trump decided they want a racist, insurrectionist strongman who hates who they hate. I could go on, but not this morning.

By far the highlight of my Election Day was spending time with our Northeastern journalism students involved in producing a half-hour newscast as part of a national project organized by Student News Live. The students were either part of our fledgling Society of Professional Journalists student chapter, NUTV or both.

Also doing a great job were Northeastern students who covered Election Day for The Scope, our digital social justice publication, and for The Huntington News, our independent student newspaper. I expect their coverage will keep rolling in throughout today.

Northeastern students after Tuesday’s newscast at NUTV

A few other observations:

• It was a big night for poll aggregators like FiveThirtyEight and its founder, Nate Silver, who has moved on and now runs a similar project. For the past month, they’ve had the race in a dead heat with Trump given slightly better odds of winning most of the time. Also: That Iowa poll meant nothing.

• Too early to tell how big a factor the Electoral College played in this. In 2016 it carried Trump to victory even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million. Four years ago Joe Biden barely squeaked through despite a decisive victory in the popular vote. That doesn’t seem to be the case this time, but we just don’t know yet.

• Living in Massachusetts, or in any Deep Blue state, will give us some protection from what’s to come. But my heart goes out to people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, immigrants, the people of Ukraine and anyone else who is going to be hit with the full force of what’s to come.

God help us all.

Vance was styling and lying while Walz stumbled. But it all came apart for JD in the closing moments.

There was a key moment in last night’s vice presidential debate between Democratic candidate Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance, and I’ll get to it. But first I want to deal with the fact-checking, since that was the biggest issue going in.

Before the debate, word was that the CBS News moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, would not attempt to fact-check the candidates in real time, as David Muir and Linsey Davis did in last month’s encounter between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — much to Trump’s detriment. Instead, television viewers who watched the debate on CBS would see a QR code on the screen that would take them to a fact-checking site where some 20 journalists were beavering away. Continue reading “Vance was styling and lying while Walz stumbled. But it all came apart for JD in the closing moments.”

New York City to boost student journalists; plus, listening to voters, and a hacking update

Now here’s a great idea. In New York City, a public-private partnership is spending $3 million to boost journalism in the city’s high schools. The program, called Journalism for All, aims to quadruple the number of Black and Latino students who are studying journalism, according to Claire Fahy of The New York Times (gift link).

High school newspapers, whether in print or digital, have been on the wane in New York and across the country in recent years, although the Student Press Law Center told the Times that the extent of the decline has not been reliably tracked.

Among other things, Journalism for All will help launch student publications by providing them with $15,000 in seed money. In addition, four students from each of the schools that are being served will be able to take part in summer internships at local news organizations.

Fahy reports that California, Illinois and Texas are also providing assistance to high school journalism programs. As I wrote this summer for CommonWealth Beacon, efforts are being made to revive a special commission to study the local news crisis in Massachusetts after the first attempt disappeared down a black hole.

Nurturing high school journalism programs and publications in Massachusetts ought to be something that gets serious consideration.

Listening to Vermont voters

It’s back to the future in Vermont, where the state’s public media operation is covering the election campaign by listening to voters and focusing on the issues they say are important rather than dwelling on the horse race and polls.

Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that journalists for Vermont Public, comprising television, radio and digital, “have spent the year speaking to more than 600 residents at diners, gas stations, and concerts about state and local politics across all 14 Vermont counties.”

It’s an effort known as the Citizens Agenda, but it’s hardly a new idea. Originally known as public journalism or civic journalism, the notion of shaping political coverage around the concerns of actual people was briefly popular in the 1990s. Among other things, the Globe itself engaged in a public journalism effort in covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is advising Vermont Public on implementing the Citizens Agenda; Rosen was also a leader of the public journalism movement in the 1990s, even writing a book about it called “What Are Journalists For?”

It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea today.

Hacked emails, then and now

One of the odder developments in the 2024 campaign is that three news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico — have reportedly received hacked emails from the Donald Trump campaign but have chosen not to publish anything from them, as Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi reported (gift link) in August for the Post.

Obviously this is quite a departure from 2016, when the news media eagerly passed along emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Then as now, the leaks come from a foreign adversary — Russia eight years ago, Iran today. Then as now, the actual content of the emails may be of little interest.

I suppose we shouldn’t complain if news executives learned a lesson from 2016, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the media helped Trump on both occasions.

Then, last week, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared one of the hacked documents on his Substack newsletter — a Trump campaign dossier on all the embarrassing things that JD Vance had said about Trump over the years.

Klippenstein tried to share his newsletter item on Twitter and got blocked and banned. I posted a workaround and got locked out of my account until I deleted the offending post. Meta has been blocking anyone’s attempts to post a link as well, though they haven’t caught up with my Threads post yet.

In any event, you can download the dossier from Klippenstein’s newsletter. I haven’t read it, but I have paged through the table of contents, and it looks highly entertaining though not especially new. (“Vance Wrote That He ‘Loathed’ Trump’s ‘Obvious Personal Character Flaws,’” p. 76).

I assume Tim Walz is boning up ahead of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.

Amid political violence and threats of violence, the NH Libertarians target Harris

Then-Sen. Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.

No sooner had I uploaded a post about Donald Trump, JD Vance and whether their promotion of lies about pet-eating immigrants amounted to incitement than we were treated to an example of something closer to actual incitement.

On Sunday, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire posted on Twitter/X: “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” According to NBC 10 Boston, they took the post down a short time later — not because they had any second thoughts, mind you, but because “we don’t want to break the terms of this website we agreed to. It’s a shame that even on a ‘free speech’ website that libertarians cannot speak freely. Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority.”

The Boston Globe looked into it as well and reported:

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the state’s Libertarian Party said the organization “believes that the journalists at the Boston Globe are as evil as rapists or murderers.”

“A proper society would exclude Globe Journalists from residing within it entirely,” Jeremy Kauffman wrote in an email.

Good Lord. I was actually aware of all this Sunday morning but refrained from writing anything because I couldn’t be sure if the Libertarians’ Twitter account had been hacked. Now we know that they’re proud of their hateful, dangerous rhetoric. It will be interesting to see whether there are any legal repercussions given that the threat against Harris comes closer to the legal definition of incitement than anything Trump or Vance said. Then again, it may still fall short of the imminent-threat language contained in Brandenburg v. Ohio.

Also on Sunday, a would-be assassin was taken into custody at Trump’s Florida golf course just two months after he was shot at during a rally in Pennsylvania.

And, finally, the U.S. Justice Department has charged two alleged neo-Nazis of publishing an assassination “hit list” whose potential targets included former U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins.

We are living through a terrifying moment, and it’s not going to end on Election Day.

Trump and Vance are inciting threats and possible violence. Here’s why they’ll get away with it.

JD Vance: “Keep the cat memes flowing.” Photo (cc) 2023 by Gage Skidmore.

Over the past week, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have been inciting threats and possible violence against the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, by advancing false claims that Haitian immigrants are grabbing people’s pets off the street and eating them.

Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done to bring Trump and Vance to heel. As I’ve written before, there is virtually no enforceable law against incitement in the U.S., even though it’s one of just three categories of speech that may be censored, the others being serious breaches of national security and obscenity.

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Although lies about pet-eating had been moving through the nether reaches of the online right for a while, Trump super-charged those lies last Tuesday in his disastrous (for him) debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. Here, again, is what he said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

Trump wasn’t clear about who “they” are, but the false rumor pertains to undocumented Haitian immigrants. Never mind that the vast majority of Haitian immigrants who live in Springfield are there legally. Continue reading “Trump and Vance are inciting threats and possible violence. Here’s why they’ll get away with it.”