Jeff Bezos – Media Nation

Accessibility, context, empathy: My students’ ideas to enhance the SPJ’s Code of Ethics; plus, media notes

Reporters taking notes — Photo (2017) by Portable Antiquities Scheme

This has become a perennial. Every semester, I ask students in my journalism ethics class to come up with a fifth principle that could be added to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. The code identifies four broad principles: Seek Truth and Report It; Minimize Harm; Act Independently; and Be Accountable. Each of them is fleshed out in some detail.

On Wednesday evening, I asked my current class, a small seminar comprising graduate students and advanced undergrads, to think of a fifth principle in three teams of three students apiece. Here’s what they came up with. I’ve done some minor editing in the interests of parallel construction, but otherwise this is entirely their work.

Ensure accessibility for your audience

Use plain language whenever possible.
Use multiple formats and multimedia as resources permit.
Reporters and sources should reflect the diversity of the community.
Neighborhoods and areas within the coverage area should be covered equitably.
A news organization’s website and social media should be ADA accessible.*️⃣

Place news coverage in context

Provide the full picture of all aspects of a story.
Give credit where it is due, especially to other news organizations.
Acknowledge relevant communities, perspectives and historical background.
Provide needed follow-up for the audience.

Balance empathy and professionalism

Show respect for sources and subjects of coverage.
Create a relationship that enables your source to trust your intentions.
Clarify to your source the scope of the article and how they might be affected after publication.
If you maintain relationships with sources, limit that to professional contacts rather than personal friendships.

*️⃣ There are, in fact, resources for ensuring that a website is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. As for social media, users are often encouraged to add text to images so that people with visual impairments can understand what an image represents. Hashtags should use upper- and lower-case in instances where confusion might result — for instance, screen-readers might trip up on the hashtag #firstamendment, so use #FirstAmendment instead.

Media notes

• Post journos petition Bezos. Since Jeff Bezos has clearly lost interest in The Washington Post, you have to wonder if he might disentangle himself from a property that he has clumsily described as a “complexifier” for him. The latest, according to NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, is that some 400 Post journalists have signed a letter asking that Bezos meet with them. The letter says in part: “We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave.”

• Muzzle Award follow-up. An order to the police chief in Burlington, Vermont, that he route all communications through the mayor’s office came at the instigation of Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, reports Colin Flanders of Seven Days. I gave Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak a New England Muzzle Award for silencing Police Chief Jon Murad and, more seriously, for following up by scheduling a press availability but failing to invite all of the city’s news organizations. George was concerned about Murad’s public statements disparaging a notorious repeat offender, calling one statement “unnecessary and performative” and saying that he “really needs to knock it off.”

• Judge gets access to BoMag notes. Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone has received off-the-record notes from Boston magazine reporter Gretchen Voss’ July 2023 interview with murder suspect Karen Read, who will soon return to court following a mistrial last year, reports Travis Andersen in The Boston Globe. Judge Cannone will privately review the notes before ruling on whether to grant the prosecution’s request for access to Voss’ reporting materials. BoMag has fought that effort on freedom-of-the-press grounds; more background here.

Mark Zuckerberg’s capitulation to Trump is all about his relentless pursuit of profits

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo (cc) 2019 by Billionaires Success.

On Tuesday I spoke with Jon Keller of Boston’s WBZ-TV (Channel 4) about Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to eliminate independent fact-checking and tone down the moderation on Meta’s social-media various platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

Among other things, Zuckerberg said he’s going to let pretty much anything go on immigration and gender on the grounds that stamping out hate speech is “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He’s also copying the Community Notes feature from Elon Musk, who has turned over fact-checking to users at his Twitter/X platform.

For all the details, I recommend this Wall Street Journal article (gift link) and Zuckerberg’s own video announcement.

Jon and I were only able to hit a few points in our conversation, so I want to say a bit more. What Zuckerberg is doing amounts to unconditional surrender to Donald Trump. Four and five years ago, Facebook struggled to clamp down on dangerous misinformation about COVID and suspended Trump from the platform after he fomented the attempted insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Now Zuckerberg is giving in completely.

Essentially we have three billionaire tech moguls who are doing everything they can to enable Trump. Musk, of course, isn’t just enabling Trump; he’s moved in with him, and his bizarre pronouncements about everything from the alleged criminality of the British government to the size of newborns’ heads now carry with them the imprimatur of our authoritarian president-elect.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is systematically destroying The Washington Post, one of our four national newspapers, for no discernible reason other than to curry favor with Trump. And now Zuckerberg has signaled his willingness to surrender unconditionally.

The dispiriting reality is that Zuckerberg has placed profit above all other values for many years, no matter what the human cost. According to Amnesty International, Facebook was complicit in genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. His products have been linked to depression and suicide among teenagers. If Zuckerberg cared about any of this, he would have taken steps to make his platforms safer even at the expense of some of his profit margin. To be clear, Zuckerberg obviously doesn’t support genocide or suicide, and he has taken some steps — but those measures have been inadequate.

We should always keep in mind what the business model is for social media, whether it be Facebook, Threads, Twitter or TikTok. All of them employ opaque algorithms to show users more of the content that keeps them engaged so that they can sell them more stuff. And studies have demonstrated that what keeps users engaged is what makes them angry and upset. This is protected by Section 230, a federal law that holds internet publishers legally harmless for any content posted by third-party users.

As Twitter has continued its descent into the right-wing fever swamps, two platforms have emerged as alternatives — Threads and the much-smaller Bluesky. The latter has received several big bumps since the election, and is likely to get another one now that Zuckerberg has harmed the Threads brand. Bluesky doesn’t use a centralized algorithm — you’re free to use one designed by other users or none at all. (That’s also the case with Mastodon, but Bluesky has zoomed well ahead in the public consciousness.)

Unfortunately, Bluesky also lacks the capacity to engage in the kind of fact-checking and moderation that Meta once used. And with growth comes toxicity.

I’ve seen a number of folks on Threads saying on Tuesday that they’re leaving for Bluesky, just as many others said last year that they were leaving Twitter for Threads. It’s all futile. What we need is less social media and more real human connection. What Zuckerberg did Tuesday didn’t destroy something great. Rather, he made something that was already bad considerably worse.

The Washington Post suffers another self-inflicted blow as Ann Telnaes quits over a killed cartoon

The rough draft of the Ann Telnaes cartoon that was killed by her editor. Via Telnaes’ newsletter, Open Windows.

The latest self-inflicted blow to The Washington Post has been rocketing around the internet since Friday. Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose wickedly funny editorial cartoons have graced the Post’s opinion section since 2008, quit after opinion editor David Shipley killed a cartoon that made fun of billionaires for sucking up to Donald Trump — including Post owner Jeff Bezos. Telnaes writes in her newsletter, Open Windows:

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

She’s wrong about one thing: Her resignation has created an enormous stir. Right now it’s trending at The New York Times and is No. 7 on The Boston Globe‘s most-read list. It’s all over social media as well.

The rough draft of Telnaes’ cartoon (above) shows Bezos and fellow billionaires Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of Open AI and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong kneeling before a giant statue of Trump. Three are holding bags of money in supplication. I’m not sure what Soon-Shiong is doing, though he appears to be wielding a container of lipstick. Mickey Mouse somehow figures into it as well.

Shipley, who was hired in 2022, is trying to do damage control, saying in a statement reported by New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin that he was simply engaged in normal editing and believed that the Post was running too much commentary about Trump’s billionaire courtiers:

Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.

I’m going to take Shipley at his word. Opinion editors should assert themselves from time to time and insist on less repetition. But not in this particular instance. Given the fraught nature of Bezos’ recent Trump-friendly moves, including his decision to kill the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and to donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund (which is what Telnaes was mocking in her cartoon), Shipley should have left this one go. By killing Telnaes cartoon, he acted in a deeply irresponsible manner at the worst possible time. And he lost one of his brightest stars.

I’ve enjoyed Telnaes’ work for years. During the Trump presidency, she often drew animated cartoons that were published on the Post’s digital platforms. Under her skillful pen, Trump was a grotesque figure, covered with makeup with his long red tie often reaching the floor.

Sadly, we are at a moment when editorial cartooning in general is on the decline, and it’s not a given that Telnaes will be picked up by another paper. The Times, which has been scooping up disaffected Posties, famously does not run editorial cartoons. Shipley says he hopes Telnaes will reconsider, but that seems unlikely.

No doubt Telnaes won’t come cheap. But several papers distinguished themselves with tough anti-Trump opinionating during the 2024 campaign, including The Boston Globe and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and I hope one of them sees fit to open up their checkbook and bring her on. The Atlantic, which like the Times has been hiring former Post staffers, is a possible landing spot as well.

At 50 hours, the audio version of Chernow’s Grant biography is scarcely shorter than the Civil War

I gave quite a bit of thought to whether I wanted to spend 50 hours with the audio version of Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant before deciding to take the plunge. I knew I was unlikely to find the time to read all 1,074 pages, and I wanted to know more about Grant and his era.

So I started it in mid-October during a drive to Portland, Maine, and kept at it an hour at a time, mainly on walks. I finished on New Year’s Day, and I’m here to report that it took longer for Grant to die than it did Joan of Arc during her interminable burning at the stake in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a 1928 silent film that we saw a few years ago accompanied by music written and performed brilliantly by a group of Berklee students.

I had previously listened to Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which, at 36 hours, was a romp by comparison. I don’t regret the time I spent getting to know Grant; Chernow is an eloquent writer and a skilled researcher, and, as I had hoped, I came away much more knowledgeable about his life and times.

But the level of detail about every trivial occurrence, and the repetitiveness about topics such as Grant’s alcoholism, military genius and ineptitude when not on the battlefield gets to be enervating after a while. As Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times: “Chernow likes extreme research; if a Civil War luminary had hemorrhoids, you can read about them here.”

I find that I absorb information from an audiobook about as well as I do from print, but since I’m not taking notes, I can’t really go back and offer much in the way of detail. More than anything, though, what stood out was Grant’s dedication to Black equality. In Chernow’s telling, Grant and Abraham Lincoln were the foremost white advocates of civil rights until Lyndon Johnson. Grant eagerly made use of Black troops during the Civil War, pushed for an expansive approach to Reconstruction, and, as president, dispatched the military to the South to break the Ku Klux Klan.

Thus it’s more than a little disconcerting to come to the end of Grant’s presidency in 1877, when Northern support for Reconstruction was waning, and learn that he believed the Civil War — which claimed an estimated 750,000 lives — had all been for naught. It’s hard to disagree, as slavery in the South morphed into Jim Crow and lynchings, a reign of terror that extended into the 1960s and whose legacy has still not been entirely put behind us.

Media notes

• Unpacking New Orleans and Las Vegas. Around this time Thursday, authorities were reportedly investigating whether the terrorist in New Orleans had accomplices and if the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion might somehow be tied in. Then, too, Donald Trump was parroting a false report from Fox News that the New Orleans attacker had driven across the border from Mexico. Today, we know that none of it was true. As the “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” from the public radio program “On the Media” puts it: “In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong” and “There’s almost never a second shooter” — or, in this case, a second attacker.

• A challenge to the AP. Reuters and Gannett are planning to offer some sort of subscription-based service to regional and local news publishers, according to Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, marking the next step in a partnership that began last spring. This is potentially bad news for The Associated Press, which has been losing customers because of its high prices. But it’s not clear how the arrangement will work. Reuters is a high-quality source of national and international news. Gannett, which publishes USA Today and owns some 200 local news outlets, is notorious for slashing its newsrooms and cutting their reporting capacity.

• Why local news matters. The Los Angeles Times has lost some 20,000 subscribers since owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and began embracing various Trump-friendly ideas, according to media reporter Oliver Darcy. Not good — but far fewer than the 250,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions over owner Jeff Bezos’ similar moves. The LA Times was starting from a smaller base, but there’s an additional factor that may be at play.

Under Bezos’ ownership, the Post reinvented itself as a nationally focused digital publication — making it relatively easy to cancel, since there are plenty of other sources of national and international news, starting with the Post’s ancient rival, The New York Times. By contrast, the LA Times is primarily a regional publication, not unlike The Boston Globe. Canceling the LA Times would mean losing access to important local and regional stories that no one else has.

Uri Berliner’s disingenuous critique of NPR was the most-viewed Media Nation post of 2024

Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.

On this last day of 2024, I’m taking a look back before we plunge ahead into the new year. Media Nation’s 10 most viewed posts for the year range from my takedown of an intellectually dishonest critique of NPR, to CBS News’ reprimand of an on-air host for being too confrontational with a guest, to news that The Boston Globe is seeking to acquire Boston magazine. So let’s get right to it.

1. Fish in a barrel: Berliner’s case against NPR is based on false and out-of-context facts (April 11). Uri Berliner, a top editor at NPR, created a stir when he accused his employer of liberal bias in a long essay for The Free Press. The problem was that his examples didn’t hold up to scrutiny. To name just one: Berliner wrote that NPR failed to confess its sins after special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia, which isn’t even remotely what Mueller reported. There was a lot more disingenuousness where that came from. Berliner ended up resigning his post at NPR and going to work for — yes, The Free Press.

2. Less news, more happy talk: Why CBS News’ reprimand of Tony Dokoupil is so ridiculous (Oct. 8). Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates popped up on the CBS morning newscast to promote latest book, “The Message,” and faced an unexpectedly tough grilling over his anti-Israeli views from co-host Tony Dokoupil. Among other things, Dokoupil told Coates that his book woudn’t be out of place “in the backpack of an extremist.” Coates gave as good as he got, and he probably sold a few more books than he otherwise would have. Nevertheless, CBS News management called Dokoupil on the carpet — probably because his attempt to commit journalism contradicted the light banter that defines the morning-news format.

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3. A riveting Boston Globe story about a medical disaster with ties to the local news crisis (Jan. 29). A Globe report about the death of a new mother at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital had something in common with the same forces that have hollowed out much of the local-news business. The mother’s death may have been caused by the hospital’s lacking a basic piece of equipment that had been repossessed because its corporate owner, Steward Health Care, wasn’t paying its bills. Steward, in turn, had been pillaged by a private-equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which is the same outfit that helped the notorious newsroom-gutting hedge fund Alden Global Capital acquire Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers in 2021.

Continue reading “Uri Berliner’s disingenuous critique of NPR was the most-viewed Media Nation post of 2024”

A tale of two libel suits: ABC News’ shocking abdication, and the end of the line in Everett, Mass.

George Stephanopoulos earlier this year. Official White House photo by Carlos Fyfe.

For this morning, a tale of two libel suits, one national, one local. The national case threatens to undermine protections for journalism that have been in place since 1964. The local case will result in the closure of a weekly newspaper that started publishing 139 years ago.

First, the national lawsuit. On Saturday, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump in order to settle a libel claim over repeated on-air assertions by anchor George Stephanopolous that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape” against the writer E. Jean Carroll. The money will be paid to Trump’s presidential library and foundation, Paula Reid and Katelyn Polantz report for CNN. ABC will also pay $1 million for Trump’s legal fees and issue an apology.

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The problem is that what Stephanopoulos said was substantially true. The CNN story put it this way: “In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll, sufficient to hold him liable for battery, though it did not find that Carroll proved he raped her.” And here’s the big “but”: In August 2023, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found that Trump had, in fact, raped Carroll under the everyday meaning of the word if not under the legal definition. Here’s what Lewis said at the time in the course of ruling on one of Carroll’s defamation proceedings against Trump:

Indeed, the jury’s verdict in Carroll II establishes, as against Mr. Trump, the fact that Mr. Trump “raped her,” albeit digitally rather than with his penis. Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms. Carroll’s “rape” accusations.

I’ll give you a moment to throw up. Now, then, let’s parse this, shall we? A jury found Trump liable for “sexual abuse,” which Judge Lewis ruled was tantamount to being found liable for rape. What Stephanopoulos said was inaccurate only under the most hypertechnical interpretation of what actually happened — and, as I said, Stephanopoulos’ assertions were substantially true, which is supposed to be the standard in libel law. But ABC and its parent company, Disney, decided to appease Trump rather than continue to fight.

And what’s with Stephanopoulos? At 63, he has made many millions of dollars. If he had resigned and continued to fight rather than go along with his corporate overlords, he could have been a hero. Who knows what opportunities would have opened up for him? Instead, he’s content to continue as a highly compensated apparatchik. It’s sad.

By settling with Trump, ABC is following in the path of other corporate titans, a number of whom have donated $1 million apiece to Trump’s inauguration festivities. The donors include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.

Under the 1964 Supreme Court ruling of Times v. Sullivan and subsequent refinements, public officials and public figures like Trump need to show that statements they find harmful are false, defamatory and made with actual malice — that is, with knowing falsehood or with reckless disregard for the truth — in order to win a libel suit.

What Stephanopoulos said arguably wasn’t even false, and surely it didn’t amount to actual malice. A deep-pockets defendant like Disney ought to stand up for the First Amendment lest its cowardly capitulation to Trump harm other media outlets without the wherewithal to fight back.

Coming at a time when two of the Supreme Court’s justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have publicly signaled that they would like to weaken Times v. Sullivan, ABC’s behavior is shockingly irresponsible.

Local paper to close

Now for the local case. On several occasions I’ve written about an explosive libel suit brought against the weekly Everett Leader Herald by that city’s mayor, Carlo DeMaria.

Unlike the matter of Trump and ABC, you will not find a clearer example of actual malice, as Leader Herald publisher and editor Joshua Resnek testified in a deposition that he’d made up facts and quotes in a campaign aimed at impugning DeMaria’s integrity. That news was broken in January 2023 by Boston magazine’s Gretchen Voss. Indeed, eight months later, Middlesex Superior Court Judge William Bloomer froze assets belonging to Resnek and one of the paper’s owners, Matthew Philbin, because he believed DeMaria was likely to win his case.

The denouement came Sunday when The Boston Globe reported that the suit would be settled for $1.1 million and that the Leader Herald would be shut down as part of the settlement. Globe reporter Maddie Khaw writes:

Resnek, who writes and edits most of the Leader Herald’s articles, has frequently used the nickname “Kickback Carlo” to refer to DeMaria, a moniker representing Resnek’s claims that DeMaria had received illegal payments in real estate deals.

Records show that Resnek has admitted to knowingly reporting falsehoods and fabricating quotes.

“Mr. Resnek wrote what he wrote because he believed Mr. DeMaria was bad for the City of Everett and he was motivated by the fanciful notion that he could bring about Mr. DeMaria’s defeat in the [2021] election for Mayor,” the defendants’ lawyers wrote in court documents.

In fact, DeMaria was re-elected in 2021.

DeMaria and his lawyers will hold a news conference later today. Meanwhile, there is nothing up at the Leader Herald’s website about the settlement, which features several stories that were posted as recently as this month.

Incredibly, Everett is also the home of two other weekly newspapers, the Everett Independent and the Everett Advocate, both of which are part of small, locally owned chains; neither of them has anything on the settlement, either.

At The Washington Post, silence is Gold; plus, a bad day for Rupe and Lachlan, and cuts at Stat News

In the latest sign that The Washington Post has lost its way, the paper’s acting executive editor killed a story reporting that managing editor Matea Gold had left to take a job at The New York Times.

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that Matt Murray intervened and ordered that a story on Gold’s departure be deep-sixed. Now, this is all very complicated. Murray, who was brought in earlier this year by the Post’s ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, replaced Sally Buzbee after she quit rather than move over to head a “third newsroom” initiative that Lewis has talked about but has not really explained. (Buzbee recently was named to a top editing job at Reuters.)

Murray, in turn, is supposed to run the third newsroom after the Post chooses a new, permanent executive editor — and Gold, a respected insider, was thought to be a candidate for that position. But now Murray himself, who’s proved to be popular inside the newsroom (at least until this week), may want to stay right where he is; independent media reporter Oliver Darcy wonders if Murray killed the story about Gold’s departure in order to curry favor with Lewis. Adding to the intrigue is that Lewis was also Murray’s boss when they both worked at The Wall Street Journal. Continue reading “At The Washington Post, silence is Gold; plus, a bad day for Rupe and Lachlan, and cuts at Stat News”

Billionaire bash: More bad omens from the owners of The Washington Post and the LA Times

The problem with good billionaire newspaper owners is that they can turn into bad billionaire newspaper owners, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. This morning I bring you two disturbing data points about owners who had already put us on notice that their days of responsible stewardship were receding into the past.

First up: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who has owned The Washington Post since 2013. Now, as I have written here on multiple occasions, Bezos was a sterling owner up until a couple of years ago, providing the legendary paper with money and independence as well as standing up to Donald Trump throughout the 2016 campaign and his first term as president. I wrote admiringly of his ownership in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” and no, I wouldn’t take any of it back.

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But Bezos lost his way sometime after Marty Baron retired as executive editor in 2021. Baron’s replacement, longtime Associated Press editor Sally Buzbee, was fine, but Bezos may have been intimidated by Baron into not indulging his worst instincts, and that ended with Baron’s departure.

Bezos’ next move was to hire British tabloid veteran Will Lewis as his publisher and to stick with him even after it was revealed that Lewis’ ethics were so compromised that his behavior has attracted the attention of Scotland Yard. Buzbee left rather than accept what looked like a demotion. The current executive editor, Matt Murray, has reportedly won the respect of the newsroom, but he’s supposed to be a temporary hire and is slated to move over to some sort of ill-defined “third newsroom” initiative. Continue reading “Billionaire bash: More bad omens from the owners of The Washington Post and the LA Times”

There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on news; plus, updates from Cambridge and CommonWealth

Ginia Bellafante’s friend has a very odd definition of what it means to tune out the news. In a recent New York Times article on liberals who have decided their mental health would be better if they stopped paying attention to the news (gift link) in the Age of Trump II, Bellafante writes:

When I spoke with a friend in Brooklyn a day or two after Donald Trump won, he told me he had committed to reading only the print paper — and just in the morning, forgoing any possible all-consuming afternoon digression into whatever might be up with Tulsi Gabbard. When I checked with him earlier this week, he was still maintaining the ritual and it felt good, he said.

Someone who reads a newspaper every day, whether in print or in digital, is actually at the high end when it comes to news consumption. Compared to most people, he is extraordinarily well-informed. Although Bellafante doesn’t tell us what he cut out of his news diet, if he’s decided to forego cable news and politically oriented social media, he may be even better informed than he was when he was jacked in to the national conversation for many of his waking hours. As I like to say, friends don’t let friends watch cable news.

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When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 while losing the popular vote by a substantial margin, it set off a frenzy of news consumption and the rise of the #Resistance — hyper-well-informed liberals and progressives who devoted much of their time and emotional energy to opposing Trump through actions such as the 2017 Women’s March. News consumption soared. You can’t stay it didn’t matter; Trump did, after all, lose to Joe Biden in 2020. Continue reading “There’s nothing wrong with cutting back on news; plus, updates from Cambridge and CommonWealth”

Soon-Shiong tries (and fails) to bully Oliver Darcy; plus, Israel and the press, and prison for a harasser

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, in an interview with Oliver Darcy on Tuesday, comes across as an entitled bully who wields disingenuous hyperliteralism as a weapon. The billionaire medical-device entrepreneur answered Darcy’s entirely reasonable questions with absurd variations on the theme of How do you know that?

Example: Soon-Shiong has asked Trump-friendly CNN talking head Scott Jennings to serve on the new editorial board he’s assembling after killing an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election. In response to Darcy’s asking about the wisdom of naming a truth-averse Trump defender to the board, Soon-Shiong replied:

Scott Jennings — you just said his job is to defend Donald Trump. Did you find that in his job description with CNN? I don’t know if you know that as a fact. I love to work with facts. So when you make that statement, just reflect on that. You just made that statement. Did you make that statement based on having Scott Jennings’ employment agreement with CNN?

Then there was this:

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, believes it is an “opinion,” not a matter of fact, that Donald Trump lies at a higher rate than other politicians.

“A lot of politicians lie a lot,” Soon-Shiong declared to me on the phone Tuesday evening, pushing back against the assertion that Trump is an abnormality in American politics.

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning project PolitiFact put it earlier this year: “It’s not unusual for politicians of both parties to mislead, exaggerate or make stuff up. But American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy.”

Then again, Soon-Shiong’s assertions were not meant as genuine answers. They weren’t even meant to obfuscate. Rather, they were intended to establish dominance over Darcy, an independent media reporter. The pattern is clear: Darcy asks a legitimate question; Soon-Shiong responds in a way that’s intended to belittle Darcy; and then Darcy has to choose between pushing back or moving on.

Soon-Shiong has proved to be a mixed blessing for the LA Times since buying it in 2018. At various times he’s both expanded and cut the newsroom, although even the cuts haven’t been as devastating as a corporate chain owner might impose.

But his respected executive editor, Kevin Merida, quit earlier this year amid reports that Soon-Shiong was interfering in news coverage on behalf of a rich friend (or, if you will, a rich friend’s dog). Then he killed the editorial board’s Harris endorsement. That was within his rights as the owner — but he handled it so badly with his last-minute timing and conflicting statements about his reasoning that the decision was greeted with resignations and canceled subscriptions.

Of course, The Washington Post is also dealing with the consequences of a high-handed decision to cancel a Harris endorsement just before the election. But whereas it’s not clear where the Post under billionaire Jeff Bezos is headed, the fate of the LA Times seems depressingly obvious.

Bezos, at least, compiled a solid track record as the Post’s owner from the time he bought it in 2013 until maybe a couple of years ago, when he seemed to lose his way, his interest or both. Soon-Shiong has been erratic from the beginning, and it’s getting worse.

Netanyahu, Trump and the press

In a possible preview of coming attractions, Israel’s government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is cracking down on Haaretz, a liberal newspaper that has been highly critical of the way that Netanyahu has prosecuted the war against Hamas. As CNN reported earlier this week:

Israel’s cabinet unanimously voted to sanction the nation’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, on Sunday citing its critical coverage of the war following the October 7 Hamas attacks and comments by the outlet’s publisher calling for sanctions on senior government officials.

Haaretz, which is widely respected internationally, has provided critical coverage of Israel’s war following the Hamas attacks on October 7, including investigations into abuses allegedly committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as military operations expanded across Gaza and into neighboring Lebanon.

The sanctions include a ban on advertising in Haaretz and the cancellation of subscriptions for government employees and people who work for government-owned companies. Aluff Benn, Haaretz’s editor-in-chief, wrote a defiant piece for The Guardian that concludes:

[W]e will prevail over the recent Netanyahu assault, just as we prevailed over his predecessors’ anger and shunning. Haaretz will stand by its mission to report critically on the war and its dire consequences for all sides. The truth is sometimes hard to protect, but it should never be the casualty of war.

The sanctions represent a considerable ratcheting up of Netanyahu’s campaign against freedom of the press. Earlier this year, his government closed Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, which was bad enough. Punishing a domestic news organization takes that one step beyond.

Don’t think Donald Trump, a Netanyahu ally, isn’t watching.

Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 137 journalists have been killed since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, which began with Hamas’ horrific terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Another 74 have been imprisoned. The CPJ says:

The Israel-Gaza war has killed more journalists over the course of a year than in any other conflict CPJ has documented. Since the beginning of the war, CPJ has stood in solidarity with the affected journalists and their families. Palestinian journalists have continued reporting despite killings, injuries, and arbitrary detention at the hands of Israeli forces, none of whom have been held accountable.

Prison for harassment ‘ringleader’

The long-running saga of a frightening harassment campaign directed at New Hampshire Public Radio journalist Lauren Chooljian and others appears to nearing its end. The U.S. attorney’s office in Boston issued a press release Monday reporting that 46-year-old Eric Labarge, described as the “ringleader,” has been sentenced to 46 months in prison, fined and ordered to pay restitution.

The release quotes U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy:

Mr. Labarge was the ringleader of a targeted, terror campaign that caused the victims — journalists exercising the First Amendment rights and the families — incredible fear and emotional harm. Mr. Labarge’s terror campaign sent ripples of fear throughout the journalism community and violated the bedrock principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Although the release does not name Chooljian or the other victims, all the shocking details are otherwise included. Two other perpetrators were sentenced to prison earlier this year, and a fourth has pleaded guilty and is to be sentenced on Dec. 6.

You can learn more about the background of the case here.