Tag: Joe Biden

Fighting back against official harassment; plus, Biden’s fitness, and more on that Everett libel case

An idyllic scene in Lancaster, Penn. Photo (cc) 2018 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Reliable and comprehensive local news can help ease the polarization that has infected our national discourse. But it’s not a guarantee — and when MAGA-drenched politics pervades community life, the result can be that the press is attacked in a manner that’s similar to the cries of “fake news” from Trump supporters.

Which is exactly what is happening right now in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In a lengthy article for The Washington Post, Erik Wemple tells the story of Tom Lisi, a reporter for the newspaper LNP who’s become the focus of relentless attacks (gift link) from the Republican chairman of the county commission.

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That chairman, Joshua Parsons, has his eye on a state senate seat, and he is evidently using his crusade against Lisi in order to build support for his campaign. Among other things, Parsons has accused Lisi of lying about harassment he’s been subjected to, making up stories “out of whole cloth,” and of having “skulked around waiting to ambush County staff.” As Wemple wryly observes: “‘Reporter’ is an appropriate term for someone who skulks around ‘waiting to ambush County staff.’” Wemple adds:

[T]he events in Lancaster County bear … on a question that has vexed leaders in journalism in recent decades: Just how should they respond to the frequent, strident and often flimsy attacks from Republican politicians? Should they stick to the industry’s default mode of turning the other cheek? Or should they speak up to challenge the gripes?

LNP and its associated website, Lancaster Online, are not part of a corporate chain or owned by a hedge fund. Rather, the media outlet was saved in 2023 by public radio station WITF and has a newsroom of 70 journalists — impressive for a medium-size daily. That transaction, though, has resulted in an enormously complex ownership structure involving three separate nonprofit boards along with all the potential conflicts of interest that entails.

As for Lisi, Wemple writes that he has started to push back publicly on Parson’s falsehoods and exaggerations about his reporting, and that on one occasion he left his tormenter momentarily speechless. The lesson, according to Wemple: “Confront the media bashers wherever they practice their profession.”

Biden’s fitness

The Wall Street Journal today published an investigative report (gift link) on attempts by President Biden’s inner circle to control access not just throughout the past four years but during the campaign that preceded it as well.

There are some harrowing details but also some problems with the reporting, including this, in which an anonymous aide quotes an anonymous official:

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.

Despite such hazy sourcing, the Journal’s story is a valuable addition to what we are learning about Biden’s age-related problems during the past half-dozen years. In retrospect, a Journal story (gift link) in early June of this year was the big breakthrough, although it was marred by its overreliance on Republican sources. A few weeks later, Biden met Donald Trump on the debate stage, and that was the beginning of the end of his re-election campaign.

A few points are now obvious: First, Biden’s inner circle covered up the president’s fading mental acuity for years — which makes you wonder why they went along with the June debate, which led directly to Kamala Harris’ candidacy and at least gave Democrats a fighting chance of holding on to the White House. Second, Biden should have pledged to serve just one term when he ran in 2020; at the very least, he should have declared victory and pulled out after Democrats did unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterms.

That we still don’t know exactly how impaired Biden was and is speaks to how difficult it is for reporters to pierce the veil. As the Journal’s story makes clear, members of Congress and even Cabinet secretaries were kept in the dark. This was not a failure of journalism so much as it was a failure of the president and the people around him to level with the public.

Everett update

Earlier this week, I noted that neither of Everett’s two remaining weekly newspapers had published anything about the demise of the Everett Leader Herald, which shut down and agree to pay Mayor Carlo DeMaria $1.1 million in order to settle a libel suit. Publisher and editor Joshua Resnek had previously admitted he fabricated stories and quotes aimed at making DeMaria appear to be corrupt.

Well, now both papers, which are owned by small independent chains, have been heard from. The Everett Advocate has an especially tough headline, “A Victory Over Journalistic Dishonesty,” with reporter Mark E. Vogler detailing the Advocate’s own role in exposing the Leader Herald’s fictions about DeMaria.

One aspect of the settlement that I was wondering about is clarified in Vogler’s story. He quotes a lawyer for DeMaria, Jeffrey Robbins, as saying that the demise of the Leader Herald was in fact a stipulation of the settlement rather than simply a side effect of suddenly having to come up with $1.1 million. “All a jury would have decided to do in this case would be to decide whether to award damages and how much in damages,” Robbins told Vogler. “But a jury could not have ordered a newspaper to close down. That was one of the things that made the settlement unusual.”

The Everett Independent has a shorter article, written by reporter Cary Shuman, headlined simply “DeMaria Vindicated.”

Finally, the Leader Herald’s former website now consists of a WordPress page that says, “You need to be logged in as a user who has permission to view this site.”

A proposed federal shield law dies; plus, The Onion v. Alex Jones, and Krugman’s awkward farewell

Sen. Tom Cotton. Photo (cc) 2016 by Michael Vadon.

The PRESS Act, which would protect reporters from being forced to identify their anonymous sources or turn over confidential documents, appears to be dead despite passing the House on a unanimous vote earlier this year.

Clare Foran and Brian Stelter report for CNN that the bill died Tuesday after Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas objected to an attempt to pass it by unanimous consent. Cotton said that passage would turn senators “into the active accomplice of deep-state leakers, traitors and criminals, along with the America-hating and fame-hungry journalists who help them out.” President-elect Donald Trump has demanded that Republicans defeat the measure, so that would appear to be the end of the road.

Meanwhile, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a staunch supporter of the bill, noted that the U.S. Justice Department’s Inspector General’s office released a report Tuesday finding that journalists’ records had been sought during Trump’s first term in violation of internal guidelines. CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post were targeted along with members of Congress and congressional staffers.

In a statement, RCFP executive director Bruce Brown said:

The government seizure of reporters’ records hurts the public and raises serious First Amendment concerns. This investigation highlights the need for a reasonable, common-sense law to protect reporters and their sources. It’s time for Congress to pass the PRESS Act, which has overwhelming bipartisan support, to prevent government interference with the free flow of information to the public.

The PRESS Act, which stands for Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying, would add the federal government to the 49 states that already have some form of shield protection for journalism. The sole exception is Wyoming.

Trump is hardly alone in his contempt for the importance of journalistic anonymity in holding government accountable. Former President Barack Obama was so aggressive in demanding that reporters identify leakers that I once wrote a commentary for The Huffington Post headlined “Obama’s War on Journalism.”

Under President Biden, though, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued guidance prohibiting federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ records except in a few narrow cases involving terrorist investigations or emergencies — the same exceptions that are spelled out in the PRESS Act. Now it seems virtual certain that Trump will return to his previous repressive practices, with Tom Cotton cheering him on.

Media notes

• Peeling back The Onion. The internet exploded in celebration recently when The Onion won a bid to purchase Infowars from right-wing conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who was sued into bankruptcy by the families of children who were killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre of 2012. Jones had spread false stories that the shootings were somehow faked. Now, though, a bankruptcy judge has ruled the Infowars auction was improperly conducted in secret and may have resulted in less money for the families than an open process, David Ingram reports for NBC News.

• Krugman’s awkward farewell. Longtime New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, surely the only opinion journalist to have won a Nobel Prize, wrote a heartfelt farewell column (gift link) on Monday. But though all was sweetness and light publicly, independent media reporter Oliver Darcy writes that Krugman may have left earlier than he would have liked because he regarded opinion editor Katie Kingsbury as heavy-handed, demanding a “far more thorough edit” (including the vetting of pitches) of all Times columnists than had previously been the case.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Krugman does next. I thought his column had become somewhat repetitive in recent years, but I’d welcome longer pieces from him published less frequently. He remains one of our most vital public intellectuals.

Update: Well, that didn’t take long. Krugman started a Substack newsletter in 2021, let it wither, and has now revived it.

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.

Win or lose, Kamala Harris has been a magnificent candidate

Kamala Harris. Photo (cc) 2019 by Gage Skidmore.

No matter how this apocalyptic election turns out, I think it’s important for all of us to recognize that Kamala Harris has been a magnificent candidate who ran a great campaign. If Donald Trump somehow manages to pull out a victory, that won’t be on Harris; rather, it will be on voters who’ve decided they’d like to give authoritarianism a try, decency and the rule of law be damned.

I hope that by tonight, or at least within a day or two, we can call her Madam President-elect. If that doesn’t happen, I fear for the future of our country. But we’ll also know that Harris did everything she possibly could. We owe her a debt of gratitude.

And if you haven’t voted yet, get out there.

Of elephants, circuses and the Olivia Nuzzi-Robert F. Kennedy Jr. imbroglio

Joe Biden. Photo (cc) 2019 by Matt Johnson.

In the weeks after President Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 presidential debate, there were several crucial data points. His interviews with George Stephanopoulos and Lester Holt, which did little to restore confidence in his abilities to think and communicate clearly. A Wall Street Journal story on how his staff was stage-managing his decline. A New York Times op-ed by the actor George Clooney, a longtime Biden friend and supporter, urging the president to step aside.

So I don’t want to make too much of a story by Olivia Nuzzi, published in early July by New York magazine, which described Biden as increasingly out of it and obviously unfit to stay in the campaign. But I will tell you that it made an impression on me at the time, combining first-hand observation and quotes from people close to Biden. Yes, the quotes were anonymous, a fact that is now being added to the bill of particulars against Nuzzi. But haven’t we all gotten accustomed to that? Did anyone seriously expect Biden’s friends to step forward and attach their names to what they were saying — other than Clooney?

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Here’s an excerpt from Nuzzi’s story that describes — rather compellingly, I think — the rising fears among Biden’s friends and supporters:

When they discussed what they knew, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.

Now we know that Nuzzi’s entire article was corrupt. That is, it’s suffused with a kind of wrongdoing that’s separate from fabulism or plagiarism, two species of journalistic ethics violations that we’re all familiar with. Nuzzi’s piece might be entirely accurate as well as truthful in its judgments and conclusions. But we don’t know. We’ll never know.

You probably have heard that Nuzzi was involved in some sort of sex scandal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was, by turns, a Democratic and then an independent candidate for president before ending his ridiculous campaign and endorsing Trump. The details of the scandal aren’t important; they reportedly involve nude photos, maybe sexting. What matters is Nuzzi was writing that Biden was too infirm to stand for re-election while she was sexually involved with one of his rivals.

The story about Nuzzi and Kennedy was broken last Thursday by independent media reporter Oliver Darcy in his newsletter, Status. Darcy reported that Nuzzi had been placed on leave, and he published this statement from New York magazine:

Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.

Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.

No evidence of bias? I just pointed out massive evidence of bias. You can’t report on one candidate when you’re sexually involved with another. Or as the late New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal once memorably put it: “I don’t care if you fuck the elephants, but if you do, you can’t cover the circus.” Much of what Nuzzi wrote about Biden was obvious to anyone who had watched Biden fumbling and stumbling on TV. But did she lay it on a little thick to help Kennedy? Did she make Biden seem more infirm than he really was? Or was she truly able to separate the personal from the professional? Who knows?

The last Nuzzi story I encountered was just a couple of weeks ago. It was a long interview with Trump that struck me as interesting, offering some insights into Trump’s thinking following the first assassination attempt, but weirdly soft and sympathetic. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now we know that she was involved, or had been involved, with someone who was angling for a high position in a possible Trump administration. Again — no bias? Seriously? By the way, I listened to her Trump profile on The New York Times’ audio app, and I’m sure Times editors are thrilled to have learned that they provided Nuzzi with an additional platform she didn’t deserve.

Unlike some observers who’ve been piling on Nuzzi, I knew nothing about her until last week except that was young (31) and employed by a magazine that I thought had high standards. I remember with relish a story she wrote several years ago about traipsing through New York City with a clearly inebriated Rudy Giuliani. I knew she had a reputation for being extraordinarily talented.

One story of hers I have not read is her profile of Kennedy from last November, which is reportedly what led to whatever it was that came next.

On a personal level, what a mess. The oft-married Kennedy has been caught cheating (I guess?) on his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, while Nuzzi was until recently engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza, who lost a previous job at The New Yorker over some MeToo allegations.

But you can get caught up on all the tabloid details elsewhere. What matters is that Nuzzi, one of our highest-profile political writers, wrote two long profiles this year that were so enmeshed in her undisclosed (at the time) conflict of interest that we now have no way of knowing whether they were on the level — or were instead hopelessly compromised.

Kamala Harris may have turned in the best performance in the history of national TV debates

After Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, I was trying to think of a better performance than Harris’.

The proper superlative was hard to come by. Joe Biden humiliated Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice presidential debate but was no better than good enough against Trump in 2020. Barack Obama, for all his rhetorical gifts, was only a so-so debater. Ronald Reagan may have won the 1980 election when he turned to President Jimmy Carter and said, “There you go again,” but Reagan was hardly a master of thrust-and-parry. I have not gone back and watched the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, but historians have said that people who listened on the radio actually thought Richard Nixon won.

So yes, it’s possible that Harris’ overwhelmingly dominant performance was the best in the history of televised national debates. What was so impressive was that she did not do particularly well in the 2019 Democratic primary debates, though she smoked Mike Pence a year later. And before you say, well, Trump helped Harris by melting down, a lot of that had to do with her.

Trump’s not easy to debate — just ask Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. His firehose of lies makes it difficult to find a point of entry. Harris did it by getting under his skin early on and making him lose his cool. Her body language was superb. She made sure to mention that he’s been found liable for sexual assault and faces sentencing in an unrelated criminal case. In retrospect, it’s a good thing that Harris lost her bid to keep both mics on throughout, since forcing Trump to stay (relatively) quiet allowed her to build her case.

My former Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, a leading historian of presidential debates, put it this way on Twitter/X:

The worst possible version of Trump showed up for this debate tonight. Harris had him on the defensive from the opening handshake, and that’s where he stayed for the rest of the night. This is as clear-cut a win as I’ve seen in a presidential debate.

Here I’ll note that a few non-MAGA pundits were less than impressed with Harris. “For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed,” wrote New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. Boston Globe political analyst James Pindell actually gave Harris a “C” and Trump a “C-minus,” saying, “Within the context of this campaign, this was a missed opportunity for Harris. She didn’t truly stand out.” I honestly don’t know what to say except: Good Lord, what were they watching?

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The right is freaking out over the ABC News debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for having the temerity to call out a few of Trump’s more egregious lies. But though you can make the case that fact-checking should be on the candidates, the moderators shouldn’t sit there liked potted plants, either. It shouldn’t have been left solely to Harris to highlight Trump’s grotesque lies about non-existent abortion laws that allow just-born babies to be “executed” and fake memes claiming that undocumented immigrants are eating dogs and cats. Oliver Darcy put it this way in his media newsletter:

While it was not feasible for Muir and Davis to correct every lie that streamed from Trump’s mouth, the duo admirably worked to ensure that on issues of major importance, the debate was not reduced to a he-said, she-said. Instead, ABC News made certain that the debate was tethered to reality and that brazen mis-and-disinformation was not given a free haven to infect the public discourse.

The questions for the most part were very good, too, getting into real substance about Trump’s unfitness to lead — especially his racism and his role in the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021.

Then again, Trump continually turned questions that should have been helpful to him against himself, especially regarding the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that took place under President Biden’s watch. I mean, who is “Abdul,” anyway?

And to top it off, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris after the debate ended, signing off her Instagram post as “Childless Cat Lady.”

The Washington Post checked in with 25 uncommitted swing-state voters after the debate; 23 said Harris performed better and only two thought Trump did. There’s also this remarkable finding from CNN’s flash poll of registered voters who watched the debate:

Debate watchers said, 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia. Prior to the debate, the same voters were evenly split on which candidate would perform more strongly, with 50% saying Harris would do so and 50% that Trump would. And afterward, 96% of Harris supporters who tuned in said that their chosen candidate had done a better job, while a smaller 69% majority of Trump’s supporters credited him with having a better night.

Two and a half months ago, President Biden turned in what might have been the worst debate performance in history, raising questions about his age and stamina and ultimately forcing him out of the race — and overshadowing Trump’s own miserable lie-infested performance. Last night we saw exactly the opposite.

Will it matter? Probably not. The race remains unimaginably tight. But for 90 minutes, Kamala Harris made the best possible case for herself and Donald Trump made the worst. That has to count for something.

A predictably uneventful interview; plus, media links and observations for your weekend

Dana Bash interviews Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

Labor Day weekend is upon us, and we’re getting away for a few days. Before we do, though, here are a few links and observations.

• In Thursday night’s CNN interview, Dana Bash’s questions were predictable, Vice President Kamala Harris’ and Gov. Tim Walz’s answers were fine, and that was that. I don’t know why anyone thought two experienced politicians were going to have any trouble in such a setting. Here’s a theory I haven’t heard from anyone else: Donald Trump invariably runs off the rails, and President Biden has an increasingly difficult time expressing himself. We’d forgotten what these things normally look like.

• A New Hampshire man named Taylor Cockerline has been sentenced to 27 months in prison and three years of supervised probation for his role in harassing and intimidating New Hampshire Public Radio journalist Lauren Chooljian, her parents and her editor, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston. Co-defendants Eric Labarage and Michael Waselchuck have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing, while a fourth defendant, Keenan Saniatan (identified only as “Saniatan” in the news release), will reportedly plead guilty on Sept. 5. Earlier, more in-depth coverage of this bizarre case is here.

• In other New Hampshire media news, The News and Sentinel, a weekly paper in Colebrook, is shutting down after the Harrigan family, which owns the 154-year-old paper, was unable to find a buyer. The InDepthNH story on the closure contains a lot of fascinating details about the paper, especially a 1997 incident when a gunman killed four people, including the editor. The late publisher, John Harrigan, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the shooting. The News and Sentinel’s slogan, by the way, should be a model for other news outlets: “Independent but Not Neutral.”

• Barnes & Noble is opening 58 new stores in 2024, and media newsletter writer Bo Sacks says that’s good news for the ailing magazine business: “B&N has a terrific well curated newsstand for magazines. 54 [sic] new newsstands may not sound like much, but it will be a big national help in magazine sales.” By the way, Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio died earlier this week at 83.

• Veteran tech writer Mathew Ingram is leaving the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review, where he’s been working since 2017 after earlier stints at the late, lamented Gigaom and, before that, The Globe and Mail of Toronto. Ingram is a calm, sometimes contrarian voice at moments when everyone else’s hair is on fire, and he is well worth paying attention to. No word on what’s next, though he says he’ll continue to write for CJR from time to time. Best wishes to him.

A thoughtful, nuanced take on how the press is (and isn’t) performing in covering the campaign

Donald Trump and President Biden at the June 27 debate

In Nieman Reports, John Harwood offers a nuanced assessment of how the media are performing in covering the presidential campaign. If I may summarize, Harwood’s take is that the press has neither been as awful as Democratic partisans would have you believe nor as good as it ought to be in holding Donald Trump to account. He writes:

Elevating democracy raises the question: Should a reporter actively promote the candidate committed to preserving it? But elevating neutrality, and passively watching an authoritarian gain power, could unravel the press freedoms woven into the fabric of the U.S. since its founding. Different journalists, sometimes gingerly, walk different paths….

In fact, neither the [New York] Times nor other major outlets have ignored the threat to democracy. Trump’s vow to be a “dictator for a day,” the criminal prosecutions of his allies in the scheme to count “fake electors,” and his plan to seize greater personal control of the government bureaucracy have all drawn significant attention. In the case of Project 2025, the radical right-wing agenda prepared in part by some of his close advisors, news stories later amplified by Democrats produced a storm intense enough that Trump disavowed the blueprint.

Harwood devotes some attention to the media’s obsession with President Biden’s age, observing that Trump received nowhere near the same level of scrutiny despite being nearly as old as Biden and showing clear signs of mental decline.

Yet it has seemed clear to me from the start, especially since the June 27 debate, that the press — led by the Times — became obsessed with driving Biden out of the race because they were so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump presidency. And, sure enough, once Biden was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, the Democrats moved into a small but consistent lead in the polls.

Harwood, by the way, was one of several journalists who were let go by CNN during the brief reign of Chris Licht, allegedly for his staunch anti-Trumpism. Given Harwood’s measured, thoughtful tone in his Nieman piece, that says more about Licht than it does about Harwood.

Mark Zuckerberg bends the knee in a groveling letter over COVID and Hunter Biden’s laptop

Mark Zuckerberg.. Photo (cc) 2016 by Alessio Jacona

Mark Zuckerberg has regrets. In a letter to U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, the right-wing Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerman said he never should have allowed the Biden administration to pressure Meta into removing misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19, because we all would have been so much better off if we could more readily access conspiracy theories about the hazards of masking and the benefits of horse tranquilizer.

“I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again,” Zuckerberg wrote. The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Hughes (free link) reports on Zuckerberg’s letter.

Here’s some analysis from Adam Clark Estes in Vox:

It’s interesting that Zuckerberg decided to dive into the free speech snake pit this week. It’s also not surprising that Republicans, who have been on a book-banning spree at schools nationwide, are propping up old facts as if they were new revelations in their ongoing quest to blame Democrats for censorship. It’s election season, and questioning reality is part of the fun.

As we enter the final two months before the election, there are fewer guardrails for misinformation in place on major social media platforms, and writing a letter about the Biden administration and censorship, Zuckerberg seems to be throwing Republicans a political grenade, something that can fire up the base and use to get mad about Democrats. In reality, though, Zuckerberg is probably just trying to keep his company out of more hot water and to continue revamping his own public image.

Zuckerberg’s abject obsequiousness comes at an interesting time. Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter in the late 2022, Zuckerberg has tried to come across as the good guy, launching Threads to compete with Twitter and marketing it as the nice alternative to the dark forces of neo-Nazism and racism that Musk has indulged in and has promoted himself.

Now comes a reminder, as if one were needed, that it’s probably not a good idea to choose your social media platform on the basis of which billionaire owner is less evil. Is Musk worse? On balance, yes. But Zuckerberg is the sort of mogul who won’t spend one cent on improving trust and safety if it means fewer profits. And lest we forget, his track record includes passively allowing Facebook’s algorithms to promote atrocities in Myanmar against the Rohingya people, as documented by Amnesty International.

Zuckerberg’s letter also expressed regret for temporarily demoting a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the closing days of the 2020 presidential campaign, which has become a crusade on the Trumpist right. But though it’s become an article of faith that the laptop was later authenticated, that’s not entirely true. It took a year and a half of hard work for The Washington Post to authenticate some of the emails on the laptop’s hard drive, and most of them remain unverified. Moreover, none of the verified emails tied Hunter’s business dealings to his father, President Biden.

Finally, Zuckerberg promised not to help with local election infrastructure anymore because “some people believe this work benefited one party over the other,” even though Zuckerberg himself said the data he’s seen shows that’s not true. So score another win for what Hillary Clinton once accurately called the “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a claim that the Biden administration’s pressure campaign to convince social media companies that they should remove certain content was a violation of the First Amendment, which was surely a relief to every elected official who’s ever picked up the phone and yelled at a reporter.

But it looks like the right is having its way regardless given that what is by far the largest and most influential tech platform — the operator of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp — has now caved.

The nuances of Biden’s 8% statement show why he was right — and why PolitiFact was wrong

Earlier this week I wrote that PolitiFact got it wrong on a claim by President Biden that billionaires pay just 8% of their income on federal taxes. PolitiFact said Biden’s assertion was “false,” and I disagreed. I got some pushback from several readers. On second thought, I decided I was incorrect. But on third thought, I’ve concluded that I was right.

Here is what Biden said Monday night:

And folks, you know we have 1,000 billionaires in America. You know what their average tax rate is? 8.2%. If we just increase their taxes, as we proposed, to 25%, which isn’t even the highest tax rate, it would raise $500 billion new dollars over 10 years.

The issue is complicated. Biden was basing his claim on the fact that unrealized stock market gains are not taxed. It’s only after you sell that you’re subject to the capital gains tax, which is 20% if your income is higher than about $500,000 (the actual income levels vary depending on marital status and how long you held the stock).

Since you can’t spend money that isn’t in your possession, and since you do actually pay taxes once you sell, then it might seem that PolitiFact was right and Biden was wrong. But not so fast.

First, the wealthy, and billionaires in particular, have multiple ways of lowering or even avoiding taxes on capital gains. Whizy Kim, writing for Vox in March of this year, put it this way:

How much tax a wealthy person owes in a given year is a complex tapestry threaded with exemptions, deductions, credits, and obscure loopholes you’ve never heard of. The ideal is to owe zilch. If that sounds impossible to achieve, just look at the leaked tax returns of the wealthiest Americans that nonprofit news site ProPublica analyzed in 2021: Over several years, billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Bloomberg, among others, paid no federal income taxes at all.

Her story, headlined “The billionaire’s guide to doing taxes,” outlines a number of tax-avoidance schemes, and obviously those options are not available to middle-class Americans. As James Royal writes for Bankrate: “While it can be easy to overlook, the IRS has clearly laid out how you can qualify for a 0 percent capital gains tax rate, and it’s not that difficult for most Americans to achieve.”

Second, Biden has actually proposed taxing unrealized capital gains, and Kamala Harris has endorsed that idea as well. So when Biden talks about billionaires paying 8%, he has something very specific in mind, and something that he would change if he had the opportunity. PolitiFact argues that the very fact that this is a proposal rather than the current reality makes Biden’s assertion false, but I think it’s just the opposite. In effect, he’s saying: Billionaires are paying a tax rate of just 8% on their income. Vice President Harris and I want to change that.

The second sentence doesn’t negate the first, entirely true sentence. In reporting on Biden’s proposal for MarketWatch, Victor Reklaitis writes:

Treasury officials offered their rationale for the proposed change, saying the country’s current approach with unrealized capital gains “disproportionately benefits high-wealth taxpayers and provides many high-wealth taxpayers with a lower effective tax rate than many low- and middle-income taxpayers.” They also said the current approach “exacerbates income and wealth disparities” and “produces an incentive for taxpayers to inefficiently lock in portfolios of assets and hold them primarily for the purpose of avoiding capital gains tax on the appreciation, rather than reinvesting the capital in more economically productive investments.”

You can agree with the Biden-Harris tax proposal or disagree with it, but it doesn’t change the reality that billionaires are paying about 8% of their income on federal taxes. (A White House report cited by PolitiFact says that 8% — to be more precise, 8.2% — is an estimate, and that the actual rate could be somewhere between 6% and 12%. The report also says the data pertain to the 400 wealthiest families. Biden cited 1,000 individuals, so maybe that amounts to the same thing.)

For Biden, it was a talking point — he didn’t take the time to define what he meant by income, and we shouldn’t expect that in political speeches. But by any measure of truth and accuracy, he was right and PolitiFact was wrong.