My evening began at church with a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. From there, it was all downhill.
The early moments of Donald Trump’s endless address to Congress (is he still talking?) made me think about Joe Biden’s final State of the Union address last March. It was, perhaps, Biden’s last really good public moment. Seated behind him, Kamala Harris was thoroughly enjoying herself while Mike Johnson looked glum.
Now we are in the midst of chaos, all of it self-inflicted by Trump and his prime minister, Elon Musk. Authoritarianism, Three Stooges-style (who is the third Stooge?), is on the rise.
I don’t really have a coherent take on Tuesday night’s ugly proceedings, but here are a few thoughts. I’m curious to know what you thought, too.
Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
I was hoping that Jeff Bezos had gotten it out of his system. After his disastrous decision to cancel The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, which cost the paper some 250,000 subscriptions, and his subsequent sucking up to Donald Trump, the billionaire had been quiet recently.
The news section’s coverage of the calamitous Trump White House has been excellent, and the Post’sdeputy managing editor, Mike Semel, has said that subscriber conversions “are strong and growing at a near-record pace,” according to media reporter Oliver Darcy.
But it was too good to be true. New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin reports (gift link) that opinion editor David Shipley is quitting after Bezos issued an edict calling for the section to go full MAGA. No longer will the Post offer a heterodox opinion section of liberals, moderates and conservatives. Rather, it will be more like The Wall Street Journal’s ultraconservative opinion section, only (I’ll predict) not as smart. Mullin writes:
“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said, in an email to The Post’s employees on Wednesday. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”
In his note, Mr. Bezos said that he asked Mr. Shipley whether he wanted to stay at The Post, and Mr. Shipley declined.
“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Mr. Bezos wrote.
You can read the full text of Bezos’ message on Mullin’s Bluesky feed.
Shipley had to endure the embarrassment of the Harris non-endorsement and then took one for the team when he killed an Ann Telnaes cartoon mocking Bezos and other corporate titans as they groveled at Trump’s feet. Shipley’s reasoning at the time — that there had already been enough of such opinionating — was disingenuous, and Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize winner, quit. But Shipley is standing tall today.
I have to assume this will set off a mass exodus from the Post’s opinion section. Good thing that Jonathan Capehart survived the purge at MSNBC that claimed Joy Reid.
A few random observations:
• Bezos says, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Hmmm … personal liberties and free markets? If Bezos is serious, then that would mean the new Post opinion section will be deeply anti-Trump: opposed to tariffs and in favor of reproductive and LGBTQ rights. But of course that’s not what he means. He’s adopting the up-is-down rhetoric of the MAGA movement.
• Bezos explicitly rejects the idea of a heterodox opinion section, arguing that it’s not necessary because “the internet does that job.” For years, the Post’s opinion section has been center-right, with a few liberals and a few Trumpers. Now The New York Times stands alone of the three major national papers in offering something close to the full spectrum. It’s kind of the mirror image of what the Post had been up until now — that is, the Times has been center-left, with a few conservatives but no Trump supporters.
• Does Bezos want the Post’s news pages to continue as tough, fair, independent truth-seekers with no interference from the owner? That’s how it works at the Journal, whose news pages continue to kick butt despite the right-wing opinion section and despite Murdoch ownership. Bezos was a very good steward of the Post from the time he bought it in 2013 until about a year ago, when he hired Fleet Street veteran and former Murdoch executive Will Lewis as publisher and kept him on even as questions about Lewis’ ethics mounted. I’m hoping for the best from the Post’s news section, but I’m bracing for the worst.
FCC chair Brendan Carr. Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore.
Donald Trump is unleashing so much chaos in service to his authoritarian agenda that it is literally impossible to keep up. So today let’s just look at how Trump is threatening the broadcast news media.
Trump’s tool in this battle is Brendan Carr, whom he appointed to the Federal Communications Commission in 2017 and then recently elevated to the chairmanship. There are currently four members of the FCC — two Republicans, two Democrats and one vacancy, which Trump will presumably fill in the near future.
Not that the current tie matters. Carr helped author Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term that Trump said he knew nothing about during the campaign. Among other things, Carr wrote that the FCC chair has extra special powers that the other members of the commission lack. Thus Carr is large and in charge, at least until someone with power challenges him.
I want to share with you just three actions that Carr has taken during his brief time as chair, all of which represent a threat to the media’s ability to provide us with the news and information we need in a democratic society.
◘ First, he is helping Trump with his bogus $10 billion lawsuit against CBS. Trump is suing the network over an interview that “60 Minutes” conducted last fall with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, claiming that the program was edited to make Harris sound more coherent than she really was.
CBS responded that it edits all of its recorded interviews, and that there was nothing unusual about the way it handled its conversation with Harris. (And really? If you watched her debate Trump or listened to her long, unedited conversations with Howard Stern and Alexandra Cooper, you know she has no problem speaking extemporaneously.) Nevertheless, the network may be on the verge of settling the lawsuit, perhaps to ease the regulatory path for CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to merge with Skydance, as Alena Botros writes for Fortune.
Carr, for his part, placed the FCC’s heavy thumb on the scale by ordering CBS to turn over the raw footage and transcripts of the Harris interview, thus making use of a public agency’s regulatory authority to help Trump do his dirty work, as David Folkenflik reports for NPR. To be clear: Trump would likely have gotten those materials anyway in the course of pre-trial discovery. Carr’s actions serve the purpose of amplifying Trump’s fact-free claim that there was something corrupt about how the interview was edited.
“60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens has said he will not apologize as part of any settlement, according to Michael Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times. Which raises a question: Will he resign? And if he does, will others follow him out the door?
◘ Second, and speaking of NPR, Carr has announced that he’s investigating NPR and PBS to see whether the public broadcasters’ underwriting practices violate their noncommercial mandate.
According to Liam Reilly of CNN, Carr is “concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” adding: “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
Well, guess what? A lot of underwriting announcements on NPR and PBS do seem like commercials. They’re more restrained than what’s on commercial television and radio, and but when a cruise line pops up before or after the “PBS NewsHour,” or when a rug company’s sponsorship is heard on WBUR Radio, it’s because they want you to take a cruise or buy a rug.
Public broadcasters have to get their money from somebody, and it can’t all come from viewers (and listeners) like you. Very little in the way of tax revenues support PBS and NPR. The rest of it has to come from foundation grants and corporate underwriting. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the BNSF Railway notice that sometimes appears on the “NewsHour,” but that’s because I like trains.
What Carr’s doing is pure harassment.
◘ Third, Carr said last week that the FCC is investigating a San Francisco radio station for the offense of committing journalism. Garrett Leahy reports in The San Francisco Standard that KCBS revealed the location of agents from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) and identified their unmarked vehicles in a place “known for violent gang activity.”
“We have sent a letter of inquiry, a formal investigation into that matter, and they have just a matter of days left to respond to that inquiry and explain how this could possibly be consistent with their public-interest obligations,” said Carr, who made his remarks during an appearance on — where else? — Fox News.
According to Leahy, KCBS declined to comment. But Juan Carlos Lara of public radio station KQED interviewed David Loy, legal director of the California-based First Amendment Coalition, who said:
Law enforcement operations, immigration or otherwise, are matters of public interest. People generally have the right to report this on social media and in print and so on. So it’s very troubling because it’s possible the FCC is potentially being weaponized to crack down on reporting that the administration simply just doesn’t like.
No doubt there will be much more to say about Carr in the months ahead. For now, it’s enough to observe that he is off to a predictably ominous start.
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.
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.
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.”
One of the most important animating principles in the work that Ellen Clegg and I have done on the future of local news is that civic engagement isn’t really possible in its absence. People naturally seek out news, and if there’s no local source, they’re more likely to spend too much time gorging on partisan talk shows on Fox News and MSNBC.
We are not especially concerned about how that might affect national elections because democracy needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that folks who are relearning the arts of community and cooperation will vote differently from those sit at home watching TV (if they’re older) or spending way too much time on social media.
So I was intrigued that a new study from the Local News Initiative (LNI) at Northwestern’s Medill School showed Donald Trump ran up some of his biggest margins over Kamala Harris in news deserts. Medill defines a news desert as a county that lacks a professional news source. It turns out that even though Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the national popular vote by the slimmest of margins, just 1.5%, he beat her by 54% in the news-desert counties that he won. Harris won a few news-desert counties as well, but her margin was 18%. Moreover, Trump won 91% of the 193 news-desert counties that LNI tracked.
There is, needless to say, a chicken-and-egg problem here, and LNI’s Paul Farhi and John Volk acknowledge it. Did Trump run up such an overwhelming victory in those counties because its residents lack local news sources? Or are people who live in those counties paradigmatic Trump voters regardless of whether they have a local news outlet? Farhi and Volk write:
Trump’s dominance of news deserts doesn’t imply a cause and effect. That is, people didn’t necessarily vote for Trump because they lack local news. Instead, a simpler and more obvious correlation may be at work: News deserts are concentrated in counties that tend to be rural and have populations that are less educated and poorer than the national average — exactly the kind of places that went strongly for Trump in 2024 and in 2020.
As Steven Waldman, the president of Rebuild Local News, tells Farhi and Volk, “The wrong way to interpret this is ‘Oh, the rubes voted for Trump because they’re uninformed.’” Nevertheless, Waldman adds, the findings underscore the reality that Trump supporters are “some of the most common victims of the collapse of local news.”
The findings translate to Massachusetts as well. Despite beating Trump here 61% to 30%, Trump won a number of communities and performed better than he did against Joe Biden in 2020. If you take a look at the map, Harris was very strong in media-rich Eastern Massachusetts and weak in the southeast, central and southwest parts of the state.
Some of those Trump communities are well served by local news outlets, and here I want to give a shoutout to Nemasket Week, which was launched a few years ago and covers my hometown of Middleborough, where Trump won by 52% to 46%. Still, you see the same correlation that LNI found: big margins for Harris in affluent areas that are the home of quite a few independent local news projects; and smaller margins for Harris, or even Trump victories, in less affluent and more rural areas, which also tend to be less well covered.
To repeat what Waldman says, what we need isn’t to figure out how we can flip Trump voters to support Democrats. Rather, we need to foster a renewed sense of community life — and reliable sources of local news is an indispensable starting point.
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.
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”
Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos raised eyebrows, and hackles, when he logged on to Twitter/X on Wednesday and posted a congratulatory note to Donald Trump:
Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
The tweet immediately angered Trump critics, who were quick to point out that it came shortly after Bezos killed a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris that had been already written and was ready to go. Bezos claimed that decision was nothing more than a reflection of his belief that the paper should stop endorsing candidates, but the timing was suspicious, to say the least.
It didn’t help that Bezos failed to offer similar congratulations on Twitter to Joe Biden in 2020. One Twitter user, @WhiteHouseAMA, pulled up Bezos’ 2016 congrats to Trump and commented: “Jeff tweeted congratulations to Trump in 2016 and 2024. No tweet exists for Biden in 2020. He didn’t kill the WaPo endorsement of Harris because he wanted to be non-partisan, he did it because he is a partisan.”
But wait.
Writing in Newsweek, Alex Gonzales reported that Bezos did, in fact, congratulate Biden in 2020, except that he did it on Instagram rather than Twitter — and he did so rather fulsomely: “Unity, empathy, and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era. Congratulations President-elect @JoeBiden and Vice President-elect @KamalaHarris. By voting in record numbers, the American people proved again that our democracy is strong.” The message is accompanied by a black-and-white photo of Biden and Harris celebrating.
Newsweek added the Instagram update in a correction, showing how widely it was believed that Bezos had not congratulated Biden four years ago.
The immediate outrage among anti-Trump forces demonstrates the impossible dilemma that Washington Post journalists now face in proving to their audience that they remain independent. Though Bezos was within his rights to cancel the Harris endorsement, it was an unspeakably bad look for him to do so in the final days of the campaign, making it seem like he was truckling under in the event of a Trump victory — which now, of course, has come to pass.
It hasn’t helped that the cancellation followed months of controversy over the Post’s ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis. If Trump is the first convicted felon to be elected president, then surely Lewis is the first Post publisher to be under investigation by Scotland Yard. I continue to trust the independence of the Post’s newsroom, but I’m watching for any signs that I shouldn’t.
Meanwhile, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took to Threads on Wednesday to offer his own cheery greetings to Trump, writing, “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
Threads is just one of the many platforms Zuckerberg controls; the most prominent are Facebook and Instagram. Threads has also been by far the most successful of the would-be alternatives to Twitter that sprang up after Trump uber-influencer Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, acquired it and started taking a wrecking ball to it in late 2022.
Threads has proved to be especially popular with liberals fleeing the extreme right-wingers and white nationalists whom Musk enabled on Twitter. And yet Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive who runs Threads and Instagram, has gone out of his way to play down political news in Threads’ algorithm, leading to frustration and anger among a number of users. Messages have been removed for no reason, too, as Washington Post technology reporter Will Oremus has noted.
Even before Zuckerberg’s congratulatory post, some Threads users were leaving and setting up shop on Bluesky, the most prominent short-form platform after Twitter and Threads. Bluesky is owned by a public-benefit corporation and as such is not subject to the whims of a billionaire owner. It also has much better personalization tools than either Twitter or Threads.
Bluesky, though, has only a fraction of the users that its larger rivals have — about 12 million total versus more than 600 million active monthly users at Twitter and 175 million at Threads. Personally, I’m trying to give equal attention to Threads and Bluesky, but it’s hard to know whether Bluesky will ever break through.
After all, it’s a billionaires’ world, and we’re just living in it.
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.
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.
