Maura Healey – Media Nation

Mass. House bills would expand digital privacy rights but restrict social media for teenagers

The Massachusetts Legislature is poised to expand digital privacy rights following unanimous House passage of a bill whose provisions include banning the sale of precise location data.

Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.

The bill now goes to a conference committee to reconcile differences with a similar, stronger Senate bill that was passed last year. After that, the legislation would be sent to Gov. Maura Healey for her signature.

As Jennifer Smith reports in CommonWealth Beacon, location data can be used to track women who have traveled to Massachusetts from states where abortion is illegal. She writes:

The House completely bans the sale of precise geolocation data but would allow the sale of all other sensitive data if the user gives consent. The location shielding would cover those visiting Massachusetts as well as its residents.

“Protecting location data is paramount if the rights in Massachusetts to reproductive health care equity are to be upheld,” said Rep. Kate Lipper-Garabedian of Melrose. Data brokers have tracked interstate visits to Planned Parenthood locations in Massachusetts, she noted, and then provided that data to an anti-abortion campaign. Now, she said, the Trump administration is purchasing location data for immigration enforcement.

“One’s personal location data should never be monetized by a private for-profit company working in concert with the dystopian government to undermine our constitutional right to due process,” Lipper-Garabedian said.

According to the advocacy group Fight for the Future, the House version “would be one of the strongest data privacy bills in the United States” and includes a provision that would allow individuals to sue large technology companies for abuses of their personal data. Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, said in a statement:

Companies shouldn’t be able to track you everywhere you go and then sell that information on the open market. Today, Massachusetts took a major step toward cracking down on Big Tech’s surveillance abuses. In Trump’s America, we know that privacy protections are a matter of life and death for LGBTQ+ youth, undocumented folks, and other vulnerable communities. We’ll continue to push for the MA legislature to pass the strongest privacy legislation possible.

Smith reports that the House and Senate must also work out their conflicts with regard to another bill, this one banning cellphone use by students while in the classroom. The House version would also ban social media accounts for children who are 13 or younger and would require 14- and 15-year-olds to have a parent or guardian’s permission before signing up.

That provision, which the governor supports, has been widely criticized on the grounds that it could harm LGBTQ youth or teenagers in abusive homes. The Senate version contains no such restriction.

Mike Deehan, reporting for Axios Boston, writes that a coalition of some 90 civil-rights and privacy groups (including Fight for the Future) have come out against the restriction, adding: “Federal judges have blocked similar laws in Florida, Louisiana and Ohio on First Amendment grounds.”

Jon Keller and I talk about billionaire newspaper owners, news deserts and other media topics

Eight years after my book “The Return of the Moguls” was published, what is the state of newspaper ownership by civic-minded billionaires? Jon Keller of WBZ-TV (Channel 4) put that question to me on his “Keller at Large” program, which was broadcast Sunday morning.

My answer: not what I had hoped. John and Linda Henry have proved to be good stewards of The Boston Globe, and another billionaire sports owner, Glen Taylor, has similarly revived The Minnesota Star Tribune. But Jeff Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post has taken a disastrous turn after 10 good years, and other masters of the universe have failed to step up.

Jon and I talked about some other media-related topics as well, including:

◘ The rise of independent local-news projects, especially in affluent suburbs. News deserts, unfortunately, persist in rural areas and urban communities of color.

◘ A New England Muzzle Award I recently gave Gov. Maura Healey for proposing to prevent public access to birth, death and marriage records for many decades — overturning a tradition of openness that dates back Puritan times.

◘ A crisis at the Internet Archive, as more than 300 local newspapers have blocked access in order to prevent AI companies from scraping their content without compensation.

Gov. Healey wants to remove public access to vital records. So we’re giving her a Muzzle Award — her third.

*Gov. Maura Healey, left, with Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll. 2023 photo in the public domain.*

Six years ago, then-Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a moderate Republican, earned a New England Muzzle Award — then hosted by GBH News — for proposing a change in the public-records laws so that access to birth, death and marriage records would not be available to the public for many decades. The delay would have amounted to 90 years in the case of birth and marriage records and 50 years after a person’s death.

Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.

Fortunately, the bill didn’t pass. But now Baker’s successor, Gov. Maura Healey, a liberal Democrat, is back with a similar bill. As The Boston Globe put it in an editorial (sub. req.) on Thursday:

In a state that already has a dreadful reputation for its lack of transparency and will probably face a ballot question over the exemptions from the state’s public records law accorded the governor’s office and the Legislature, this is simply the wrong law at the wrong time.

The Globe observes that Healey, in her announcement touting the legislation, emphasizes one of its few positive aspects — the end of references to “out of wedlock” on birth and marriage certificates. The rest of it, though, would deprive researchers of information they need to do their work in areas such as public health and genealogy. And she has stacked the deck in favor of passage by making it part of a budget bill that must be approved and for which debate is limited.

As I wrote in 2020, these records have been freely available to anyone who asks for them since the early Puritan era. Investigative reporter Jenifer McKim of GBH News said on Twitter at the time: “As MA governor [Baker] works to make birth, death records secret, thinking of the stories I’ve written and produced with the help of these key, currently public, documents, including suicides at colleges and universities.”

And in a 2020 interview with the Chelsea Record, Ryan Woods, executive vice president of the New England and Genealogical Society, said, “Unequivocally it was a surprise to us. There had not been any public discussion about this until it appeared in the budget.”

This is not Gov. Healey’s first time around with the Muzzle Awards. In 2015, when she was the state attorney general, I singled her out for defending a 1946 state law that criminalized political lies aimed at influencing an election, as if that were even theoretically possible.

In 2018, also a time when she was AG, she won another Muzzle, this one for upholding rulings that public information should, in some cases, remain private. Then-Globe reporter Todd Wallack, now with The Washington Post, documented a number of Healey’s attempts to suppress public records. His most startling finding: Healey’s office had upheld a ruling by the Worcester district attorney that records pertaining to the 1951 murder of a state trooper should not be made public. Healey’s decision reversed a ruling by Secretary of State Bill Galvin’s office and denied a friend of the murder victim the opportunity to follow up some leads on his own. The friend had since died.

Massachusetts has one of the worst reputations in the country with regard to public records. All too often, Maura Healey has been part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

In Colorado, a Trumper is charged with assaulting a journalist of color; plus, media notes

“This is Trump’s America now.” Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.

This story has been slowly building since Dec. 18 and finally broke through over the weekend. A Colorado television journalist who’s a person of color was reportedly attacked by a taxi driver who attempted to choke him, demanded to know whether he was a U.S. citizen, and taunted him by shouting, “This is Trump’s America now.”

No doubt we can expect to see more of this as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House on Jan. 20. Trump has normalized attacks on the media, and we shouldn’t be surprised that some of his more unhinged supporters would escalate that hatred into actual physical assaults.

On this penultimate day of 2024, I hope you’ll consider becoming a supporter of Media Nation. For just $5 a week, you’ll receive a weekly newsletter with exclusive content, a roundup of the week’s posts, photography and music. Please click here.

I learned about the incident from Corey Hutchins, who writes Inside the News in Colorado, a weekly newsletter. He wrote about it on Dec. 27 and decided not to name either the alleged assailant or the journalist, though both had been previously identified by CBS Colorado. Hutchins explained:

I haven’t yet seen the victim say anything publicly beyond what he told police, though I’ve reached out, and you can imagine what kind of hate and harassment might come his way these days with his name widely known. As for the accused, I haven’t seen him reached for comment yet, either. A Mesa County Court official said on Thursday he is represented by a public defender; her voicemail stated she is out of the office until after the new year.

That was a smart ethical decision on Hutchins’ part, though it didn’t hold for very long. As he notes, the story was picked up by The Associated Press on Dec. 28 and has since been reported by a number of news outlets including CNN, Axios and The Guardian.

According to the AP account, the taxi driver, 39-year-old Patrick Thomas Egan, was arrested on Dec. 18 in Grand Junction after police say he followed reporter Ja’Ronn Alex for about 40 miles. Egan pulled up next to Alex at a stoplight and, according to police, said something like “Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now! I’m a Marine and I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”

Alex is a native of Detroit with a Pacific Islands background, according to news accounts.

Alex drove his news vehicle back to his station, KKCO/KJCT and, after he got out, was reportedly chased by Egan, who demanded to see his ID. Egan is accused of then tackling Alex, putting him in a headlock and attempting “to strangle him,” police said. Coworkers and others came to Alex’s rescue and said he was starting to lose his ability to breathe.

Egan has not yet been formally charged but is being held on $20,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday.

Hutchins also quotes from a recent study finding that 37% of white respondents thought it was acceptable for political leaders to target journalists and news outlets. As the authors of the study, Julie Posetti and Waqas Ejaz, wrote for The Conversation: “It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face…. Trump has effectively licensed attacks on American journalists through anti-press rhetoric and undermined respect for press freedom.”

Media notes

• Through a glass, darkly. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is slow-walking a pledge she made during her 2022 campaign to bring the governor’s office under the purview of the state’s public-records laws, according to Matt Stout of The Boston Globe. Healey says she still supports “transparency,” and would like to extend the law to the legislative and judicial branches as well — but she now says the governor needs to be able to invoke unspecified “exceptions.” The public-records law is one of the most restrictive in the country.

• Battle of the MAGAs. In case you missed it over the holidays, Heather Cox Richardson has a good overview of the battle that broke out online last week between Tech Bro MAGA and White Racist Twitter. The fight is between newly minted Trumpers like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who don’t want immigration restrictions to apply to highly educated tech workers, and classic haters like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon, who really, really want to prevent anyone who doesn’t look like from them entering the country. “Now, with Trump not even in office yet, the two factions of Trump’s MAGA base — which, indeed, have opposing interests — are at war,” Richardson writes.

• Coming attractions. Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry’s year-end message, published as a full-page ad in Sunday’s print edition and emailed to subscribers (you can read it here), lays out a number of goals for 2025. I found two especially worthy of note. The morning newsletter, Starting Point, will be expanded, which I hope means it will be come out every weekday instead of just on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Earlier would be better, too. By 7 a.m., most of us are off and running for the day.

Another smart goal: “Enhancing our high school sports coverage to further local engagement.” The region’s legacy newspapers are barely covering school sports these days, and many of the nonprofit startups don’t see it as part of their mission. More Globe sports coverage would fill a real need.

• Remembering Jimmy Carter. The late, great Jimmy Carter lived so long that several of the journalists who wrote his obituary years ago were no longer with us by the time their work was published. At The New York Times (gift link), Peter Baker shares a byline with Roy Reed, who died in 2017. The Washington Post’s obit (gift link) was written by Kevin Sullivan and Edward Walsh, the latter of whom died in 2014. Carter left office 43 years ago. For perspective, Franklin Roosevelt was in the midst of his second term 43 years before that.

Social media and its discontents; plus, Trump’s war against the press, and the Globe’s latest Steward stunner

Almost from the beginning of the social-media age, I’ve been too deeply immersed for my own good. So I appreciated this recent essay (gift link) in The New York Times Magazine by J Worthen, who tells us that Bluesky might look like the better, kinder place at the moment but that it’s probably destined to turn into a vortex of sociopathy like all the rest. Here’s the nut:

We have officially arrived in late-stage social media. The services and platforms that delighted us and reshaped our lives when they began appearing a few decades ago have now reached total saturation and maturation. Call it malaise. Call it Stockholm syndrome. Call it whatever. But each time a new platform debuts, promising something better — to help us connect better, share photos better, manage our lives better — many of us enthusiastically trek on over, only to be disappointed in the end.

As someone who used to get into fights on Usenet back in the 1990s (look it up), long before anyone had ever thought of using algorithms to drive content that engages and enrages, I agree that it’s hopeless. Bluesky might prove to be the exception. Among other things, you get to choose your own algorithm, or none at all. But it really doesn’t matter. The real problem is that, no, you can’t have meaningful conversations with strangers, and social media is inimical to the way we’ve evolved.

Become a supporter of Media Nation for just $5 a month.

The post-Musk social-media landscape has also been defined by the incredibly annoying practice of platform-shaming — a hopeless chase after the least-evil alternative, accompanied by bitter criticism of anyone who would dare keep using those platforms that are deemed insufficiently free of harmful entanglements.

Continue reading “Social media and its discontents; plus, Trump’s war against the press, and the Globe’s latest Steward stunner”

The media, the president and what we should have known about his age-related issues

George Stephanopoulos interviews President Biden in 2021. White House photo.

Right now we’re all waiting to see how President Biden does in his interview with George Stephanopoulos. Obviously Biden has to come off as coherent, and even then it’s not going to stop calls for him to step aside in the midst of donor panic and declining poll numbers. The New York Times and The Boston Globe are reporting that Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has been telling associates that Biden’s candidacy is “irretrievable.”

Given the terrible position in which we find ourselves, it’s worth asking whether the media should have covered Biden differently over the past few months. My Northeastern University colleague Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of the Times, thinks so, writing a commentary for Semafor that begins:

It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smoke screens and find out the truth. The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age. Shame on the White House press corps for not to have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.

Richard Tofel, a former top executive at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica, has been reminding us on social media that he’s been calling for greater scrutiny of Biden’s age since last October. Here’s part of what he said back then:

Is Biden speaking more slowly because he’s conscious that his lifelong stutter might now be taken for cognitive frailty, or because he has no choice? Is he walking more cautiously because he knows the political peril of falling, or because he can no longer go any faster? If you think you know the answers to those questions, what is your evidence? I know of very little, either way.

My own sense is that there was actually quite a bit of reporting on Biden’s age even before his disastrous June 27 debate with Donald Trump, but that it was discounted for a variety of reasons. When special counsel Robert Hur called Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” that got plenty of coverage. At the same time, though, Hur was arguably engaging in prosecutorial misconduct by adding his own commentary while not bringing charges against Biden — which, in turn, reminded people of then-FBI Director James Comey trashing Hillary Clinton in 2016 over the way she handled her emails even while concluding she had not committed a crime.

The Wall Street Journal published an in-depth story on Biden’s age-related issues in early June, but that was widely dismissed because of the Journal’s reliance on partisan Republican sources, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had previously told aides privately that he found the president to be sharp in White House meetings.

The Times itself has spent months obsessing over what voters think about Biden’s age, which in turn brought about accusations of both-sides-ism and false equivalence given that Trump is nearly as old and arguably more addled as well as an insurrectionist and a convicted criminal who’s been found liable for sexual assault.

Brian Stelter has written an excellent, deeply reported overview for Vox. Here’s the nut:

The national media wasn’t dodging the story: The biggest newspapers in the country published lengthy stories about Biden’s mental fitness. The public wasn’t in the dark about Biden’s age: Most voters (67 percent in a June Gallup poll) thought he was too old to be president even before the debate. But questions about Biden’s fitness for office were not emphasized as much as they should have been.

That’s the third option: The stories should have been tougher, the volume should have been louder.

Then, too, journalists are not unaware of what we’re facing. A second Trump term could amount to nothing less than the end of democracy in this country. Surely there was a sense that as long as Biden wasn’t too impaired, it wasn’t worth the risk of throwing the election into chaos and risking Trump’s return to office — this time as the head of the authoritarian right.

If Biden could somehow make it across the finish line this November, so this thinking went, it would be up to God and Vice President Kamala Harris after that. I definitely count myself among those observers who dismissed concerns about Biden’s age, partly because I thought they were overblown, partly because I feared the consequences of removing Biden from the top of the ticket.

Unfortunately, we’ve got chaos anyway.

Leave a comment | Read comments

The latest Green Line Extension problems are an outrage

Green Line trolley at the new Tufts/Medford station. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.

It’s hard to describe how outrageous it is that the brand-new, $2.3 billion Green Line Extension was built with miles of tracks that are too close together. Bruce Mohl writes at CommonWealth:

At a confusing press conference on Thursday that raised almost as many questions as answers, MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng said it appears the prefabricated plated rail ties for the Green Line extension were made to incorrect specifications and then installed. A plated rail tie consists of a wooden tie with steel plates on either end for holding the rail in place.

Gov. Maura Healey blamed her predecessor, Charlie Baker, which is a pretty safe call — the GLX was built on his watch, so surely someone in his administration was responsible. The Boston Globe reports that Eng also said his underlings didn’t inform him of the problem in a timely manner. Let the firings begin.

One thought that occurs to me is that Baker canceled a more expensive version of the GLX approved by his predecessor, Deval Patrick. It would not surprise me if Baker let an unqualified contractor sweet-talk his administration into doing the job on the cheap.

I don’t usually take the GLX because the Medford/Tufts terminus is too far from my house and is s-l-o-w. Instead, I generally take the commuter rail to North Station and then the Orange Line. But the GLX can be valuable as a backup, and of course a lot of people depend on it. This is literally unbelievable, except that it’s the MBTA.

Leave a comment | Read comments

The Mystic Valley Charter School, winner of a 2017 Muzzle, is back to its old tricks

Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.

The Mystic Valley Regional Charter School — recipient of one of the all-time most outrageous New England Muzzle Awards back in 2017 — is in trouble once again, this time for its insistence on conducting the public’s business behind closed doors. Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub reports that state Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office has asked a judge to order that the taxpayer-funded school produce public documents it has refused to hand over despite requests at the local level as well as repeated demands by Secretary of State Bill Galvin.

🗽The New England Muzzles🗽

School officials claim they do not have to comply because Mystic Valley, based in Malden, doesn’t meet the definition of a “public school,” even though state law specifically describes charter schools as such. In any case, they say they won’t produce the records until a judge orders them to do so, notwithstanding the fact that the state public records law empowers the secretary of state to enforce the law.

The records, sought by Malden News Network, a local journalism outlet; Commonwealth Transparency, an advocacy group; and Malden mayoral candidate Lissette Alvarado cover a wide range of issues, including payroll, contracts, conflicts of interest, accountings of school income, copies of emails, and documents regarding Boston Globe stories about the school.

Now, to get back to that 2017 Muzzle Award from GBH News. During the 2016-’17 school year, Mystic Valley administrators began enforcing a dress-code prohibition against hair extensions, worn most often by Black female students. After parents complained about the clearly racist policy, school officials doubled down, leading to reporting by The Boston Globe and other news organizations. Yet the school refused to back down until then-Attorney General Maura Healey intervened.

That stiff-necked refusal to acknowledge its own wrongdoing obviously hasn’t changed over the years. When a judge finally orders the school to produce public documents, it will be interesting to see whether Mystic Valley complies — or if, instead, its administrators decide the judge somehow improperly claimed jurisdiction, or was wearing the wrong-colored robe or something.

If you want to read the full complaint, Adam’s posted it at the link above. The Boston Globe reports on Campbell’s lawsuit here. And Malden News Network has posted an item on its Facebook page.

Healey’s ambivalent stand on public records recalls her Muzzle Award-winning past

Gov. Maura Healey. Photo (cc) 2013 by ZGreenblatt.

Andrew Quemere, a journalist who doggedly follows open-government issues in Massachusetts at his newsletter, The Mass Dump, reports that newly minted Gov. Maura Healey may prove to be not quite the champion of Beacon Hill transparency that she claimed she would be.

No one should be too surprised — she is, after all, a two-time winner of the New England Muzzle Awards, a feature I wrote for 25 years for GBH News and, before that, The Boston Phoenix that tracked outrages against free speech. I’ll get to that. But first, the latest. Quemere’s item begins:

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey’s administration said Monday that it will not release records from past administrations. The decision means that a vast amount of vital information about state government — including former Governor Charlie Baker’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the repeated safety problems at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, and the sprawling overtime-fraud scandal at the State Police — will remain secret.

Some background: Baker and previous governors declared that the state’s public records law did not cover either them or their immediate staff. Indeed, the notoriously weak law also doesn’t cover the legislative branch (see this 2020 report by Northeastern journalism students) or the judiciary, meaning that the only governmental groups that have to comply are cities, towns, the state’s executive agencies and quasi-independent authorities. (And county government, to the extent that we have county government, which we pretty much don’t.)

Healey told GBH News in December that she would end the exemption for her office — but then reversed herself, explaining, essentially, that she would take it on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, the Healey administration refused to provide Quemere with records pertaining to police and law enforcement dating back to Baker’s time in office, saying that the new, more open policy she has adopted is not retroactive.

So: Healey’s new policy of openness does not cover previous administrations; and we’re not clear what the new policy really means.

As for the Muzzle Awards, the most pertinent is from 2018, when she was singled out for upholding rulings that public information should, in some cases, remain private. Healey’s secretive approach to the people’s business when she was the state attorney general was revealed by then-Boston Globe reporter Todd Wallack, now with WBUR Radio. As I wrote at the time:

Wallack’s most startling finding: Healey’s office had upheld a ruling by the Worcester district attorney that records pertaining to the 1951 murder of a state trooper should not be made public. Healey’s decision reversed a ruling by Secretary of State Bill Galvin’s office and denied a friend of the murder victim the opportunity to follow up some leads on his own. The friend has since died.

Wallack documented numerous other examples of Healey’s penchant for siding with the secret-keepers, including her decision to appeal an order that the state police provide the Globe with dates of birth for state troopers. That would have made it possible for the paper to examine the driving records of officers who had been involved in motor-vehicle accidents. Robert Ambrogi, a First Amendment lawyer and the director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, told Wallack: “I would expect more based on the promises she has made about open government.”

Her previous Muzzle was less germaine: I criticized her in 2015 for filing a formal defense of “a 1946 state law criminalizing political lies aimed at influencing an election.” Go ahead. You tell me what what’s a lie, what’s a mistake and what’s political hyperbole. I wrote:

As the libertarian Cato Institute was quoted as saying in an article by the State House News Service, it can be “incredibly difficult to assess the truth of a politician’s claims, especially in the chaos of an election campaign.” A number of advocacy groups and media organizations opposed Healey, including the ACLU of Massachusetts and the New England First Amendment Coalition.

We live in a time of intense political polarization, but there is an issue that unites Democrats and Republicans: the intense desire to conduct the public’s business out of public view. Let’s hope that Gov. Healey’s first steps aren’t a sign of things to come.