Despite the Trump regime’s ongoing attempts to dismantle the First Amendment, there are important checks that remain in place. Libel protections against frivolous lawsuits remain strong — as long as news organizations use them rather than caving in to Donald Trump’s threats. Prior restraint is almost unheard of.
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One aspect of press freedom that has been left outside the walls of the First Amendment, though, is a recognition that journalists need to protect their anonymous sources and confidential documents. Forty-nine states, including Massachusetts, provide some protection. But the federal government does not. And one of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first actions after Trump returned to the White House was to weaken Justice Department guidelines put in place by her predecessor, Merrick Garland, to make it easier for the government to demand access to that information.
Portrait of Jeff Bezos (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
By honoring The Washington Post with its most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize Board appeared intent on sending a message to two people: Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos.
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On Monday, the Post received the Public Service Award for its reporting on the chaos unleashed by Elon Musk and his DOGE assault on the federal government. One of the lead reporters in that effort was Hannah Natanson, the target of an extraordinary raid by the FBI last January.
Bob Dylan and his band. Photo (cc) 2012 by Adrian Lasso.
Well, of course Bob Dylan deserves to be among The New York Times’ “30 Greatest Living American Songwriters.” He could stand all by himself. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few bones to pick.
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First, Dylan’s “five essential songs” includes “Isis,” which is a good but not great song. More to the point, he had a co-writer on that one — Jacques Levy, whom Dylan employed as a lyricist on his 1976 “Desire” album. Of the hundreds of truly essential songs that Dylan has written over the past 60 years, why would the Times choose one on which he had substantial help with the lyrics?
Second, Jody Rosen, who wrote the Dylan essay, points to the so-so “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” from the B-plus “Infidels” album (1983), as an example of his sense of humor:
It’s like I’m stuck inside a painting that’s hanging in the Louvre My throat starts to tickle and my nose itches, but I know that I can’t move
You want museums and humor? How about this, from “Visions of Johanna”?
Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues You can tell by the way she smiles See the primitive wallflower freeze When the jelly-faced women all sneeze Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeez, I can’t find my knees”
That’s from 1966’s “Blonde and Blonde,” a top-five Dylan album (or top three; or best ever), which isn’t even represented in the Times’ list of essentials. Nor is his acoustic period, which many admirers still regard as his greatest. Now, I’m mainly a fan of Dylan the rocker, but it’s hard to imagine how “Chimes of Freedom” didn’t make it in here. He could have won the Nobel Prize for that alone. Consider:
Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Finally a nitpick. I’m glad to see that Dylan’s astonishing late-career comeback is represented in the essential-songs list. “Nettie Moore,” from “Modern Times” (2006), is deeply moving, both weird and elegiac. But the Times could have chosen “Not Dark Yet,” from “Time Out of Mind,” the 1997 album that began Dylan’s revival, which continues 29 years later. “Not Dark Yet” is even more elegiac than “Nettie Moore,” if less weird, and Daniel Lanois’ production makes it one of Dylan’s greatest recordings.
At least they got Patti Smith to contribute her thoughts about “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” She recalls hearing Dylan perform it live, before he recorded it. She says in part:
What I remember most was the line “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to,” which made me very sad. But the line that made me feel understood, and that I have held onto my whole life, was “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” A person like me, who had many conflicting thoughts about everything, a lot that I kept to myself: I felt like he understood.
My caveat is that absolutely no one is going to be satisfied with anyone’s list of Dylan’s most esential songs. Mine changes all the time — and no doubt yours does, too.
A shaken Wolf Blitzer of CNN describes what it was like to be in close proximity to the gunman at the WHCA dinner. Click on the image to watch.
On the brand-new “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we examine the aftermath of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Click here or on the image to watch.
What pressures did the press experience in covering the story under frightening, confusing conditions? Why did conspiracy theories about the shooting spread so quickly? And does The New York Times’ print deadline have to be quite so early given that other papers — including The Washington Post and The Boston Globe — managed to get the story on page one?
We also take a look at the hypocrisy at the heart of a rumored affair involving Patriots coach Mike Vrabel and Athletic reporter (make that former reporter) Dianne Russini as well as an attempt by Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey to restrict teenagers’ access to social media. Plus our Rants & Raves.
Emily is joined by Contrarian Boston editor Scott Van Voorhis, Lylah Alphone of The Boston Globe and me, with expert production by Tonia Magras.
I hear from so many people that they can’t live without their print newspaper and morning coffee that I’m often tempted to remind them it’s technically possible to drink coffee while reading the news on your iPad.
The declining relevance of print is top of mind this morning as The New York Times failed to get the White House Correspondents Dinner shooting into its dead-tree edition. Lest you think this is a Boston delivery problem, it’s also not in the replica edition. Needless to say, it’s all over the Times homepage, and it probably found its way into the late city editions as well.
The (deservedly) much-maligned Washington Post managed to go big with the shooting in its print edition. You might say that’s a function of being the hometown paper, but it’s really not. It’s a function of press times.
The Boston Globe leads its print edition with the shooting, alongside the firing of Red Sox manager Alex Cora.
No excuses for the Los Angeles Times, which is three hours behind the East Coast, meaning that the incident took place around 5 p.m. Pacific time.
Of course, even those papers whose editors managed to yell “Stop the presses!” and get the story into print have much more up-to-date news about the shooting in their digital editions today.
We get the print edition of the Sunday Times because, whenever we try to cancel in order to save money, we’re offered a special deal. Digital advertising isn’t worth much, but print ads are still fairly lucrative, especially in the Times and especially on Sunday. But when there’s a big, late-breaking story, digital is the place to be.
FBI Director Kash Patel’s $250 million libel suit against The Atlantic may prove to be nothing more than bluster. Nevertheless, it’s already raised some interesting issues about ethics and defamation law, and I thought it would be useful to walk through some of them here.
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Patel sued after Sarah Fitzpatrick reported Friday that Patel’s tenure at the FBI has been marred by excessive drinking, lapses in judgment and a shocking lack of discipline. The story, she writes, was based on “more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers.” There are no named sources who say they’ve had first-hand knowledge of Patel’s alleged misbehavior. Still, that’s a lot of sources.
Ruins of the Library of Pantainos in Athens, Greece. Photo (cc) 2018 by Michael Kogan.
Has the Internet Archive reached the end of the line? The 30-year-old nonprofit, which has saved and made searchable more than a trillion webpages, has proved itself to be of enormous value over the years.
I’ve used it to track changes in reporting, including this blog post about The New York Times’ shifting coverage of an explosion at Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in the days after Hamas’ October 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. The Times and other news organizations initially reported that Israeli forces had bombed the hospital, but they later had to walk back that unverified claim.
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The Internet Archive is also home to The Boston Phoenix’s online digital and print archives thanks to an agreement that it made with Northeastern University, which acquired the Phoenix’s intellectual property after the legendary alt-weekly went out of business in 2013. (Note: I was a longtime staff columnist for the Phoenix, and I helped arrange the donation to Northeastern.)
Now, though, the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine, which reproduces web content from years past, are facing an existential threat. News organizations ranging from the Times to USA Today are inserting code into their sites that blocks the Archive from crawling their content, mainly to prevent AI companies from accessing their journalism without permission.
As Katie Knibbs reports for Wired, the irony is that USA Today recently published an important piece of investigative journalism documenting ICE detention statistics that wouldn’t have been possible without the Archive. Knibbs writes:
According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is helping to lead a signature drive in support of the Archive, compares the publishers’ actions to “a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper,” according to a recent EFF article by Joe Mullin, who writes:
For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive’s crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.
This is not the first time the Archive has run into legal problems. One major challenge was of its own making: a project begun during the COVID pandemic to make books available for free without permission and without any compensation to publishers or authors. Not surprisingly, the Archive lost that case in a federal appeals court in 2024. As I wrote in describing that decision: “The Archive claimed that it was in compliance with copyright law because it limited e-book borrowing to correspond with physical books that it had in its collection or that was owned by one of its partner libraries. That’s not the way it works, though.”
The current threat involves the right of publishers’ to make the content available as they see fit, which they have a legal right to do. They are under no obligation to let the Internet Archive repurpose it. Ideally, they will come to understand the incalculable damage they are doing.
As EFF’s Mullin puts it: “There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.”
New York Times assistant managing editor Michael Slackman, left, with Northeastern School of Journalism director Jonathan Kaufman. Photo (cc) 2026 by Dan Kennedy.
Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House has been fraught with peril for independent journalism. I couldn’t possibly list the threats emanating from the regime without omitting many others, but you know what’s been happening:
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Outrageous legal settlements agreed to by the parent companies of ABC News and CBS News. The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. The arrests of reporters Don Lemon and Georgia Fort while they were covering a protest. Threats against broadcast licenses by FCC chair Brendan Carr. The pending Trump-greased acquisition of CNN by billionaires David Ellison and his father, Larry, for whom wrecking CBS wasn’t enough. The Trump-friendly direction taken by The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times opinion sections at the behest of their billionaire owners. An illegal raid on a Washington Post reporter’s home.
Perhaps the most fraught topic during the first week of the war in Iran was the bombing of an elementary girls’ school, a horrendous event that killed about 165 people.
Some of the first reports, including one in Al Jazeera, claimed that Israel was responsible. That was followed by a social media campaign claiming that the Iranian government itself had admitted that the bombing was caused by one of its missiles that had gone astray. That was debunked by PolitiFact. Finally, investigations by media outlets like The New York Times and Bellingcat found that it was almost certain that the United States was responsible. The most likely explanation is that U.S. forces had targeted a Revolutionary Guard facility that was adjacent to the school.
I’m going to discuss with my graduate ethics students this evening how the story unfolded, and I’ve put together the slideshow you see here to go with it. You can also click here for a larger view.
Don Lemon reporting from Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn.
On the new “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we look at Don Lemon’s arrest, when journalists should (and shouldn’t) use the word “murder,” looming cuts at The Washington Post, and transitions for Scot Lehigh, who’s retiring from The Boston Globe, and David Brooks, who’s moving from The New York Times to The Atlantic. With Emily, Scott Van Voorhis and me — plus a big assist from producer Tonia Magras.
