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.
We’re excited to announce an all-star lineup for our 2026 What Works webinar, “Audience, AI and Events,” aimed at practical skills for local news publishers. This free, all-day teleconference will be held on Thursday, May 21. You’ll be able to sign up for interactive workshops facilitated by leaders in their fields. Please register today!
My colleagues and I are engaged in the convoluted, ever-shifting process of figuring out how to use artificial intelligence in journalism in ways that are both productive and ethical. Somewhere between “Let students use AI to write their stories” and “We should forbid all uses of AI,” there is a reasonable approach, and we’re all trying to figure out what that is.
Our students learn from us. We learn from our students. Keep in mind, though, that we have not yet seen what you might call “AI natives” in our classrooms. Young people in their late teens and early 20s were part of the before times. In the not-too-distant future, though, we’ll start seeing students who can’t remember a world without ChatGPT, Claude and the rest.
Recently I devoted a class to AI in my graduate ethics seminar. It’s a small group of five students, one of whom is an advanced undergrad. I was surprised to learn that they are as skeptical of AI as I am.
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.
The Massachusetts Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
Massachusetts has long been notorious for being one of the least progressive states with regard to government transparency. The state’s public records law is alone in exempting the governor’s office, the Legislature and the judiciary, leaving cities, towns, counties and the state’s executive agencies as the only government bodies that may be compelled to produce documents when requested to do so by journalists or members of the public.
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What’s worse, there are few penalties for failing to comply with the law. As John Hilliard observes (sub. req.) in The Boston Globe:
Michael Morisy, the chief executive of Boston-based MuckRock, who’s been helping people file public records requests for years, told the Globe: “It’s among the worst states when it comes to public records access.”
The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper, is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The paper — now mostly digital — began life in 1926 as The Northeastern News, a university-supported outlet formed by the merger of two other campus newspapers.
The News went independent in 2008, changing its name and ending its dependence on funding from the administration. Yet its mission has remained the same: comprehensive coverage of Northeastern, supplemented with reporting from the surrounding community.
The Huntington News is a vital resource on campus. The News today is better than the News I was part of in the 1970s — more professional and serious-minded, with more measured judgment. Plus there’s just much more journalism than we were able to offer in our weekly print paper 50 years ago. Congratulations to all!
The Boston Globe calls its decision not to print a paper today “unprecedented.” But as Aidan Ryan reports (sub. req.), it depends on your definition of unprecedented: “Even during the historic Blizzard of ’78, the Globe printed a few thousand copies of the Feb. 7, 1978, edition, though its delivery trucks couldn’t get through the piles of snow around its old offices on Morrissey Boulevard.”
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Moreover, Ryan notes that today’s edition will be printed and delivered with Wednesday’s paper. It strikes me as an odd move given that the Globe’s website is up and running, including the daily e-paper. But maybe there are a few print customers who really don’t want to read the paper online and who will appreciate having today’s paper — perhaps to commemorate the Blizzard of ’26.
A prominent editor has unleashed a scathing attack on journalism schools for what he claims is their retrograde attitude toward artificial intelligence. Since the editor, Chris Quinn of Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, is invading my turf, I thought I’d take a look at what he has to say and offer some context.
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Quinn begins his recent “Letter from the Editor” column with an anecdote about a recent college graduate who turned down a job because of the way Quinn’s publications use AI. Increasingly, they ask reporters to do nothing but report, turning over their notes to be transformed into news stories by AI, with human editors looking them over to make sure the final product is accurate and coherent.
Charles Sennott interviews a Taliban leader while on assignment in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. Photo by Ben Brody. Used with permission.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Charles Sennott, a former foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe who left in 2008 to become a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded GlobalPost and The GroundTruth Project. GroundTruth, a nonprofit, was a partner to GBH News, PBS’s “Frontline,” public radio’s “The World,” and the “PBS NewsHour.” It focused on partnerships to amplify international and national news projects.
Now Charlie has turned his attention to local news. He teamed up with Steven Waldman to launch Report for America as an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Dan and Ellen talked with Waldman on an earlier podcast.
Sennott’s newest creation is GroundTruth Media Partners, LLC based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he leads a small staff and publishes and writes the GroundTruth newsletter on Substack. The nonprofit that was called The GroundTruth Project has recently rebranded to call itself Report Local, with Report for America and Report for the World as its flagship initiatives. Report Local and the University of Missouri School of Journalism did groundbreaking work on water issues in the Mississippi River Basin.
In a recent post on Substack, Sennott writes about this new branding. He also writes about why he officially stepped aside from the program but remains proud of the movement it has created.
As his own act of community service, Sennott is also serving as the publisher and editor of the Martha’s Vineyard Times. He and his wife, Julie, who has an extended family on the Island, now live there year-round.
We’re also joined by Alexis Algazy, a Northeastern journalism and political science student who has written a compelling story about why politicians need to engage in storytelling on social media.
I’ve got a Quick Take about public support for local news. Politico recently published an in-depth story on what’s gone wrong with a program in California that was supposed to provide $250 million to help fund local news over a five-year period, with the money to come from the state and from Google. The deal seems to be coming apart. And yet there are reasons to be optimistic — as you will hear.
Ellen has a Quick Take on the role of video in recording the violent acts of ICE agents in Minneapolis and the protests all over the Twin Cities. Video by bystanders has played an important role in exposing what’s happening on the ground. But video and social media in general also pose a challenge for reporters covering the story for The Minnesota Star Tribune. Editor Kathleen Hennessey spoke about it in a brief interview with Semafor.
As current and former faculty members at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, we condemn the unconstitutional arrests of independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. We are instructors, mentors and colleagues of young journalists, and we believe it is imperative that we stand up for the vital role of a free and unfettered press in a democratic society.
The Justice Department has filed charges against Lemon and Fort for the crime of committing journalism when they accompanied activists who entered Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Jan. 18. The activists were there to protest the pastor’s alleged employment by ICE. The journalists were there to observe, to live-stream the proceedings and to interview participants, church members and the pastor before leaving the church. In so doing, they engaged in activities protected by the First Amendment with the goal of informing the public about the Trump administration’s deadly and illegal occupation of the Twin Cities.
As Amnesty International put it: “Journalism is not a crime. Reporting on protests is not a crime. Arresting journalists for their reporting is a clear example of an authoritarian practice.” We call on the Justice Department to drop all charges against Lemon and Fort and to acknowledge the centrality of journalism in holding the government and other powerful institutions to account.
Note: Our statement was published earlier this morning by The Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student newspaper.
Belle Adler
Rahul Barghava
Mike Beaudet
Matt Carroll
Myojung Chung
Ellen Clegg
Charles Fountain
John Guilfoil
Meg Heckman
Carlene Hempel
Marcus Howard
Jeff Howe
Dan Kennedy
William Kirtz
Catherine Lambert
Laurel Leff
Peter Mancusi
Meredith O’Brien
Jody Santos
Alan Schroeder
Jeb Sharp
Dan Zedek
