There’s some very good news out of Russia this morning, as three U.S. citizens who have been wrongly imprisoned by Vladimir Putin’s government —Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, U.S. Marine veteran Paul Whelan and Russian-American radio journalist Alsu Kurmasheva — are reportedly on the verge of being released.
Oddly, the Journal, which has been fierce in keeping the spotlight on Gershkovich, does not yet have the report. But according to BBC News, the three are part of a larger swap involving “at least 24 prisoners,” including eight Russians who will be returned to Moscow.
There’s been some reporting in recent months to the effect that the Russian government wouldn’t be willing to talk about freeing Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich until after his case was resolved. Now that he’s been convicted at a sham trial (free link) and sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony, perhaps negotiations to win his release will get serious.
With the prospects of President Biden’s remaining in office still uncertain despite his insistence that he’s not going anywhere, here are three updates:
• The Wall Street Journal posted a five-byline story Monday night headlined “How Biden’s Inner Circle Worked to Keep Signs of Aging Under Wraps.” It’s a well-reported reprise of a piece that the Journal published a month ago that was widely dismissed at the time because of its reliance on partisan Republican sources. Now that earlier article looks prescient (free links).
• What you might call a mini-feeding frenzy broke out Monday afternoon when The New York Times, CNN and others reported that a specialist in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House eight times over the past eight months. Hours later, the story looked like a cautionary tale in not getting ahead of the story, as we learned that the doctor had almost certainly been called in to see other patients, and that his service at the White House goes back a dozen years.
• Josh Marshall is always worth reading when you’re trying to make sense of complicated political stories. On Monday he wrote that he’s less sure than he was a week ago that Biden would step aside, mainly because, well, he hasn’t stepped aside. “By the end of the weekend,” he wrote, “I was back to near total uncertainty about where any of this was going.”
The editorial pages of the three national newspapers are calling on President Biden to end his re-election campaign or to strongly consider it. The most forthright of the three is the liberal New York Times, which argues that Biden’s disastrous debate performance on Thursday shows that he’s no longer the strongest candidate to stop the threat (free link) that Donald Trump poses to democracy should Trump win election this November:
As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.
The Times does say that it will endorse Biden if he persists with his candidacy: “If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick.”
The Washington Post, more centrist than the Times but just as anti-Trump, begins its editorial (free link):
If President Biden had weekend plans, he should cancel them in favor of some soul-searching. His calamitous debate performance on Thursday raises legitimate questions about whether he’s up for another four years in the world’s toughest job. It’s incumbent on this incumbent to determine, in conversation with family and aides, whether continuing to seek reelection is in the best interests of the country.
Unlike the Times and the Post, the right-wing editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is more concerned that an enfeebled Biden might actually win (free link) and prove that he’s not up to a second term:
Well, that was painful — for the United States. President Biden’s halting, stumbling debate performance Thursday night showed all too clearly that he isn’t up to serving four more years in office. For the good of the country, more even than their party, Democrats have some hard thinking to do about whether they need to replace him at the top of their ticket.
Closer to home, The Boston Globe has not weighed in. But three of its columnists have. Adrian Walker, Scot Lehigh and Brian McGrory all write that the time has come for Biden to step aside in favor of a Democrat who might stand a better chance of beating Trump. Walker has the line of the day in describing the president’s excruciating debate performance: “Biden was not merely bad. He was bad in a way people running for president are never bad.”
Biden could have pulled out a year or two ago but chose not to. The argument in favor of his staying in the race is that the chaos that would be unleashed by throwing the nomination to an open Democratic convention would be a greater risk than keeping him at the head of the ticket. Now it seems likely that the greater risk is to stick with Biden, a good and decent man and a successful president who just may not be up to the task of stopping the authoritarian menace that looms this fall.
Jeff Bezos. Painting (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
Having tracked the rise of The Washington Post under owner Jeff Bezos, executive editor Marty Baron and chief technologist Shailesh Prakash in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” I’ve watched its dispiriting decline with sadness. On Sunday, that decline was underscored by Sally Buzbee’s departure as executive editor. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy has the story.
Lest we forget, Bezos did not choose Baron and Prakash; rather, he inherited them from Graham family ownership after he bought the paper in 2013 for $250 million. And though Bezos had the good sense to keep them and give them the resources they needed, it was their vision that created a great digital, nationally focused news organization that was positioned perfectly for the rise of Trump. Maybe an early warning sign was that when Bezos did get to make a big hire, he chose Ronald Reagan apparatchik Fred Ryan as publisher. As Baron makes clear in his book “Collision of Power,” Ryan did not prove to be an inspired choice.
Since Donald Trump left office, it’s been nothing but a downhill slide for the Post, which, according to the new publisher, Will Lewis, lost $77 million last year and about half its audience since 2020. Was that entirely the fault of Buzbee, a former Associated Press executive editor who took the Post’s helm after Baron retired in early 2021? Of course not. But it all happened on her watch, so it’s not a surprise that she’s leaving.
As Poynter media reporter Tom Jones points out, it’s not 100% clear that Buzbee was fired. It’s possible that she decided she wanted nothing to do with Lewis’ recently articulated vision, which includes having “AI everywhere in our newsroom,” according to Semafor media reporter Max Tani. Ugh.
The new executive team sets off some alarm bells. Lewis is a former publisher of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal who reportedly was involved in helping Murdoch clean up his tabloids’ phone-hacking scandal in the U.K. a dozen years ago, according to David Folkenflik of NPR. Buzbee will be replaced on a temporary basis by Matt Murray, a former editor-in-chief of the Journal. After the 2024 election, Murray will slide over to a newly created position creating service and social media journalism while the main news product will be under the direction of Robert Winnett, currently deputy editor of The Telegraph Media Group, a right-wing news organization. Media critic Dan Gillmor wrote on Mastodon:
The Washington Post is about to lurch sharply to the right politically as former Murdoch apparatchik solidifies his grip on the organization. Current editor Buzbee is out, and he’s bringing in people from Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph (right-wing UK news org).
I’m willing to wait and see, in part because The Wall Street Journal remains a great newspaper notwithstanding its editorial page, whose right-wing orientation precedes Murdoch’s ownership. I’m deeply concerned about what Lewis has in mind with his artificial intelligence initiative, though.
For the second time since he bought it in 2013, Jeff Bezos is faced with the challenge of reinventing The Washington Post. He succeeded spectacularly the first time, with years of growth, profitability and influence. This time, though, he’s doing it with people he chose himself — and there are caution signs all over the place.
Some notable front pages reporting Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to cover up payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels — payments aimed at keeping their sexual encounter out of the headlines just before the 2016 election.
• Catch and kill. The National Enquirer’s practice of paying for stories and of deep-sixing articles in order to gain power and influence over someone — known as “catch and kill” — didn’t start with former Enquirer owner David Pecker. Nor was Donald Trump the first alleged beneficiary. I recommend “Scandalous,” a 2019 documentary about the Enquirer that is revealing and highly entertaining. Both Bob Hope and Bill Cosby were caught dead to rights in tawdry sexual affairs, and the Enquirer killed stories about those affairs in order to force them to cooperative in cheery feature stories. Pecker’s innovation was to politicize the practice.
• Facebook and news. Back when I was reporting my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls,” news organizations desperately sought to use Facebook as a way of distributing their journalism. News publishers liked to talk about “the barbell,” by which they would attract readers on Facebook (one end of the barbell) and try to get them to migrate to their own digital products (the other end of the barbell), where, it was hoped, they would become paying subscribers.
In the years since, Meta executives have decided news just isn’t worth it and have throttled journalism on Facebook and other products, including Threads and Instagram. How bad is it? The Washington Post has conducted a data analysis (free link) showing that “the 25 most-cited news organizations in the United States lost 75 percent of their total user engagement on Facebook” between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2024. It’s further evidence that news organizations’ business models shouldn’t be dependent on giant corporations with their own agendas.
• The WSJ will miss Murdoch. Axel Springer, the right-wing German media conglomerate that took over Politico in 2021, has its sights set on The Wall Street Journal, according to Ben Smith of Semafor. Rupert Murdoch, through his control of the Fox News Channel and other outlets on three continents, may be the most malignant media magnate on the planet. But he’s been a surprisingly good steward of the Journal, which after 17 years of his ownership remains one of our great newspapers. At 93, he won’t be in charge too much longer. And here’s a quote from Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner that you might enjoy: “I’m all for climate change. We shouldn’t fight climate change but adjust to it.”
I’ll grant you that’s something you might see on the Journal’s editorial page even now. Murdoch, though, has been better about not letting that bleed into the news pages than Axel Springer might be.
It has become a strange and perverse exercise. Every so often, Press Gazette, a U.K.-based website that tracks developments in the news business, rounds up the latest weekday print circulation figures reported by U.S. newspapers and informs us that, yes, they’re down once again. For instance: The Wall Street Journal, 555,200, a drop of 14% over the previous year; The New York Times, 267,600, down 13%; The Boston Globe, 56,900, down 11%.
These same news organizations, though, are succeeding in selling digital subscriptions. The Times has 9.7 million digital-only subscribers. The Journal is around 3.5 million. The Globe has about 250,000, and CEO Linda Henry has announced a push for 400,000.
Why does Press Gazette persist in tracking these print-only numbers? Because they’re there. Twice a year, the Alliance for Audited Media reports print circulation for every newspaper that’s a member. Reliable digital numbers are much harder to come by.
As the Press Gazette itself concedes: “While print remains an important revenue stream, data on digital subscriptions presents a more promising picture.” No kidding.
News organizations ranging from the Los Angeles Times to The Wall Street Journal are cutting their Washington bureaus. Will that detract from public knowledge about the 2024 presidential campaign? I told Mark Stenberg of Adweek that it would not — and we’d be better off if we’d focus on areas where there are real reporting deficits. Stenberg writes:
The internet has eliminated the geographical monopolies these publishers once had, and readers can now turn to any number of D.C. outlets for their political coverage, said Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy.
Local outlets still need to ensure that their readers have access to reporting about how federal legislation affects their local government, but there are dozens of publishers covering the presidential election. Voters looking for insightful coverage of national races have, still, more coverage than they can make sense of.
“Does anyone believe there are too few people covering the election?” Kennedy said. “If anything, some of these reporters could be reassigned to cover other stories that are going untold.”
