On the brand-new “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we take a look at the Trump regime’s thuggish attempts to control coverage of the war in Iran.
Our other topics: the possibility of a merger between Boston’s two public radio stations, GBH, which is gung-ho, and WBUR, which isn’t; and why The Washington Post is refusing the Pentagon’s demands that it take down its confidential tip line. Plus our Rants & Raves.
Our panel is helmed by Emily and hosted by Scott Van Voorhis of Contrarian Boston, joined by Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.
If you’ve canceled your subscription to The Washington Post because of the rightward lurch of its opinion section, the decimation of the newsroom or both, I have news that might surprise you: The paper is involved in a vitally important First Amendment battle over its right to report on the Pentagon.
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Erik Wemple, himself a Post alumnus, reports in The New York Times that the Trump regime’s objection to a tip box the Post has been publishing has emerged as an issue in a lawsuit brought by the Times over the Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists.
U.S. Justice Department. Photo (cc) 2006 by Coolcaesar.
Should a judge be expected to know when a prosecutor’s request is illegal? I would have thought so. But that turns out to be not the case with regard to a Washington Post reporter whose home was raided by the FBI last month as part of a leak investigation targeting a Pentagon contractor.
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New York Times reporter Charlie Savage reported recently that the Justice Department had failed to tell a judge that a 1980 federal law prohibited the government from seeking a journalist’s reporting materials in most instances. Because of that failure, the judge issued a warrant to search the home of Post reporter Hannah Natanson — a shocking move given that journalists are generally summoned to court and given an opportunity argue against being forced to turn over their documents.
Dale Anglin at the recent Knight Media Forum in Miami.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Dale Anglin, the inaugural executive director of Press Forward, a philanthropic effort that is dedicated to funding local news initiatives nationwide.
Before she was named as the leader of Press Forward, Anglin served as a vice president for grantmaking at the Cleveland Foundation. She also led the foundation’s journalism strategy. Then and now, she focuses on local news and information as a way to restore a sense of community.
I’ve got a Quick Take on The Baltimore Banner, one of the most prominent nonprofit digital startups. It looks like readers of The Washington Post who live in the DC area may not be deprived of local news and sports after all despite the recent deep cuts ordered by its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. The Banner is expanding, and it’s part of executive editor Audrey Cooper’s mission to build civic engagement through community journalism.
Ellen’s Quick Take is on a bill in New York state that attempts to put some guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence in newsrooms. Among other things, it would require disclosures and mandate supervision and fact-checking by actual human editors. It received a hearty endorsement from journalism industry unions. But there’s a lot of catching up to do to rein in the robots.
The Washington Nationals will soon be covered by The Baltimore Banner. Photo (cc) 2022 by All-Pro Reels / Joe Glorioso.
The gutting of The Washington Post may prove to be an opportunity for The Baltimore Banner. According to an announcement, the Banner, a digital nonprofit startup, will cover Washington teams, including beat coverage of the Nationals baseball team and the Commanders football team. The Banner’s editor-in-chief, Audrey Cooper, is quoted as saying:
This decision is part of our unwavering commitment to serve Maryland with honest, independent journalism. It builds on last week’s announcement that we are expanding our news coverage into Prince George’s County and represents another step in strengthening our statewide reach.
At a time when so much pulls communities apart, sports bring us together. The Washington Post’s decision to eliminate its sports section creates an opportunity for us to serve more Marylanders with The Banner’s distinctive mix of fearless accountability reporting, engaging storytelling and sharp analysis.
I found Cooper’s comments about sports bringing people together to be especially interesting because they parallel something she told Mike Blinder recently on the Editor & Publisher vodcast:
America is having a hard time having civil, civic conversations right now and I think the reason behind that is because of the shrinking local news ecosystem. If we spent more time worrying about whether our kids are being educated, whether our roads are paved, whether our water is safe to drink, and less time about these national culture fights that, to be honest, don’t affect our day-to-day lives, I think there’s a chance that local news has to re-teach Americans how to have civic conversations.
To me, saving the great American experiment means saving local news. And I think it’s difficult to find a place in America right now where that’s not, where Baltimore is like second to none. I mean, I think what’s happening here and what the Banner is doing is the most interesting experiment in local news, and I wanted to be a part of it.
This echoes a theme that Ellen Clegg and I explore in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and on our podcast. The nationalization of everything has a lot to do with why we are so polarized. We live in communities, in neighborhoods, but the phony controversies that are ginned up in the national media — especially on Fox News — gain more resonance than they should when we lack reliable sources of local news to inform us about what really matters.
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The Jeff Bezos-owned Post’s decision to eliminate its sports staff and cut back on metro coverage was mind-boggling. As Poynter media columnist Tom Jones observed (second item), the Post’s sports section was “legendary,” and it “was once known for having some of the best sportswriters in the business with the likes of Shirley Povich, Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, Sally Jenkins and Thomas Boswell, just to name a few. And the sports department of today — well, of last week — also had a deep talent pool with brilliant journalists including Chuck Culpepper, Dave Sheinin and columnists Candace Buckner and Barry Svrluga.”
The Banner’s move follows a bid by Washington City Paper to purchase the Post’s sports and metro sections. Tina Nguyen reported in The Verge that though soon-to-depart publisher Will Lewis was receptive, the talks went nowhere, and the paper went ahead with massive cuts — initially reported as 300 of the paper’s 800 journalists, but which is now being revealed as even worse than that. (Former Post reporter Paul Farhi, writing for Washingtonian, places the number at 350 to 375 positions eliminated out of a total headcount of 790.)
If the Banner’s embrace of Washington sports and coverage of Prince George’s County is successful (previously the Banner started covering another Washington suburb in Maryland, Montgomery County), I hope it might lead to more — maybe even a Washington Banner. The Post is supposedly going to continue covering national politics. But when Bezos bought the paper in 2013 from the legendary Graham family, the Post was primarily a regional paper that had more in common with The Boston Globe or The Philadelphia Inquirer than it did with The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.
Perhaps the Banner, City Paper, Washingtonian and others can make up for that local news gap. It would also be nice if one or more of them amped up their book coverage, as the Post’s standalone book section was a casualty of the bloodletting. (And the entire photo staff. Good Lord.)
The Banner is quite a story. Earlier this week I wrote an article for The Conversation about five large regional newspapers that have achieved sustainability of a sort. Four of them are either owned by billionaires or owe their current success to billionaires. I could have mentioned the Banner as well. Hotel magnate Stewart Bainum founded and endowed the Banner after he was spurned in his bid to purchase The Baltimore Sun and then all of Tribune Publishing from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
The Banner launched in 2022 and, according to Cooper in her interview with Blinder, has 75,000 paid subscribers. As of last September, the newsroom staff comprised nearly 100 people. It’s won a Pulitzer Prize, and — Boston trivia alert — Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory serves on its board of directors.
Portrait of Jeff Bezos (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
If The Washington Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, ever decides he wants to take journalism seriously again, then he might take a look at a handful of large regional papers that have charted a route to sustainability against the strong headwinds that continue to buffet the news business.
Perhaps the most important difference between these papers and the Post — and the hundreds of other shrinking media outlets owned by corporate chains and hedge funds — is that they are rooted in the communities they cover. Whether owned by wealthy people or run by nonprofits, they place service to their city and region above extracting the last smidgen of revenue they can squeeze out.
Although I could add a few to this list, I am mentioning five large regional newspapers as examples of how it’s possible to succeed despite the long-term decline in the economics of journalism.
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.
Barack Obama’s administration threatened reporters with jail if they refused to turn over their confidential sources. But he didn’t order raids on reporters’ homes. Photo (cc) 2024 by Gage Skidmore.
Back in 2012, I wrote an opinion piece for The Huffington Post (now just HuffPost) that I headlined “Obama’s War on Journalism.” The premise was that Barack Obama, like George W. Bush and other presidents before him, was disrespecting the First Amendment’s protection of independent journalism by taking reporters to court and theatening them with jail if they didn’t reveal the identities of White House sources leaking to them.
At least Obama, Bush et al. were following a legal process. As The Associated Press reports, Donald Trump’s FBI, headed by the buffoonish but dangerous Kash Patel, raided the home of a Washington Post journalist to grab what they claimed were classified documents provided by a Pentagon contractor.
Semafor reported on Jan. 3 that The New York Times and The Washington Post learned of the pending U.S. raid on Venezuela shortly before it began but held off reporting on it “to avoid endangering US troops.”
Now Times executive editor Joe Kahn says it’s not true, at least with regard to his paper. He chose an unusually low-key forum in which to push back — in a response to a reader question in The Morning Newsletter. Here’s the relevant part of his answer (sub. req.). The boldface is mine, not his.
We reported on U.S. missions targeting Venezuela, including boat strikes and preparation for land-based military action, in considerable detail for several months. Our Pentagon, national-security and intelligence-agency beat reporters talked repeatedly with their sources about heightened preparations for bolder action against the Venezuelan leadership. Contrary to some claims, however, The Times did not have verified details about the pending operation to capture Maduro or a story prepared, nor did we withhold publication at the request of the Trump administration….
While not relevant in this case, The Times does consult with the military when there are concerns that exposure of specific operational information could risk the lives of American troops. We take those concerns seriously, and have at times delayed publication or withheld details if they might lead to direct threats to members of the military. But in all such cases, we make our editorial decisions independently. And we have often published accountability and investigative stories about military and intelligence operations and national-security decision making that government officials pressed us to withhold.
Last week I wrote about the parallels between Venezuela and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, noting that the Times was accused of withholding key details. I cited research I did as a Boston University graduate student in the 1980s that showed the Times actually published what it knew and held back only on aspects of the story it couldn’t verify. The parallels between then and now may be even closer than I realized.
I don’t believe that the Post has responded to the Semafor story, which has not been corrected or amended.
Front and center: The New York Times reports on the imminent invasion of Cuba on April 7, 1961.
The New York Times and The Washington Post learned about U.S. plans to attack Venezuela shortly before the raid began, according to Max Tani and Shelby Talcott of Semafor. But they declined to run with the story “to avoid endangering US troops, two people familiar with the communications between the administration and the news organizations said.”
The decision was reminiscent of the legend over how the Times reported on an imminent U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba in 1962, which I’ll get to in a few moments.
But first, regarding the Venezuela decision: Right call or wrong call? As the Semafor story notes, the decision was “in keeping with longstanding American journalistic traditions.” Independent media commentator Margaret Sullivan writes that she’s torn and asks her readers to weigh in. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Jem Bartholomew leans toward yes they should have on the grounds that the Times and the Post knew the raid would violate international law.
