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.
The Washington Post’s increasingly Trump-friendly editorial page has rediscovered its soul, however briefly.
In a piece published Tuesday afternoon, the Post tears into Donald Trump for his friendly White House get-together with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, according to a CIA intelligence assessment, was behind the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident (and Post columnist) Jamal Khashoggi.
The editorial is unsigned, which means that it represents the institutional voice of the newspaper, including its owner, Jeff Bezos. Better still, The New York Times reports that Bezos was not among the tech moguls who attended Trump’s dinner for bin Salman, even though others were there — including Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Dell’s Michael Dell, Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, Elon Musk and others.
Jeff Bezos. Illustration (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, there were fears that he would position its editorial pages to boost his various business interests and amplify his quirky political philosophy.
Consider, for example, Shel Kaphan, an engineer who was Amazon’s first employee and later had a falling-out with Bezos. “It makes me feel quite nauseous,” Kaphan told the Post immediately after the purchase was announced. “I’d hate to see the newspaper converted into a corporate libertarian mouthpiece.”
Contrary to Kaphan’s fears, Bezos proved to be an exemplary owner for 10 years. Then, in late 2023 he hired the ethically challenged Fleet Street veteran Will Lewis as his publisher, and it’s been all downhill since then.
Particularly damaging has been Bezos’ assault on the Post’s opinion section, which began with his decision to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the 2024 presidential election. That was followed by the exodus of key employees, Bezos’ pronouncement that the opinion section would be reoriented to emphasize “free markets and personal liberties,” and the hiring of the conservative journalist Adam O’Neal to be opinion editor.
Now comes yet another disturbing development in the Post opinion section’s race to the bottom. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes that, on three occasions in recent weeks, the Post has editorialized in favor of Bezos’ business interests without making any disclosure — a violation of basic journalistic ethics. As Folkenflik observes:
For the newspaper’s owner to have outside business holdings or activities that might intersect with coverage or commentary is conventionally seen to present at the least a perception of a conflict of interest. Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency.
The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past, whether the Graham family’s holdings, which included the Stanley Kaplan educational company and Slate magazine, or, since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper’s reporters do so as a matter of routine.
The three undisclosed conflicts, by the way, involved a rousing endorsement of Donald Trump’s hideous ballroom, for which Amazon was a major corporate donor; support for the military’s bid to build nuclear reactors, which could bolster another Amazon investment; and a piece urging local officials in Washington to approve self-driving cars. Amazon’s autonomous car company, Zoox, had just announced that it would be moving into the nation’s capital.
Folkenflik noted that in the case of the ballroom to replace the now-demolished East Wing, the Post added a disclosure after its initial publication — but only after being called on it by Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin.
It’s not at all unusual for media moguls to have a variety of entangling business interests. The solution, without exception, is to disclose those conflicts whenever they are being reported on or editorialized about. The Boston Globe, for instance, rarely fails to disclose John and Linda Henry’s ownership of the Red Sox and their other sports-related interests when reporting on them as business enterprises.
To borrow Shel Kaphan’s description, it is nauseating to watch Bezos destroy his legacy as a first-rate newspaper owner by turning the Post’s opinion section into a pathetic joke. It has cost the Post tens of thousands of readers, and media reporter Natalie Korach of Status reports writes the staff is preparing for a painful round of cuts just before the holidays.
But Bezos doesn’t care. His interests are elsewhere. I just wish the world’s fourth-richest person would donate the Post to a nonprofit foundation so that he can cease being, as he’s put it, “not an ideal owner” of one of our great newspapers.
George W. Bush in 2001. Public domain photo via the U.S. National Archives.
FCC chair Brendan Carr’s thuggish threat to crack down on media companies following late-night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk differed from past instances only in that he said it out loud.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an appearance on a right-wing podcaster’s show. And Disney, Nexstar and Sinclair, all of which have significant regulatory issues before the FCC, wasted no time in making sure that Kimmel was banished from ABC’s airwaves.
Trump himself put it even more bluntly, saying that broadcasters who are “against me” should lose their licenses, reported Zoë Richards of NBC News.
The first comparison that comes to mind, naturally, is Richard Nixon’s threat in 1973 to take away the licenses of two Florida television stations owned by The Washington Post amid the paper’s dogged reporting on the Watergate scandal. “The difference here is that Nixon talked about the scheme only privately,” the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote about the scheme many years later.
Globe Opinion’s original headline. It was later changed to “Charlie Kirk murder: America needs dialogue, not bullets” online and “An attack on democracy” in print.
Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham has quit the paper’s editorial board in protest over last week’s editorial (sub. req.) praising the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s commitment to free speech — an editorial that was widely derided by critics who objected to Kirk’s often hateful rhetoric. Graham will remain as a columnist and will continue to write her Globe newsletter, Outtakes.
Graham confirmed those developments in an email exchange but would not offer any further comment.
A Globe spokesperson said of Graham’s decision: “We are grateful to Renée Graham for her valuable contributions to our team and to the editorial board. We respect her decision to resign from the board and are pleased that she will continue in her role as a Globe Opinion associate editor, columnist, and newsletter writer.”
Kirk was murdered during an appearance at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10. It’s been the top story in the news ever since given the public nature of his death (including a graphic video), the devotion of his millions of followers (Donald Trump and JD Vance among them), and his comments targeting Black women, members of the LGBTQ community, immigrants and others.
As best as I can determine, in the 11 months since The Washington Post’s opinion section descended into Jeff Bezos-imposed turmoil, no one had been fired — until now. Some people quit in protest, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, or because they disagreed with Bezos’ mandate to focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets,” such as opinion editor David Shipley. But Karen Attiah is the first to lose her job.
Attiah, who had been a columnist for the Post, took to her Substack newsletter on Monday to announce that she had been sacked for a series of posts on Bluesky in which she condemned gun violence following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last Wednesday. By her own account, her only post even mentioning Kirk was this one, quoting Kirk’s own words:
“Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot”. -Charlie Kirk
Some have argued that Kirk’s quote had been taken out of context because he was referring to specific Black women and was characterizing what others were saying, as David Gilmour writes at Mediaite. To which I would observe that Kirk’s quotes and what he meant are sometimes difficult to parse. Attiah is hardly the only journalist who may have misconstrued something that he said.
Attiah, noting that she was the Post’s last remaining full-time Black columnist, wrote:
My commentary received thoughtful engagement across platforms, support, and virtually no public backlash.
And yet, the Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation — claiming disparagement on race. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.
Media reporter Oliver Darcy obtained (sub. req.) a copy of the letter in which Attiah was fired, from human resources head Wayne Connell, who claimed that she had disparaged white men. Connell’s letter begins with this:
I am writing to inform you that The Post is terminating your employment effective immediately for gross misconduct. Your public comments on social media regarding the death of Charlie Kirk violate The Post’s social media policies, harm the integrity of our organization, and potentially endanger the physical safety of our staff.
Of course, taking to social media in the immediate aftermath of a tragic event such as the Kirk assassination is fraught with danger. Opinion journalists, though, should be able to post freely as long as they maintain the same tone they would be expected to adhere to in their day job. Attiah’s posts on Bluesky were certainly provocative, but they strike me as being well within the bounds of what is acceptable.
Then again, this may have amounted to a convenient excuse to get rid of a troublesome internal critic. Darcy reported last month (sub. req.) that Attiah had a tense meeting with the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, and declined to take a buyout that was being offered even though O’Neal was trying to push out anyone whose work “work didn’t align with his vision for the section.”
Poynter Online media columnist Tom Jones reports that the Post’s union issued a statement condemning Attiah’s firing “and will continue to support her and defend her rights.” What form that support may take is not specified.
Meanwhile, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter writes that Attiah’s newsletter, The Golden Hour, gained 10,000 new subscribers in the immediate aftermath of her post about having been fired. Then, too, Matthew Dowd, fired by MSNBC last week after he said “hateful words lead to hateful thoughts lead to hateful actions” while commenting on Kirk’s murder, is also promoting his Substack newsletter, Lighthouse Sentinel.
We are in the midst of a right-wing backlash, led by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are using Kirk’s tragic death as an opportunity to punish their critics. As the BBC notes, “Pilots, medical professionals, teachers and one Secret Service employee are among those who have been suspended or sacked for social media posts that were deemed inappropriate about Kirk’s death.”
Of course, no one should be celebrating Kirk’s death, which was a tragedy for his family and friends. But for the MAGA movement to use it as an opportunity to unleash a witch hunt against their opponents is as sickening as it is predictable. I don’t think this is going to blow over any time soon.
Because Jeff Bezos has taken a wrecking ball to The Washington Post’s opinion section, critics have become sensitive to any hint that the billionaire owner is paying obeisance to Donald Trump.
Which brings me to an op-ed the Post published Tuesday evening (gift link) by newly confirmed U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro about Trump’s decision to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., in order to crack down on a crime wave that, by all credible accounts, does not exist. I haven’t been able to find any media commentary criticizing the Post for running Pirro’s piece, but I have seen grumbling on social media along with yet another round of vows by readers to cancel their subscriptions.
Deciding whether to run such a piece is not just a journalistic decision but also an ethical one. Pirro’s major qualification for her job as D.C.’s top prosecutor is having served as a Trump-worshipping talk-show host on Fox News, although it has to be said that she served as both a prosecutor and a judge many years ago. Her op-ed defends an authoritarian president who is militarizing the nation’s capital just because he can. Should the Post have just said no?
The Post itself editorialized against her appointment (gift link) back in May. Part of the paper’s objection was over process, but the editorial also called out her judgment and noted that her executive producer at Fox News had referred to her as a “reckless maniac” in promoting the voting-machine conspiracy that led to a $787.5 million libel settlement by her then-employer.
Which is to say that the Post’s editorial board, compromised though it may be, saw fit to stand up to Pirro and Trump as recently as three months ago. No doubt the new opinion editor, Adam O’Neal, decided to run Pirro’s op-ed for the most ordinary of reasons: it was submitted (if not necessarily written) by a high-ranking government official with responsibility for a significant issue in the news.
In that regard, it’s useful to remember the mess over The New York Times’ decision to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton back in 2020 in which Cotton endorsed the use of military force to crush violent Black Lives Matter protesters. As I wrote for GBH News, the Times shouldn’t have run the piece for several reasons. Among other things, the editors did not insist that Cotton address an earlier public statement he’d made suggesting that violent protesters should be killed on the streets, and he was allowed to make an entirely unsubstantiated assertion that antifa was involved in the protests.
We later learned that editorial-page editor James Bennet hadn’t even bothered to read Cotton’s screed before publishing it. Bennet, whose miscues were piling up (including his inserting a false assertion into an editorial that led to Sarah Palin’s endless libel suit against the Times), was soon fired.
Pirro’s op-ed strikes me as unremarkable right-wing boilerplate about what she describes as a need to crack down on youthful offenders. She calls on the D.C. Council to amend or reverse three laws that would strip those offenders of important rights and protections. The op-ed says in part:
Unfortunately, young criminals have been emboldened to think they can get away with committing crime in this city, and, very often, they do. But together with our local and federal partners, our message to them today is: We will identify you, prosecute you and convict you. For any juveniles: We are going to push to change the laws so that if you commit any violent crime, I have jurisdiction to prosecute you where you belong — in adult court.
Don’t get me wrong. This is terrible, vile stuff, but the question is whether the Post should have run her op-ed. I think the answer is yes. It’s a newsworthy piece by a public official who’s close to the president. If I were editing the piece, I would have insisted that she address the falling crime rate in D.C. (As a general principle, I think editorial-page editors need to insist on standards of truthfulness and accuracy in outside contributions.) Overall, though, I don’t think Pirro’s piece is nearly as objectionable as Cotton’s was five years ago.
The Post, given its location in the nation’s capital, has always been a favored landing spot for op-eds by high-ranking government officials. The best way to have prevented Pirro’s op-ed from running would have been to keep Trump out of the White House. But it’s far too late for that.
Where is The Washington Post heading? Certainly from outside the paper’s walls, the situation looks grim, as staff members are streaming toward the exits in droves, especially but not exclusively from the opinion side. But as disgusted as I am by Jeff Bezos’ shift from model owner to boss from hell over the past couple of years, I’ve held out hope that all may not be lost — as long as he doesn’t mess with the news operation. So far, he hasn’t.
Which is why I want to call your attention to this Jon Allsop piece from the Columbia Journalism Review. He recounts the devastation in minute detail, but he offers more nuance than I’ve seen elsewhere. He also buries the lead. The key is his wrap-up:
[J]ournalism is more of a team sport than the industry focus on its stars sometimes acknowledges, and the Post is clearly retaining a corps of incredibly talented journalists. In their departure notes, [chief political reporter Dan] Balz and [sports columnist Sally] Jenkins both emphasized this fact, with the latter writing that she sees “the glimmer of a new Washington Post — one that moves”; it will have “to be right-sized,” she added, “and young trees planted, but when the clocks all start chiming at the same time, it will be glorious.” Chelsea Janes, who covers baseball for the Post, and is staying, reacted to news of Jenkins’s exit with a different metaphor — that of a sports team that has been torn apart for unclear reasons — but added that there’s “plenty of talent still on the roster, and everyone on that roster plays to win.” I can sympathize with Janes’s analogy: my English soccer team is currently in the process of a full-scale rebuild, and a lot about it sucks. But it also feels like a moment of opportunity. That is, if the owners and management know what they’re doing. The same is true in journalism.
The challenge is finding an audience for the Post now that Bezos’ feckless leadership has allowed the paper to be caricatured as a mouthpiece for Donald Trump, even though it’s not, and even though its news coverage remains superb. It also doesn’t help that he’s stuck with Will Lewis as his publisher despite Scotland Yard’s ongoing interest in Lewis’ possible involvement in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. I would love it if Bezos returned to the generous, hands-off owner I wrote about in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” but that’s not likely to happen.
Even so, we still have three great national newspapers — the Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. If the Journal can survive and thrive despite Murdoch family ownership (by the way, here’s a terrific profile of Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker by The Guardian’s Michael Savage), then the Post can overcome Bezos. That is, assuming Bezos wants it.
Media Nation on semi-hiatus
We’re heading out later today for the rest of the week, and I’m not planning on writing anything unless there’s huge media news. I’ll try to send out an abbreviated supporters newsletter sometime on Thursday. Behave yourselves.
