Justice Integrity Report - Media News 2020

Several major media trends are seriously undermining American democracy and other quality of life issues. Among these developments are:

Government censorship, falsehoods, restrictions of access or covert manipulation;
Financial cutbacks in newsrooms eroding professional standards;
Slanted or otherwise manipulative "news" techniques;
Outright "fake news" that makes scant pretense of honest coverage.

To counter such practices, we link to significant news reports and commentary below. The materials are in reverse chronological order and are drawn primarily from large news organizations and expert commentators.

Andrew Kreig / Justice Integrity Project editor

The Justice Integrity Project's editor (shown above during a 2014 lecture shown on C-SPAN, is a public affairs commentator, author and attorney in the communications field

Andrew Kreig, the editor of the materials excerpted below, is a former newspaper reporter, magazine editor and columnist. Also, he was the president / CEO (from 1996 to 2008) of the Wireless Communications Association, a Washington, DC-based trade association that advocated for wireless Internet services and advanced applications on behalf of members that included leading communications companies. For years, he edited its daily bulletins and supervised its conventions that gathered prominent government officials, companies, educators and other thought leaders in advanced communications.

Also, he is the author of two books addressing problems in the news media that harm civic life. Read more.

Based on such experience, the news excerpts below are chosen to illustrate important news and trends. The excerpts cite language from the outlets except for subheads and an occasionally clearly marked 'Editor's note.'

2020

Note: This near-daily summary of Media News is encompasses news stories beginning in 2020. For previous periods extending back to 2018, kindly visit these links: 2018, 2019 and 2020.

December, 2020

Dec. 31

New York Times, Hedge Fund Seeks Control of Tribune Publishing, a Major News Chain, Michael J. de la Merced and Marc Tracy, Dec. 31, 2020. Alden Global Capital, which is already Tribune’s biggest shareholder, valued the company at about $520.6 million.

Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has amassed a newspaper empire, has expressed interest in taking full control of Tribune Publishing, the parent of major metropolitan dailies including The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News and The Baltimore Sun.

If a deal goes through, it would strengthen the financial industry’s grip on the struggling news media business.

Alden controls some 200 newspapers nationwide through its MediaNews Group subsidiary, and its acquisition of Tribune Publishing would make it an even more formidable rival to the largest United States newspaper chain, Gannett, a company controlled by the private equity fund Fortress Investment Group.

Alden’s designs on Tribune Publishing, a publicly traded company that runs eight prominent metro dailies across the country, became clear in 2019, when the hedge fund revealed that it had taken a 32 percent stake in the chain, making it the company’s largest shareholder. Many Tribune Publishing reporters denounced Alden’s hold on the company, citing the hedge fund’s strategy of slashing newsroom costs at its MediaNews Group publications.

Alden’s offer, if it goes through, may strike fear into the hearts of journalists at Tribune newspapers, who have publicly urged benefactors to keep the hedge fund from taking control of the chain’s papers.

Alden’s most famous run-in with journalists came in 2018, when the staff of The Denver Post openly rebelled, publishing a special opinion section devoted to blasting its hedge fund ownership, which had made drastic cuts at the paper. “If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will,” the paper’s editorial board wrote.

Tribune was a chain in trouble before Alden’s entry into the company. For many years, it billed itself under a new name meant to suggest its digital emphasis — Tronc — and its executives tangled with journalists at the Los Angeles Times in a series of spats that did not end until Tribune sold that paper to the medical entrepreneur Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and his wife, Michele B. Chan. In 2018, Tribune cut the staff of The New York Daily News, once the largest-circulation newspaper in the country, in half.

Since Alden acquired its 32 percent stake in Tribune, the hard times have continued. The company has offered buyouts and closed several newsrooms while trying to endure the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on an already distressed industry.

In August, after most newspaper employees had worked remotely for months, Tribune announced that it was permanently closing the newsroom of The Daily News. That announcement was quickly followed by the company’s shuttering of the physical newsrooms of The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa.; The Orlando Sentinel; The Carroll County Times in Westminster, Md.; and The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md. In December, the newsroom at another Tribune daily, The Hartford Courant, which has been in operation since 1764, also went dark.

spiked HR cover11 Revenue has plummeted for local newspapers over the past 15 years as readers have increasingly favored getting the news on screens rather than in print newspapers. Alden and other hedge funds have found that they have nonetheless been able to wring profits from newspaper chains through austere management practices.

Journalists and press advocates have expressed alarm over the influx of private equity into the news-gathering business, arguing that finance firms make imperfect stewards of an industry built on the work of watching closely over government and commerce.

Justice Integrity Project editor Andrew Kreig published a 1987 book, "Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper" (Peregrine Press), documenting problems at the Hartford Courant in Connecticut as a case study of the transformation of the newspaper sector under conglomerate ownership.

Times Mirror bought the locally owned newspaper, the second largest in New England, in 1979 for the then-record price of $105 million and then resold it to the Tribune Companies. The Courant recently announced the closure of its much-downsized newsroom, thereby requiring journalists to work from home.

OpEdNews, Opinion: The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes U.S. Myths About Freedom and Tyranny, Glenn Greenwald, Dec. 31, 2020. That U.S. indictment and the accompanying request to extradite Assange to the U.S. to stand trial provided, by design, the pretext for the British government to imprison Assange indefinitely.

A judge quickly ruled that Assange could not be released on bail pending his extradition hearing, but instead must stay behind bars while the U.K. courts fully adjudicate the Justice Department's extradition request. No matter what happens, it will takes years for this extradition process to conclude because whichever side (the DOJ or Assange) loses at each stage (and Assange is highly likely to lose the first round when the lower-court decision on the extradition request is issued next week), they will appeal, and Assange will linger in prison while these appeals wind their way very slowly through the U.K. judicial system.

That means that absent a pardon by Trump or the withdrawal of the charges by what will become the Biden DOJ, Assange, right, will be locked up for years without any need to prove he is guilty of any crime. He will have been just disappeared: silenced by the very governments whose corruption and crimes he denounced and exposed.

Those are the same governments -- the U.S. and U.K. -- that sanctimoniously condemn their adversaries (but rarely their repressive allies) for violating free speech, free press and due process rights.

(he ample evidence showing that the indictment of Assange is the single gravest threat to press freedoms in years, and that the arguments mounted to justify it are fraudulent, has been repeatedly documented by myself and others, so I will not rehash those discussions here. Those interested can see the article and video program I produced on this prosecution along with my op-ed inThe Washington Post; Laura Poitras' New York Times op-ed last week on the indictment; former Brazilian President Lula da Silva's Guardian op-ed calling for Assange's immediate release; the editorial from The Guardian and column from The Washington Post's media reporter Margaret Sullivan condemning this prosecution as abusive; and statements from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Columbia Journalism Review, and the ACLU warning of the serious dangers to press freedoms it poses).

Even Assange's conviction on "bail jumping" charges, and the way it is portrayed in mainstream media discourse, reveals how deceitful these narratives are, and how illusory are these supposedly protected liberties.

Assange's misdemeanor bail jumping conviction was based on his decision to seek asylum from Ecuador rather than appear for his 2012 extradition hearing in London. That asylum request was granted by Ecuador on the ground that Sweden's attempt to extradite Assange from the U.K. for a sexual assault investigation could be used as a pretext to ship him to the U.S., which would then imprison him for the "crime" of reporting on its illegal and deceitful acts. Such retaliatory imprisonment, said Ecuador, would amount to classic political persecution, thus necessitating asylum to protect his political rights from attack by the U.S. (the case in Sweden was subsequently closed after prosecutors concluded that Assange's asylum rendered the investigation futile).

When the U.S. grants asylum to dissidents from adversary countries in order to protect them from persecution, the U.S. media heralds it a noble, benevolent act, one that proves how devoted the U.S. Government is to the rights and freedoms of people all over the world.

New York Times, Opinion: Goodbye, Twitter Trump! And Other Predictions for 2021, Kara Swisher, right, Dec. 31, 2020. The coronavirus has forced the kind of work experimentation that would have taken a decade otherwise. No one expected 2020 to turn out the way it did. The worst I imagined for this year, in my annual list of digital predictions in 2019, was that the “ever screechy” President Trump would get “to stay on Twitter retweeting fake accounts and links that appear to unmask a whistle-blower.”

If only. Mr. Trump is screechier than ever, and even more unhinged than expected. Most of his tweets are now labeled “disputed” by Twitter, which I would translate from geekspeak as a polite way of calling them lies.

Since I’m not polite, I’m starting this round of prognosticating with this: Soon after our forever troller in chief leaves office on Jan. 20, his account will be suspended by Twitter temporarily, and then, since he cannot stop breaking rules, he’ll get tossed off, just like his hideous pal, Alex Jones.

I have never thought, as many have, that Mr. Trump should have been de-platformed during his term as president. As flagitious as he can be, Mr. Trump has been a legitimate news figure and, thus, what he had to say should be aired.

But after Joe Biden is inaugurated, Mr. Trump should be treated like any other mendacious loudmouth, and Twitter will be well within its rights to put a sock in it. He’ll rage and then head over Parler to try to make fetch happen, which will not satisfy his enormous ego. It will all end in a whimper.

The Amazon acquisition this week of the podcast maker Wondery, in a deal valued at $300 million — whatever that means — was exactly the kind of thing we will see more of. Amazon is aiming its considerable heft and pocketbook directly at a nascent podcast market. This will result in an inevitable smackdown with Spotify, which has been playing the most aggressively in this space, and we’ll see Apple wade in too along with traditional media companies.

Speaking of media companies: While the reverberations of the Warner Bros. decision to put all its 2021 movies on its HBOMax streaming service are sorting themselves out, the shift is permanent — whether offended filmmakers like it or not. Creators who adapt will benefit, especially if they devise new models of payment.

The longtime entertainment business model was built on powerful gatekeepers that made most of the money and relied on a vast network of middlemen. But in the new world, those who can assemble a fan base that they directly service will profit. Imagine the future relationship between creators and fans as a subscription business, and the economics get much more interesting. Hollywood will have to become much more nimble and entrepreneurial.

Mediaite, GOP Congressman Slams Mark Levin Over Calling Him A ‘Reckless Politician’: ‘Godfather Of Outrage For Profit," Zachary Petrizzo, Dec. 31, 2020. Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) fired back at Fox News host Mark Levin Thursday morning after Levin took a series of potshots at the Republican legislator over him being a vocal critic of President Donald Trump.

Levin, who was once a “NeverTrump” supporter, began the war of words by tweeting early Thursday morning that Kinzinger was a “reckless politician.”

“Adam Kinzinger is very devious and reckless politician. He was elected as a Tea Party candidate 10 years ago and quickly turned on them,” the Fox News host tweeted. “He is now an activist for the administrative state and against constitutionalists.”

Levin proceeded to take additional swings at Kinzinger.

“Unsurprisingly, he’s celebrated by the Dem-Party media. His attack on those earnestly trying to fix what the Dems broke during this election cycle & their efforts to prevent further usurpations of the Constitution (as they’ve announced their intentions), is unconscionable,” Levin added.

“He should be defeated at the ballot box in the next Republican primary. Then he can join CNN or MSNBC as a full-time, conservative-trashing contributor,” Levin concluded.

Yet Kinzinger, right, wasn’t going to let the big-time conservative talk radio host’s words go without a response.

“Mark is The Godfather of ‘outrage for profit.’ For some reason he has been obsessed with me for a while,” Kinzinger fired back.

In recent days, Levin has touted his departure from Facebook and continues to be an outspoken supporter of Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

And how could one forget that Levin wants Trump to be honored with a ‘ticker-tape parade.”

UPDATE (1/1/2021): Levin responded to Kinzinger ripping him.

“I guess I hit a nerve. Don’t flatter yourself, Hollywood. And don’t worry about my finances. I pay your overpaid salary. Just do your damn job,” Levin tweeted.

Dec. 28 djt nypost stop insanity cover dec 28 2020

Washington Post, Murdoch’s New York Post urges Trump to accept defeat: ‘You’re cheering for an undemocratic coup,’ Tim Elfrink, Dec. 28, 2020. The tabloid, long one of President Trump’s strongest allies, demanded he stop spreading false claims of voter fraud and accept Joe Biden’s victory.

New York Times, A Cheerleader’s Vulgar Message Prompts a First Amendment Showdown, Adam Liptak, right, Dec. 28, 2020. A Pennsylvania school district has asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether students may be disciplined for what they say on social media. The Supreme Court next month will consider whether to hear the case of Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., involving a student’s freedom of speech while off school grounds.

It was a Saturday in the spring of 2017, and a ninth-grade student in Pennsylvania was having a bad day. She had just learned that she had failed to make the varsity cheerleading squad and would remain on junior varsity.

The student expressed her frustration on social media, sending a message on Snapchat to about 250 friends. The message included an image of the student and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with text expressing a similar sentiment. Using a curse word four times, the student expressed her dissatisfaction with “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything.”

Though Snapchat messages are ephemeral by design, another student took a screenshot of this one and showed it to her mother, a coach. The school suspended the student from cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was needed to “avoid chaos” and maintain a “teamlike environment.”

The student sued the school district, winning a sweeping victory in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia. The court said the First Amendment did not allow public schools to punish students for speech outside school grounds.

Next month, at its first private conference after the holiday break, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., No. 20-255. The Third Circuit’s ruling is in tension with decisions from several other courts, and such splits often invite Supreme Court review.

In urging the justices to hear the case, the school district said administrators around the nation needed a definitive ruling from the Supreme Court on their power to discipline students for what they say away from school. “The question presented recurs constantly and has become even more urgent as Covid-19 has forced schools to operate online,” a brief for the school district said. “Only this court can resolve this threshold First Amendment question bedeviling the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools.”

Justin Driver, a law professor at Yale and the author of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court and the Battle for the American Mind” agreed with the school district, to a point.

“It is difficult to exaggerate the stakes of this constitutional question,” he said. But he added that schools had no business telling students what they could say when they were not in school.

“In the modern era, a tremendous percentage of minors’ speech occurs off campus but online,” he said. “Judicial decisions that permit schools to regulate off-campus speech that criticizes public schools are antithetical to the First Amendment. Such decisions empower schools to reach into any student’s home and declare critical statements verboten, something that should deeply alarm all Americans.”

The key precedent is from a different era. In 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court allowed students to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War but said disruptive speech, at least on school grounds, could be punished.

Dec. 27

New York Times, Commentary: Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break From the Media Maelstrom. It’s Working, Ben Smith, Dec. 27, 2020. She is the breakout star of the newsletter platform Substack, doing the opposite of most media as she calmly situates the news of the day in the long sweep of American history.

Last Wednesday, I broke the news to Heather Cox Richardson that she was the most successful individual author of a paid publication on the breakout newsletter platform Substack.

Early that morning, she had posted that day’s installment of “Letters From an American” to Facebook, quickly garnering more than 50,000 reactions and then, at 2:14 a.m., she emailed it to about 350,000 people. She summarized, as she always does, the events of the day, and her 1,120 words covered a bipartisan vote on a spending measure, President Trump’s surprise attack on that bill, and a wave of presidential pardons. Her voice was, as it always is, calm, at a slight distance from the moment: “Normally, pardons go through the Justice Department, reviewed by the pardon attorney there, but the president has the right to act without consulting the Department of Justice,” she wrote. “He has done so.”

The news of her ranking seemed to startle Dr. Richardson, who in her day job is a professor of 19th century American history at Boston College. The Substack leader board, a subject of fascination among media insiders, is a long way from her life on a Maine peninsula — particularly as the pandemic has ended her commute — that seems drawn from the era she studies. On our Zoom chat, she sat under a portrait that appeared as if it could be her in period costume, but is, in fact, her great-great-grandmother, who lived in the same fishing village, population a bit over 600.

Dec. 26

donald trump melania trump piano pose

TMZ, Donald Trump Says 'Elitist Snobs' in Fashion Biz Kept Melania Off Magazine Covers, Staff report, Dec. 26, 2020. Donald Trump has too many grievances to count ... the latest being his anger that Melania (shown in a file photo with him) has not graced a single magazine cover in the 4 years he's been President, and he thinks he knows why.

Trump tweeted his outrage that, as he called her, "the most elegant First Lady" has been blackballed from mag covers by "elite snobs," and without directly saying it, it seems he might be zeroing in on Anna Wintour.

Melania was on the cover of Vogue in 2005, shortly after her marriage to Trump, but that was it.

Michelle Obama, by contrast, was on the cover of Vogue 3 times during her tenure in the White House. The last cover was in November 2016 ... after Trump's victory. As you know, the Obamas popularity drives Trump insane, so no surprise here.

Melania was actually on one cover that we know of ... the February 2017 issue of Vanity Fair Mexico.

Wintour is not a Trump fan, for sure. She's been public about her political preferences, which include Kamala Harris, whom she profiled in April 2018.

How 'bout focusing on that COVID relief bill, please.

Dec. 22

Washington Post, Millions of Christmas presents may arrive late because of USPS package delays, Jacob Bogage and Hannah Denham, Dec. 22, 2020 (print ed.). Historic volumes of e-commerce orders, soaring coronavirus cases among its workforce and continuing fallout from a hobbled cost-cutting program are choking U.S. Postal Service operations.

Nearly 19,000 of the agency’s 644,000 workers have called in sick or are isolating because of covid-19, according to the American Postal Workers Union. Meanwhile, packages have stacked up inside some postal facilities, leading employees to push them aside to create narrow walkways on shop floors.

Some processing plants are now refusing to accept new mail shipments. The backlogs are so pronounced that some managers have reached out to colleagues in hopes of diverting mail shipments to nearby facilities. But often, those places are full, too. Meanwhile, packages sit on trucks for days waiting for floor space to open so their loads can be sorted.

“[Customers] are screaming, ‘Where’s my package? Why did it go to Jacksonville, Fla., when it’s going to Miami?’" said Martin Ramirez, president of the APWU Local 170 in Ohio. “I can’t speak on that. I’ve never seen this before where these places are overflowing.”

The end result: Many families won’t see online orders arrive in time for Christmas Day.

New York Times, Ex-Bloomberg Reporter Who Covered Martin Shkreli Reveals Relationship With Him, Katie Robertson, Dec. 22, 2020 (print ed.). Christie Smythe helped break the story of Mr. Shkreli’s arrest in 2015. Then she “started to fall for him,” she said, and quit her job at Bloomberg News. The relationship between Ms. Smythe, who joined Bloomberg News as a legal reporter in 2012, and Mr. Shkreli was revealed in an Elle magazine article on Sunday.

Dec. 21

New York Times, Analysis: The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media, Ben Smith, Updated Dec. 21, 2020. Last week, a lawyer for Antonio Mugica sent scathing letters to Fox, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name. Voting machine companies threaten “highly dangerous” cases against Fox, Newsmax and OAN, says Floyd Abrams.

Antonio Mugica, left, was in Boca Raton when an American presidential election really melted down in 2000, and he watched with shocked fascination as local government officials argued over hanging chads and butterfly ballots.

It was so bad, so incompetent, that Mr. Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer, decided to shift the focus of his digital security company, Smartmatic, which had been working for banks. It would offer its services to what would obviously be a growth industry: electronic voting machines. He began building a global company that ultimately provided voting machinery and software for elections from Brazil to Belgium and his native Venezuela. He even acquired an American company, then called Sequoia.

Last month, Mr. Mugica initially took it in stride when his company’s name started popping up in grief-addled Trump supporters’ wild conspiracy theories about the election.

“Of course I was surprised, but at the same time, it was pretty clear that these people were trying to discredit the election and they were throwing out 25 conspiracy theories in parallel,” he told me in an interview last week from Barbados, where his company has an office. “I thought it was so absurd that it was not going to have legs.”

But by Nov. 14, he knew he had a problem. That’s when Rudy Giuliani, serving as the president’s lawyer, suggested that one voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, had a sinister connection to vote counts in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.” Mr. Giuliani declared on Twitter that the company “was a front for SMARTMATIC, who was really doing the computing. Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?”

Soon his company, and a competitor, Dominion — which sells its services to about 1,900 of the county governments that administer elections across America — were at the center of Mr. Giuliani’s and Sidney Powell’s theories, and on the tongues of commentators on Fox News and its farther-right rivals, Newsmax and One America News.

Here’s the thing: Smartmatic wasn’t even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its founders’ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.

In an era of brazen political lies, Mr. Mugica has emerged as an unlikely figure with the power to put the genie back in the bottle.

Last week, his lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name — and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit.

He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose “lean finely textured beef” was described by ABC News as “pink slime.”

Washington Post, Perspective: There are flickers of hope for local journalism. So far, it’s not nearly enough, Margaret Sullivan, right, Dec. 21, 2020 (print ed.). With its 14-member newsroom, Mississippi Today is by far the largest in the state, he said. Only 20 years ago, a typical regional newspaper boasted a newsroom staff of at least 100; larger ones, as in Cleveland and Detroit, had 300 journalists or more.

Fifty-five news outlets have closed for good since the pandemic began — and that’s on top of more than 2,000 newspapers that have folded since 2004. Thousands of local journalists have been fired or furloughed.

New York Times, The Antitrust Case Against Big Tech, Shaped by Tech Industry Exiles, Daisuke Wakabayashi, Dec. 21, 2020 (print ed.). Regulators are relying on insiders like Dina Srinivasan, who left her digital ad job after concluding that “Facebook and Google were going to win and everybody else is going to lose.”

Three years ago, before she became an antitrust scholar whose work laid the blueprint for a new wave of monopoly lawsuits against Big Tech, Dina Srinivasan was a digital advertising executive bored with her job and worried about the bleak outlook for the industry.

“It just felt like, OK, Facebook and Google were going to win and everybody else is going to lose and that’s just the way the cards were stacked,” Ms. Srinivasan said. “I don’t think this was widely understood.”

So she quit her job at a unit of WPP, the world’s largest advertising agency, and pursued something she hadn’t done since her days as a law student at Yale: writing a legal treatise.

With no background in academia but an insider’s understanding of the digital ad world and a stack of economics books, she wrote a paper with a novel theory — that Facebook harmed consumers by extracting more and more personal data for using its free services. This year, she argued in another paper that Google’s monopoly in advertising technology allowed for the type of self-dealing and insider trading that would be illegal on Wall Street.

Her arguments reframed the antitrust thinking about the companies. And her timing was perfect.

New York Times, Giving Billions Fast, MacKenzie Scott Upends Philanthropy, Nicholas Kulish, Through a streamlined operation, Ms. Scott has given away $6 billion this year, much of it to small charities and nonprofits. On a Monday evening in November, Dorri McWhorter, the chief executive of the Y.W.C.A. Metropolitan Chicago, got a phone call from a representative of the billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. The news was almost too good to be true: Her group would be receiving a $9 million gift.

Between the pandemic and the recession, it had been a difficult year for the Chicago Y.W.C.A., which runs a rape crisis hotline and provides counseling to women on jobs, mortgages and other issues. Money was tight. Ms. McWhorter shed tears of joy on the call.

Similar scenes were playing out at charities nationwide. Ms. Scott’s team recently sent out hundreds of out-of-the-blue emails to charities, notifying them of an incoming gift. Some of the messages were viewed as possible scams or landed in spam filters. Many of the gifts were the largest the charities had ever received. Ms. McWhorter was not the only recipient who cried.

All told, Ms. Scott — whose fortune comes from shares of Amazon that she got after her divorce last year from Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder — had given more than $4 billion to 384 groups, including 59 other Y.W.C.A. chapters.

Dec. 20

NBC News, Kansas City Star apologizes for decades of racist coverage, Tim Stelloh, Dec. 20, 2020. The newspaper had “robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition,” the newspaper's editor wrote.

One Midwest’s most influential newspapers apologized Sunday for what its top editor described as decades of racist coverage of Kansas City.

In a letter to readers, Mike Fannin, who has been the Kansas City Star's editor since 2008, wrote that the newspaper “disenfranchised, ignored and scorned generations of Black Kansas Citians. It reinforced Jim Crow laws and redlining.”

For much of the early history of the newspaper, which was founded in 1880, the Star “robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition,” Fannin wrote.

The apology came three months after the publisher of another influential U.S. newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, acknowledged its own “blind spots” and said its staff was beginning the process of “acknowledging” its past biases and affirming that its newsroom will not tolerate prejudice.

Dec. 19

Palmer Report, Opinion: Fox News forced to finally crack down on lunatic host Lou Dobbs, Bill Palmer, Dec. 19, 2020. Just how much of a lunatic tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist has Lou Dobbs become? Fox News doesn’t even air him on its main network, and instead airs him on Fox Business Channel. Dobbs’ show generally consists of laugh out loud conspiracy theories, with a healthy heaping of racism and pro-Trump cheerleading.

But now Lou Dobbs’ nonsense has finally gotten him in trouble. After one voting machine company demanded that Fox stop allowing hosts like Dobbs to spread phony conspiracy theories about its machines, Fox responded by forcing Dobbs to air a two minute long fact check, shooting down his own claims. What’s more, Mediaite says that Fox is going to force Judge Jeanine Pirro to air the same fact check during her show this weekend.

Hosts like Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro are unwatchably inane, and we’ve long suspected that Fox only keeps them around because Donald Trump is a fan of them. We’ve wondered if the end of Trump’s presidency might eventually mean the end of their shows. At this rate they might not last as long as we were expecting.

Washington Post, The massive cyber spy campaign against the U.S. government is grave and ongoing. And Russia is ‘pretty clearly’ behind it, Pompeo says, Ellen Nakashima, Dec. 19, 2020. The secretary of state is the first Trump administration official to publicly blame Moscow for the hacks.

Russia is behind the massive, ongoing cyber spy campaign against the federal government and private sector, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday — the first Trump administration official to publicly blame Moscow for the computer hacks.

“This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” said Pompeo, right, in an interview with “The Mark Levin Show.”

The department he leads is one of a growing list of federal agencies discovered in recent days to have been breached.

Until now the administration has refrained from attributing the operation and President Trump, who has long expressed skepticism that Russia engaged in interference in the 2016 election, has not publicly addressed the issue.

Washington Post, Federal prosecutors accuse Zoom executive of working with Chinese government to surveil users and suppress video calls, Drew Harwell and Ellen Nakashima, Dec. 19, 2020 (print ed.). The case is a stunning blow for the $100 billion video-call giant that has become the go-to source for staying in touch during the pandemic.

A security executive with the video-tech giant Zoom worked with the Chinese government to terminate Americans’ accounts and disrupt video calls about the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, Justice Department prosecutors said Friday.

The case is a stunning blow for Zoom, one of the most popular new titans of American tech, which during the pandemic became one of the main ways people work, socialize and share ideas around the world. The California-based company is now worth more than $100 billion.

But the executive’s work with the Chinese government, as alleged by FBI agents in a criminal complaint unsealed Friday in a Brooklyn federal court, highlights the often-hidden threats of censorship on a forum promoted as a platform for free speech. It also raises questions about how Zoom is protecting users’ data from governments that seek to surveil and suppress people inside their borders and abroad.

Prosecutors said the China-based executive, Xinjiang Jin, worked as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence services, sharing user information and terminating video calls at the Chinese government’s request.

peter navarro white house image

Washington Post, Analysis: This might be the most embarrassing document created by a White House staffer, Philip Bump, Dec. 19, 2020 (print ed.). Peter Navarro's compilation of nonsensical fraud claims offers a new low-water mark,

The first thing I did when I cracked open White House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s 30-page compilation of President Trump’s voter-fraud greatest hits was check a footnote. The introduction claimed that, as of midnight on Election Day, Trump looked to be “well on his way to winning a second term,” given that he “was already a lock to win both Florida and Ohio.”

But this, in broad strokes, is how Navarro’s document operates. It throws out as near-certainties things that are unfounded, misrepresented or unimportant.

His footnotes cite the blatantly pro-Trump Epoch Times more than the Washington Post and the New York Times combined. In fact, he celebrates his reliance on biased and flawed sources of information

Put another way, Americans seeking dubious or debunked information are only able to find it from outlets willing to publish and air dubious and debunked information.

One of the hallmark characteristics of rhetoric from the White House is the substitution of volume for value. Trump offers dishonest statements with abandon, hoping that his audience will accept as true at least some small percentage of his blizzard of nonsense.

But the White House also uses presenting a lot of accusations as somehow being evidence supporting the accusations, as though getting 500 people to say they believe aliens invented pistachios makes it more likely to be true than if one person said it. Navarro does this exact thing explicitly at one point, in fact, hyping widespread belief that something dubious occurred — belief fostered by Trump and the above-named media outlets — as evidence that it did.

New York Times, A Riveting ISIS Story, Told in a Times Podcast, Falls Apart, Mark Mazzetti, Ian Austen, Graham Bowley and Malachy Browne, Dec. 19, 2020 (print ed.). He described the killings in lurid detail — how he shot one man in the head and stabbed another in the heart before hanging the corpse on a cross.

A Canadian’s gruesome account as an Islamic State executioner in Syria, which was the subject of the “Caliphate” podcast, was fabricated, officials say.

He spoke at length about joining the religious police of the Islamic State in Syria, and being trucked to a terrorist training session on attacking the West, including North America, his homeland.

He recounted how Islamic State commanders displayed maps and color-coded instructions, showing recruits like him how to strike major Western targets, get into restricted areas, kill people and attain martyrdom.

They envisioned “something as spectacular as 9/11,” he said. “They wanted to outdo Al Qaeda, make their mark.”

But Shehroze Chaudhry, the central figure in the 2018 podcast “Caliphate,” by The New York Times, was a fabulist who spun jihadist tales about killing for the Islamic State in Syria, Canadian and American intelligence and law enforcement officials contend.

Washington Post, The New York Times could not verify ISIS claims in its ‘Caliphate’ podcast. Now it’s returning a prestigious award, Elahe Izadi and Paul Farhi, Dec. 19, 2020 (print ed.). The New York Times acknowledged Friday that a celebrated podcast that featured a would-be Islamic State terrorist’s account of committing atrocities in Syria could not be substantiated, completing a spectacular journalistic fall for the award-winning series and its primary reporter.

In several episodes of “Caliphate,” a Canadian man named Shehroze Chaudhry hauntingly described barbaric acts that included executing two hostages in Syria in 2014.

But after a nearly three-month review, the Times concluded that the podcast, co-hosted by reporter Rukmini Callimachi and audio producer Andy Mills, “did not meet our standards for accuracy,” according to an editor’s note now attached to the series.

Dec. 17

virginia roberts giuffres st tropaz naomi cambpell

Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, recruited by Mar-a-Lago member Jeffrey Epstein's operation from her work as a towel girl at poolside at the Trump-owned club in Florida, is shown in her travels at a party in St. Tropez in bygone days with such society figures as model Naomi Campbell, top right, and Epstein's friend, sex partner and alleged recruiter, Ghislaine Maxwell, back to camer at upper right. Maxwell is seeking release from pre-trial custody for the holidays pending trial on sex trafficking charges next summer.

New York Post, Jeffrey Epstein’s modeling agent pal Jean-Luc Brunel detained in Paris, Rebecca Rosenberg, Dec. 17, 2020. Jean-Luc Brunel, model-scout pal of late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, has been taken into custody in France for questioning on suspicion of raping and trafficking minors, Paris prosecutors said.

jean luc brunel Brunel, who was being investigated as part of a French probe into the sexual abuse of women and girls by Epstein and his friends, was picked up Wednesday at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, officials said. He was about to board a flight to Dakar, Senegal, the Guardian reported.

Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre alleges that Brunel, 74, had once “gifted” the late financier three 12-year-old French girls from poor families for his birthday.

She alleged that Brunel bought them in Paris from their parents, promising to promote their modeling careers, then shipped them to New York to be sexually abused by Epstein. They were allegedly returned to France the following day.

Giuffre, who has claimed she was coerced into being Epstein’s “sex slave,” made the disturbing disclosure in court papers.

Brunel’s lawyer has previously said he denies the allegations. He has been dogged by sexual abuse claims for decades. Ghislaine Maxwell introduced Brunel to Epstein in the 1980s, according to the Guardian. Maxwell was arrested in July on charges she recruited girls and women to be abused by her and Epstein. She has pleaded not guilty.

Washington Post, Nearly 40 states sue Google over search manipulation, marking the third antitrust salvo against the tech giant, Tony Romm, Dec. 17, 2020. The lawsuit by the state attorneys general marks the third competition case that U.S. regulators have filed against the search-and-advertising giant since October

Dec. 15

Daily Beast, Opinion: Plea to the Press: Don’t Make Trump 2021’s Shadow President, Matt Lewis, Dec. 15, 2020. BE BEST, MEDIA! As president, everything he says is news. Soon, that won’t be so. We have to learn not to take his bait.

There’s a dirty little secret between Donald Trump (right, in a file photo by Jim Watson of AFP via Getty) and the media that at this point isn’t much of a secret.

A symbiosis exists between us; we use him and he uses us. Now that his presidency is mercifully taking its last gasp, can we quit him and return to a modicum of sanity and normalcy? Starting in January, can we string together a few Trump-free news cycles? More to the point: can we quit taking his bait? Or are we doomed to cover Trump’s antics as a sort of shadow presidency?

New York Times, An Agent’s Mistake Cost an N.B.A. Player $3 Million. He Paid Him Back, Sopan Deb, Dec. 15, 2020 (print ed.). All Bill Duffy had to do was inform the Miami Heat that Anthony Carter planned to return. Two decades after failing to do that, Duffy has made his client whole.

Washington Post,‘This is the reality’: Newsmax and One America grapple uneasily with Biden’s electoral college victory, Jeremy Barr, Dec. 15, 2020 (print ed.). As electors certified the presidential vote, the conservative outlets that have tried to outflank Fox News changed their tune on election denialism — slightly.

For the past six weeks, two upstart cable news channels — Newsmax and One America News — have tried to outflank Fox News from the right by embracing President Trump’s strategy of election denialism.

But on Monday, as the electoral college sealed Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, their paths seemed to diverge slightly.

Dec. 13

michael pack

Washington Post, Opinion: Restoring the Voice of America after a Trump ‘wrecking ball’ won’t be easy. But it’s worth saving, Margaret Sullivan, right, Dec. 13, 2020. The global news organization has been under siege by CEO Michael Pack (shown above), who claims to be rooting out bias.

Washington Post, John le Carré, who lifted the spy novel to literature, dies at 89, Matt Schudel, Dec. 13, 2020. John le Carré, a British author who drew on the enigma of his incorrigibly criminal father and his own experiences as a Cold War-era spy to write powerful novels about a bleak, morally compromised world in which international intrigue and personal betrayal went hand in hand, died Dec. 12 at a hospital in Cornwall, England. He was 89.

The cause was pneumonia, his U.S. publisher, Viking Penguin, said in a statement.

In a literary career spanning six decades, Mr. le Carré published more than two dozen books. His best-known titles, including “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1963) and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1974), sold in the millions and were made into acclaimed film and television adaptations. More than a master of espionage writing, he was widely regarded as an elegant prose stylist whose skills and reputation were not limited by genre or era.

Dec. 12

Washington Post, Opinion: I’m burning a source. Here’s why, Radley Balko, Dec. 12, 2020. For the past several months, I’ve been working on a new series about policing in Little Rock. In 2018, I published an investigation into how the city had been conducting illegal no-knock drug raids, and then another into police misconduct disciplinary problems in the city’s police department.

A Little Rock attorney lied to me during an off-the-record conversation, then mischaracterized that conversation in a sworn court document.

Dec. 10

Washington Post, U.S., states sue Facebook as an illegal monopoly, setting stage for potential breakup, Tony Romm, Dec. 10, 2020 (print ed.). The U.S. government and 48 attorneys general filed landmark antitrust lawsuits against Facebook on Wednesday, seeking to break up the social networking giant over charges it engaged in illegal, anti-competitive tactics to buy, bully and kill its rivals.

The twin lawsuits filed in federal district court allege that Facebook under its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, behaved for years as an unlawful monopoly — one that had repeatedly weaponized its vast stores of data, seemingly limitless wealth and savvy corporate muscle to fend off threats and maintain its stature as one of the most widely used social networking services in the world.

The state and federal complaints chiefly challenge Facebook’s acquisition of two companies: Instagram, a photo-sharing tool, and WhatsApp, a messaging service. Investigators said the purchases ultimately helped Facebook remove potentially potent rivals from the digital marketplace, allowing the tech giant to enrich itself on advertising dollars at the cost of users, who as a result have fewer social networking options at their disposal.

Read the state and federal lawsuits against Facebook

The lawsuits together represent the most significant political and legal threats to Facebook in its more than 16-year history, setting up a high-profile clash between U.S. regulators and one of Silicon Valley’s most profitable firms that could take years to resolve. Antitrust regulators explicitly asked a court to consider forcing Facebook to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp to remedy their competition concerns. Such a punishment would unwind Zuckerberg’s digital empire and severely constrain Facebook’s ambitions.

The Federal Trade Commission, led by Republican Chairman Joe Simons, brought its lawsuit in a D.C. district court. Letitia James, the Democratic attorney general of New York, led her Democratic and Republican counterparts from dozens of states and territories in filing their complaint in the same venue. Appearing at a news conference, James on Wednesday sharply rebuked Facebook for having put “profits ahead of consumers’ welfare and privacy.”

Washington Post, Silicon Valley feared Facebook’s bullying tactics years before they came to the attention of regulators, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Dec. 10, 2020 (print ed.). Facebook hasn’t kept its promises of independence to WhatsApp and Instagram.

Facebook executives approached Ali Partovi, the creator of a popular app that used Facebook’s data, a decade ago with a threatening ultimatum. Sell your company to us or we will shut you down, according to legal filings. Partovi’s app, iLike, had built a predecessor to the “like” button.

Partovi refused the offer. Shortly after, Facebook discontinued features that iLike relied upon, pushing Partovi to sell his start-up to Myspace for a fraction of its previous value. Facebook then built its own “like” button, modeled after iLike.

The negotiations — when Facebook was a much smaller player — are early evidence of the hardball tactics to neutralize competition that got the social network to where it is today: a platform that counts more than a third of the world’s population as monthly users of its family of apps, which include WhatsApp messaging and the photo-sharing service Instagram.

That behavior is now the subject of sweeping antitrust lawsuits filed Wednesday from 48 state attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission. The suits allege that the company is a monopoly that abused its market power through years of anti-competitive conduct and illegal acquisitions, enabling Facebook to become the world’s largest social network while stripping users of alternatives.

Dec. 10

Washington Post, A North Carolina judge is blocking journalists from his courtroom. One objected — and got handcuffed, Elahe Izadi and Mark Berman, Dec. 11, 2020. The judge has given no reason for the order in a county wracked by racial-justice protests. That’s causing concern for transparency advocates.

It started last week, when a District Court judge blocked them from a hearing in his courtroom. Though many assumed it had to do with the pandemic, he offered no explanation.

So this week, three newspapers filed a motion asking for clarity and demanding access to observe a Tuesday hearing in a case that has drawn the attention of local Black Lives Matter activists. One publisher pushed the issue harder, walking into the hearing and telling Judge Fred Wilkins he had a right to be there.

That’s when the handcuffs came out.

Dec. 9

New York Times, FireEye, a Top Cybersecurity Firm, Says It Was Hacked by a Nation-State, David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, Dec. 9, 2020 (print ed.). The Silicon Valley company said hackers — almost certainly Russian — made off with tools that could be used to mount new attacks around the world.

For years, the cybersecurity firm FireEye has been the first call for government agencies and companies around the world who have been hacked by the most sophisticated attackers, or fear they might be.

Now it looks like the hackers — in this case, evidence points to Russia’s intelligence agencies — may be exacting their revenge.

FireEye revealed on Tuesday that its own systems were pierced by what it called “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.” The company said hackers used “novel techniques” to make off with its own tool kit, which could be useful in mounting new attacks around the world.

It was a stunning theft, akin to bank robbers who, having cleaned out local vaults, then turned around and stole the F.B.I.’s investigative tools. In fact, FireEye said on Tuesday, moments after the stock market closed, that it had called in the F.B.I.

michael pack

Washington Post, Voice of America interim director pushed out by Trump-appointed overseer in final flurry of actions to assert control, Paul Farhi, Dec. 9, 2020 (print ed.). Trump appointee overseeing VOA won’t cooperate with Biden transition team.

The head of the agency that oversees Voice of America removed the international broadcasting service’s interim director on Tuesday, in a move apparently aimed at asserting greater control over its editorial operations.

Michael Pack, shown above in a file photo, a Trump appointee who has made sweeping and controversial changes at VOA and its sister broadcasting networks, pushed out Elez Biberaj, a VOA veteran whom Pack had appointed as the head of the service on an interim basis in June.

Biberaj, who has worked as a journalist for 40 years at VOA, had quietly resisted Pack’s attempts to change the news organization into one more aligned with President Trump’s views and policies.

Pack, who runs a federal agency called the U.S. Agency for Global Media that supervises VOA and four other government-funded news and information networks, has asserted the right to breach a regulatory “firewall” that prohibits political appointees from direct involvement in the work of journalists at VOA and sister agencies, such as Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

Washington Post, State, federal authorities expected to file antitrust lawsuits against Facebook, Tony Romm, Dec. 9, 2020 (print ed.). The filings from more than 40 attorneys general and the U.S. government will allege the tech giant engaged in unlawful tactics to buy or kill off its rivals and solidify its dominance in social networking.

New York Times, In a reversal, YouTube will remove new misleading videos that claim fraud or errors influenced the 2020 election, Davey Alba, Dec. 9, 2020. YouTube on Wednesday announced changes to how it handles videos about the 2020 presidential election, saying it would remove youtube logo Custom new videos that mislead people by claiming that widespread fraud or errors influenced the outcome of the election.

The company said it was making the change because Tuesday was the so-called safe harbor deadline — the date by which all state-level election challenges, such as recounts and audits, are supposed to be completed. YouTube said that enough states have certified their election results to determine that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the president-elect.

Dec. 7

New York Times, Bob Dylan Sells His Songwriting Catalog in Blockbuster Deal, Ben Sisario, Dec. 7, 2020. Universal Music purchased Bob Dylan’s songwriting catalog, including classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The deal, which covers Dylan’s entire career, from his earliest tunes to his latest album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” was struck directly with Dylan, 79, who has long controlled the vast majority of his own songwriting copyrights. The price was not disclosed, but is estimated at more than $300 million.

Washington Post, FCC announces $9.2 billion in awards to provide rural areas with broadband access, Christian Davenport, Dec. 7, 2020. SpaceX joins Charter Communications, LTD Broadband and the Rural Electric Cooperative Consortium in receiving large grants to provide broadband Internet service to millions of Americans who now lack access to reliable service.

The Federal Communications Commission on Monday awarded $9.2 billion in funding to help companies provide broadband Internet service to millions of Americans without access to reliable service.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called the awards the “single largest step ever taken to bridge the digital divide.”

Among the big winners was Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has been launching dozens of satellites at a time in a bold attempt to build a massive constellation in space that would help serve remote or rural areas. The company received $886 million from the FCC to help serve hundreds of thousands of customers in 35 states, a huge boost in its quest to pull off a feat even Musk has said had a high likelihood of failure.

So far the company has launched nearly 1,000 satellites as part of its Starlink constellation and has begun a pilot program in the northern United States and southern Canada it calls “Better Than Nothing.”

The company has approval to launch some 12,000 satellites, and as the number increases, so will the reliability and speed of its service, the company has said. It plans to expand its beta service by early next year and “rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021,” according to its website.

Biden, top Democrats lay groundwork for multibillion-dollar push to boost U.S. broadband

The funding gives SpaceX an even bigger lead over its competitors in the race to build the Internet in space. Recently, OneWeb emerged from bankruptcy and appointed a new CEO. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon also intends to flood Earth’s orbit with its own satellites in a project it calls Kuiper that it has said would bring broadband to “unserved and underserved communities around the world.” (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

In a statement, Pai said the awards would bring “welcome news to millions of unconnected rural Americans who for too long have been on the wrong side of the digital divide. They now stand to gain access to high-speed, high-quality broadband service.” The winning bidders must provide financial statements, coverage maps and certify that their network is capable of delivering “to at least 95% of the required number of locations in each relevant state,” the FCC said.

Dec. 6

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump is leaving press freedom in tatters. Biden can take these bold steps to repair the damage, Margaret Sullivan, right, Dec. 6, 2020. In words and deeds, Biden should act quickly to restore America’s reputation and stop the attacks on journalists.

New York Times, Opinion: Why Do So Many Americans Think the Election Was Stolen? Ross Douthat, Dec. 6, 2020 (print ed.). Looking for the reasons behind a seemingly unreasonable belief.

There have been few surprises this past month in how Donald Trump has dealt with the reality of his electoral defeat.

Anyone familiar with his career could have predicted that he would claim to have been cheated out of victory.

So far, so predictable. But speaking as a cynical observer of the Trump era, one feature of November did crack my jaded shell a bit: not his behavior or the system’s response, but the sheer scale of the belief among conservatives that the election was really stolen, measured not just in polling data but in conversations and arguments, online and in person, with people I would not have expected to embrace it.

Drawn from my conversations in the past few weeks, here’s an attempt at a taxonomy of these unlikely seeming fraud believers.

The conspiracy-curious normie.
The outsider-intellectual
The recently radicalized

At the moment, the voter-fraud narrative is being deployed, often by people more cynical than the groups I’ve just described, to help an outgoing president — one who twice lost the popular vote and displayed gross incompetence in the face of his administration’s greatest challenge — stake a permanent claim to the leadership of his party and establish himself as the presumptive Republican nominee in 2024.

And it’s being used to push aside the more compelling narrative that the Republican Party could take away from 2020, which is that Trump’s presidency demonstrated that populism can provide a foundation for conservatism, but to build on it the right needs a very different leader than the man Joe Biden just defeated.

Washington Post, SNL skewers Giuliani and Trump’s ballot fraud claims, Helena Andrews-Dyer, Dec. 6, 2020. On "Saturday Night Live," Rudy Giuliani's flatulence and Cecily Strong's drunken conspiracy theorist Melissa Carone stole the cold open.

In its first episode after celebrating President-elect Joe Biden’s win, “Saturday Night Live” lampooned voter fraud conspiracy theories and later turned the punchlines inward to address its own controversy.

First, the cold open poked fun at political theater that was practically made for Studio 8H. Real life took a decidedly bonkers turn last Wednesday as the Michigan House of Representatives Oversight Committee heard testimony on possible election fraud from Trump campaign attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and the campaign’s star witness Melissa Carone, who claimed with no evidence that tens of thousands of votes had been counted twice.

The opening scene began with SNL player Mikey Day assuming the part of Michigan state Rep. Steven Johnson (R) who introduced the hearing thusly: “It is my honor and also one of the great horrors of my life to welcome President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.”

SNL’s famed chameleon Kate McKinnon then took over as a bald (and very flatulent) Giuliani. “It’s great to be in a courtroom where I’m not the defendant,” she said.

McKinnon-as-Giuliani then swore that he and Trump would overturn illegal votes in “Georgylvania,” “Pennsachusettes,” and “North Dacanada.” When Rep. Johnson countered that the campaign’s voter fraud claims were based on “zero actual evidence,” Giuliani brought in his “highly intelligent, barely intoxicated” eyewitnesses.

First at-bat was Cecily Strong as a dead ringer for the real life Carone with black frame glasses, a blonde messy top knot and a business-y blazer.

Hollywood PoliTrivia, The often-forgotten third industry of Hollywood, Wayne Madsen, right, Dec. 6, 2020. The thirteen-story Capitol Records Tower is almost as wayne madsen screen shot iconic as the famed "Hollywood" sign overlooking Tinsel Town from the Hollywood Hills in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Musical artists recording their singles and albums at the Capitol Records Tower did so at a time when their hits sometimes ended up as part of motion picture scores. During the heyday of Hollywood, movies, television shows, and record hits were all interwoven in what was then the entertainment capital of the world.

Radio listeners around the world were also keenly aware of Hollywood's connection to music when, every week and beginning on July 4, 1970, deejay Casey Kasem played "Billboard" magazine's top popular music hits on "American Top 40."

Dec. 3

Washington Post, DOJ sues Facebook, alleging it improperly hired foreign workers, Tony Romm and Abigail Hauslohner, The Justice Department on Thursday sued Facebook over allegations that it discriminated against Americans in the way it hired temporary foreign workers for thousands of well-paid positions.

The lawsuit contends that Facebook failed to properly advertise at least 2,600 jobs — and consider applications from U.S. citizens — before it offered the spots to foreign workers whom the tech giant was sponsoring for green cards granting permanent residence.

Facebook’s practices violated federal laws that require employers to demonstrate that there are no qualified U.S. workers available before it offers positions to temporary foreign workers it is sponsoring, the Justice Department said. The government sought unspecified monetary damages and other penalties against the tech giant for the alleged violations, which occurred in 2018 and 2019.

Washington Post, Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe crashed a private CNN teleconference. CNN says he may have broken the law, Jeremy Barr, Dec. 3, 2020. Over the last few years, Project Veritas has gathered evidence in an effort to prove that CNN slants its coverage to hurt President Trump.

In the past, that has meant surreptitiously recording and releasing videos of unsuspecting CNN employees talking about the network’s coverage, as well as releasing leaked tapes of comments made by network executives and staffers in editorial meetings.

But on Tuesday, Project Veritas — an organization that has used deceptive tactics in some of its attempts to capture proof of what it says is liberal bias and corruption in mainstream media and government — may have crossed a line.

To help promote a new cache of two months of recordings of CNN’s daily morning editorial calls, the group’s founder, James O’Keefe, filmed himself calling in to the network’s 9 a.m. meeting and pressing CNN President Jeff Zucker on the network’s journalistic integrity.

While Project Veritas had previously disseminated covert recordings of CNN’s daily meeting, in this video O’Keefe himself could be seen dialing in to a private CNN call — apparently without the knowledge or consent of participants.

Washington Post, Parler’s got a porn problem: Adult businesses target pro-Trump social network, Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell and Rachel Lerman, Dec. 3, 2020 (print ed.). Anyone following the #sexytrumpgirl hashtag on Parler, a social media site increasingly popular with conservatives, got an eyeful one recent Thursday evening as images of topless women and links to hardcore pornography websites appeared at a rapid-fire rate, often more than one per minute.

The surge of #sexytrumpgirl posts highlighted a broader dilemma for Parler: The site’s lax moderation policies, in keeping with its claims to being a bastion of free speech, have helped it become a magnet for pornographers, escort services and online sex merchants using hashtags targeting conservatives, such as #keepamericasexy and #milfsfortrump2020.

The pornography threatens to intrude on users not seeking sexual material and has the potential to complicate hopes the site may have to expand advertising, which is now limited. Experts on the impact of pornography say major companies typically avoid having their sales pitches appear alongside controversial imagery.

Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, for example, prohibit sexually explicit images and videos, while Twitter generally allows them so long as they show the images or actions of consenting adults.

Parler once banned all pornography but in recent months revised its terms of service to permit essentially anything that’s legal, making its policy close to Twitter’s, if slightly more permissive.

Washington Post, Kayleigh McEnany’s husband, an MLB pitcher, declines to wear mask at White House briefing, Des Bieler, Dec. 3, 2020 (print ed.). Sean Gilmartin, a free agent MLB pitcher and the husband of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, declined to wear a mask during a White House briefing Wednesday despite being asked to do so by a New York Times photographer.

According to a pool report by Chris Johnson of the Washington Blade, Gilmartin was standing near the back of the White House briefing room while McEnany conducted a news conference for approximately 25 minutes. New York Times photographer Doug Mills, a board member of the White House Correspondents’ Association, pointed out to Gilmartin that there is a policy requiring mask-wearing in White House press areas.

At that point, per the pool report, a White House staffer “incredulously” asked, “Kayleigh’s husband?” As Mills replied that the rules on mask-wearing applied to everyone, the staffer exited the room with Gilmartin, who played last season for the Tampa Bay Rays. Mills subsequently told Johnson that he was unaware of Gilmartin’s identity when he confronted the veteran relief pitcher.

Zeke Martin of the Associated Press, the president of the WHCA, told The Washington Post via email that his organization has “repeatedly encouraged everyone in the press areas to wear masks at all time, including with signage and frequent reminders that failing to do so puts themselves and others around them at greater risk.”

Dec. 2

Washington Post, Parler’s got a porn problem: Adult businesses target pro-Trump social network, Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell and Rachel Lerman, Dec. 2, 2020. Anyone following the #sexytrumpgirl hashtag on Parler, a social media site increasingly popular with conservatives, got an eyeful one recent Thursday evening as images of topless women and links to hardcore pornography websites appeared at a rapid-fire rate, often more than one per minute.

Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, for example, prohibit sexually explicit images and videos, while Twitter generally allows them so long as they show the images or actions of consenting adults.

Washington Post, To boost voter-fraud claims, Trump advocate Sidney Powell turns to unusual source: The longtime operator of QAnon’s Internet home, Drew Harwell, Dec. 2, 2020 (print ed.). In her legal quest to reverse the reality of last month’s election, President Trump’s recently disavowed attorney Sidney Powell has gained a strange new ally: The longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the QAnon conspiracy theory’s Internet home.

Powell on Tuesday filed an affidavit from Ron Watkins, the son of 8kun’s owner Jim Watkins, in a Georgia lawsuit alleging that Dominion Voting Systems machines used in the election had been corrupted as part of a sprawling voter-fraud conspiracy.

Powell has claimed that a diabolical scheme backed by global communists had invisibly shifted votes with help from a mysterious computer algorithm pioneered by the long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez — a wild story debunked by fact-checkers as a “fantasy parade” and devoid of actual proof.

No real evidence was included in Watkins’ affidavit, either. But Watkins, who said in the affidavit that he lives in Japan, nevertheless speculated that — based on his recent reading of the Dominion software’s online user guide — it may be “within the realm of possibility” for a biased poll worker to fraudulently switch votes.

Watkins’ affidavit marks one of the first official connections between a notable player in the QAnon conspiracy universe and Trump’s muddled multistate legal campaign, which some of the president’s allies have labeled, in the words of Chris Christie, a “national embarrassment.”

But many similar Trump-QAnon overtures have already played out on TV and social media since the election nearly one month ago. Watkins made similar allegations in an unchallenged segment on the far-right One America News network, which Trump retweeted to his 88 million followers last month.

Powell and her client Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, are effectively celebrities to QAnon loyalists, who posit online that both will soon help “release the Kraken” and expose a bombshell that could salvage a Trump second term, vanquish his enemies and unveil the hidden machinations of a communist conspiracy.

Since claiming to have resigned last month from 8kun, Watkins has devoted much of his online activity to claims about unfounded suspicions regarding Dominion, an 18-year-old voting-technology company whose computer programs, ballot printers and other products are used by elections officials in 28 states. Trump and his supporters have loudly attacked the Denver-based company as having contributed in some unproven way to steal the vote.

In a lengthy rebuttal last week, Dominion said that Powell’s claims were nonsensical: Manual recounts, machine tests and independent audits had reaffirmed that the voting systems had given accurate, undistorted results. Her “wild and reckless allegations,” the company added, were “not only demonstrably false” but had “led to stalking, harassment, and death threats to Dominion employees.”

In his affidavit, Watkins called himself an information security expert with nine years of experience as a “network and information defense analyst” and security engineer. But he did not mention that his experience had come largely through 8kun, the site once called 8chan that was knocked offline for nearly three months last year.

The message board is infamous for its anonymous threads of racist bile and extremist threats, and the site was used by gunmen to announce and celebrate three fatal attacks last year at an El Paso Walmart, a San Diego-area synagogue and a New Zealand mosque.

Major web-services providers that form the Internet’s backbone have refused to work with the site, with one executive telling The Washington Post last year that Watkins’ site had facilitated “mass shootings and extreme hate speech with intolerable consequences.”

Q has posted more than 4,000 times since 2017, but only three times since the election, sparking a mix of anxiety and faith-based recommitment among QAnon believers.

Dec. 1

Washington Post, Trump threatens to veto major defense bill unless Congress repeals Section 230, a legal shield for tech giants, Tony Romm, Dec. 1, 2020. President Trump on Tuesday threatened to veto an annual defense bill unless Congress repeals the federal law that spares Facebook, Google and other social-media sites from legal liability over their content-moderation decisions.

Trump delivered the ultimatum targeting the digital protections, known as Section 230, in a late-night tweet that marked a dramatic escalation in his attacks against Silicon Valley over unproven allegations that the country’s tech giants exhibit bias against conservatives.

“Section 230, which is a liability shielding gift from the U.S. to ‘Big Tech’ (the only companies in America that have it - corporate welfare!), is a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity,” Trump tweeted.

Unless the “very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA),” Trump continued, “I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk.”

Section 230: The little law that defined how the Internet works

FCC push to rethink legal protections for tech giants marks major turn amid months of political pressure

Section 230 is a decades-old federal law that spares websites from being held liable for their decisions about the posts, photos, videos and other content they take down or leave online. It is considered one of the web’s foundational laws, crafted in large part to facilitate free expression.

Many lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans — have sought to repeal Section 230 in recent years to hold tech giants accountable for failing to police a wide array of harmful content, including hate speech and election disinformation. But Trump and his Republican allies have seized on the debate to advance their arguments that Facebook, Google, Twitter and others exhibit political bias against conservatives — a charge for which they have provided little evidence, and one that the companies themselves deny.

Trump has ratcheted up his attacks as social-media companies have taken more aggressive action against his most controversial posts, including his tweets falsely claiming he won the 2020 presidential election. Tying the fight to the NDAA, a must-pass defense bill, threatens to inject a heavy dose of partisan politics into an annual national security debate.

Washington Post, To boost voter-fraud claims, Trump advocate Sidney Powell turns to unusual source: The longtime operator of QAnon’s Internet home, Drew Harwell, Dec. 1, 2020. In her legal quest to reverse the reality of last month’s election, President Trump’s recently disavowed attorney Sidney Powell has gained a strange new ally: The longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the QAnon conspiracy theory’s Internet home.

Q has posted more than 4,000 times since 2017, but only three times since the election, sparking a mix of anxiety and faith-based recommitment among QAnon believers.

November

Nov. 30

New York Times, The Luxury E-Commerce Wars Heat Up, Elizabeth Paton and Vanessa Friedman, Nov. 30, 20200 (print ed.). On one side: Amazon. On the other: a new alliance of brands and platforms. Who will win?

New York Times, Opinion: The King of Trump TV Thinks You’re Dumb Enough to Buy It, Ben Smith, Nov. 30, 20200 (print ed.). Chris Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax, has found a business opportunity in feeding Trump supporters the fantasy that the president could still win the election.

Mr. Ruddy, a Long Island-born 55-year-old, has emerged as the most audacious media entrepreneur of the Trump election fantasy. The chief executive of Newsmax and part of President Trump’s South Florida social circle, Mr. Ruddy has capitalized on the anger of Mr. Trump’s supporters at Fox News for delivering the unwelcome news, first in Arizona and then nationally, that Mr. Trump had lost his re-election campaign. On Newsmax, however, the fight is still on, the imaginary election-altering Kraken is yet to be released, Mr. Trump is striving valiantly for four more years and the ratings are incredible.

Newsmax’s prime-time ratings, which averaged 58,000 before Election Day, soared to 1.1 million afterward for its top shows, with one host, Greg Kelly, cheerleading on Twitter and on the air for “the QUEST TO COUNT all the LEGAL VOTES.” The ratings even drew a congratulatory call from Mr. Trump himself, my colleagues Michael Grynbaum and John Koblin reported last week.

But Mr. Ruddy is not the sort of true-believing ideologue his viewers may imagine in the foxhole alongside them. He is, rather, perhaps the purest embodiment of another classic television type, the revenue-minded cynic for whom the substance of programming is just a path to money and power.

Mr. Ruddy is hardly alone in the sudden scramble to convert Mr. Trump’s political profile into cash.

The noisiest effort is led by Hicks Equity Partners, the family business of a Republican National Committee co-chairman and friend of Donald Trump Jr., Thomas Hicks Jr. The Hicks group has sought to lead buyouts of both Newsmax and its smaller and stranger rival, the One America News Network.

Other possibilities for the president to cash in on his stature include creating a new Trump TV network from scratch, either as a television broadcast channel, a package of online video or even a way to direct cash into the Trump family political operation.

New York Times, TV Review: Which Nxivm Show Is Better? An Expert Investigates, Barry Meier, Nov. 30, 20200 (print ed.). The reporter who broke the story of the cult for The New York Times thought he was done with Nxivm. But he couldn’t resist seeing how “The Vow” and “Seduced” compared with his own experiences.

“The Vow” on HBO and “Seduced” on Starz have a combined running time of 13 hours. I make cameos in both shows as the reporter for The New York Times who in 2017 broke the story about Nxivm (pronounced Nex-e-um), and had fast forwarded through them to check out how good I looked. (Quite good, it turns out.)

The Nxivm story was bizarre and sickening. The group, which was based near Albany, N.Y., offered “self-improvement” courses, claiming they would help participants overcome fears and realize their potential. But Nxivm was a misogynistic, mind-control cult whose adherents referred to its leader, Keith Raniere, as “Vanguard,” and where women who joined a secret sorority were branded with a symbol containing his initials. Over the past two years, several Nxivm officials have pleaded guilty to federal charges and Raniere, following his conviction for sex trafficking and other crimes, was recently sentenced to 120 years in prison.

I’d had my fill of Nxivm. But the documentaries have become pandemic TV hits and, given my role in them, plenty of people have offered me their opinions of the shows. They have included friends and acquaintances I wouldn’t have expected to spend evenings absorbed by a sex cult. Then, my interest was further piqued when Apatow tweeted, “I may need to do a 300 hour podcast to explain why The Vow goes so much easier on the NXIVM cult than Seduced.”

I decided to watch the documentaries more closely to see how their depictions of Nxivm jibed with my impressions. They struck me as starkly different from each other. “The Vow” resembles a crime show that follows several Nxivm defectors and the actress Catherine Oxenberg, whose daughter India became a member of the cult, in real time as they try to alert law enforcement authorities to its horrors. “Seduced,” in which the Oxenbergs are the central characters, is a study of the coercive techniques used by cults and delves deeply into the abuse that Nxivm visited on its female members.

I watched “The Vow” first because I played a part in its story. I learned about Nxivm from the two filmmakers, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, who would go on to direct the show. The couple had previously made “The Square,” a well-received documentary about the Arab Spring, and we met in 2016 when they approached me about making a documentary based on a book I had written about a former FBI agent, Robert A. Levinson, who disappeared in Iran.

Nov. 27

New York Times, Pushed by the Pandemic, Amazon Goes on a Hiring Spree Without Equal, Karen Weise, Nov. 27, 2020. The company added 427,300 employees in 10 months for a work force of more than 1.2 million people globally, which approaches the population of Dallas. The hiring has taken place at headquarters in Seattle, at warehouses in rural communities and suburbs, and in countries such as India and Italy.

Amazon added 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its work force to more than 1.2 million people globally, up more than 50 percent from a year ago. Its number of workers now approaches the entire population of Dallas.

The spree has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic, which has turbocharged Amazon’s business and made it a winner of the crisis. Starting in July, the company brought on about 350,000 employees, or 2,800 a day. Most have been warehouse workers, but Amazon has also hired software engineers and hardware specialists to power enterprises such as cloud computing, streaming entertainment and devices, which have boomed in the pandemic.

Washington Post, Opinion: Horse-race political analysis is important — and flawed. We need more moral journalism, Michael Gerson, right, Nov. 27, 2020 (print ed.). michael gerson file photo Many of our most serious divisions have become openly moral. In the current case, the president and his strongest supporters believe that their cause — the maintenance of power — is worth the massive invalidation of legitimate votes in disproportionately Black urban areas. They claim this is a moral action — to fight socialism, or to protect tradition, or to serve their illustrious leader, or whatever.

They are wrong. And only an ethical argument can demonstrate it. It is racist to seek the invalidation of mainly Black votes in Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia or Atlanta. It is a violation of morality and an attack on democracy to throw away valid votes for nakedly political reasons.

This is not to argue against the importance of horse-race journalism or issues journalism, both of which will always have their place. It is only to put in a good word for moral journalism and moral commentary — which reveal the names and faces of those who suffer, and remind us of the duties we have to one another.

World Socialist Web Site, Commentary on 'Meet the Censored': Andre Damon, Matt Taibbi, Nov. 27, 2020. The following interview was conducted by journalist Matt Taibbi, the author of The Great Derangement (2009); Griftopia (2010); The Divide (2014); Insane Clown President (2017); I Can't Breathe (2017); and Hate Inc. (2019).

For much of the last four years, the WSWS World Socialist Web Site] has been a bit of a canary in the coal mine, when it comes to new forms of censorship and speech restrictions.

Many Americans didn't pay attention to new forms of content moderation until May, 2019, when a group of prominent tech platforms banned figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopolis. A legend quickly spread that such campaigns exclusively target the right. Long before then, however, the WSWS had been trying to sound the alarm about the impact of corporate speech moderation on dissenting voices on the progressive left. As far back as August of 2017, the WSWS sent an open letter to Google, demanding that it stop the "political blacklisting" of their site, as well as others.

Like many alternative news sites, WSWS noticed a steep decline in traffic in 2016-2017, after Donald Trump was elected and we began to hear calls for more regulation of "fake news." Determined to search out the reason, the site conducted a series of analyses that proved crucial in helping convince outlets like the New York Times to cover the issue. In its open letter to Google, the WSWS described inexplicable changes to search results in their political bailiwick:

Google searches for "Leon Trotsky" yielded 5,893 impressions (appearances of the WSWS in search results) in May of this year. In July, the same search yielded exactly zero impressions for the WSWS, which is the Internet publication of the international movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

The WSWS connected the change to Project Owl, a plan announced by Google in April of 2017 designed to "surface more authoritative content."

When I called Google about a year later for a story on a related subject, they explained the concept of "authority" as an exercise in weighting some credentials over others. So, I was told, an old search for "baseball" might first return a page for your local little league, while a new one would send you to the site for Major League Baseball.

The rub was that Google was now pushing viewers away from alternative sources, such that an article in the New York Times about Trotskyism might be ranked ahead of the world's leading Trotskyite media organ. Queries had to be right on the nose to call up a whole host of alternative sites, all of which had seen sharp drops in their Google search results.

The WSWS listed many of them: Alternet down 63 percent, Common Dreams down 37 percent, Democracy Now! down 36 percent, down 25 percent, etc. Even WikiLeaks, in the middle of an international furor over Russiagate, was down 30 percent.

In the years since, the WSWS has been one of the only major media outlets in the U.S. to regularly focus on tech censorship issues, frequently showing an interest in constitutional principles curiously absent in traditionally "liberal" publications. This has won the site an unpleasant brand of notoriety with tech platforms. In a recent Senate hearing, Google CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the WSWS when challenged by Utah Republican Mike Lee to name one left-wing "high profile person or entity" it had censored.

TK reached out to Andre Damon, writer and editor for the WSWS, to ask about the site's experiences:

TK: There was recently an incident involving the Twitter presence of International Youth and Students for Social Equality. Can you explain what happened? Has the WSWS had any other issues with Twitter over the years?

Damon: On November 11, Twitter suspended the account of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (US) without explanation. The IYSSE is the student movement of the Socialist Equality Parties around the world, which are affiliated with the World Socialist Web Site.

When we wrote to Twitter to demand the reinstatement of the account, Twitter replied vaguely, hinting that the IYSSE was operating multiple accounts. We responded that the IYSSE has chapters all over the world, which are officially recognized on dozens of campuses, including New York University, the University of Michigan, and Berlin's Humboldt University, where the IYSSE holds multiple seats in the student parliament. Each of these chapters, legitimately, has its own social media presence.

Twitter's stated justification for suspending the IYSSE's account was a ridiculous pretext, and this act of censorship triggered statements of opposition. Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters and model Andrea Pejić made statements opposing it, as did dozens of other people. Nine days after the account was suspended, Twitter reinstated it, again without any serious explanation.

TK: When did the WSWS first become interested in the issue of platform censorship, content moderation, or whatever you want to call it? Actually, what do you call it? Is what's going on with increased content moderation a first amendment/free speech issue?

Damon: It's censorship, and it absolutely is a First Amendment issue.

In July 2017, we noticed that traffic to our site from Google fell by more than 75 percent. After reaching out to other sites and SEO experts we realized that the WSWS was one of over a dozen left-wing websites whose search traffic had also plunged.

As we sought an explanation, we discovered a blog post by Ben Gomes, at the time Google's VP of engineering, announcing that Google was making changes in its algorithm to demote what it called "fake news." It explained that Google would be hiring a small army of people to review search results and score them. The reviewers were told that if a search returned "alternative viewpoints," that search should be scored poorly. This system was internally called 'Project Owl,' and later came to be known as such publicly.

It was obvious that the drop in search traffic to the WSWS and other left-wing sites was caused by this change in Google's algorithm.

The actions by Google were the outcome of a campaign, largely bipartisan but led by the Democrats and their affiliated news outlets, to claim that domestic social opposition was the product of interference by foreign countries, particularly Russia. To stop this alleged interference, it was necessary to censor domestic political opposition, which the Russians allegedly sought to "amplify."

At repeated hearings in Washington, figures like Mark Warner and Adam Schiff would demand over and over again that Google, Facebook and Twitter censor left-wing content. It was all a clear and flagrant violation of the First Amendment, which says that Congress does not have the power to limit the freedom of expression. But here was Congress instigating private companies to do exactly that, and threatening to regulate or fine them if they did not comply.

In August 2017, the WSWS sent Google executives an open letter demanding "that the anti-democratic changes to the Google search result rankings and its search algorithm since April be reversed." In January 2018, we called for the formation of an "international coalition to fight Internet censorship."

In response to our letters, Google flatly denied it was carrying out political censorship. But this makes its admission this month that it is censoring the WSWS so significant.

When Senator Mike Lee asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai, "Can you name for me one high profile person or entity from a liberal ideology who you have censored," Pichai replied that "We have had compliance issues with the World Socialist Review [sic], which is a left-leaning publication."

This was a confirmation of every claim made by the WSWS in its campaign against internet censorship.

Nov. 26

New York Times, Penguin Random House to Buy Simon & Schuster, Alexandra Alter and Edmund Lee, Nov. 25, 2020. ViacomCBS agreed to sell the 96-year-old company in a deal that potentially creates a megapublisher.

The biggest book publisher in the United States is about to get bigger. ViacomCBS has agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House for more than $2 billion in a deal that will create the first megapublisher.

Penguin Random House, the largest book publisher in the United States, is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Adding Simon & Schuster, the third largest publisher, would create a book behemoth, a combination that could trigger antitrust concerns.

The deal announced on Wednesday includes provisions that would protect ViacomCBS in the event that a sale is squashed by authorities. Bertelsmann would pay what is known as a termination fee if the deal does not go through. The sale of the company will profoundly reshape the publishing industry, increasingly a winner-take-all business in which the largest companies compete for brand-name authors and guaranteed best-sellers.

Simon & Schuster, which publishes prominent authors like Stephen King, Don DeLillo, Bob Woodward, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Walter Isaacson, had long been rumored to be the next big company to be put up for sale, and it made an attractive prize for larger publishing houses seeking to grow through acquisitions. It has a vast backlist of more than 30,000 titles.

The sale of Simon & Schuster is part of a great unwinding taking place across the media industry as conglomerates cleave off or close down ancillary businesses. ViacomCBS, which also owns Paramount studios and Nickelodeon, has bet its future on streaming, and books won’t play a big role in that strategy.

Daily Beast, The Biden Presidency Already Has Its First Conspiracy Theory: The Great Reset, Will Sommer, Nov. 26, 2020. HERE WE GO AGAIN. Usually, you become president before the crazy starts. But Biden still has weeks to go till he assumes office. Joe Biden isn’t president yet. But his incoming White House already has its first conspiracy theory to deal with.

It goes by the tag the “Great Reset” and under its construct a wild dystopian future is in store. The coronavirus pandemic is merely a means to enslave humanity and end capitalism. Biden’s “Build Back Better” slogan is really a cover for nefarious plotting of a global cabal from Davos, Switzerland, intent on abolishing private property and building prison camps for the dissenters who refuse to accept microchips that will read their thoughts. Even Grover from Sesame Street might be involved.

The Great Reset is a hodgepodge of one-world-government fears that has gained steam in the wake of Biden’s win. It’s been fed by right-wing media personalities who have told their audiences that Biden is bent on launching said reset by using the coronavirus pandemic to ban religion, crush small businesses, and turn humans into something like robots—or replace them with actual robots.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has declared that the Great Reset is “up in your grill,” while talk radio host Glenn Beck said the Great Reset is a plot to institute Nazi-style restrictions on American citizens. WorldNetDaily has called it a scheme from our “globalist overlords.” Pro-Trump personalities “Diamond and Silk” have warned their audience on Newsmax TV that Biden is behind the Great Reset plot.

“You know Biden said he wants to build back better,” Lynnette “Diamond” Hardaway said on Nov. 21 on her show, Diamond and Silk: Crystal Clear. “But no, he doesn’t want to build back better. He wants to take this economy and build back globally. You all, I know you heard about this thing called the Great Reset.”

Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have also promoted the idea that Biden is a key player in a nefarious movement dubbed the Great Reset.

“His handlers, who are basically all old Obama staffers, believe in something called the Great Reset of capitalism,” Ingraham said in a November episode of her show. “It’s a plan to force a more equitable distribution of global resources.”

Despite the apocalyptic predictions of pro-Trump media figures, though, the supposed Great Reset’s actual origins are much more mundane.

In May, the World Economic Forum—a non-governmental group that hosts the annual Davos conference—announced a series of events and articles called the Great Reset centered on the idea of reducing inequality in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The series, summed up in a book of the same name from WEF chief Klaus Schwab, is made up of the same kind of vague, feel-good talk aimed at the world’s wealthy that amounts to thought leadership at Davos. The WEF’s Great Reset website is filled with buzzwords like “sustainability,” “upscaling,” and “stakeholder capitalism,” but few concrete plans—and certainly nothing like the world-destroying plot described in pro-Trump media.

Nov. 25

Washington Post, Fact Checker Analysis:Trump tweets string of falsehoods about Wisconsin absentee voters, Salvador Rizzo, Nov. 25, 2020.

“‘In Wisconsin, somebody has to be indefinitely confined in order to vote absentee. In the past there were 20,000 people. This past election there were 120,000...and Republicans were locked out of the vote counting process.’ @VicToensing @newsmax”

— President Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 24, 2020

Every part of this is false, proving once again why none of Trump’s claims about election fraud should be given any credence.

As we’ve documented in recent fact checks, the statements from Trump and his lawyers are all absurd and easily debunked. Last week, it was Sidney Powell alleging with no evidence that an algorithm from Venezuela had changed millions of Trump votes to votes for President-elect Joe Biden. This week, Rudolph W. Giuliani is mixing up Michigan and Minnesota to peddle a false claim about “phantom voters.”

New York Times, Opinion: Happy Thanksgiving to All Those Who Told the Truth in This Election, Thomas L. Friedman, right, Nov. 25, 2020 (print ed.). Civil servants, elected officials and judges did their jobs and protected democracy. With so many families gathering, in person or virtually, for this most unusual Thanksgiving after this most unusual election, if you’re looking for a special way to say grace this year, I recommend the West Point Cadet Prayer. It calls upon each of these future military leaders to always choose “the harder right instead of the easier wrong” and to know “no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy.”

Because we should be truly thankful this Thanksgiving that — after Donald Trump spent the last three weeks refusing to acknowledge that he’d lost re-election and enlisted much of his party in a naked power play to ignore the vote counts and reinstall him in office — we had a critical mass of civil servants, elected officials and judges who did their jobs, always opting for the “harder right” that justice demanded, not the “easier wrong” that Trump and his allies were pressing for.

It was their collective integrity, their willingness to stand with “Team America,” not either party, that protected our democracy when it was facing one of its greatest threats — from within. History will remember them fondly.

New York Times, Since Election Day, a Lot of Tweeting and Not Much Else for Trump, Karen Yourish and Larry Buchanan, Nov. 25, 2020 (print ed.). President Trump has posted some 550 tweets since Nov. 3. About three-quarters of them attempted to undermine the integrity of the election results.

In total, the president attacked the legitimacy of the election more than 400 times since Election Day, though his claims of fraud have been widely debunked.

As Mr. Trump’s attacks continue, the coronavirus pandemic rages on, worse than ever. More than 25,000 people in the United States have died from Covid in the past three weeks.

Mr. Trump’s public calendar, meanwhile, has been remarkably light, especially relative to his pre-election schedule, when he often attended multiple campaign rallies in a single day.

From Nov. 4 to Nov. 23, he has had just eight days with an official schedule, though he has managed to maintain his weekend golf plans at his club in Virginia, as he has done most weekends in Washington.

Washington Post, YouTube suspends One America News, a Trump favorite, for peddling pandemic misinformation, Craig Timberg, Nov. 25, 2020 (print ed.). The action against OANN, which President Trump’s allies have praised in recent weeks while raging against Fox News for supposed disloyalty following the election, was the latest sign that Silicon Valley remains prepared to enforce policies against false and misleading information.

YouTube said it suspended right-wing channel One America News for one week, beginning Tuesday, for violating its policy against misinformation related to the covid-19 pandemic and temporarily stripped the channel of its ability to make money from other videos.

youtube logo Custom The action against OAN, which President Trump’s allies have praised in recent weeks while raging against Fox News for supposed disloyalty during and after this month’s election, was the latest sign that Silicon Valley was prepared to enforce policies against false and misleading information — even against those aligned with the president.

YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi said OAN, which has 1.2 million subscribers on the video service and sees some of its posts reach hundreds of thousands of viewers, violated the policy against portraying a covid-19 remedy as a cure for the illness that has killed more than 258,000 Americans and 1.4 million people worldwide.

In addition to losing the ability to post new videos for the coming week, OAN has been suspended from YouTube’s “Partner Program,” which allows monetization of videos through advertisements and can be a significant source of revenue to online operations. The reason, Choi said, was “repeated violations” of YouTube’s policies against covid misinformation.

Washington Post, Comcast to begin charging more for heavy Internet users in Northeast, ending pandemic-related relief, Rachel Lerman, Nov. 25, 2020. Comcast said this week it would start charging more for heavy users of home Internet in the Northeast, sparking complaints from some customers as the global pandemic keeps life online.

Home Internet usage has skyrocketed during the pandemic as more people work from home and attend classes online, not to mention spend hours and hours streaming TV and games.

Comcast initially responded to this trend by giving people relief from data caps, which have already been in place across the central and western U.S. for a few years. That reprieve ended in July, and now the company is expanding its controversial data thresholds to the new region starting next year.

Nov. 23

New York Times, Investigation: How Misinformation ‘Superspreaders’ Seed False Election Theories, Sheera Frenkel, Nov. 23, 2020. Researchers have found that a small group of social media accounts are responsible for the spread of a disproportionate amount of the false posts about voter fraud.

eric trump djt On the morning of Nov. 5, Eric Trump (shown at far right), one of the president’s sons, asked his Facebook followers to report cases of voter fraud with the hashtag, Stop the Steal. His post was shared over 5,000 times.

By late afternoon, the conservative media personalities Diamond and Silk had shared the hashtag along with a video claiming voter fraud in Pennsylvania. Their post was shared over 3,800 times.
Image

That night, the conservative activist Brandon Straka asked people to protest in Michigan under the banner #StoptheSteal. His post was shared more than 3,700 times.

Over the next week, the phrase “Stop the Steal” was used to promote dozens of rallies that spread false voter fraud claims about the U.S. presidential elections.

New research from Avaaz, a global human rights group, the Elections Integrity Partnership and The New York Times shows how a small group of people — mostly right-wing personalities with outsized influence on social media — helped spread the false voter-fraud narrative that led to those rallies.

That group, like the guests of a large wedding held during the pandemic, were “superspreaders” of misinformation around voter fraud, seeding falsehoods that include the claims that dead people voted, voting machines had technical glitches, and mail-in ballots were not correctly counted.

“Because of how Facebook’s algorithm functions, these superspreaders are capable of priming a discourse,” said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz. “There is often this assumption that misinformation or rumors just catch on. These superspreaders show that there is an intentional effort to redefine the public narrative.”

Across Facebook, there were roughly 3.5 million interactions — including likes, comments and shares — on public posts referencing “Stop the Steal” during the week of Nov. 3, according to the research. Of those, the profiles of Eric Trump, Diamond and Silk and Mr. Straka accounted for a disproportionate share — roughly 6 percent, or 200,000, of those interactions.

While the group’s impact was notable, it did not come close to the spread of misinformation promoted by President Trump since then. Of the 20 most-engaged Facebook posts over the last week containing the word “election,” all were from Mr. Trump, according to Crowdtangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. All of those claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact checkers.

The baseless election fraud claims have been used by the president and his supporters to challenge the vote in a number of states. Reports that malfunctioning voting machines, intentionally miscounted mail-in votes and other irregularities affecting the vote were investigated by election officials and journalists who found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The voter fraud claims have continued to gather steam in recent weeks, thanks in large part to prominent accounts. A look at a four-week period starting in mid-October shows that President Trump and the top 25 superspreaders of voter fraud misinformation accounted for 28.6 percent of the interactions people had with that content, according to an analysis by Avaaz.

“What we see these people doing is kind of like setting a fire down with fuel, it is designed to quickly create a blaze,” Mr. Quran said. “These actors have built enough power they ensure this misinformation reaches millions of Americans.”

In order to find the superspreaders, Avaaz compiled a list of 95,546 Facebook posts that included narratives about voter fraud. Those posts were liked, shared or commented on nearly 60 million times by people on Facebook.

Avaaz found that just 33 of the 95,546 posts were responsible for over 13 million of those interactions. Those 33 posts had created a narrative that would go on to shape what millions of people thought about the legitimacy of the U.S. elections.

A spokesman for Facebook said the company had added labels to posts that misrepresented the election process and was directing people to a voting information center.

“We’re taking every opportunity to connect people to reliable information about the election and how votes are being counted,” said Kevin McAlister, a Facebook spokesman. The company has not commented on why accounts that repeatedly share misinformation, such as Mr. Straka’s and Diamond and Silk’s, have not been penalized. Facebook has previously said that President Trump, along with other elected officials, is granted a special status and is not fact-checked.

Many of the superspreader accounts had millions of interactions on their Facebook posts over the last month, and have enjoyed continued growth. The accounts were active on Twitter as well as Facebook, and increasingly spread the same misinformation on new social media sites like Parler, MeWe and Gab.

Washington Post, Opinion: Why the far-right news outlets can’t beat Fox News at its game, Paul Waldman, Nov. 23, 2020. President Trump’s most devoted supporters have had it with the liberally biased news media. But now, the outlet they’re abandoning isn’t CNN or the New York Times or The Post. It’s Fox News.

Many seem to be heading to Newsmax, which used to be a network characterized by cheap production values and elaborate conspiracy theories, but is now characterized by cheap production values, elaborate conspiracy theories — and rapidly growing ratings. Others seem to be gravitating to One America News, the even nuttier cable news alternative that has long been a Trump favorite. Meanwhile, some Trumpists fed up with Twitter — another of Trump’s targets — have been decamping for Parler, where right-wingers are free to say almost anything they please without moderation.

But as a political project, they’re limited in one important way. Conservatives are very good at raising a stink, and news organizations often respond by changing their coverage. But it only works if those in the mainstream are aware of what’s being said on the right. You can’t pressure someone who is barely aware you exist.

Which is part of the power of Fox News: It’s watched by most Republicans in official Washington, and what happens there is injected into the mainstream conversation. The same congressman who watches Fox News in his office later goes on ABC News and repeats what he heard.

Nov. 22

rudy giuliani calls for beheading dems

Rudy Giuliani, Trump's top lawyer in lawsuits seeking to overturn the election, calls for beheading Democratic leaders (that would include President-Elect Biden) on Fox New's Hannity show. (Sceengfrab by Dave Lindorff).

This Can' Be Happening Blog via OpEdNews, Opinion: 'They should be beheaded!': Trump and Giuliani Go Full IS in Attack on Biden and Democrats, Dave Lindorff, oenearthlogo Nov. 22, 2020. It's often been noted that countries that go to war tend to adopt the behaviors of their enemies in fighting them, and then bring that war and the techniques they have appropriated home where they begin to apply them domestically.

For at least two decades, since the US in 2001 launched its so-called "War" on Terror following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, the US, under a series of three presidents, has waged a grossly illegal war around the globe against alleged terrorists, real or perceived, in countries as remote as Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. In this borderless, lawless "war" the US has turned to the same kind of terrorism that it accuses its enemies of using.

sean hannity white house These attacks on terrorist leaders are, in the lingo of the trade, referred to as "decapitations." It's the same term applied to what the Taliban in Afghanistan or IS fighters in Syria or elsewhere use to describe how they kill captives in their actions, which they, without an airforce or access to drone technology, dispatch in the old-fashioned way, with a large knife or a sword.

Now soundly and decisively defeated in his bid for re-election (Biden's winning the national vote by 4% and by 6 million votes and counting, with only heavily Democratic New York State and primarily even more heavily Democratic New York City having a significant one-sixth of its votes in the form of absentee ballots left to count) and having won 306 Electoral College votes, 36 more than needed, Dear Leader Donald Trump is turning to IS tactics in his flailing effort to hang on to the White House.

On Nov. 19 on Fox News's "Sean Hannity Show," Rudy Giuliani, the head of Trump's legal team that is filing dozens of lawsuits in so-called swing states that narrowly went for Joe Biden this year seeking to overturn those Biden victories, told Hannity, shown in a file photo above right, that the Democratic Party had been taken over by "the Clintons," and then added that the the leadership of that party "needs to be beheaded."

He made a hand-accross-the-neck gesture to emphasize his meaning.

Hannity cut the interview off abruptly at that point, but the Fox News shock-jock shouldn't have been caught by surprise."

Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani leads a news conference at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC on Nov. 19, 2020.

Trump counsel Rudy Giuliani leads a news conference at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, DC on Nov. 19, 2020.

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump’s wildest claims are going nowhere in court. Thank legal ethics, Adam Winkler (professor at UCLA School of Law, where he teaches legal ethics and other subjects), Nov. 22, 2020 (print ed.). The president’s lawyers can’t make assertions without evidence in front of judges.

President Trump’s lie that the election was stolen has had some unfortunate success in the court of public opinion: Polling shows that more than three-quarters of his supporters believe the contest was riddled with fraud. To overturn the result, though, Trump needs to win in the court of law. A president who packed the federal courts with conservatives now depends on the judicial system to agree with his perspective and provide him a pathway to a second term despite Joe Biden’s win.

Yet Trump’s legal strategy has run aground — in no small part because of legal ethics. While lawyers are often cast as unscrupulous and immoral, they are required to follow a strict code of professional responsibility established by state bars. The famous duty of lawyers to keep a client’s confidences, for instance, comes from these ethical codes. Law students must take a course in legal ethics, the bar exam includes a section on ethical rules, and continuing-education requirements emphasize lawyers’ duties to clients and to the courts.

Two ethical rules have been fatal to Trump’s election lawsuits in state after state: the lawyer’s duty of candor to a court and the lawyer’s duty to avoid frivolous claims. The president can spew all the theories he wants, and his advocates can say whatever they like on television, but because of these two ethical duties, Trump’s lawyers can make claims before courts only if they can back them up with actual evidence.

Lawyers are obligated to be truthful in everything they say to a court. If they aren’t, they can lose their license to practice law. In a hearing over Trump’s claim that his campaign was being excluded from observing the ballot count in Philadelphia, the judge — a conservative George W. Bush appointee — asked Trump’s lawyer if campaign observers were in fact present. Because of the duty of candor to the court, Trump’s lawyer had to concede that campaign observers were indeed in the room.

djt rudy giuliani headshots Custom Concerns about violating ethical rules partly explain why Trump’s lawyers are deserting him. Two large law firms withdrew as counsel only days after filing lawsuits. Two new lawyers signed on, only to withdraw within days themselves. Lawyers in high-profile cases rarely quit a client so quickly — unless they fear that the representation will violate the rules of legal ethics. Then they have no choice. Likewise, most of the establishment legal team that defended Trump during his impeachment has stayed away from the post-election litigation efforts.

The exodus has left Trump’s lawsuits in the hands of Rudolph W. Giuliani, who until this past week hadn’t been in a courtroom in decades. Although he’s made wild accusations in news conferences about “a massive fraud” involving the Clintons, George Soros and Hugo Chávez, Giuliani acknowledged in a federal court hearing in Pennsylvania that “this is not a fraud case.” And so far, none of the strangest claims he’s made publicly have found their way into any court filings.

Washington Post, Opinion: The disinformation system that Trump unleashed will outlast him. Here’s what reality-based journalists must do about it, Margaret Sullivan, right, Nov. 22, 2020. It’s time for journalism to stand for something — or lose its audience to the excitement of burgeoning lies.

President Trump didn’t create the media cesspool that he’ll bequeath to a troubled nation. He just made it exponentially worse — not only with his own constant lies but with his ability to spread the ugliness.

Just days ago, he tweeted out a debunked conspiracy theory that a company that makes voting machines had deleted millions of Trump votes. And though he — barring true disaster — will leave office in January, the widespread disinformation system that he fostered will live on.

Social media platforms, streaming “news” channels and innumerable websites will spew lies and conspiracy theories, and will keep weakening the foundation of reality that America’s democracy needs in order to function.

So what, if anything, can the reality-based press do to counter it?

I see three necessities.

First, be bolder and more direct than ever in telling it like it is. No more pussy-foooting or punch-pulling. No more of what’s been called “false equivalence” — giving equal weight to truth and lies in the name of fairness.

New York Times, Newsmax, Once a Right-Wing Also-Ran, Is Rising, and Trump Approves, Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin, Nov. 22, 2020. A once-niche conservative cable network, owned by a longtime friend of the president, lures audiences by refusing to declare an electoral winner.

Flanked by aides in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump dialed up a friend in the news media with a message: Keep up the good work.

“He said that it’s just incredible, the ratings you’re getting, and everyone’s talking about it,” recalled Christopher Ruddy, the owner of Newsmax, a niche conservative cable network that has yet to declare a winner in the 2020 presidential election.

Based in Boca Raton, Fla., the network features lo-fi production values and off-brand personalities like Sean Spicer and Diamond and Silk. Even finding it can be a chore: It appears on Channel 1115 in some major markets. But since Election Day, Newsmax has become a growing power in a conservative media sphere that has been scrambled by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory and Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede.

Hundreds of thousands of new viewers have tuned into Newsmax programs that embrace the president’s debunked claims of voter fraud and insist that Mr. Trump can keep the White House. Until recently, the network’s top shows attracted a paltry 58,000 viewers. On Thursday night, the network drew its biggest audience ever, notching 1.1 million viewers at 7 p.m.

The out-of-nowhere rise has come as Fox News — the No. 1 network in TV news and long the destination of choice for many Trump partisans — has experienced a rare dip in dominance. Ratings for the Rupert Murdoch-owned network have dropped since election night, when its early projection that Mr. Biden had won Arizona infuriated Mr. Trump and his allies.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Chuck Todd crashes and burns, Bill Palmer, Nov. 22, 2020. The mainstream media is getting a number of things wrong right now. For instance, Donald Trump isn’t looking at some kind of 2024 magic carpet ride, he’s looking at criminal charges and prison. But the media has done a good job of making clear that Trump has lost, and that he isn’t going to just magically remain in office come January. Then there’s Chuck Todd.

This morning Chuck Todd (above), who isn’t fit to host The Gong Show let alone Meet The Press, said this: “It looks like Biden is going to be the apparent winner. There’s still more to go through.” No really, he said this. This is some Fox News level nonsense.

It’s the latest reminder that while too many TV pundits treat politics as if both sides were the same, Chuck Todd openly roots for both-sidesism. He has way too much fun trying to invent ways to knock one side when the other side is doing poorly, which he appears to think it what “unbiased” means. He’s almost uniquely bad at this, and in his current position he does real harm. It’s one thing to be at 1pm weekdays on MSNBC, when no one cares. It’s another thing to hold the reins of something as powerful as Meet The Press. Every one of you reading this would do a better job of hosting it, if only because you wouldn’t try to do it wrong.

The American penal system is a perfect breeding ground for the virus. Squabbles over mask wearing and social distancing are essentially moot inside overcrowded facilities, many of them old and poorly ventilated, with tight quarters and with hygiene standards that are difficult to maintain. Uneven testing, inadequate medical resources and the constant churn of staff members, visitors and inmates further speed transmission. Crueler still, inmates suffer disproportionately from comorbidities, such as high blood pressure and asthma, putting them at an elevated risk for complications and death.

Nov. 21

michael pack

Washington Post, Judge halts efforts by Trump appointee to reshape Voice of America and related agencies, Paul Farhi, Nov. 21, 2020 (print ed.). Michael Pack (shown above in a file photo) took over VOA’s parent agency in June and immediately set about firing senior leaders and disbanding oversight boards.

A federal judge issued a series of preliminary injunctions against a Trump appointee who has enacted sweeping and controversial changes at Voice of America and other government-funded news networks, effectively stopping the appointee’s efforts to reshape the international broadcasters.

beryl howell The ruling late Friday by Judge Beryl A. Howell, right, in district court in Washington was a setback for Michael Pack, who in June took over Voice of America’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), and immediately set about firing senior leaders and disbanding oversight boards.

Pack had asserted the right to direct how journalists at VOA and sister networks such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia covered the news, a violation of the traditional “firewall” that ensures the networks aren’t government mouthpieces. Pack’s declaration was viewed by journalists at the networks as both alarming and ironic, given that their broadcasts — which are intended to counter foreign government’s official censorship and propaganda — would themselves be subjected to potential censorship by a political appointee of the U.S. government.

Pack’s actions and statements — including evidence-free suggestions that VOA was a nest of foreign spies — raised concerns that Pack was seeking to create news favorable to President Trump, his political patron.

Howell’s ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed last month by five senior executives at USAGM whom Pack had fired or suspended in August in what was seen as a purge of those opposed to Pack’s plans. The former employees sought to stop Pack from interfering in the editorial affairs of the broadcasters his agency oversees.

Nov. 20

jfk limo dallas 31kb

Future of Freedom Foundation, Analysis: The Cunning Plot to Kill Kennedy, Jacob Hornberger, right, Nov. 20, 2020. If anyone murders a federal official, you can be assured jacob hornberger new of one thing: the feds will do everything they can to ensure that everyone involved in the crime is brought to justice. It's like when someone kills a cop. The entire police force mobilizes to capture, arrest, and prosecute everyone involved in killing the cop. The phenomenon is even more pronounced at the federal level, especially given the overwhelming power of the federal government

Yet, the exact opposite occurred in the Kennedy assassination. The entire effort immediately became to pin the crime solely on a "communist" ex-U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald and to shut down any aggressive investigation into whether others were involved in the crime.

What's up with that? That's not the way we would expect federal officials to handle the assassination of any federal official, especially the president of the United States. We would expect them to do everything -- even torture a suspect -- in order to capture and arrest everyone who may have participated in the crime.

For example, just three days after the assassination and after Oswald himself had been murdered, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach sent out a memo stating, "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial."

How in the world could he be so certain that Oswald was the assassin and that he had no confederates? Why would he want to shut down the investigation so soon? Does that sound like a normal federal official who is confronted with the assassination of a president?

The answer to this riddle lies in the brilliantly cunning scheme of the U.S. national-security establishment to ensure that the investigation into Kennedy's assassination would be shut down immediately and, therefore, not lead to the U.S. national-security establishment.

The assassination itself had all the earmarks of a classic military ambush, one in which shooters were firing from both the front and back of the president. It is a virtual certainty that responsibility for the ambush lay with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been waging a vicious war against Kennedy practically since the time he assumed office. (See Future of Freedom Foundations book JFK's War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.)

While the JCS were experts at preparing military-style ambushes, they lacked the intellectual capability of devising the overall plot and cover-up, given its high level of cunning and sophistication. That responsibility undoubtedly lay with the CIA, whose top officials were brilliant graduates of Ivy League Schools. Moreover, practically from its inception the CIA was specializing in the art of state-sponsored assassinations and in how to conceal the CIA's role in them.

To ensure that the role of the Pentagon and the CIA in the Kennedy assassination would be kept secret, they had to figure out a way to shut down the investigation from the start. Their plan worked brilliantly. While the normal thing would have been all-out investigations into the murder, in this particular murder the state of Texas and U.S. officials did the exact opposite. They settled for simply pinning the crime on Oswald, the purported lone nut communist ex-U.S. Marine.

Here is how they pulled it off.

As the years have passed, it has become increasingly clear that Oswald was a government operative, most likely for military intelligence or maybe the CIA and the FBI as well. His job was to portray himself as a communist, which would enable him to infiltrate not only domestic communist and socialist organizations but also communist countries, such as Cuba and the Soviet Union.

After all, how many communist Marines have you ever heard of? The Marines would be a good place to recruit people for intelligence roles. Oswald learned fluent Russian while in the military. How does an enlisted man do that, without the assistance of the military's language schools? When he returned from the Soviet Union after supposedly trying to defect and after promising that he was going to give up secret information he had acquired in the military, no federal grand jury or congressional investigation was launched into his conduct, even though this was the height of the Cold War.

Thus, Oswald would make the perfect patsy. He could be stationed wherever his superiors instructed. And he would have all the earmarks of a communist, which would immediately prejudice Americans at the height of the Cold War.

lee harvey oswald in dallas custody But simply framing Oswald (shown in custoday in Dallas after the shooting) wouldn’t have been enough to shut down the investigation. An aggressive investigation would undoubtedly be able to pierce through the pat nature of the frame-up. They needed something more.

If you’re going to frame someone who is supposedly firing from the rear, then doesn’t it make sense that you would have shots being fired only from the rear? Why would they frame a guy who is supposedly firing from the rear by having shots fired from the front?

That’s where the sheer brilliance of this particular regime-change operation came into play. The plan was much more cunning than even the successful regime-change operations and assassinations that took place prior to the one against Kennedy — i.e., Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Cuba from 1959-1963, and the Congo in 1961.

There is now virtually no doubt that Kennedy was hit by two shots fired from the front. Immediately after Kennedy was declared dead, the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital described the neck wound as a wound of entry. They also said that Kennedy had a massive, orange-sized wound in the back of his head. Nurses at Parkland said the same things. Two FBI agents said they saw the big exit-sized wound. Secret Service agent Clint Hill saw it.

Navy photography expert Saundra Spencer told the ARRB in the 1990s that she developed the JFK autopsy photos on a top-secret basis on the weekend of the assassination and that they depicted a big exit-sized wound in the back of JFK’s head. A bone fragment from the back of the president’s head was found in Dealey Plaza after the assassination. That is just part of the overwhelming evidence that establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the shot that hit Kennedy in the head came from the front.

Okay, if you’ve got a shooter firing from the back and he’s a communist, and if you have other shooters firing from the front, then they have to be working together. So, who would the shooters be who were firing from the front? The logical inference is that they had to be communist cohorts of Oswald.

That’s what Oswald’s supposed visits to the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico just before the assassination were all about — making it look like Oswald was acting in concert with the Soviet and Cuban communists to kill Kennedy.

If the assassination was part of the Soviet Union’s supposed quest to conquer the world, retaliation would mean World War III, which almost surely would have meant nuclear war, which was the biggest fear among the American people in 1963.

But why not retaliate in some way? Would U.S. officials at the height of the Cold War hesitate to retaliate for the communist killing of a U.S. president, simply because they were scared of nuclear war? Not a chance! In fact, throughout Kennedy’s term in office the Pentagon and the CIA were champing at the bit to attack Cuba and go to war with the Soviet Union.

But here’s the catch: How do you take action that is going to destroy the world when it was your side that started the assassination game in the first place? Remember: It was the CIA that started the assassination game by partnering with the Mafia to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Thus, Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, and the JCS had the perfect excuse to shut down the investigation and pin the crime only on Oswald: If they instead retaliated, it would be all-out nuclear war based on an assassination game that the U.S. had started.

In fact, when Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade alleged from the start that Oswald was part of a communist conspiracy, Johnson told him to shut it down for fear that Wade might inadvertently start World War III.

Moreover, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, right, initially declined Johnson’s invitation to serve on what ultimately became the Warren Commission, Johnson appealed to his sense of patriotism by alluding to the importance of avoiding a nuclear war. Johnson used the same argument on Senator Richard Russell Jr.

From the start, the Warren Commission proceedings were shrouded in “national-security” state secrecy, including a top-secret meeting of the commissioners to discuss information they had received that Oswald was an intelligence agent. When Warren was asked if the American people would be able to see all the evidence, Warren responded yes, but not in your lifetime.

Does that make any sense? If the assassination was, in fact, committed by some lone nut, then what would “national security” and state secrecy have to do with it?

...

Thus, the plan entailed operating at two levels: One level involved what some call the World War III cover story. It entailed shutting down the investigation, as well as a fraudulent autopsy, to prevent nuclear war. The other level involved showing the American people that their president had been killed by only one person, a supposed lone nut communist former Marine.

...

Gradually, as the years have passed, the incriminating puzzle has come together. The big avalanche of secret information came out in the 1990s as part of the work done by the Assassination Records Review Board.

Of course, there are still missing pieces to the puzzle, many of which are undoubtedly among the records that the CIA and national-security establishment are still keeping secret. But enough circumstantial evidence has come to light to enable people to see the contours of one of the most cunning and successful assassination plots in history.

Washington Post, Biden, top Democrats lay groundwork for multibillion-dollar push to boost U.S. broadband, Tony Romm, Nov. 20, 2020. President-elect Joe Biden and top congressional Democrats are hoping they can secure billions of dollars in new government aid to improve Internet access and affordability -- and help people stay online during the pandemic.

Party leaders are mulling a wide array of proposals that would extend the availability of broadband in hard-to-reach rural areas, raise Internet speeds for American households, assist families who are struggling to pay their Internet bills and provide more funding to schools for computers and other equipment. Many Democrats say they are bullish about their prospects, believing they can shepherd a series of record-breaking investments at a time when the resurgent coronavirus is forcing Americans to work and learn from home again.

Washington Post, Tucker Carlson bashes Trump attorney Sidney Powell for lack of evidence in fraud claims: ‘She never sent us any,’ Tim Elfrink, Nov. 20, 2020. As Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted on Thursday night, he’s more than willing to give airtime to outlandish claims. “We literally do UFO segments,” he said.

But even Carlson, right, said he was fed up with the total lack of evidence produced by Sidney Powell, one of the Trump campaign’s attorneys, for her unfounded allegation that electronic voting systems had switched millions of ballots to favor President-elect Joe Biden.

“We invited Sidney Powell on the show. We would have given her the whole hour,” Carlson said. “But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests, polite requests. Not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

Carlson also noted: “She never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.”

Washington Post, Analysis: The very different view of the election from pro-Trump media, David Weigel, Nov. 20, 2020 (print ed.). On Newsmax, on One America News, at websites such as the Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit, the plan to keep President Trump in power sounds straightforward.

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, carrying 306 electoral votes. Dozens of lawsuits, brought by both President Trump's campaign and by conservative activists, have been knocked down, failing to find irregularities that had any effect on the vote.

epoch times Yet for three hours on Tuesday night, Newsmax prepared conservative viewers for something big. In Wayne County, Mich., two Republican officials had declined to certify the results of the Nov. 3 election. Host Greg Kelly claimed that the election could be “reversed,” then brought on Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell to explain what the events in Michigan had meant.

“That’s an excellent development,” Powell said. “I would expect the entire Michigan board to reject the counts from the ballots. The election could not have been more rigged than it was.”

Moments later, the Wayne County Republicans reversed their decision, certifying the election. Twenty-four hours later they’d reverse themselves, again, attempting to retract the certification, which election rules don't allow them to do. This was surprising, but far less so for people watching pro-Trump media. Those outlets are offering his base an addictive alternate theory of the election. In this theory, one with no basis in fact or evidence but that threatens to undermine how American democracy works, the president claims to have won the election and the rest of the media is trying to steal it from him.

Nov. 19

New York Times, BuzzFeed to Acquire HuffPost From Verizon Media, Edmund Lee and Tiffany Hsu, Nov. 19, 2020. Once they had digital media almost to themselves. Now, in a deal led by the BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, two giants of the web plan to join forces to better compete in an increasingly crowded field.

After falling prey to some of the same business difficulties that have plagued newspapers and magazines, the digital-media giants BuzzFeed and HuffPost have decided to join forces, the companies announced on Thursday.

Under the plan, BuzzFeed will acquire HuffPost from its owner, Verizon Media, as part of a larger stock deal, the companies said. The BuzzFeed and HuffPost websites will remain distinct, each with its own editorial staff. The BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, who helped found HuffPost 15 years ago, will serve as the chief executive.

As part of the arrangement, Verizon Media will become a minority shareholder in BuzzFeed, the companies said, but it will not have a seat on BuzzFeed’s board.

BuzzFeed and HuffPost have struggled, with both having gone through rounds of layoffs in recent years. Mr. Peretti believes that getting bigger is the right move for his business.

Digital media, a relatively open territory when HuffPost started in 2005, has grown crowded and more competitive. Google and Facebook have grabbed huge chunks of ad revenue from publishers; Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Twitch are taking would-be readers’ attention; and many legacy media outlets have gotten the hang of the web while also figuring out how to persuade readers to pay for content.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Twitter cracks down on Republican Party’s official account, Bill Palmer, Nov. 19, 2020. As Donald Trump’s tweets continue to become more false and unhinged, Twitter has begun promptly placing various warning labels on them. Many of us think Twitter hasn’t been going far enough. But at least now Twitter is expanding its crackdowns to include the official @GOP account, which claimed today that Donald Trump won in a “blowout” but was hit with a warning label which confirmed that Joe Biden is the actual winner. It’s a start.

Donald Trump has found a way to get himself publicly condemned by Tucker Carlson, Mitt Romney, and Ben Sasse, all on the same night. Don’t tell me Trump is somehow magically winning. He’s just forcing his sometimes-allies to totally throw him under the bus, because they feel compelled to preserve their own relative credibility while he goes down this particularly embarrassing path to defeat.

Tweet of the day, from Congressman Eric Swalwell: “Why am I not freaking out over realDonald Trump? It’s not that I have faith in him doing what’s right. It’s that I have faith in you. He is a loser. It’s over. He wants you to think this is a thing. Let’s not make a small, insignificant man bigger and more significant than he is.”

Nov. 18

Washington Post, Opinion: An improbable journalist’s case could pressure the Supreme Court to rethink qualified immunity, George F. george f will Will, right, Nov. 18, 2020. Priscilla Villarreal, who calls herself Lagordiloca, which she translates as the Crazy Fat Lady, is a familiar figure on the streets of Laredo.

She has cruised them practicing a form of journalism that she calls “News on the Move.” In December 2017, the police department of Texas’s 10th-largest city arrested her for committing two felonies. She was charged, essentially, with committing journalism: She got information from the government and published it.

Three years after her arrest, she is suing the city and some of its employees, charging that her arrest was retaliatory. Her case involves a 2020 preoccupation, police misbehavior, and a court-created rule, “qualified immunity,” that breeds misbehavior by enabling much of it to go unpunished.

Villarreal, who sometimes uses salty language that would cause blushes below deck in a troop transport, has used her cellphone and her Facebook page — she has more than 170,000 followers — to livestream and comment on crime scenes, traffic accidents, immigration enforcement and other matters, including police behavior. She has enemies in high places.

Nov. 17

New York Times, A Popular Political Site Made a Sharp Right Turn. Why? Jeremy W. Peters, Nov. 17, 2020. Real Clear Politics pitches itself as a “trusted, go-to source” for unbiased polling. The Trump era changed its tone and funding sources.

For three days after every major news organization declared Joseph R. Biden Jr. the victor of the presidential election, one widely read political site maintained that Pennsylvania was still too close to call.

The delay was welcome news to allies of President Trump like Rudolph W. Giuliani and friendly outlets like The Gateway Pundit, which misrepresented the site’s decision in their efforts to spread false claims that Mr. Biden’s lead was unraveling.

That site, Real Clear Politics, is well known as a clearinghouse of elections data and analysis with a large following among the political and media establishment — and the kinds of political obsessives who might now have all the counties in Georgia memorized. It markets itself to advertisers as a “trusted, go-to source” admired by campaign and news professionals alike. Its industry benchmark polling average is regularly cited by national publications and cable news networks.

But less well known is how Real Clear Politics and its affiliated websites have taken a rightward, aggressively pro-Trump turn over the last four years as donations to its affiliated nonprofit have soared. Large quantities of those funds came through two entities that wealthy conservatives use to give money without revealing their identities.

The founders of Real Clear Politics, two self-described news junkies who became friends at Princeton and started the website in 2000, said over email that they “fully stand behind” the average and their editors’ decision to publish those pieces. “Our advertisers, sponsors, supporters, and readers represent an array of perspectives across the political spectrum,” wrote John McIntyre, the chief executive, and Tom Bevan, the president. “And they know we practice fiercely independent journalism that necessarily covers all relevant sides of our national political and policy debates.”

Nov. 14

Daily Beast, The Mercer Family Is Funding the Right-Wing Social Network Parler: WSJ, Blake Montgomery, Nov. 14, 2020. Robert and Rebekah Mercer are funding the moderation-free Twitter alternative Parler, The Wall Street Journal reports.

`Neither the hedge fund billionaire nor his daughter commented to the Journal on why, but both have financed many of the highest-profile ultra-conservative causes of recent years like Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart News, and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The app has grown to 10 million users thanks in large part to conservatives chafing against other social networks’ content moderation policies, which, among other things, prohibit false claims that the election was stolen.

Nov. 13

U.S. Media News

Washington Post, First major newspaper to endorse Trump in 2016 urges him to accept loss in this election, Elahe Izadi, Nov. 13, 2020 (print ed.). The editorial page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, owned by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, right, urged President Trump to work with Joe Biden’s transition team.

“President Donald Trump seeks to delay the inevitable,” reads the headline of the editorial, which appeared in print Thursday and published online Wednesday night.

“It is too fitting that the Trump presidency concludes amid a babel of bluster and bravado,” the unbylined authors, representing the viewpoint of the paper’s management, wrote. “But the president does a disservice to his more rabid supporters by insisting that he would have won the Nov. 3 election absent voter fraud. That’s simply false.”

Washington Post, Trump’s attacks on election outcome prolong tech’s emergency measures, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Nov. 13, 2020 (print ed.). Facebook extends political ad ban while Twitter labeled 300,000 tweets on election week. Technology companies are bracing for a prolonged period of uncertainty as long as President Trump and his allies dispute the outcome of the election, testing whether the firms can sustain the pace of enforcement they put in place during the past week.

Twitter has softened the aggressive approach it took in the days after the election, when the company covered up 456 total tweets, the company said in a blog post Thursday, including many by Trump, his campaign and allies including his son Eric Trump and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. It labeled 300,000 tweets overall. Spokesman Nick Pacilio said it will continue to restrict the proliferation of tweets that get labels and disable the retweet button indefinitely in an effort to slow the flow of potentially harmful content until the election results are settled.

Roughly 30 percent fewer people shared tweets that received a prompt warning people before sharing, Twitter said. And 74 percent of people who saw the tweets saw it with the label — the others saw the tweets before they were labeled.

A Google spokeswoman, Charlotte Smith, declined to share information about the company’s timeline for lifting its political ad ban, which applies to all Google properties, including Google-owned YouTube.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump has made a huge mistake, Bill Palmer, Nov. 13, 2020. Donald Trump has made a huge mistake by going a week without speaking in public. It’s not clear if he’s trying to make us miss him, or if he’s just pouting, or some combination of both. But either way, he’s given us a taste of what it’ll be like when he’s gone – no chaos and a newfound ability to focus on more important things – and it’s only making us more eager to be rid of him.

Trump tweeted “Biden did not win.” Twitter slapped a warning label on it that confirms Biden did win. That pretty much sums up how this entire delusional farce is going for Trump.

The government of China just congratulated Joe Biden on his win. This is a big deal. China could have chosen to drag this out as a way of trying to weaken Biden’s negotiating position in the early days of his presidency. Instead China is opting to fall in line fairly quickly, a sign that it knows better than to mess with Biden on this kind of thing.

Tweet of the day, from Jimmy Kimmel: “One reason Trump’s advisors are so worried he might not be able to win, is because he lost.”

Nov. 12

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump, the “kingmaker” of Cell Block D, Bill Palmer, Nov. 12, 2020. The mainstream media has done a pretty good job of making clear to the American public that Donald Trump has in fact lost the election, and that he’s not going to somehow magically overturn the results. That said, the media clearly doesn’t want to give up its ratings-friendly Trump chew toy just yet, and so it’s spinning a tale of Trump either being a 2024 presidential contender, or being a “kingmaker” who determines the prospects of future Republican candidates.

Sorry, I just can’t stop laughing at this.

Even when you set aside the fact that Donald Trump will obviously be in prison long before 2024, the notion of him getting blown out this badly and then having that much influence in the party is simply hilarious. Yes, a lot of people voted for him, but a lot more people voted against him. He’s broadly unpopular. His endorsement won’t be one that any Republican running in a swing state or competitive district would want to touch.

It reminds me of when Sarah Palin’s presence on the ticket caused John McCain to get blown out in 2008. The mainstream media insisted that this would somehow make Palin either the 2012 frontrunner or the Republican Party “kingmaker.” Sure, she had her die-hard base. But again, she was broadly unpopular, just like Trump. The GOP understood this, and by 2012 it was largely treating Palin like she never existed.

Donald Trump awaits the same fate. The media is just (wittingly or unwittingly) giving in to wishful thinking. Controversial politicians like Trump and Palin tend to generate huge ratings for the media, and so naturally the media hopes that they stick around in some form.

But logic says that Trump is about to become just another Palin – the only difference being that Palin didn’t go to prison. Are we really expecting Trump to be holding rallies for 2024 Republican candidates from his prison cell? Come on.

New York Times, Jeffrey Toobin Is Fired by The New Yorker, Katie Robertson, Nov. 12, 2020 (print ed.). The star journalist, right, exposed himself on a video conference call last month. “We take workplace matters seriously,” a Condé Nast executive said.

Mr. Toobin, 60, reported the news of his firing on Twitter. "I was fired today by @NewYorker after 27 years as a Staff Writer. I will always love the magazine, will miss my colleagues, and will look forward to reading their work."

Nov. 11

OpEdNews, Opinion: Trump Is Sandbagging to Send Election to the House; Election Integrity Should Not Help Him, Jonathan Simon, shown at right oenearthlogo below, author of "Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century," also shown below, Nov. 11, 2020.

jonathan simon As Donald Trump, facing a defeat he signaled in advance he would not (and could not, given the stakes and his nature) accept, files lawsuit after lawsuit in a kind of virtuoso false-note cadenza improvised on a lifelong theme of litigiousness, some of my election integrity colleagues (and good friends) have declared support for Trump's attempted putsch, "open-mindedly" asserting it is our vehicle to a new election-integrity dawn. The ironies could not be much richer.

We do face what one of my colleagues, appalled by Trump, described as a "horrible dilemma:" to seize the rarest of opportunities to secure bipartisan support and press for serious election reform or essentially keep silent vigil and pray Trump's con doesn't work. The answer, to me, becomes clearer with every CAPS LOCK TWEET, frivolous lawsuit, and breathless Trump/GOP fundraising appeal. This crisis is being played for money (lots of it) and short- and long-term political advantage. It has literally nothing to do with democracy or election integrity. And it is being played by the same cynics who doubled down on every thumb on the electoral scales, including voter-suppression and disinformation schemes galore.

It is worthy of note that Trump has never stopped claiming that there were "millions of illegal voters" who cost him the popular vote victory in 2016 without ever producing a shred of evidence to substantiate that eternally repeated claim. In fact, he slapped together an Electoral Integrity "Commission" to ferret out the fraudsters and then disbanded it without so much as a Report.

jonathan simon code red And it is further worthy of note that Trump's current strategy is not about actually overturning enough votes to win election legitimately. His own aides have acknowledged that is impossible. Rather it is fixed on delaying certification past the applicable deadlines. The law favors delay and Team Trump knows it.

His plan is to prevent certification of 270 Biden electoral votes by tying up several state processes in court past the state deadlines (the "hard" one being 12/14, when the Electoral College votes on slates) and then either importuning friendly state legislatures (the GOP controls Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona) to send Trump elector slates to Congress, or simply throwing the election to the House, where the GOP controls the majority of state delegations (under the Twelfth Amendment, the House votes for president by state delegation) so Trump wins.

Does that look like democracy or electoral integrity to you? To me it looks like yet another right-wing scheme to steal an election and haven't we been through (and been irreparably harmed by) enough of those? Don't kid yourselves this is a clear and present danger.

So I think we should examine what's going on now in context. Yes, our electoral system is manifestly in need of serious reform. And yes, no Democrat, since The Help America Vote Act (2002) ushered in the Computerized Voting Era, has challenged the system's non-transparency or the parade of red flags that that non-transparency has given rise to. But Trump has no intention of pursuing a genuine investigation bent on bringing transparency to the system. He is interested in the welfare of no one and nothing other than Donald J. Trump not his party, not his nation, not its voters. That has been demonstrated beyond any disputing. He will lie. He will falsely accuse. He might even commit fraud as part of his desperate putsch.

I think our responsibility is not to join the Democrats and media in chanting how wonderful and legitimate our electoral system is. We know better than anyone that it is not. But our responsibility is to keep careful watch over the delay-scam that Trump is now setting in motion, and give what support we can to the beleaguered election officials who will now be attacked ruthlessly and desperately (my god, they're even going after their own GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in Georgia!). So far Trump has failed for lack of evidence in virtually every case he has taken to court, some before highly partisan right-leaning judges. We can let that process play out (it is infinitely more than Kerry or Clinton or Ossoff or Coakley or any Democrat-of-note with the exception of Al Franken has ever ventured). But we don't have to and shouldn't provide more anecdotal or ambiguous forensic fuel to a desperate man who has utter contempt for fact and evidence, or to the party that yet again is riding cynical shotgun for him.

It's not that we as Democrats, Progressives, or EI advocates "won." Given the polls and the control of the equipment, and given all the other outcomes (from Senate to House to state legislatures), Democrats are hardly the "winners" of this election. We have at least as good reason, in the pervasive red shift from both exit and tracking polls, to suspect wholesale rigging to benefit Republican candidates, as Trump has to suspect retail indeed much better, given the egregious numbers and the whole forensic history of the post-HAVA era.

Perhaps this will turn out to be a long-postponed moment of truth and reckoning for our voting system and for a counting process incidentally or diabolically designed for concealment. We continue to crunch numbers and search for telltale patterns of "mistabulation." Computerized election fraud rarely, if ever, comes out and shakes your hand. Trust in our electoral process and its core protocols has, as I've cautioned with increasing urgency over the past two decades, at last jumped the shark, hit the wall, gone over the cliff so perhaps there will now be a more receptive audience for our near-proofs and desperate pleas.

But you don't get Trump if you don't get that he will use everyone and everything he possibly can for his own ends -- and lose you when you no longer serve them. He's demonstrated that his whole life with hardly a single flinch.

You think you'll ride his scattershot charges to some new dawn for electoral integrity. If you get in bed with him (and do anything to further nurture the hopes of his besotted followers), don't expect to get up in the morning.

Washington Post, Robin Kemp lost her news job in Clayton County, Ga. — but she kept reporting the news. It paid off on election week, Reis Thebault, Nov. 10, 2020. Robin Kemp was 12 hours into the longest day of her journalism career when she got a call from a funny number. A British radio station wanted her on air to talk about the presidential election in Clayton County, Ga., where she lives and works. Could she be ready in, oh, 30 seconds?

That was Kemp’s first clue that her county, a suburban community south of Atlanta, had become the center of the political world. It was late on Thursday, nearly two full days after polls had closed, and Joe Biden was suddenly on the precipice of overtaking President Trump in Georgia and turning the state blue for the first time in nearly three decades.

It took her even longer to realize that the world wasn’t just watching her state. It was watching her.

Kemp, an indefatigable 56-year-old reporter who started her news site after the local paper laid her off in April, was the only journalist to watch all 21 hours of Clayton County’s marathon tabulation of absentee votes, from about 9 a.m. Thursday to 5 a.m. Friday. During that span, a record number of absentee ballots helped Biden close the statewide gap with Trump. And it was votes from Clayton County — the heart of the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis’s old district — that pushed Biden into the lead.

Kemp’s all-night coverage was public service journalism in its purest form.

When she set out that morning, Kemp had just a couple hundred Twitter followers and less than $2,000 in a GoFundMe she started in April. By the next day, she was at well over 10,000 followers and dollars. And her fledgling news site, the Clayton Crescent, saw a flood of readers.

Kemp’s work is emblematic of the sort of journalism that is vanishing by the day in the United States. Since 2004, more than a quarter of the country’s newspapers have disappeared, according to research by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill journalism professor Penny Muse Abernathy. The coronavirus pandemic has only accelerated that dire trend. In April and May alone, at least 30 papers closed or merged, dozens went online-only and thousands of journalists were furloughed or laid off.

Nov. 10

Washington Post, E.U. antitrust regulators announce charges against Amazon, alleging unfair business practices, Michael Birnbaum, Nov. 10, 2020. The European Union’s antitrust chief announced charges against Amazon on Tuesday, alleging that the online giant misuses the data it gathers from other sellers on its platform.

The charge was the latest European move against U.S. tech giants, who in recent years have often run into more aggressive regulation from E.U. enforcers than those in the United States. E.U. antitrust regulator Margrethe Vestager alleged that Amazon uses the vast pool of information it gathers from its marketplace platform to identify popular products being sold by outside vendors on its website, then offers similar products itself, sometimes at lower prices.

Vestager, a former Danish economy minister, has made aggressive policing of companies including Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple a theme of her tenure. Her allegations came a day after E.U. ministers approved $4 billion in tariffs on U.S. products, an unrelated decision that nevertheless suggested that nearly four years of angry trade relations under President Trump are unlikely to end overnight with the election of Joe Biden as president, even if he has offered a more conciliatory approach than the current occupant of the Oval Office.

New York Times, Analysis: What Went Wrong With Polling? Some Early Theories, Nate Cohn, Nov. 10, 2020. Pollsters thought they had learned from the errors of 2016. It’s possible that they did, and that this election reflects new problems. It’s not too early to say that the polls’ systematic understatement of President Trump’s support was very similar to the polling misfire of four years ago, and might have exceeded it.

For now, there is no easy excuse. After 2016, pollsters arrived at plausible explanations for why surveys had systematically underestimated Mr. Trump in the battleground states. One was that state polls didn’t properly weight respondents without a college degree. Another was that there were factors beyond the scope of polling, like the large number of undecided voters who appeared to break sharply to Mr. Trump in the final stretch.

This year, there seemed to be less cause for concern: In 2020, most state polls weighted by education, and there were far fewer undecided voters.

But in the end, the polling error in states was virtually identical to the miss from 2016, despite the steps taken to fix things. The Upshot’s handy “If the polls were as wrong as they were in 2016” chart turned out to be more useful than expected, and it nailed Joe Biden’s one-point-or-less leads in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.

The national polls were even worse than they were four years ago, when the industry’s most highly respected and rigorous survey houses generally found Hillary Clinton leading by four points or less — close to her 2.1-point popular-vote victory. This year, Mr. Biden is on track to win the national vote by around five percentage points; no major national live-interview telephone survey showed him leading by less than eight percentage points over the final month of the race.

In the months ahead, troves of data will help add context to exactly what happened in this election, like final turnout data, the results by precinct, and updated records of which voters turned out or stayed home. All of this data can be appended to our polling, to nail down where the polls were off most and help point toward why. But for now, it’s still too soon for a confident answer.

Washington Post, ‘Have we all been conned?’: The QAnon conspiracy theory faces a post-Trump identity crisis, Drew Harwell and Craig Timberg, Nov. 10, 2020 (print ed.). President Trump’s election loss and the week-long disappearance of their anonymous prophet have forced supporters of the baseless movement to rethink their beliefs.

President Trump’s election loss and the week-long silence of “Q,” the QAnon movement’s mysterious prophet, have wrenched some believers into a crisis of faith, with factions voicing unease about their future or rallying others to stay calm and “trust the plan.”

The uncertainty has been compounded by the abrupt public resignation, also last Tuesday, of Ron Watkins, the administrator of Q’s online sanctuary on the message board 8kun.

Q has gone quiet before. But the abrupt lack of posts since last Tuesday — Election Day, which the anonymous figure had touted for months as a key moment of reckoning — has sparked speculation and alarm among the movement’s most ardent followers.

Some QAnon proponents have begun to publicly grapple with reality and question whether the conspiracy theory is a hoax. “Have we all been conned?” one user wrote Saturday on 8kun.

Washington Post, Stop the Steal’ supporters, restrained by Facebook, turn to Parler to spread false election claims, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rachel Lerman, Nov. 10, 2020 (print ed.). Alternative social media app Parler has surged in popularity as Facebook restricts groups and hashtags spreading election misinformation.

Nov. 8

Washington Post, Opinion: The media never fully learned how to cover Trump. But they still might have saved democracy, Margaret Sullivan, right, Nov. 8, margaret sullivan 2015 photo 2020. Over the past four or five years, I’ve been sharply critical of the media, including that subset I like to call the “reality-based press” — as distinguished from, say, the mendacious bilge spewed by the likes of Sean Hannity and Alex Jones.

He was a deeply abnormal president, but we constantly sought to normalize him, treating his deranged tweets like legitimate news and piously forecasting, every time he sounded the least bit calm, that he was becoming “presidential.”

The mainstream media, however flawed, has managed to tell us who Trump is. Even the worst of it — the way lie-filled briefings on the coronavirus, in which the president promoted untested cures and pure quackery, were broadcast live to the nation — had the benefit of showing people how unfit he was.
Without the reality-based press, whatever its flaws and shortcomings, we would be utterly lost.

Washington Post, Seymour Topping (1921–2020): New York Times correspondent and editor dies at 98, Harrison Smith, Nov. 7, 2020. He reported on the Chinese Communist Revolution and First Indochina War and later served as the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.

Nov. 7

Vox, Opinion: A Coup Attempt In Plain Sight, Ezra Klein, Nov. 7, 2020. How do we cover it when it’s happening here? A few years ago, there was a boom of articles called “If it happened there,” imagining how the American press would cover this or that story if it happened in another country. How would we cover the government shutdown if it happened in another country? The Ferguson protests? The Oregon militia siege? George Floyd’s killing? Mike Bloomberg?

Slate’s Joshua Keating popularized the form, but other outlets, including Vox, have deployed it. The intent was to use the tropes of foreign coverage to create a sense of what the literary critic Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement”: severing us from the familiarity and overconfidence that can dull our awareness of extraordinary events. And so you’d get leads like, “the pleasant autumn weather disguises a government teetering on the brink. Because, at midnight Monday night, the government of this intensely proud and nationalistic people will shut down, a drastic sign of political dysfunction in this moribund republic.”

djt as chosen one But the slight air of parody lent the whole enterprise a sense of unreality. America isn’t a banana republic. It wasn’t happening there. It was happening here, and that made all the difference. In order to even see the danger, to recognize the depth of tensions or the possibilities of fracture, we had to control for American exceptionalism, for the implicit belief that we were the United States of America, and we were different.

If the past four years — and the past four days — have proven anything, it’s that we are not as different as we believed, not as kissed by providence as we hoped. Perhaps we are not different at all. We need to cover it as if it happening here, because it is.
Donald Trump is trying to discredit an election he is losing

Joe Biden has won the presidency. But the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is attempting a coup in plain sight. “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” he tweeted on Saturday morning. This came after he demanded that states cease counting votes when the total began to turn against him, after his press secretary shocked Fox News anchors by arguing that legally cast votes should be thrown out.

The Trump administration’s current strategy is to go to court to try and get votes for Biden ruled illegitimate, and that strategy explicitly rests on Trump’s appointees honoring a debt the administration, at least, believes they owe. One of his legal advisers said, “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court — of which the President has nominated three justices — to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.”

If that fails, and it will, Mark Levin, one of the nation’s most popular conservative radio hosts, is explicitly calling on Republican legislatures to reject the election results and seat Donald Trump as president anyway. After Twitter tagged the tweet as contested, Trump’s press secretary weighed in furiously on Levin’s behalf.

That this coup probably will not work — that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively — does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences. Millions will believe Trump, will see the election as stolen. The Trump family’s Twitter feeds, and those of associated outlets and allies, are filled with allegations of fraud and lies about the process (reporter Isaac Saul has been doing yeoman’s work tracking these arguments, and his thread is worth reading). It’s the construction of a confusing, but immersive, alternative reality in which the election has been stolen from Trump and weak-kneed Republicans are letting the thieves escape.

This is, to borrow Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar’s framework, “an autocratic attempt.” That’s the stage in the transition toward autocracy in which the would-be autocrat is trying to sever his power from electoral check. If he’s successful, autocratic breakthrough follows, and then autocratic consolidation occurs. In this case, the would-be autocrat stands little chance of being successful. But he will not entirely fail, either. What Trump is trying to form is something akin to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of power by corrupt elites.

The corruption of the GOP will outlive Trump’s presidency

Members of the Trump family are explicitly, repeatedly, trying to make the acceptance of their conspiracies a litmus test for ambitious Republicans. And it is working. To read elected Republicans today — with a few notable exceptions, like Sen. Mitt Romney — is to read a careful, cowardly double-speak. Politician after politician is signaling, as Vice President Mike Pence did, solidarity with the president, while not quite endorsing his conspiracies. Of course every legal vote should be counted. Of course allegations of fraud should be addressed. But that is not what the president is demanding — he is demanding the votes against him be ruled illegal — and they know it.

What we are not seeing, in any way, is a wholesale rejection on the right of Trump’s effort to delegitimize the election. And thus there is no reason to believe Trump will not retain his hold over much of the party, and much of its base, going forward.

Even if Trump is rejected in this election, the Republican Party that protected and enabled him will not be. Their geographic advantage in the Senate insulates them from anything but massive, consecutive landslide defeats, and their dominance over the decennial redistricting process has given them a handicap in the House, too.

Here’s the grim kicker: The conditions that made Trump and this Republican Party possible are set to worsen. Republicans retained control of enough statehouses to drive the next redistricting effort, too, and their 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court will unleash their map-drawers more fully. The elections analyst G. Elliott Morris estimates that the gap between the popular vote margin and the tipping point state in the Electoral College will be 4 to 5 percentage points, and that the GOP’s control of the redistricting process could push it to 6 to 7 points next time.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Fox News reportedly suspends or cancels Judge Jeanine Pirro after Donald Trump loses, Bill Palmer, Nov. 7, 2020. For months, Palmer Report has been predicting that if Donald Trump lost the election, Fox News would make some noise in his defense, but would then end up moving to distance itself from Trump and try to move on.

After all, Fox is a business, not a fan club, and it has to remain viable with its audience as Trump fades from the stage.

Now the far right site Newsmax is reporting that Fox News has either suspended or canceled Judge Jeanine Pirro’s television show after she launched into particularly deranged conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s election loss.

Newsmax is the kind of propaganda site that’s making a point of refusing to admit that Trump lost. So we don’t trust them in general, but there would be no reason for them to make up a story about Jeanine Pirro, right, getting the boot.

So take it for whatever it’s worth until it’s independently confirmed, but it looks like Fox News may indeed already be laying the groundwork for moving beyond the Donald Trump era now that it’s over.

New York Times, The New York Post has turned critical as President Trump moves toward defeat, and a top editor plans to retire, Katie Robertson, Nov. 7, 2020 (print ed.). Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid has turned critical as the president seems headed to defeat. Col. Allan, a wizard there, says he plans to retire next year.

Last month The New York Post called President Trump “an invincible hero, who not only survived every dirty trick the Democrats threw at him, but the Chinese virus as well.” Then it published front-page articles trying to link the contents of a laptop said to belong to Hunter Biden to his father, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

On Thursday, in a sudden about-face, Rupert Murdoch’s scrappy tabloid published two articles with a wildly different tone. One accused the president of making an “unfounded claim that political foes were trying to steal the election.” The headline on the other described Donald Trump Jr. as the “panic-stricken” author of a “clueless tweet.”

What happened?

In short, the president appears to be going down — and The Post is not about to go with him.

Palmer Report, Opinion: The balance of power on Twitter just shifted dramatically, Bill Palmer, Nov. 7, 2020. The tweets that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris posted today announcing victory are now both among the top ten most liked tweets in history. Trump’s most popular tweet today got barely one-third as many likes as Joe’s and Kamala’s tweets. The balance of power on Twitter has shifted dramatically.

According to the folks who track these things, Kamala’s tweet today is the seventh most liked of all time, and Joe’s tweet is the eighth most liked of all time. President Obama has the second and third most liked tweets of all time. Interestingly, Donald Trump doesn’t have any tweets on the top ten list.

Nov. 5

Washington Post, ESPN announces hundreds of layoffs as pandemic, cord-cutting upend sports television, Ben Strauss, Nov. 5, 2020. ESPN will lay off 300 workers and leave another 200 positions unfilled, network president Jimmy Pitaro told employees Thursday, as the pandemic and changing television-viewing habits continue to affect the sports behemoth and its parent company, Disney.

The cuts will affect all aspects of the company but focus heavily on those who work in production, for events the network televises and studio programming at the company’s headquarters in Bristol, Conn., according to multiple people with knowledge of the changes.

ESPN has faced various head winds in recent years, mainly the decline in cable subscribers. This year brought a new series of challenges as the novel coronavirus disrupted the sports calendar and contributed to a sharp decline in sports viewership.

The network, still the dominant force in sports television, went several months without any of its traditional live sports offerings in the spring and summer. When sports did return, they did so with mostly empty stadiums and fan bases whose interest in sports was dampened by the pandemic and a dizzying political-news cycle.

Washington Post, Facebook bans ‘STOP THE STEAL’ group Trump allies were using to organize protests against counting, Tony Romm and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Nov. 5, 2020. The group, which had attracted more than 360,000 members, was among widespread efforts by conservative activists to spark protests challenging the legitimacy of the election.

President Trump’s allies have turned to Facebook and other social-media sites in an effort to spark nationwide protests against the 2020 election, thrusting some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful organizing tools into a contest over the legitimacy of American democracy.

The campaign and its aides have relied on a network of new and existing Facebook pages, groups and events — some of which have garnered hundreds of thousands of members — to rally people in public this week around a baseless conspiracy theory that Democratic candidate Joe Biden is attempting to “steal” the election. Some of the efforts promoted in places like Pennsylvania and Arizona specifically target vote-counting centers, threatening disruptions while ballot tallying is still underway.

Nov. 4

Washington Post, Top White House adviser Birx contradicts Trump on virus threat, urging all-out response, Lena H. Sun and Josh Dawsey, Nov. 4, 2020 (print ed.). A top White House coronavirus adviser sounded alarms Monday about a new and deadly phase in the health crisis, pleading with top administration officials for “much more aggressive action,” even as President Trump continues to assure rallygoers that the nation is “rounding the turn” on the pandemic.

“We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic … leading to increasing mortality,” said the Nov. 2 report from Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force. “This is not about lockdowns — it hasn’t been about lockdowns since March or April. It’s about an aggressive balanced approach that is not being implemented.”

Birx’s internal report, shared with top White House and agency officials, contradicts Trump on numerous points: While the president holds large campaign events with hundreds of attendees, most without masks, she explicitly warns against them. While the president blames rising cases on more testing, she says testing is “flat or declining” in many areas where cases are rising. And while Trump says the country is “rounding the turn,” Birx notes that the country is entering its most dangerous period yet and will see more than 100,000 new cases a day this week.

Through a spokesperson, Birx did not respond to a request for comment.

Other health experts, including Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have warned of record surges in cases and hospitalizations as the United States records more than 9 million cases and 230,000 deaths.

“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” Fauci told The Washington Post late Friday, predicting a long and potentially deadly winter unless there’s an “abrupt change” — prompting Trump to suggest that he planned to fire the scientist after the election.

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump blatantly seeks to undermine democracy with attempts to falsely claim victory, subvert election, Dan Balz, Nov. 4, 2020. For four years, President Trump has sought to undermine the institutions of a democratic society, but never so blatantly as in the early morning hours of Wednesday. His attempt to falsely claim victory and to subvert the election itself by calling for a halt to vote-counting represents the gravest of threats to the stability of the country.

Millions of votes remain to be counted, votes cast legally under the laws of the states. Until they are all counted, the outcome of the election remains in doubt. Either he or former vice president Joe Biden could win an electoral college majority, but neither has yet done so, no matter what he says. Those are the facts, for which the president shows no respect.

A president who respected the Constitution would let things play out. But Trump has shown once again he cares not about the Constitution or the stability and well-being of the country or anything like that. He cares only about himself and retaining the powers he now holds. And so he cries “fraud” when there is no evidence whatsoever of any such thing.

Media News

Washington Post, Opinion: We still don’t know much about this election — except that the media and pollsters blew it again, Margaret Sullivan, right, Nov. 4, 2020. Observations on the unexpected margaret sullivan 2015 photo election night we should have seen coming.

By early morning Wednesday, there was a lot that millions of anxious Americans didn’t know.

Mainly, they didn’t know who the president-elect is. That, in itself, wasn’t unexpected, nor is it terrible.
Follow the latest on Election 2020

But after consuming hours of news on Tuesday night, and observing the election results thus far, there are a few things that we can be certain of.

That we should never again put as much stock in public opinion polls, and those who interpret them, as we’ve grown accustomed to doing. Polling seems to be irrevocably broken, or at least our understanding of how seriously to take it is.

The supposedly commanding lead that Joe Biden carried for weeks didn’t last very long into Tuesday evening. This was a lead, remember, that many predicted could result in a landslide Biden victory, help turn the Senate blue, and bring the Democrats amazing victories in red states like Ohio and Florida.

Fox News called Arizona early for Biden — and once again, prompted Trump to question its loyalty

It didn’t take long for that dream to dissipate into a much more typical process of divvying up the states into red and blue, with a lot of unknowns added in. But none of it amounted to the clear repudiation of Trump that a lot of the polling caused us to think was coming. (As for the New York Times “needle” that projected results for Georgia, North Carolina and Florida? Just as in 2016, the way the graphic twitched and swerved throughout the evening once again was capable of provoking a heart attack or, depending on your politics, nausea.)

The news media, in general, has not done a good job of covering the Latino vote. “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans . . .” tweeted Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times.

New York Times, Fox News Made a Big Call in Arizona, Buoying Biden and Angering Trump, Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin, Nov. 4, 2020. It was just after 12:30 a.m. on election night, and Fox News was under fire.

“Arnon, we’re getting a lot of incoming here, and we need you to answer some questions,” the network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, said pointedly.

“Shoot!” Arnon Mishkin replied, his face breaking into a smile.

Roughly an hour earlier, Mr. Mishkin’s decision desk team at Fox News had made a bold call that instantly changed the tenor of the night: Arizona had gone to Joseph R. Biden Jr. The projection buoyed supporters of the Democratic candidate and sent President Trump’s aides into conniptions.

Even Mr. Trump himself took a whack, referring dismissively to Mr. Mishkin during an early-morning appearance at the White House as “the gentleman that called it.”

“It” was Arizona, a state that Mr. Trump won in 2016 but that Fox News now said had fallen into Mr. Biden’s column, just as Democrats were ruing a lackluster showing in Florida.

Trump campaign officials said they were taken aback by the Fox News projection: Jason Miller, the campaign’s chief strategist, claimed on Twitter that more than one million votes were outstanding in Arizona, and he baselessly accused the network of “trying to invalidate their votes.” John Roberts, the network’s chief White House correspondent, said the campaign was “livid.” A false rumor circulated online that Fox News had retracted its call.

Cue Mr. Mishkin, a management and polling consultant who has led Fox News’s decision desk since 2008. Far from caving to the pressure from Mr. Trump’s aides, he held firm, saying the campaign’s insistence that it could secure a win in the state was, simply, wrong.

“That’s not true,” Mr. Mishkin told the Fox News anchor team. “I’m sorry, the president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes.” He added, “We’re not wrong in this particular case.”

This was a night when other networks were playing things cautiously. CNN, for instance, did not project Mr. Biden’s victory in Virginia until several hours after The Associated Press had already called it.

Nov. 2

New York Times, Analysis: It’s the End of an Era for the Media, No Matter Who Wins the Election, Ben Smith, Nov. 2, 2020 (print ed.). President Trump made the legacy media great again. Here’s what’s next for them.

Many leaders in news and media have been holding their breaths for the election — and planning everything from retirements to significant shifts in strategy for the months to come, whoever wins. President Trump, after all, succeeded in making the old media great again, in part through his obsession with it.

His riveting show allowed much of the television news business, in particular, to put off reckoning with the technological shifts — toward mobile devices and on-demand consumption — that have changed all of our lives. But now, change is in the air across a news landscape that has revolved around the president.

Nov. 1

Palmer Report, Opinion: I like our chances, Bill Palmer, right, Nov. 1, 2020. More people would be reading this article right now if I’d given it a scary headline about how we could be just forty-eight hours from total doom. But I’ve never been interested in trying to scare people into paying attention to my political analysis, and I’m not going to start now. I don’t believe in optimism, but I do believe in evidence.

When you look at the numbers and the circumstances, there is far, far, far greater reason to expect Joe Biden to win than there was to expect Hillary Clinton to win. The two elections just look so different; the main difference being that Donald Trump keeps trying the same tricks as last time, yet this time he isn’t getting much mileage out of any of them. Hunter Biden’s emails? Crazed rallies? Lock somebody up? This is all so 2016. The clear majority of the country is over it.

Heading into Election Day in 2016, Clinton had a three and a half point lead in the national polling averages; she ended up winning by two points (and therefore lost the Electoral College). Heading into Election Day in 2020, Biden has an eight to ten point lead in the national polling averages, depending on how you do the math; if the polls are off in 2020 by the same amount they were off in 2016, Biden will win an Electoral College landslide.

And while I believe the Supreme Court wouldn’t hesitate to hand Donald Trump a victory if the deciding swing state came down to a few hundred votes like in 2000, there is nothing to suggest that this election is going to be close. If Biden wins decisively, Trump may put up a fight – but Democrats have lawyers too, and Biden will be named the winner.

So yeah, we should all be concerned that there’s a remote chance our country could come to an end in forty-eight hours. I’m not going to sugar coat how ugly it would be if Trump did win. But the odds are overwhelmingly in our favor. I like our chances. And if you’re worried about the remote chance that everything might be about to go to hell, then spend these final two days making sure your friends, family, and associates turn out and vote. We’ve spent four years working to take Trump down. Now let’s finish the job.

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump just made Biden’s closing argument for him, Dana Milbank, right, Nov. 1, 2020 (print ed.). This is the time for presidential candidates to make their closing dana milbank Custom arguments, but Joe Biden didn’t really have to.

“The Fake News Media is riding COVID, COVID, COVID, all the way to the Election. Losers!” Trump tweeted.

“Covid, covid, covid, covid,” he said in Nebraska.

“Covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid!” he railed in Michigan

Trump was doubling down — actually, tripling, quadrupling, sextupling and decupling down — on the very thing costing him the election: his incompetent and inhumane handling of the greatest mass trauma in living memory for the vast majority of Americans.

U.S. Elections / Democracy

New York Times, Analysis: Dishonesty Has Defined Trump’s Presidency. The Consequences Could Be Lasting, Peter Baker, Nov. 1, 2020. Whether President Trump wins or loses, the concept of public trust in a set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has been eroded.

Born amid made-up crowd size claims and “alternative facts,” the Trump presidency has been a factory of falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and defied historical analogy.

But now, with the election just days away, the consequences of four years of fabulism are coming into focus as President Trump argues that the vote itself is inherently “rigged,” tearing at the credibility of the system. Should the contest go into extra innings through legal challenges after Tuesday, it may leave a public with little faith in the outcome — and in its own democracy.

The nightmarish scenario of widespread doubt and denial of the legitimacy of the election would cap a period in American history when truth itself has seemed at stake under a president who has strayed so far from the normal bounds that he creates what allies call his own reality. Even if the election ends with a clear victory or defeat for Mr. Trump, scholars and players alike say the very concept of public trust in an established set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has eroded during his tenure with potentially long-term ramifications.

“You can mitigate the damage, but you can’t bring it back to 100 percent the way it was before,” said Lee McIntyre, the author of “Post-Truth” and a philosopher at Boston University. “And I think that’s going to be Trump’s legacy. I think there’s going to be lingering damage to the processes by which we vet truths for decades. People are going to be saying, ‘Oh, that’s fake news.’ The confusion between skepticism and denialism, the idea that if you don’t want to believe something, you don’t have to believe it, that’s really damaging and that’s going to last.”

October

Oct. 29

NBC News, Investigation: How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge, Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, Oct. 29, 2020. A 64-page document that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump appears to be the work of a fake "intelligence firm."
Hunter Biden speaks at the World Food Program USA's annual awards ceremony in Washington in April 2016.

One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden's laptop, a fake "intelligence" document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden's son and business in China.

The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake "intelligence firm" called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.

The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen's profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.

One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist.

Despite the document's questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.
Inside the false conspiracy theory being pushed about the Bidens
Oct. 23, 202004:43

The document and its spread have become part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden's presidential campaign, which moved from the fringes of the internet to more mainstream conservative news outlets.

An unverified leak of documents — including salacious pictures from what President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a Delaware Apple repair store owner claimed to be Hunter Biden's hard drive — were published in the New York Post on Oct. 14. Associates close to Trump, including Giuliani and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, have promised more blockbuster leaks and secrets, which have yet to materialize.

The fake intelligence document, however, preceded the leak by months, and it helped lay the groundwork among right-wing media for what would become a failed October surprise: a viral pile-on of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
Behind Typhoon

The Typhoon Investigations document was first posted in September to Intelligence Quarterly, an anonymous blog "dedicated to collecting important daily news," according to its "about" section. Historical domain records show the blog was registered to Albert Marko, a self-described political and economic adviser, who also lists the blog on his Twitter bio. When asked about the provenance of the document, Marko said he received it from Balding.

Balding, an associate professor at Fulbright University Vietnam who studies the Chinese economy and financial markets, posted the document on his blog on Oct. 22, seven weeks after it was initially published.

"I had really not wanted to do this but roughly 2 months ago I was handed a report about Biden activities in China the press has simply refused to cover. I want to strongly emphasize I did not write the report but I know who did," Balding said in an email.

Balding later claimed to NBC News that he wrote some of the document.

"I authored small parts of the report and was involved in report preparation and review. As a researcher, and due to the understandable worry about foreign disinformation, it was paramount that the report document activity from acknowledged and public sources," Balding said. "Great care was taken to document, cite, and retain information so that acknowledged facts could be placed in the public domain."

martin aspen deep fake A viral dossier about Hunter Biden was written by "Martin Aspen," left, a fake identity whose profile picture was created by artificial intelligence.TyphoonInvesti1 / via Twitter

Balding said Aspen is "an entirely fictional individual created solely for the purpose of releasing this report." Balding did not name the document's main author, saying "the primary author of the report, due to personal and professional risks, requires anonymity."

Balding claimed that the document was commissioned by Apple Daily, a Hong Kong-based tabloid that is frequently critical of the Chinese government. Apple Daily did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to posting the document to his blog, Balding also promoted it in far-right media, appearing on Bannon's podcast and on "China Unscripted," a podcast produced by The Epoch Times, a pro-Trump media outlet opposed to the Chinese government.

Balding, an American who taught economics at China's Peking University HSBC Business School until 2018, is often critical of the Chinese government. He made news this year as a source uncovering a global bulk data collection operation by the Chinese company Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Fox News just cut off Donald Trump and aired Joe Biden instead, Bill Palmer, Oct. 29, 2020. Earlier this week Donald Trump publicly expressed his frustration after Fox News aired President Obama’s campaign speech. Trump still seems to believe that Fox was propping him up all this time because it liked him, when in reality these decisions are always about ratings and maintaining relative credibility with your audience.

Trump is sure to be even more upset when he gets word that Fox News cut him off mid-speech today in favor of airing Joe Biden’s rally speech in full. Trump always counted on getting an unfair amount of cable news airtime in 2016, particularly from Fox, and it’s a contribution factor as to why he’s in office.

But at this point Fox News appears to have concluded that Donald Trump is likely to lose, and that Joe Biden is a better ratings draw, even for its right-leaning audience. Whether Fox viewers like Biden or not, many of them expect him to be the next President, so they’re interested in what he has to say and what he’s going to do.

If Trump was hoping Fox would keep propping him up until the bitter end, he’s about to learn the hard way that his relationship with Fox has always been transactional. Trump is loyal to no one, so it’s fitting that Fox is finally being less loyal to him during his time of need.

glenn greenwald intercept anniversary poster april 16 2019

Better Times: Shown above is a promotional photo for The Intercept, showing Editor Betsy Reed at left. Next to her is shown co-founder and columnist Glenn Greenwald, who resigned on Oct. 29.

New York Times, Glenn Greenwald Leaves The Intercept, Claiming He Was Censored, Katie Robertson, Oct. 29, 2020. Mr. Greenwald will join other high-profile journalists who have left major media outlets to work largely on their own at Substack.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald said on Thursday that he was leaving The Intercept, the news website he helped found, claiming that it had refused to publish an article he wrote on Joseph R. Biden Jr. unless he removed sections that were critical of the Democratic presidential nominee.

Mr. Greenwald, who is best known for his role in making public the National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, said in a statement that he would continue to publish his work at Substack, a digital platform for subscription newsletters.

He announced his decision to leave The Intercept in a Substack post, writing that the “final, precipitating cause” was that “The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.”

Betsy Reed, the editor in chief of The Intercept, disputed Mr. Greenwald’s claim that he had been censored.

“Glenn Greenwald’s decision to resign from The Intercept stems from a fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship,” she wrote in a statement.

Ms. Reed added that his post about his departure was “teeming with distortions and inaccuracies — all of them designed to make him appear a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum.”

The statement included some qualified praise.

“We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be, and we remain proud of much of the work we did with him over the past six years,” the editor wrote. “It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not the Intercept.”

In a phone interview, Mr. Greenwald said he had received a “story memo” from The Intercept outlining what the publication would allow and not allow in his article. “My arrangement with The Intercept since it began is my opinion pieces are not edited by anyone,” he said.

In his resignation post, Mr. Greenwald referred to “the Hunter Biden materials,” suggesting that the disputed article was about digital data taken from a laptop computer said to belong to the candidate’s son.

The Intercept was founded in 2013 by Mr. Greenwald, the filmmaker Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, with backing from the eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

Substack, Personal Opinion: My Resignation From The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, Oct. 29, 2020. The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles. Today I sent my glenn greenwald firstlook intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media.

The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.

The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.

I had no objection to their disagreement with my views of what this Biden evidence shows: as a last-ditch attempt to avoid being censored, I encouraged them to air their disagreements with me by writing their own articles that critique my perspectives and letting readers decide who is right, the way any confident and healthy media outlet would. But modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. So censorship of my article, rather than engagement with it, was the path these Biden-supporting editors chose.

The censored article will be published on this page shortly. My letter of intent to resign, which I sent this morning to First Look Media’s President Michael Bloom, is published below.

As of now, I will be publishing my journalism here on Substack, where numerous other journalists, including my good friend, the great intrepid reporter Matt Taibbi, have come in order to practice journalism free of the increasingly repressive climate that is engulfing national mainstream media outlets across the country.

This was not an easy choice: I am voluntarily sacrificing the support of a large institution and guaranteed salary in exchange for nothing other than a belief that there are enough people who believe in the virtues of independent journalism and the need for free discourse who will be willing to support my work by subscribing.

I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.

Oct. 28

djt amy coney barrett resized white house 10 26 20

President Trump and Justice Amy Coney Barrett at the White House on Monday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Daily Howler, Opinion: Who is Associate Justice Barrett? Bob Somerby, Oct. 28, 2020. Who is Amy Coney Barrett? And why didn't anyone ask? Barrett, of course, is now an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. She'll be on the Court for the next thirty years—but who was Amy Coney Barrett in the 48 years before that?

The question arises because of an AP news report which only broke last week. As it appeared in the Washington Post, the AP report started like this, headline included:

SMITH AND BIESECKER (10/21/20): Barrett was trustee at private school with anti-gay policies:

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett served for nearly three years on the board of private Christian schools that effectively barred admission to children of same-sex parents and made it plain that openly gay and lesbian teachers weren’t welcome in the classroom.

The policies that discriminated against LGBTQ people and their children were in place for years at Trinity Schools Inc., both before Barrett joined the board in 2015 and during the time she served.

The three schools, in Indiana, Minnesota and Virginia, are affiliated with People of Praise, an insular community rooted in its own interpretation of the Bible, of which Barrett and her husband have been longtime members. At least three of the couple’s seven children have attended the Trinity School at Greenlawn, in South Bend, Indiana.

The AP spoke with more than two dozen people who attended or worked at Trinity Schools, or former members of People of Praise. They said the community’s teachings have been consistent for decades: Homosexuality is an abomination against God, sex should occur only within marriage and marriage should only be between a man and a woman.

The AP report continued from there. We remain puzzled by the (extremely) late emergence of this information.

Barrett testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 13 and 14. She was never asked about this matter, possibly because no one knew about it.

Arguably, it was an abomination against democratic procedure when Barrett received a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court without this matter being reported or discussed. One wonders where Democrats were in recent years, but also the national press.

Has opposition research suddenly ceased to exist? Barrett was known to (possibly) be "next in line" for at least the past three years. It's hard to know how a matter like this could come to light only after it was too late to make any conceivable difference in any conceivable way.

The AP report on this matter came and went last week. Perhaps understandably at this juncture, it provoked very little discussion.

That said, the chronology of this revelation remains a mystery to us. Who is Associate Justice Barrett? And why was no one able to ask her about this part of her personal history?

As we mentioned in real time, we spent two full days watching Barrett testify. As we mentioned, we were struck by how amazingly little we knew about her by the time the two days were done.

Democrats insisted on asking the types of questions they knew she wouldn't answer. A week later, we learned that no one had asked her about this part of her past.

Today, warnings are emerging across the press about the ways the Supreme Court could intervene in the aftermath of an apparent win by Candidate Biden. Was Barrett a "Manchurian nominee," one who might tip the balance toward a judicial assault on the electoral process?

We don't know how the Court might handle legal challenges to an apparent Biden win. But who is Amy Coney Barrett, and why didn't anyone ask?

We had two major reactions to Barrett's two days of testimony:

First, we noted the fact that Barrett was amazingly telegenic. Also, Democratic questioning struck us as amazingly pointless and daft.

One week later, up jumped the AP report. In our view, the fire trucks had arrived at the scene puzzlingly late.

What the heck ever happened to oppo? We can't answer that question.

Associated Press via Texarkana Gazette, Both newspapers in Utah's capital plan to cease daily publication, Oct. 28 2020. Salt Lake City will go from two daily printed newspapers to none after both of its major publications cut print days to once a week in unusual moves for a large city that could portend more struggles for the country's newspaper industry.

The 170-year-old Deseret News in the state capital said Tuesday it will stop publishing daily starting next year, a disclosure that came a day after the Salt Lake Tribune made a similar announcement.

It's an unusually deep cutback in print days, even in an era of steeply declining revenue, media analyst Ken Doctor said.

"To go from seven to one just like that and to have it done by both papers in the same city shows us how deep the reckoning is for the American newspaper industry going into 2021," said Doctor, who writes the Newsonomics blog.

The newspaper industry has been in crisis, with The Associated Press finding in 2019 that some 1,400 cities and towns across the U.S. had lost a newspaper over the past 15 years. Much of that has come in smaller markets, though papers in cities such as New Orleans and Pittsburgh have also cut print days less deeply.

Youngstown, Ohio, became the largest U.S. city without a daily newspaper last year — before the nation's economy was thrown into turmoil by the pandemic.

In Salt Lake City, both newspapers will continue to publish breaking stories online every day. The Salt Lake Tribune, which won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 2017, is not cutting newsroom staff. There were some journalist layoffs at the Deseret News.

The two publications have a joint-operating agreement that wi3ll end later this year.

Both papers will offer a weekly print publication. The Deseret News will also have a monthly magazine.

Deseret News Editor Doug Wilks said in an op-ed that the publication owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will continue its "national leadership role as the watchdog of the family and of faith in the public square."

Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall tweeted that it's a significant change for the city.

"It's hard to believe we'll no longer have a daily print paper in SLC," she wrote. "Local journalism is essential to democracy I look forward to reading online, but I'll miss both papers dearly."

The Deseret News will lay off six journalists and give severance packages to 18 staffers in visual editing and sales departments. About 160 people associated with the two newspapers' joint print operations will also be laid off.

The Deseret News is named after the territory's early title. The newspaper was born three years after pioneers arrived in 1847.

The newspaper has worked to expand its digital offerings for a decade, appealing to church members and others outside the state, and now 70% of its digital users come from outside the state, said Jeff Simpson, its president and publisher.

Politico, MAGA scrambles to repair the Hunter Biden narrative, Tin Nguyen, Oct. 28, 2020. Instead of publishing the more salacious allegations, conservative media has been more focused on covering alleged suppression of the story.

Weeks ago, when Rudy Giuliani first threw the contents of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop online, he promised a trove of even more damning information 10 days before the election.

Yet with less than a week to go, Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is still moving down the conservative media food chain, looking for takers.

The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have both reported finding no evidence that former Vice President Joe Biden benefited from the Hunter Biden business dealings that have drawn scrutiny. More explicitly pro-Trump media outlets — OAN, Breitbart, Newsmax — have mostly shied away from publishing fresher, more salacious allegations. And conservative talking heads — pundits, politicians and loud MAGA Twitter personalities alike — have been more focused on the meta narrative around the laptop, arguing that mainstream media, social media companies and the deep state are conspiring to prevent President Donald Trump’s reelection by suppressing the story.

When Breitbart did touch on new revelations, it preemptively distanced itself, carefully framing a fresh trove of emails as an independent investigation by Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, the 2015 look into the Clinton family’s extensive foreign financial ties that made several overstated or inaccurate claims.

So the story has gone elsewhere. Videos apparently showing Hunter Biden in compromising positions, allegedly obtained from the laptop, have been uploaded to a Chinese website owned partially by Steve Bannon, the former Trump aide who has been helping Giuliani. The explicit photos ended up on Gateway Pundit, a site known for promoting conspiracy theories about various Democratic figures. An email allegedly tying Hunter Biden to a Kazakh oligarch ended up in the British tabloid The Daily Mail, with only a passing mention of Biden. Other details have been published by outlets connected to prominent conservative super PACs.

Ultimately, the bulk of fresh allegations have been reduced to public statements from Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, who found a willing partner in Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night. Bobulinski got an extensive, 45-minute segment to lay out his case to Carlson’s millions of viewers. Yet elsewhere, Giuliani has groused on his podcast, “Common Sense,” that the public can only find out the truth from him, “because I'm not allowed on main television to tell you these things.”

Oct. 25

WhoWhatWhy, Investigation: Watch Porn? You Might Think Twice After Reading This, Laura Arman,Oct. 25, 2020. The world’s most popular X-rated site, Pornhub, averages 70 million daily visits, ranking 11th in global traffic ranking, according to Traffic Junky. Two other porn “tube” sites are close behind: Redtube at #85 and YouPorn at #120.

Of the tens of millions of free porn videos available online (Pornhub alone claims to have more than 13 million selections), most feature lawful activity between consenting adults. But critics say it’s not unusual on Pornhub and other sites to find clips of minors, rapes (real or simulated), or videos posted without consent of the participants.

Pornhub “is blatantly enabling and profiting from the rape, trafficking, assault and abuse of women and children,” said Laila Mickelwait, founder of Traffickinghub. The organization wants to shut down X-rated sites like Pornhub, saying they encourage sex trafficking and fail to remove illegal videos.

“There was recently a case of a 15-year-old girl in Florida who was missing for a year and she was located in 58 videos on Pornhub being exploited and raped for profit,” Mickelwait told WhoWhatWhy.

“She was part of a program … where Pornhub earns 35 percent of the revenue from video sales.” According to a published report, the girl’s mother found almost 60 porn videos of her on Pornhub, Periscope, Modelhub, Snapchat, and other video sharing sites.

On September 15, an Alabama man, Michael Williams, was arrested after an 18-year-old told police about a 2018 video on Pornhub that showed her performing sexual acts with the suspect when she was 16. Williams had an account, apparently verified through the site’s ModelHub program, which allowed Pornhub to earn 35 percent of each sale, according to Michael Dinsmore of the anti-trafficking campaign Exodus Cry.

“Any commercial sex act involving a minor is by definition sex trafficking according to the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act,” Dinsmore said. “The monetized child pornography video was up for two years with over 2,000 views.”

Earlier this year, “the BBC reported that 14-year-old Rose Kalemba was taken at knifepoint, raped for 12 hours and the videos of her torture were uploaded to Pornhub,” Mickelwait said. The horrific event took place in the summer of 2009 in a small town in Ohio.

A spokesman for Pornhub, who refused to be identified, told WhoWhatWhy that he was familiar with Kalemba’s claims, but said there was no evidence that her videos had been posted on the site: “We have a very detailed record of videos that have existed on Pornhub dating back to its inception, and Rose has said what the titles of videos were, and there are no videos that matched those titles or anything close to it that ever appeared on Pornhub.”

He acknowledged that prohibited videos are sometimes uploaded to Pornhub, but said the problem is far greater on other non-porn websites, especially social media. Twitter, for example, said it had banned 244,188 unique users for child sexual abuse material during the first six months of 2019.

He accused critics of trying to disguise their true goal: banning pornography entirely. “Just because Traffickinghub says these things, doesn’t make them true,” he said.

Oct. 24

New York Times, How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine, Kevin Roose, Oct. 24, 2020. Since 2016, the Falun Gong-backed newspaper has used aggressive Facebook tactics and right-wing misinformation to create an anti-China, pro-Trump media empire.

For years, The Epoch Times was a small, low-budget newspaper with an anti-China slant that was handed out free on New York street corners. But in 2016 and 2017, the paper made two changes that transformed it into one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.

The changes also paved the way for the publication, which is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscure Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, to become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.

epoch times First, it embraced President Trump, treating him as an ally in Falun Gong’s scorched-earth fight against China’s ruling Communist Party, which banned the group two decades ago and has persecuted its members ever since. Its relatively staid coverage of U.S. politics became more partisan, with more articles explicitly supporting Mr. Trump and criticizing his opponents.

Around the same time, The Epoch Times bet big on another powerful American institution: Facebook. The publication and its affiliates employed a novel strategy that involved creating dozens of Facebook pages, filling them with feel-good videos and viral clickbait, and using them to sell subscriptions and drive traffic back to its partisan news coverage.

In an April 2017 email to the staff obtained by The New York Times, the paper’s leadership envisioned that the Facebook strategy could help turn The Epoch Times into “the world’s largest and most authoritative media.” It could also introduce millions of people to the teachings of Falun Gong, fulfilling the group’s mission of “saving sentient beings.”

Today, The Epoch Times and its affiliates are a force in right-wing media, with tens of millions of social media followers spread across dozens of pages and an online audience that rivals those of The Daily Caller and Breitbart News, and with a similar willingness to feed the online fever swamps of the far right.

falun gong nazi symbol demonstration It also has growing influence in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. The president and his family have shared articles from the paper on social media, and Trump administration officials have sat for interviews with its reporters. In August, a reporter from The Epoch Times asked a question at a White House press briefing.

It is a remarkable success story for Falun Gong (whose supporters have portrayed their movement at times with Nazi-like symbolism, as at left), which has long struggled to establish its bona fides against Beijing’s efforts to demonize it as an “evil cult,” partly because its strident accounts of persecution in China can sometimes be difficult to substantiate or veer into exaggeration. In 2006, an Epoch Times reporter disrupted a White House visit by the Chinese president by shouting, “Evil people will die early.”

Oct. 21

New York Times, Justice Department Files Antitrust Suit Against Google, David McCabe and Cecilia Kang, Oct. 21, 2020 (print ed.). Most Aggressive Move Against Tech Giants in Decades

The Justice Department accused Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising, in the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation.

In a lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, the agency accused Google, a unit of Alphabet, of using several exclusive business contracts and agreements to lock out competition.

Such contracts include Google’s payment of billions of dollars to Apple to place the Google search engine as the default for iPhones. By using contracts to maintain its monopoly, the suit says, competition and innovation has suffered.

Attorney General William P. Barr, left, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, has played an unusually active role in the investigation. He pushed career Justice william barr new o Department attorneys to bring the case by the end of September, prompting pushback from lawyers who wanted more time and complained of political influence. Mr. Barr has spoken publicly about the inquiry for months and set tight deadlines for the prosecutors leading the effort.

The lawsuit may stretch on for years and could set off a cascade of other antitrust lawsuits from state attorneys general. About four dozen states and jurisdictions have conducted parallel investigations and are expected to bring separate complaints against the company’s grip on technology for online advertising.

A victory for the government could remake one of America’s most recognizable companies and the internet economy that it has helped define since it was founded by two Stanford University graduate students in 1998.

But Google has long denied accusations of antitrust violations and is expected to fight the government’s efforts by using a global network of lawyers, economists and lobbyists. Alphabet, valued at $1.04 trillion and with cash reserves of $120 billion, has fought similar antitrust lawsuits in Europe.

Washington Post, The Justice Department is suing Google — but it’s the government’s power to police big tech that’s on trial, Tony Romm, Oct. 21, 2020. At stake in the lawsuit is no less than the power and political willingness of Washington to watch over Silicon Valley, putting to the test whether century-old federal antitrust rules are sufficiently powerful to keep the country's technology giants in check.

Washington Post, Analysis: Five takeaways from the Google antitrust lawsuit, Heather Kelly, Oct. 21, 2020 (print ed.). What the federal action has to say about Apple, Amazon and the problems with being the most popular search engine.

In the 64-page complaint, the Justice Department lays out its case against Google’s alleged search monopoly by focusing on one part of its business. It looks at all the deals Google has struck to be the path of least resistance for most consumers. Years of partnering with other companies, expanding its own line of products and user complacency have made it the default search engine on everything from our laptops to smartwatches.

New York Times, Analysis: It’s Google’s World. We Just Live In It, Brian X. Chen, Oct. 21, 2020 (print ed.). Googling something was all we once did with Google. Now we spend hours a day using its maps, videos, gadgets and more, our columnist writes.

About 20 years ago, I typed Google.com into my web browser for the first time. It loaded a search bar and buttons. I punched in “D.M.V. sample test,” scrolled through the results and clicked on a site.

Wow, I thought to myself. Google’s minimalist design was a refreshing alternative to other search engines at the time — remember AltaVista, Yahoo! and Lycos? — which greeted us with a jumble of ads and links to news articles. Even better, Google seemed to show more up-to-date, relevant results.

And the entire experience took just a few seconds. Once I found the link I needed, I was done with Google.

Two decades later, my experience with Google is considerably different. When I do a Google search in 2020, I spend far more time in the internet company’s universe. If I look for chocolate chips, for example, I see Google ads for chocolate chips pop up at the top of my screen, followed by recipes that Google has scraped from across the web, followed by Google Maps and Google Reviews of nearby bakeries, followed by YouTube videos for how to bake chocolate chip cookies. (YouTube, of course, is owned by Google.)

It isn’t just that I am spending more time in a Google search, either. The Silicon Valley company has leveraged the act of looking for something online into such a vast technology empire.

The Guardian, Rudy Giuliani faces questions after compromising scene in new Borat film, Catherine Shoar, Oct. 21, 2020. Trump’s personal attorney has indiscreet encounter with actor playing Borat’s daughter in hotel room during pandemic. This article contains spoilers about 'Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.'

The reputation of Rudy Giuliani could be set for a further blow with the release of highly embarrassing footage in Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat.

In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.

Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.

After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

Representatives for Giuliani have not replied to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

Word of the incident first emerged on 7 July, when Giuliani called New York police to report the intrusion of an unusually-dressed man. “This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit,” Giuliani told the New York Post. “It was a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top, it looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive.

“This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shakedown, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away,” Giuliani said. The police found no crime had been committed.

Giuliani continued: “I only later realised it must have been Sacha Baron Cohen. I thought about all the people he previously fooled and I felt good about myself because he didn’t get me.”

Viewers may be less convinced that Baron Cohen, reprising his role as the bumbling reporter Borat Sagdiyev, and Maria Bakalova, who plays his daughter, Tutar, had no success.

In the film, Borat is dispatched by the Kazakh government back to the US to present a bribe to an ally of Donald Trump in order to ingratiate his country with the administration. After the monkey earmarked for the gift is indisposed, Borat’s supposedly underage offspring becomes the replacement present.

Even before he reaches into his trousers, Giuliani does not appear to acquit himself especially impressively during the encounter. Flattered and flirtatious, he drinks scotch, coughs, fails to socially distance and claims Trump’s speedy actions in the spring saved a million Americans from dying of Covid. He also agrees – in theory at least – to eat a bat with his interviewer.

Giuliani has become a key figure in the late stages of the US presidential election after obtaining a laptop hard drive purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden and left at a repair shop in Delaware.

His efforts to unearth political dirt on Trump’s rival for the White House mean that the film’s mortifying footage can be seen as an attempt to undermine Giuliani’s credibility. The film, released on Amazon Prime less than a fortnight before the election, ends with an instruction for viewers to vote.

Although unfortunate, the circumstances of the setup appear consensual, with Giuliani led to believe he was being courted. Bakalova, 24, is highly plausible in the sting, despite also having to pretend, for the benefit of viewers, to be a feral child posing as a far-right journalist.

As with the first film, which made $262m on release in 2006 and won a Golden Globe for Baron Cohen, the most troubling scenes are those which reveal deep-seated prejudice among the American people.

Oct. 20

djt lesley stahl

New York Times, Trump Taunts Lesley Stahl of ‘60 Minutes’ After Cutting Off Interview, Michael M. Grynbaum and Maggie Haberman, Oct. 20, 2020. Two weeks from Election Day, the president picked a fight with the country’s most popular television news program.

President Trump abruptly cut off an interview with the “60 Minutes” star Lesley Stahl, left, at the White House on Tuesday and then taunted her on Twitter, posting a short behind-the-scenes video of her at the taping and noting that she had not been wearing a mask in the clip.

Mr. Trump then threatened to post his interview with Ms. Stahl ahead of its intended broadcast time on Sunday evening, calling it “FAKE and BIASED.”

The spectacle of a president, two weeks from Election Day, picking a fight with the nation’s most popular television news program began on Tuesday after Mr. Trump grew irritated with Ms. Stahl’s questions, according to two people familiar with the circumstances of the taping.

One person briefed on what took place said that Mr. Trump had spent more than 45 minutes filming with Ms. Stahl and her CBS News crew, and that the taping had not wrapped up when the president’s aides had expected it to.

Washington Post, Inside the ‘Malarkey Factory,’ Biden’s war room designed to fight online misinformation, Matt Viser, Oct. 20, 2020 (print ed.). Joe Biden’s campaign has quietly built a multimillion-dollar operation with dozens of people monitoring the Web and deploying countermeasures.

Joe Biden’s campaign has quietly built a multimillion-dollar operation over the past two months that’s largely designed to combat misinformation online, aiming to rebut President Trump while bracing for any information warfare that could take place in the aftermath of the election.

The effort, internally called the “Malarkey Factory,” consists of dozens of people around the country monitoring what information is gaining traction digitally, whether it’s resonating with swing voters and, if so, how to fight back. The three most salient attacks the Malarkey Factory has confronted so far are claims that Biden is a socialist, that he is “creepy” and that he is “sleepy” or senile.

In preparation for misinformation spreading as voters head to the polls, especially a stretch around Election Day when Facebook will not let campaigns buy new ads, the campaign has partnered with dozens of Facebook pages associated with liberal individuals or groups that have large followings. The campaign has also enlisted 5,000 surrogates with big social media platforms who can pump out campaign messages.

Washington Post, U.S. held secret talks with Syria over missing American journalist, sanctions and U.S. military presence, Syrian newspaper reports, Sarah austin tice Custom Dadouch, Oct. 20, 2020 (print ed.). Two senior U.S. officials visited Damascus in August for secret talks about the fate of missing American journalist Austin Tice, sanctions and the U.S, military presence in Syria, in rare high-level negotiations, according to a newspaper aligned with the Syrian government.

According to the report in Al Watan newspaper, U.S. Ambassador Roger Carstens, an envoy for hostage affairs, and Kash Patel, a top White House counter-terrorism advisor, met with Ali Mamlouk, the head of Syria’s intelligence agency, in his office in Damascus.

The visit, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes as the White House has been pressing Syria to release Tice, right, a freelance journalist abducted in Syria in 2012 and believed to be held there by the Syrian government or allied forces.

New York Times, New Yorker Suspends Jeffrey Toobin After Zoom Incident, Johnny Diaz and Azi Paybarah, Oct. 20, 2020. In a statement, the magazine said it was investigating a matter involving the author and CNN legal analyst.

The New Yorker said on Monday that it had suspended the staff writer Jeffrey Toobin after he exposed himself during a Zoom call last week with employees of the magazine and WNYC radio, according to two people familiar with the call.

Staff writers at The New Yorker and employees from WNYC, which jointly produce the magazine’s podcast, were on a video call prepping for election night coverage, according to Vice, which first reported the episode.

During a pause in the call for breakout discussions, Mr. Toobin switched to a second call that was the video-call equivalent of phone sex, according to the two people familiar with the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Asked Monday afternoon about reports that he had exposed himself, Mr. Toobin said in a statement: “I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers.”

Oct. 19

Hunter Biden (shown in a Zoom video of remarks at the 2020 Democratic National Convention)

Hunter Biden (shown in a Zoom video of remarks at the 2020 Democratic National Convention)

New York Times, Investigation: New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report Amid Newsroom Doubts, Katie Robertson, Oct. 19, 2020 (print ed.). Some reporters withheld their bylines and questioned the credibility of an article that made the tabloid’s front page on Wednesday. The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.

Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.

Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.

The article named two sources: Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive on Oct. 11.

Mr. Giuliani said he chose The Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

Top editors met on Oct. 11 to discuss how to use the material provided by Mr. Giuliani. The group included the tabloid veteran Colin Allan, known as Col; Stephen Lynch, The Post’s editor in chief; and Michelle Gotthelf, the digital editor in chief, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. Mr. Allan, who was The Post’s editor in chief from 2001 to 2016 and returned last year as an adviser, urged his colleagues to move quickly, the person said.

As deadline approached, editors pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story — and at least one aside from Mr. Golding refused, two Post journalists said. A Post spokeswoman had no comment on how the article was written or edited.

New York Times, As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place, Davey Alba and Jack Nicas, Oct. 19, 2020 (print ed.). A nationwide operation of 1,300 local sites publishes coverage that is ordered up by Republican groups and corporate P.R. firms.

The instructions were clear: Write an article calling out Sara Gideon, a Democrat running for a hotly contested U.S. Senate seat in Maine, as a hypocrite.

Angela Underwood, a freelance reporter in upstate New York, took the $22 assignment over email. She contacted the spokesman for Senator Susan Collins, the Republican opponent, and wrote an article on his accusations that Ms. Gideon was two-faced for criticizing shadowy political groups and then accepting their help.

The short article was published on Maine Business Daily, a seemingly run-of-the-mill news website, under the headline “Sen. Collins camp says House Speaker Gideon’s actions are hypocritical.” It extensively quoted Ms. Collins’s spokesman but had no comment from Ms. Gideon’s campaign.

Then Ms. Underwood received another email: The “client” who had ordered up the article, her editor said, wanted it to add more detail.

The client, according to emails and the editing history reviewed by The New York Times, was a Republican operative.

Maine Business Daily is part of a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country. Yet the network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals, a Times investigation found.

The sites appear as ordinary local-news outlets, with names like Des Moines Sun, Ann Arbor Times and Empire State Today. They employ simple layouts and articles about local politics, community happenings and sometimes national issues, much like any local newspaper.

But behind the scenes, many of the stories are directed by political groups and corporate P.R. firms to promote a Republican candidate or a company, or to smear their rivals.

djt apprentice

New York Times, Analysis: The TV Producer Who Shaped Trump’s Image Is Losing His Touch, Ben Smith, Oct. 19, 2020 (print ed.). With “The Apprentice,” Mark Burnett helped make Donald Trump a national figure. But he seems to be losing his grip on the cultural moment, Ben Smith writes.

Like his greatest creation, Mr. Trump — who sought and then lost an idiotic television ratings war on Thursday night with Joe Biden — Mr. Burnett seems to be struggling to keep his grip on the cultural moment.

Mr. Burnett’s story has been told often, and until 2016 he was eager to help tell it — how he reshaped American television with “Survivor” in 2000 and how, with the 2004 start of “The Apprentice,” he “resurrected Donald Trump as an icon of American success,” as The New Yorker put it.

He’s been in Mr. Trump’s ear ever since: He held a planning meeting for the 2016 inauguration in his Ritz-Carlton apartment, the event’s planner, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, wrote. His associates produced the Republican National Convention this summer, Michael Grynbaum and Annie Karni reported for The New York Times. When President Trump took the presidential helicopter from the hospital to the White House this month, panicked Twitter commentators compared an official video of his triumphal return to the work of the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. But Mr. Burnett was the artiste whose influence really shined through on the video, though a spokeswoman said he did not consult on it.

“The level of production coming out of the White House is something we would have appreciated having,” Bill Pruitt, a producer on the “The Apprentice,” said of the video’s specific camera angles and its particular obsession with helicopters, a longtime favorite prop of Mr. Burnett’s dating back to “Survivor.” “As is customary for this, the reality TV version of a presidential campaign, it seems they’re not striving as much for ‘four more years’ as they are ‘Season 2.’”

The Idea Logical Company, Analysis: The end of the general trade publishing concept, Mike Shatzkin, Oct. 19, 2020. My brilliant friend Joe Esposito has written a piece to explain why Penguin Random House would want to acquire Simon & Schuster. I have also been thinking about why PRH, or any of the other three of the “Big Five”, would want to acquire S&S. In fact, two of the three, Hachette and HarperCollins, have indicated interest.

Here’s a snapshot of my view of the world of big consumer publishers and how it has changed over the past three decades, which informs my explanation of why PRH would want to buy S&S.

Big consumer publishers are called “trade publishers” because they have historically sold the vast preponderance of their units through “the trade,” the network of bookstores and libraries and their wholesalers that has grown up in the US over the past century. As the role and importance of bookstores in the overall distribution world of books has changed, so has the commercial reality for publishers.

In 1990, there were about 500,000 individual book titles to choose from because only what was in “books in print” was really available. There were, at that time, dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of stores in the country that carried 100,000 titles or more. Trade publishers who depended on that bookstore network and worked it regularly with two or three “lists” a year could almost always put out a few thousand copies of any book on their list through that bookstore network.

Each new book published was competing with half-a-million others in the market, and the publishers were insulated from competition from any entity that didn’t cover the bookstores regularly the way they did.

The result of this was that most publishers made a little money on most of the books they published, unless they very much overpaid on the author advance or printed many more copies than they distributed

We’re in a different world today. The universe of possible titles now is about 18 million unique possibilities, or about 35 to 40 times more titles competing with each new book for attention and sales than existed three decades ago. (And all of those 18 million books, most of which live today as files ready to be printed-on-demand, are available in a day or two from Ingram.) Bookstores today are perhaps 25 percent of sales, so having a strong position with them only commands a fraction of the market. The stores are smaller in number and smaller in footprint; very few stores today carry more than 35-40,000 titles.

Big publishers (and Ingram, which is not a publisher but provides the full range of services and a shared infrastructure to 600 distributed publishers, making them collectively as big as most of the Big Five) have long recognized this market shift. They have been building “direct” sales efforts, including creating vertical websites, compiling email lists of book consumers, and “working” the Internet for sales and marketing opportunities, for well over a decade.

This has been reflected in shrinking trade sales forces and growing digital marketing teams. It has also delivered greater profitability for publishers while sales — topline revenues — are struggling to stay even with last year.

And all of that is why Penguin Random House could benefit a great deal from acquiring Simon & Schuster. They would get tens of thousands of commercially viable titles to push through channels they have that S&S did not.

Book publishing is not going to stop, or even slow down. Individual authors, purpose-driven publishers, and many organizations (including schools) that see books as useful to their mission, will keep pushing new titles into the marketplace. It gets less and less expensive to do that all the time when a “first printing” doesn’t have to be covered with risk capital. But publishing as a commercial enterprise will become increasingly challenging, especially as a “stand-alone.”

Publishers will need to have a captive market — of students, conference attendees, employees, customers for something else — to make a lot of new titles make sense.

Hartford Courant, Hartford Courant will outsource printing of newspaper, Kenneth R. Gosselin, Oct 19, 2020. The Hartford Courant announced Monday that the newspaper will now be printed in Springfield, ending more than 250 years of publication in Connecticut’s capital city.

The outsourcing will eliminate 151 jobs at the Courant’s plant on Broad Street, effective between Dec. 19 and Jan. 15, according to a notice filed with the state Department of Labor Monday afternoon.

The shift from Hartford will not affect distribution and circulation of the paper, which is the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper. The paper began as a newsweekly on Oct. 29, 1764.

“The Courant remains committed to its mission of telling the stories of the people of Connecticut,” said Andrew Julien, the Courant’s Publisher and Editor-in-Chief. “We are not in any way changing the mission of the paper.”

Earlier this year, Tribune Publishing Co., the Courant’s Chicago-based parent, said it would close five newsroom spaces, including the Daily News in New York and the Orlando Sentinel in Florida. Those newspapers are continuing to publish, with reporters, editors and photographers working at home as they had been doing during the pandemic. Courant reporters and photographers have been working remotely during the pandemic.

Monday’s announcement did not address the future of the newsroom in Hartford.

Two months ago, the Hartford City Council passed a resolution urging Tribune Publishing’s largest shareholder, Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund, to “cease any further layoffs that have decimated the staff.”

Tribune Publishing, a Chicago-based media company also publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and other daily papers.

The Springfield Republican newspaper will take over printing of the paper by the end of the year.

A decades-long decline in advertising revenue across the newspaper industry deepened with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year. Nationwide, newspaper financial woes have intensified, amid reader shifts to more fragmented, digital consumption of news and consolidation under corporate ownership.

For years, newspapers have sought to cut expenses by outsourcing printing operations. Earlier this month the Philadelphia Inquirer said it would close its printing plant and shift production to an outside contractor. The Miami Herald also outsourced printing this year, as did papers in nearby Northampton and Greenfield, Massachusetts.

Although newspapers have accelerated their push into digital delivery of news, it came late, forcing publishers to play catch-up. The relocation of printing of the Courant could signal a more intense focus on its digital offerings.

A history of The Courant, published for the newspaper’s 250th anniversary in 2014, noted the paper had been printed on its own presses with only two exceptions: for four days during the flood of 1936 when the New Britain Herald published the Courant and one day during the flood of 1955 when the Courant’s rival The Hartford Times printed the paper.

Oct. 18

Palmer Report, Analysis: Rudy Giuliani’s New York Post stunt just turned into even more of a disaster, Bill Palmer, Oct. 18, 2020. To give you an idea of just how badly Rudy Giuliani’s “Hunter Biden laptop” story has flopped, his fellow Kremlin asset Ron Johnson resorted to making the desperate false claim today that there were inappropriate pictures of children on the laptop. No one is falling for this crap who wasn’t already voting for Trump, meaning the whole thing was pointless Now it’s gotten even uglier.

It turns out the New York Post article in question – which was so obviously a work of fiction that Twitter banned it from even being linked to – was written by a reporter who ended up having such doubts about the story, he refused to allow his name to be placed on it. The New York Times is reporting that multiple people at the Post thought the story was nonsense. But it gets even worse, because Rudy is now running his mouth.

Rudy admitted that he gave the story to the New York Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” That’s right, Rudy is flat out admitting that if he gave the story to any news outlet that might scrutinize it before publishing it, the story would fall apart and never get published at all. It’s one thing to do this, which is shady. It’s another to admit it out loud, which is stupid and self-sabotaging.

In any case, there is no indication that this phony “Hunter Biden laptop” scandal is having any impact on the outcome of the election. The only people who are choosing to fall for it are the people who were already voting for Trump anyway. It’s simply up to the rest of us to turn out in full force and vote him out.

Media Matters, Analysis / Advocacy: New York Times report exposes the shoddy journalism behind New York Post's Biden hit piece, John Whitehouse, Oct. 18, 2020. Katie Robertson has a must-read piece up at The New York Times about the reaction inside the New York Post's newsroom to its shoddy hit piece on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter earlier this week. There's a lot in there, so please go read the whole thing.

Now that you've done that, here are some of the key takeaways:

The report was mostly written by a staff writer who refused to put their name on it, per two Post sources.
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani says he gave the material to the Post because he was worried other outlets would practice actual journalism: “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out."
Top figures at the paper were involved in deciding how to proceed, including editor in chief Stephen Lynch, digital editor in chief Michelle Gotthelf, and adviser Colin Allan.
Editors at the Post pressed people there to add their name to the byline, according to two sources who spoke to Robertson.

Of the two bylines on the piece, we had known that Emma-Jo Morris had worked at Sean Hannity's Fox News show recently, and that her Instagram had pictures of her with figures like Hannity, Roger Stone, and Steve Bannon. Robertson adds that Gabrielle Fonrouge, who had the other byline on the piece, did not know that she had a byline until after the piece went live. Robertson writes that three sources told her that Fonrouge “had little to do with the reporting or writing of the article.”

The one outlet that embraced the report wholeheartedly from the get go was Fox News, which ran over 100 segments on the story in the first two and a half days, despite all the red flags.

The New York Post is the corporate cousin of Fox News, and is part of News Corp, which is run by Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Co-Chairman Lachlan Murdoch, and CEO Robert Thomson. This is how Murdoch-style journalism works.

Oct. 17

Washington Post, FCC push to rethink legal protections for tech giants marks major turn, Tony Romm, Oct. 17, 2020 (print ed.). The agency’s Republican chairman unveiled his plans hours after Facebook and Twitter limited the reach of an article about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his family, angering President Trump and his supporters.

A new effort by the Federal Communications Commission to rethink the legal shield that applies to social media sites drew widespread rebukes this week, as critics faulted the agency for reversing its past positions in the face of mounting public pressure from the White House.

The agency’s move threatens to strike at the heart of a critical federal law known as Section 230, which for decades has spared tech giants from being held ajit pai headshot custom accountable for the ways they police their platforms. Ajit Pai, the FCC’s Republican chairman, unveiled his plans to “clarify” the scope of those protections hours after Facebook and Twitter took the rare step of limiting the reach of a New York Post story about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his family, angering President Trump and his top supporters.

The FCC is an independent agency, and historically, it has sought to emphasize its separation from the White House. But some critics still saw the FCC’s timing as politically peculiar.

Only a year ago, top FCC aides had told the Trump administration privately that they did not want to pursue regulation around online speech, according to four people with direct knowledge of the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential proceedings. The comments came as part of a series of conversations convened by the White House designed to explore potential regulation targeting Silicon Valley.

Pai himself had previously expressed opposition to new FCC regulation targeting social media sites. On Thursday, however, he set the agency on a path toward issuing new rules around Section 230, citing concerns shared by “all three branches of government” about the tech giants’ behavior.

“Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech,” said Pai, who tweeted his statement at 2:30 p.m. “But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters.”

Oct. 16

New York Times, Trump Campaign Lawyers Are Aiding a Leading Proponent of QAnon, Danny Hakim, Oct. 16, 2020. A firm started by a group of Trump lawyers underscores the connections between false conspiracy theory and President Trump and his inner circle.

Senior lawyers for the Trump campaign set up a small law firm last year that is working for Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican House candidate in Georgia with a history of promoting QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory.

While federal filings show that the firm, Elections L.L.C., principally collects fees from the president’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, it also does work for a number of congressional candidates, and none more so than Ms. Greene, underscoring the connections between QAnon and Mr. Trump and his inner circle. The latest example came Thursday night, when President Trump repeatedly declined to disavow QAnon at a televised town hall.

Ms. Greene is one of several Republican candidates who openly espouse the collection of bogus and bizarre theories embraced by followers of QAnon, who have been labeled a potential domestic terror threat by the F.B.I. and who former President Barack Obama warned Wednesday were infiltrating the mainstream of the Republican Party. QAnon imagines, falsely, that a Satanic cabal of pedophile Democrats are plotting against Mr. Trump, plays on anti-Semitic tropes and stokes real world violence — and has been expounded on at length by Ms. Greene in videos.

Elections L.L.C. was founded last year by Justin Clark, Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager, and Stefan Passantino, a former top ethics lawyer in the Trump White House. Matthew Morgan, the Trump campaign’s counsel, is also a partner at the firm. Ms. Greene’s campaign has made 14 payments to the firm since last year, worth nearly $70,000 in total, the most of any congressional campaign.

Mr. Passantino appears in records filed with the Georgia secretary of state as the lawyer who incorporated Ms. Greene’s campaign committee, though the full scope of his work for the candidate is unclear. He also does legal work for a Georgia political operative, Jason D. Boles, who is a personal friend of Ms. Greene’s and who helped set up her campaign. (Mr. Boles has been a recent subject of controversy, after it emerged that he had helped bankroll an effort to infiltrate and discredit voting rights groups in North Carolina.)

Washington Post, Savannah Guthrie grilled Trump like few others have, taking the heat off NBC for its town, Jeremy Barr, Oct. 16, 2020 (print ed.). The network was criticized for accommodating Trump after he rejected a debate. But then the ‘Today’ host started asking him questions.

Media Matters, Analysis / Advocacy: Trump’s prime-time mask attack is powered by the Trump-Fox feedback loop, Matt Gertz, Oct. 16, 2020. A lot of people are dying because Trump takes advice from Tucker Carlson and friends.

President Donald Trump is using a new false talking point on the campaign trail to downplay the effectiveness of face masks in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. He likely adopted it after seeing a similar falsehood deployed on Tucker Carlson Tonight, one of his favorite Fox News programs. The situation presents a case study in how the president has leaned on the network’s right-wing commentators to shape the federal response to the pandemic, with deadly results.

On Thursday, Trump repeatedly mangled a study to falsely suggest that face coverings may not prevent -- and may actually promote -- the spread of the virus.

“They come out with things today — did you see, the CDC? That 85% of the people wearing the masks catch it, OK?” he said during a rally in Greenville, North Carolina.

He repeated the claim during a prime-time town hall event on NBC. “Just the other day,” he said, “they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it.”

“They didn't say that,” moderator Savannah Guthrie responded. “I know that study. That's not --”

“Well, that's what I heard,” Trump replied, “and that's what I saw.”

When Trump later attempted to return to the figure, Guthrie said, “I looked at that report. It's not about mask wearing — it was neutral on the question of masks.”

More than 10 million Americans watched the president’s dubious critique of masks.

But Guthrie is correct about the study, which was published in September by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and did not focus on mask use.

Based on a survey of 314 people from 11 health care facilities, it focused on the impact of going to public places where masks cannot easily be worn, such as restaurants with on-site eating and bars. The study concluded that “adults with positive SARS-CoV-2 test results were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant than were those with negative SARS-CoV-2 test results.” It also found that close contact with someone who also tested positive was a major risk factor.

Washington Post, Court rules Trump appointee overstepped authority when he tried to replace media fund’s leadership, Paul Farhi, Oct. 16, 2020. A District judge has ruled that a Trump appointee overstepped his authority when he fired the board of an agency that helps dissidents and journalists in repressive countries and sought to replace it with his own slate of directors, including himself.

Shortly after taking over as chief executive of the federal agency that supervises the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and other government-funded media operations in June, Michael Pack began a sweeping overhaul of the six organizations, firing five of their directors; two others resigned in anticipation of his cuts.

But the board of the Open Technology Fund, which Pack dismissed along with its director, rejected his order, arguing that he didn’t have the authority to replace them, and at one point, it blocked Pack’s chosen slate of directors and his new chief executive designee from taking over its offices in the District.

The District’s attorney general, which oversees nonprofits in the city, sued on the agency’s behalf. And on Wednesday, Superior Court Judge Shana Frost Matini agreed that Pack was not authorized by the fund’s bylaws to replace its leadership and that the board Pack has been seeking to replace is the “valid” one at the agency.

Although the ruling affirms the existing board’s authority, it probably has little application for Voice of America and other entities under control of Pack’s U.S. Agency for Global Media because they are chartered under a different set of regulations that gives USAGM greater oversight.

Pack has frozen about half of Open Technology Fund’s remaining grant funds for 2020, said Laura Cunningham, the agency’s acting chief executive and president. Along with unpaid grants from the prior fiscal year, USAGM has held back about $20 million, she said, prompting the suspension of about 80 percent of its ongoing projects.

Washington Post, C-SPAN suspends political editor Steve Scully after he lied about his Twitter account being hacked, Elahe Izadi, Oct. 16, 2020. The host came forward with an explanation for a mysterious tweet about Trump ahead of a since-scrapped presidential debate.

C-SPAN has suspended host and political editor Steve Scully — who had been booked to moderate the now-scrapped second presidential debate — after he falsely claimed his Twitter account had been hacked.

Scully informed C-SPAN and the Presidential Commission on Debates late Wednesday that he had lied when he claimed a mysterious tweet that appeared on his feed was the result of a hack, C-SPAN said in a statement.

“By not being immediately forthcoming to C-SPAN and the Commission about his tweet, he understands that he made a serious mistake,” reads a statement from C-SPAN. “We were very saddened by this news and do not condone his actions.”

C-SPAN noted his 30-year tenure with the network and “his fairness and professionalism as a journalist. . . . After some distance from this episode, we believe in his ability to continue to contribute to C-SPAN.”

The C-SPAN host had been criticized for several weeks on social media and by conservative media outlets, culminating with President Trump attacking him by name on television, Scully said in a statement. “Out of frustration,” he explained, he sent a brief tweet to Anthony Scaramucci, a former Trump White House communications director who has emerged as a vocal critic of the president, reading “should I respond to trump."

“The next morning when I saw that this tweet had created a new controversy, I falsely claimed that my Twitter account had been hacked," Scully said. “These were both errors in judgement for which I am totally responsible. I apologize.”

The incident with Scully is the latest in a string of bad headlines and headaches for the journalists tasked with moderating national political debates this year. Wallace was criticized for not intervening sooner in the first debate between Trump and Biden. USA Today’s Susan Page, who moderated the vice-presidential debate, faced blowback beforehand for having hosted an off-the-record event honoring Trump appointees.

NBC News correspondent Kristen Welker is scheduled to moderate the third debate on Oct. 22.

New York Times, Twitter Changes Course After Republicans Claim ‘Election Interference,’ Mike Isaac and Kate Conger, Oct. 16, 2020 (print ed.). President Trump called Facebook and Twitter “terrible” and “a monster” and said he would go after them. Senators Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn said they would subpoena the chief executives of the companies for their actions. And on Fox News, prominent conservative hosts blasted the social media platforms as “monopolies” and accused them of “censorship” and election interference.

On Thursday, simmering discontent among Republicans over the power that Facebook and Twitter wield over public discourse erupted into open acrimony. Republicans slammed the companies and baited them a day after the sites limited or blocked the distribution of an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

For a while, Twitter doubled down. It locked the personal account of Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, late Wednesday after she posted the article, and on Thursday it briefly blocked a link to a House Judiciary Committee webpage. The Trump campaign said Twitter had also locked its official account after it tried promoting the article. Twitter then prohibited the spread of a different New York Post article about the Bidens.

But late Thursday, under pressure, Twitter said it was changing the policy that it had used to block the New York Post article and would now allow similar content to be shared, along with a label to provide context about the source of the information. Twitter said it was concerned that the earlier policy was leading to unintended consequences.

Even so, the actions brought the already frosty relationship between conservatives and the companies to a new low point, less than three weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election, in which the social networks are expected to play a significant role. It offered a glimpse at how online conversations could go awry on Election Day. And Twitter’s bob-and-weave in particular underlined how the companies have little handle on how to consistently enforce what they will allow on their sites.

“There will be battles for control of the narrative again and again over coming weeks,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies social media companies. “The way the platforms handled it is not a good harbinger of what’s to come.”

Facebook declined to comment on Thursday and pointed to its comments on Wednesday when it said the New York Post article, which made unverified claims about Hunter Biden’s business in Ukraine, was eligible for third-party fact-checking. Among the concerns was that the article cited purported emails from Hunter Biden that may have been obtained in a hack, though it is unclear how the paper obtained the messages and whether they were authentic.

Twitter had said it was blocking the New York Post article partly because it had a policy of not sharing what might be hacked material. But late Thursday, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, said the policy was too sweeping and could end up blocking content from journalists and whistle-blowers. As a result, she said, Twitter was changing course.

Ms. Gadde added that Twitter would continue blocking links to or images from the article if they contained email addresses and other private information, which violated the company’s privacy policy.

Washington Post, Fox News veterans face a hurdle in the job market: Having Fox on the résumé, Jeremy Barr, Oct. 16, 2020 (print ed.). When Eboni Williams was first exploring leaving her job at Fox News in 2017 and 2018, she kept hearing the same thing in her conversations with news executives at rival networks.

“They would meet with me and say, ‘You’ve got to get out,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘We cannot acquire a Fox News talent. We can’t take that on, publicity-wise.’ ”

Williams, who now hosts a weekly news show for the much smaller Revolt TV, understands what they meant: After Fox, she needed to go somewhere else first, before they would even consider hiring her.

“Nobody wants to be the first to pick up a Fox News talent,” she said. “Once you’re at Fox three or more years, you are indoctrinated with that Fox News branding, and it becomes almost impossible to shake.”

Williams is among the Fox News veterans, both journalists and pundits, who say they’ve faced skepticism in the job market since leaving the network. While Fox has always leaned right, particularly its nighttime punditry hours, its image as a fortress of conservatism has been hardened during the Trump presidency, as fire-breathing hosts such as Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have gone to extreme rhetorical lengths to defend the president and attack his critics. Fairly or not, that reputation has rubbed off even on many of Fox’s most ardently nonpartisan journalists.

Washington Post, Opinion: By giving Trump a town hall to rival Biden’s, NBC is playing into his ratings obsession — again, Margaret Sullivan, right, Oct. 16, 2020 (print ed.). After the president bailed on a scheduled debate, the network rewarded him with a gift: an event on his own terms.
When NBC News drew fire for scheduling Thursday night’s town hall with President Trump directly opposite an ABC News town hall with Joe Biden, the excuse was parity.

This arrangement was the essence of fairness, the corporate brass maintained, since it mirrored a recent town hall that Biden had done with the network — same Miami location, same 8 p.m. time slot.

Totally even-handed! Right?

Actually, I’d describe that gambit with an entirely different word: specious. It may sound plausible, but it is wrong.

In fact, NBC News is doing what so much of mainstream media has done time and again: allowed Trump to steal the spotlight and command attention on his terms.

“I am dismayed—more like disgusted—by NBC’s decision to air Trump’s ‘I won’t play by the rules so let me make my own rules’ town hall opposite Biden’s,” wrote a former NBC News executive, Cheryl Gould.By 1 hour ago

New York Times, YouTube Cracks Down on QAnon Conspiracy Theory, Kevin Roose, Oct. 16, 2020 (print ed.). Citing Offline Violence, YouTube has played a bigger role in moving QAnon from the fringes to the mainstream than most platforms.

youtube logo Custom YouTube on Thursday became the latest social media giant to take steps to stop QAnon, the sprawling pro-Trump conspiracy theory community whose online fantasies about a cabal of satanic pedophiles running the world have spilled over into offline violence.

The company announced in a blog post that it was updating its hate speech and harassment policies to prohibit “content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence.” The new policy will prohibit content promoting QAnon, as well as related conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, which falsely claims that top Democrats and Hollywood elites are running an underground sex-trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant.

Other social networks have also taken steps to curb the spread of QAnon, which has been linked to incidents of violence and vandalism. Last week, Facebook hardened its rules related to QAnon content and compared it to a “militarized social movement” that was becoming increasingly violent. This week, several smaller platforms, including Pinterest, Etsy and Triller, also announced new restrictions on QAnon content.

Under YouTube’s new policy, which goes into effect today, “content that threatens or harasses someone by suggesting they are complicit” in a harmful theory like QAnon or Pizzagate will be banned. News coverage of these theories and videos that discuss the theories without targeting individuals or groups may still be allowed.

Daily Beast, Obama Photographer Pete Souza Exposes Trump’s ‘Obviously’ Staged Pics, Matt Wilstein, Oct. 16, 2020 (print ed.). Pete Souza breaks down what working for Reagan and Obama taught him about Trump’s “disastrous” presidency. Plus, watch an exclusive clip from his documentary “The Way I See It.”

As soon as Pete Souza saw the photos of President Donald Trump “working” from Walter Reed hospital earlier this month, he knew something was off.

“They were obviously posed pictures,” Souza, who worked as chief White House photographer under both President Barack Obama and President Ronald Reagan, tells me by email a couple of weeks after our longer conversation below about his new documentary The Way I See It, which will premiere commercial-free on MSNBC this Friday night at 10 p.m. ET.

Aside from the seemingly blank sheet of paper Trump can be seen signing in one of the photos, released by the White House in an attempt to prove the president was hard at work, one intrepid reporter determined that another photo, in which Trump is wearing a different outfit, was taken just 10 minutes later.

Oct. 15

New York Times, YouTube Cracks Down on QAnon Conspiracy Theory, Kevin Roose, Oct. 15, 2020. Citing Offline Violence, YouTube has played a bigger role in moving QAnon from the fringes to the mainstream than most platforms.

YouTube on Thursday became the latest social media giant to take steps to stop QAnon, the sprawling pro-Trump conspiracy theory community whose online fantasies about a cabal of satanic pedophiles running the world have spilled over into offline violence.

youtube logo Custom The company announced in a blog post that it was updating its hate speech and harassment policies to prohibit “content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence.” The new policy will prohibit content promoting QAnon, as well as related conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, which falsely claims that top Democrats and Hollywood elites are running an underground sex-trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant.

Washington Post, Facebook and Twitter take unusual steps to limit spread of New York Post story on Hunter Biden, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Oct. 15, 2020. The actions, which prompted an outcry from President Trump and the right, were the result of a year of tech companies’ scenario-planning exercises for the 2020 election.

Facebook and Twitter took unusual steps Wednesday to limit readership of an article by the New York Post about alleged emails from Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, one of the rare occasions they have sanctioned a traditional media outlet.

The social media giants took that action before verifying the contents of the article, in which President Trump‘s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and his former top adviser Stephen K. Bannon claimed to have obtained and leaked a trove of private materials from Hunter Biden. The leaked documents suggested at one point he gave a Ukrainian executive the “opportunity” to meet the former vice president. The Biden campaign said his schedule indicated no such meeting took place.

Facebook preemptively limited the spread of the story while sending it to third-party fact-checkers, a decision the company said it has taken on various occasions but is not the standard process. Twitter allowed the story to surge to a No. 3 trending topic in the U.S., although later marked the link as “potentially unsafe” and blocked it. It also temporarily locked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s account, as well as the New York Post’s, adding notices to their tweets saying they violated Twitter’s rules on prohibiting publishing hacked materials. Trump’s campaign account was also temporarily locked.

Washington Post, QAnon-supporting Republican candidate endorses Loeffler for Senate, Paulina Firozi, Oct. 15, 2020. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) has accepted the endorsement of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congressional candidate in the state who has made a slew of racist statements and openly espoused the QAnon conspiracy theory.

“I’m so proud to have this strong, conservative fighter on Team Kelly!” Loeffler tweeted, announcing the endorsement.

The pair appeared together at an event in Paulding County in Georgia to announce the endorsement, driving up to the event in a vehicle adorned with a campaign sign for Greene and a smaller sign for President Trump and Vice President Pence.

Greene, on Twitter, called Loeffler the “most conservative Senator in Washington” who has “fought for the key issues I care about.”

Loeffler is running in a Nov. 3 special election to keep her Senate seat after being appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R) to fill the vacancy left when former senator Johnny Isakson (R) resigned because of health problems.

In Facebook videos unearthed by Politico, Greene makes numerous racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic remarks. In the videos, she said Black people are “held slaves to the Democratic Party,” called prominent Jewish Democratic donor George Soros a “Nazi himself trying to continue what was not finished,” and likened the election of the first two Muslim women to Congress to an “Islamic invasion of our government.”

Greene has promoted QAnon, an online movement the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat. The baseless conspiracy theory maintains that Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. The House voted overwhelmingly this month to condemn QAnon.

Greene, whom Trump has called a “future Republican star,” is all but certain to win the race for Georgia’s deep-red 14th Congressional District after her challenger, Democrat Kevin Van Ausdal, dropped out of the race in September.

New York Times, Twitter Changes Course After Republicans Claim ‘Election Interference,’ Mike Isaac and Kate Conger, Oct. 15, 2020. President Trump called Facebook and Twitter “terrible” and “a monster” and said he would go after them. Senators Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn said they would subpoena the chief executives of the companies for their actions. And on Fox News, prominent conservative hosts blasted the social media platforms as “monopolies” and accused them of “censorship” and election interference.

Washington Post, Fox News veterans face a hurdle in the job market: Having Fox on the résumé, Jeremy Barr, Oct. 15, 2020. When Eboni Williams was first exploring leaving her job at Fox News in 2017 and 2018, she kept hearing the same thing in her conversations with news executives at rival networks.

“They would meet with me and say, ‘You’ve got to get out,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘We cannot acquire a Fox News talent. We can’t take that on, publicity-wise.’ ”

Williams, who now hosts a weekly news show for the much smaller Revolt TV, understands what they meant: After Fox, she needed to go somewhere else first, before they would even consider hiring her.

Washington Post, Opinion: By giving Trump a town hall to rival Biden’s, NBC is playing into his ratings obsession — again, Margaret Sullivan, right, Oct. 15, 2020. After the president bailed on a scheduled debate, the network rewarded him with a gift: an event on his own terms.
When NBC News drew fire for scheduling Thursday night’s town hall with President Trump directly opposite an ABC News town hall with Joe Biden, the excuse was parity.

This arrangement was the essence of fairness, the corporate brass maintained, since it mirrored a recent town hall that Biden had done with the network — same Miami location, same 8 p.m. time slot.

Totally even-handed! Right?

Actually, I’d describe that gambit with an entirely different word: specious. It may sound plausible, but it is wrong.

In fact, NBC News is doing what so much of mainstream media has done time and again: allowed Trump to steal the spotlight and command attention on his terms.

Media Matters, Analysis / Advocacy: Fox News death cult embraces declaration calling for “herd immunity," Madeline Peltz, Oct. 15, 2020. An online declaration called "The Great Barrington Declaration" developed by a libertarian think tank, is being supported by the White House and promoted by Fox News personalities. The declaration that calls for “herd immunity” approach to the coronavirus pandemic, the deeply flawed idea that the virus should be intentionally spread widely in the population. While the “herd immunity” concept in vaccinology dictates that a population can become immune to a disease through mass vaccination, it has been spun by the White House and right-wing media in an effort to end public health best practices, and allow the coronavirus to spread throughout the population unfettered.

Fox’s promotion of herd immunity and praise of the Trump White House’s embrace of it, is dangerous. Dr. Anthony Fauci called the Great Barrington Declaration “ridiculous” and “if you talk to anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases, they will tell you that that is risky and you'll wind up with many more infections of vulnerable people, which will lead to hospitalizations and deaths. So I think that we just got to look that square in the eye and say it's nonsense.”

Then vs now: Scott Atlas, a Fox News regular who used the platform to become Trump’s dubious coronavirus adviser, appeared on The Ingraham Angle to push “herd immunity,” only a few weeks after appearing on the network to deny reports that he had counseled the president on this policy.

Herd immunity approach, debunked: It's not just Fauci calling out Atlas. Infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm told Meet the Press today that a "herd immunity" theory reportedly invoked by Atlas "is the most amazing combination of pixie dust and pseudoscience I've ever seen."

Who is to blame: Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch is reportedly “disgusted” by President Donald Trump’s failed handling of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The fact is that he and his son Lachlan Murdoch, who currently oversees the network, are also partly responsible for it.

Media Matters, Analysis / Advocacy: Sinclair stations set to air Eric Bolling monologue claiming masks and lockdown precautions do not help slow the spread of COVID-19, Zachary Pleat, Oct. 15, 2020. Sinclair Broadcast Group’s weekly program America This Week continues to be a source of dangerous COVID-19 misinformation thanks to its host Eric Bolling, who in a monologue this week dismissed the effectiveness of face mask use and social distancing in slowing down the spread of the novel coronavirus which has killed well over 200,000 Americans.

Bolling pushed this dangerous health misinformation, uncritically aired Trump’s claim of being immune to the virus, and repeated long-debunked lies that the virus was “altered” in a Chinese lab. His program is typically broadcast on weekends on more than 40 Sinclair-owned or -operated TV stations in about three dozen states, and the latest episode is already available for streaming from Sinclair stations’ websites.

After Media Matters' Zach Pleat reported on this, Sinclair told The New York Times that it would edit Bolling's monologue to remove his anti-mask commentary -- and would leave the rest in.

This is just the latest example of Sinclair pushing disinformation about the pandemic -- and then doing not even bare minimum when we expose them for the propagandists that they are.

Meanwhile, Bolling is set this week to host a town hall with President Donald Trump at the White House.

Also: A Sinclair reporter has pushed pro-Trump messaging in at least 18 national news segments aired on Sinclair stations.

Trump’s prime-time mask attack is powered by the Trump-Fox feedback loop

The lie started in the fever swamps, jumped to Tucker Carlson and Alex Berenson on Fox News, where it was picked up by President Donald Trump, who added his own dishonest twist. Trump's new talking point is that "85% of the people wearing the masks" contract COVID-19. This is totally false, just a complete and utter lie.

A similar claim attacking masks was trumpeted on conservative websites like TheBlaze, The Federalist, and The Gateway Pundit misinterpreting a CDC study. The study itself tried to identify risk factors in the United States other than masks for people who contracted COVID. The study focused on places where masks cannot be diligently worn, like restaurants and bars.

When Trump brought the study up during his NBC town hall, he was promptly corrected by Savannah Guthrie.

This is just the latest example of Fox News using terrible data to attack basic health and safety practices during the pandemic. As The Washington Post reports,Trump brought a Laura Ingraham screenshot to the debate and waved it around. The Post found that the data Ingraham gave Trump was misleading.

A bizarre Benghazi conspiracy theory traveled through the right-wing echo chamber from QAnon accounts to the president

This is, to be honest, one of the dumbest conspiracy theories I've ever seen get so much traction in right-wing media. And it was amplified by President Donald Trump -- twice.

Courtney Hagle explains: "A fringe right-wing narrative has been circulating alleging a secret plot among Obama administration officials and the CIA to protect Osama bin Laden and assassinate members of SEAL Team 6. The claims appear to have originated at a conservative conference last weekend and quickly spread across the internet, reaching President Donald Trump by Tuesday evening when he retweeted an unverified account affiliated with QAnon."
The full, bonkers conspiracy theory makes wild allegations about a body double for Bin Laden.

YouTube: YouTube has allowed The Next News Network, a conspiracy theory channel with over a million subscribers, to monetize misinformation, without much penalty for doing so. The network's version of the Bin Laden conspiracy theory has been viewed over 2 million times.

Daily Beast, Obama Photographer Pete Souza Exposes Trump’s ‘Obviously’ Staged Pics, Matt Wilstein, Oct. 15, 2020. Pete Souza breaks down what working for Reagan and Obama taught him about Trump’s “disastrous” presidency. Plus, watch an exclusive clip from his documentary “The Way I See It.”

As soon as Pete Souza saw the photos of President Donald Trump “working” from Walter Reed hospital earlier this month, he knew something was off.

Washington Post, Fox News veterans face a hurdle in the job market: Having Fox on the résumé, Jeremy Barr, When Eboni Williams was first exploring leaving her job at Fox News in 2017 and 2018, she kept hearing the same thing in her conversations with news executives at rival networks.

“They would meet with me and say, ‘You’ve got to get out,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘We cannot acquire a Fox News talent. We can’t take that on, publicity-wise.’ ”

Williams, who now hosts a weekly news show for the much smaller Revolt TV, understands what they meant: After Fox, she needed to go somewhere else first, before they would even consider hiring her.

Washington Post, Opinion: By giving Trump a town hall to rival Biden’s, NBC is playing into his ratings obsession — again, Margaret Sullivan, right, After the president bailed on a scheduled debate, the network rewarded him with a gift: an event on his own terms.
When NBC News drew fire for scheduling Thursday night’s town hall with President Trump directly opposite an ABC News town hall with Joe Biden, the excuse was parity.

This arrangement was the essence of fairness, the corporate brass maintained, since it mirrored a recent town hall that Biden had done with the network — same Miami location, same 8 p.m. time slot.

Totally even-handed! Right?

Actually, I’d describe that gambit with an entirely different word: specious. It may sound plausible, but it is wrong.

In fact, NBC News is doing what so much of mainstream media has done time and again: allowed Trump to steal the spotlight and command attention on his terms.

As soon as Pete Souza saw the photos of President Donald Trump “working” from Walter Reed hospital earlier this month, he knew something was off.

Oct. 14

Lewiston Tribune (Idaho), COVID-19 infection scuttles local TV news, Elaine Williams, Oct. 14, 2020. KLEW-TV employees are in two-week quarantine after positive test among staff. The region’s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic edged up Tuesday with a fatality in Whitman County, while operations at KLEW-TV in Lewiston and the Idaho County Jail were limited by COVID-19 infections.

The man who died in Whitman County was between the ages of 60 and 79 and was the third person there to succumb to COVID-19, according to a news release from the county.

Elsewhere, the disease continued to create challenges in a number of ways. KLEW-TV is not doing its nightly Lewiston news broadcasts after one staff member was confirmed to have COVID-19, and five employees began a two-week quarantine Friday, Station Manager Dan Stellmon said.

The station is serving its viewers through its Facebook page, Twitter and its website www.klewtv.com as much as possible for the next two weeks, Stellmon said.

“We’ll be back to normal as soon as possible,” he said in a prepared statement. “Please wear a mask when in public and maintain social distancing.”

One inmate at the Idaho County Jail tested positive for COVID-19, prompting the sheriff’s office to suspend fingerprinting, jail visits, work on concealed weapons permits and sex offender registrations, Sheriff Doug Giddings said.

The inmate is recovering and has been isolated from the rest of the jail population.

He exhibited mild coronavirus symptoms, Giddings said, and the jail staff followed the same procedure they do for any ill inmate, taking him across the street to the medical clinic at Syringa Hospital.

“We’re just being cautious, because the virus is a nasty thing,” he said.

Daily Beast, Twitter Blocks Users From Sharing NY Post Article on Biden, Rachel Olding, Oct. 14, 2020. The extraordinary measure by Twitter went a step further than Facebook. Twitter has blocked a controversial New York Post article on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, from being shown or shared—the first time the social media company has proactively blocked an article from a major mainstream news organization.

Facebook’s policy communications director Andy Stone also tweeted that Facebook would reduce the article’s visibility while it is fact-checked by outside fact-checkers. If Twitter users try to share the article, a message reads, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.” Links to the article in older tweets now warn the user that the article is potentially unsafe.

The article, touted as an exclusive provided to the Post by Trump sidekick Rudy Giuliani, was shot down by the Biden camp for containing crucial errors that could have been pointed out if the Post had approached them for comment.

Daily Beast, Man Who Reportedly Gave Hunter’s Laptop to Rudy Speaks Out in Bizarre Interview, Jordan Howell and Erin Banco, Oct. 14, 2020. John Paul Mac Isaac gave conflicting stories to reporters on Wednesday. He also said he feared for his life, citing the Seth Rich conspiracy. On Wednesday morning, the New York Post published a story alleging that Hunter Biden dropped off a laptop at a Delaware computer store for repair and that the device contained nefarious emails and photos.

The item was immediately viewed with suspicion, both for the timing of it—coming less than three weeks before the elections—and the path the laptop supposedly took. The Post said that “before turning over the gear,” the owner of the computer repair shop “made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.” The story alleged that the Biden son was setting up a meeting between a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm on which he served and his father, who was then the vice president. The Biden campaign has said no such meeting was scheduled.
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On Wednesday afternoon, a group of reporters, among them a journalist for The Daily Beast, spoke with the owner of the shop, a man named John Paul Mac Isaac who lives in Wilmington, Delaware. The audio of that nearly hour-long question and answer session is below.

Mac Isaac appeared nervous throughout. Several times, he said he was scared for his life and for the lives of those he loved. He appeared not to have a grasp on the timeline of the laptop arriving at his shop and its disappearance from it. He also said the impeachment of President Trump was a “sham.” Social media postings indicate that Mac Isaac is an avid Trump supporter and voted for him in the 2016 election.

Mac Isaac said he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden’s because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it. He said that Hunter Biden actually dropped off three laptops for repair, an abundance of hardware that he chalked up to the Biden son being “rich.”

Throughout the interview, Mac Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that contacted him. At one point, Mac Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop. At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for “help accessing his drive.”

Mac Isaac referenced the infamous Seth Rich conspiracy theory—which holds that a DNC staffer who police say was murdered in a botched robbery was actually killed off by Clinton allies because he leaked committee emails—as reason for his paranoia. He said he made a copy of the hard drive for the purposes of personal protection.

“They probably knew I had a copy because I was pretty vocal about not wanting to get murdered,” he said, “so I’m going to have a copy.”

Mac Isaac refused to answer specific questions about whether he had been in contact with Rudy Giuliani before the laptop drop-off or at any other time before the Post article’s publication. Pressed on his relationship with Giuliani, he replied: “When you’re afraid and you don’t know anything about the depth of the waters that you’re in, you want to find a lifeguard.”

Seeming to realize he’d said too much, he added: “Ah, shit.”

So Rudy was your lifeguard? the reporters asked. “No comment,” he replied.

Washington Post, Fact Checker Analysis: Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: An explainer, Glenn Kessler, Oct. 14, 2020. How Trump's attempt to force a Biden-Ukraine investigation backfired to the impeachment trial.

The Fact Checker unravels what happened when Trump tried to force an investigation into the false rumor about then-Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine. (Meg Kelly, Sarah Cahlan/The Washington Post)

The New York Post on Wednesday published an article based on emails purportedly obtained from a laptop that Hunter Biden, the vice president’s son, had supposedly left behind for repair in a Delaware shop in April 2019. Here’s a brief explainer to help readers evaluate its significance. We will continue to update this article as more information becomes available.

The key thrust of the article is that an April 2015 email suggests Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm to meet with the then-vice president when he was in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” reads the email, supposedly written by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma.

Why would that be important?

Hunter Biden in 2014 became a board member of Burisma, which news reports at the time suggested was a conflict of interest, given his father’s position. The former vice president has said he did not discuss Burisma with his son. The email is not specific about the nature of the meeting and is written in a way that it could be talking about a possible future meeting. Nevertheless, Republicans have long sought to tie the vice president to his son’s business interests, even launching a Senate investigation, so any indication that the vice president helped his son could be politically damaging. The New York Post claimed it was a “smoking-gun email.”

How do we know the email is authentic?

We do not. The New York Post published PDF printouts of several emails allegedly taken from the laptop, but for the “smoking-gun” email, it shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid, the author of “Active Measures,” a book on disinformation. “There is no header information, no metadata.” The Washington Post has not been able to independently verify or authenticate these emails, as requests to make the laptop hard drive available for inspection have not been granted. The New York Post said it obtained the material from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a personal lawyer to President Trump.

There also is no indication that Hunter Biden replied to the email.

Moreover, another alleged email published by the New York Post contradicts the notion that Hunter Biden could influence his father. “What he will do and say is out of our hands,” Hunter Biden wrote in an email that the New York Post said was sent April 13, 2014.

What does the Biden campaign say?

Andrew Bates, a campaign spokesman for Joe Biden, said a review of Biden’s schedules from 2015 finds no record of any such meeting. Officials who worked for Biden at the time told The Fact Checker that no such meeting took place.

“I was with the vice president in all of his meetings on Ukraine,” said Michael Carpenter, Biden’s foreign policy adviser in 2015. “He never met with this guy. In fact, I had never heard of this guy until the New York Post story broke.”

The New York Post article also cites an email from Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden saying he was “going to share this information with the US embassy here in Kyiv, as well as the office of Mr Amos Hochstein in the States.”

“I know for a fact he never contacted me or my office,” said Hochstein, who at the time worked closely with Biden as special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs. “I provided every record to the Senate investigation, and no mention of this guy was ever made, no emails, no correspondence. I know almost every player in the energy sector in Ukraine. I never met this guy.”

Carpenter said that the vice president wouldn’t have had a meeting with a company executive. “He was the vice president of the United States,” he said. “He met with prime ministers.”

This does not exclude the possibility that Biden briefly shook hands and chatted with Pozharskyi during a public event. Hunter Biden, for instance, helped arrange for a potential business partner, Jonathan Li, to shake hands with his father in the lobby of a Beijing hotel when the vice president made an official trip to China.

Pozharskyi, in the email, mentions that he spoke to Hunter “yesterday evening.” At the request of The Fact Checker, a Biden aide reviewed Biden’s schedule for April 16, 2015. The vice president gave remarks at the White House Greek Independence Day Reception, between 5 and 6 p.m., and then spoke to the Congressional Fire Services Institute Gala, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., the aide said.

What does Hunter Biden say?

Asked to verify whether the email is genuine, Hunter Biden’s attorney George Mesires told The Fact Checker: “We have no idea where this came from, and certainly cannot credit anything that Rudy Giuliani provided to the NY Post, but what I do know for certain is that this purported meeting never happened.”
Are there errors in the New York Post report?

A separate article, about another email, claims that a public relations company that worked for Burisma was allowed to take part in a conference call about an upcoming visit by Joe Biden to Ukraine. But there was nothing secret about this call, and the transcript was released publicly and posted on the White House website.

More broadly, the New York Post repeats the falsehood, advanced by President Trump, that the “elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”

We have fact-checked this repeatedly. During President Barack Obama’s second term, Biden was in charge of the Ukraine portfolio, keeping in close touch with the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko. Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as part of Ukraine’s escape from Russia’s orbit. But the Americans saw an obstacle to reform in Viktor Shokin, the top Ukrainian prosecutor, whom the United States viewed as ineffective and beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs. In particular, Shokin had failed to pursue an investigation of the founder of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky.

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv proposed that Biden, during his 2015 visit there, use a pending delivery of $1 billion of loan guarantees as leverage to force reform. Biden addressed the Ukrainian parliament, decrying the “cancer of corruption” in the country and criticizing the prosecutor’s office. During that visit, Biden privately told Poroshenko the loan guarantees would be withheld unless Shokin was replaced. After repeated calls and meetings between the two men over several months, Shokin was removed and the loan guarantees were provided.

Pavlo Klimkin, Ukrainian foreign minister from 2014 until Aug. 29, 2019, said that the firing of Shokin was universally urged by Ukraine’s benefactors. “The demand came not just from the U.S., and not just from Biden,” he said. “I heard it in every meeting with the international financial institutions, especially the IMF and World Bank. It was not just Biden. Clearly.”

Colin H. Kahl, Biden’s national security adviser at the time, told The Fact Checker that “our policy on corruption and Shokin in Ukraine kept getting tougher across 2015, so the whole theory of the case [in the New York Post] makes no sense.”

Why is this coming out now?

Good question. The FBI supposedly obtained the hard drive earlier this year from John MacIsaac, who said he owns the Wilmington Mac Shop.

MacIsaac told reporters on Wednesday that a MacBook laptop was dropped off at his shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019. MacIsaac, who said that he was legally blind, said that he was almost certain that it was Hunter Biden who dropped off the computer. He said that he made several attempts to get in touch with Hunter Biden but the equipment was still in his hands 90 days after it had been left there, and he said that he became curious about what he’d seen.

He made a copy of the hard drive and gave it to Giuliani. This past weekend, Giuliani passed a copy to the New York Post. But presumably the laptop would have been of use to the year-long Senate investigation, which found no wrongdoing by Biden.

As Giuliani has sought to locate information about Hunter Biden and Ukraine, he has regularly interacted with a Ukrainian lawmaker who was recently sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department as being an “active Russian agent for over a decade” and was engaged in an influence operation to affect the 2020 election. Those interactions have given rise to fears that the emails could be part of a broader disinformation campaign.

WVTF (Virginia Public Radio -- RADIOIQ), Local Journalist Receives Outpouring of Support After Being Fired, Mallory Noe-Payne, Oct. 14, 2020. The last remaining journalist at the Floyd Press says she’s been fired by corporate owner Lee Enterprises after doing an interview detailing difficult work conditions.

That story, “She’s a One-Person Newsroom, But Lee Enterprises Kept Cutting” was published by Radio IQ last Thursday.

In an interview Wednesday Ashley Spinks says she doesn’t regret giving the interview because “I think that’s some of the only power that workers have over corporate ownership is to speak truth to power, and speak honestly about their experiences.”

Spinks was paid $36,000 to do the job of a reporter, editor, photographer and layout designer at the Floyd Press. Since Lee Enterprises took control of the paper in March she had been furloughed and the paper’s freelance budget had been slashed. She had been vocal on Twitter about the challenges of doing her job well under the circumstances.

She says she was told she was let go Tuesday afternoon because she had spoken “disparagingly” about Lee Enterprises on social media and had given an interview without corporate permission. She says she was also told she had violated “journalistic ethics.”

She says she asked for specific examples and was given none.

A spokesman for Lee Enterprises declined our interview request Wednesday saying “the company does not comment on personnel matters.” The spokesman did say that the position of Managing Editor of the Floyd Press, the only editorial staff position at the weekly paper, will be posted immediately and that contingencies have been made to cover the absence in the meantime. He said "The Floyd Press will print and be delivered without interruption."

Spinks says she was asked to leave the office immediately after she was given notice of her termination Tuesday. The paper, which publishes each Thursday, was not yet complete.

“I’m deeply sad and worried for the Floyd community,” Spinks said. “I don’t know what the state of the newspaper will be for Floyd this week or in coming weeks.”

Spinks shared the news on Twitter Tuesday afternoon. It’s since been shared thousands of times, including by high-profile journalists like NPR's David Folkenflik, CNN’s Jake Tapper and the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold.

Floyd Press Managing Editor Ashley Spinks is the only full-time editorial staff at the weekly paper. Credit Mallory Noe-Payne / RADIOIQ

WVTF (Virginia Public Radio -- RADIOIQ), She’s a One-Person Newsroom, But Lee Enterprises Kept Cutting, Mallory Noe-Payne, Oct. 8, 2020. Lee Enterprises is one of the largest corporate newspaper chains in the country, and the company now owns more than a dozen daily papers throughout Virginia -- plus more weeklies. Lee bought the newspapers back in March from BH Media for $140 million. Since then they’ve fired reporters, outsourced work, and furloughed staff.

10/14 Update: Days after this story was initially published, Ashley Spinks was fired. She says one reason management cited was that she gave this interview and that she made "disparaging comments" about Lee Enterprises. Our story about that is here.

It may be the weekend but reporter Ashley Spinks still has a full schedule. It begins with a Pride parade in downtown Floyd.

“I’m Ashley, I’m from the Floyd Press,” she introduces herself to a parade participant with a smile, notebook in hand.

Spinks and I walked to the parade route together from the Floyd Press headquarters. The office itself is an old brick building in a downtown that isn’t just small, it’s less than half a square mile. Fun fact, says Spinks, there’s only one stop light in the entire county.

Another fact: there’s also only one full-time newspaper reporter.

Spinks’ technical title is Managing Editor of the Floyd Press, but in practicality she’s reporter, photographer, layout designer and editor. Each week she single-handedly pulls together the 16-20 page newspaper. And she does it all for $36,000. The paper does also have one ad manager and one customer service representative.

All you have to do though is take a look at the photographs on the wall to see it hasn’t always been this way. Spinks points them out in the lobby, a chronicling of the years. With a small laugh she calls it “cool slash demoralizing.” You can see the group shrink over time.

These are cuts that happened before the latest corporate owner took charge in March, by the time Lee Enterprises bought the paper from BH Media there was practically no staff left to cut. But the company has still managed to find other ways to trim.

Media Matters, The New York Post’s Hunter Biden smear story doesn’t make any sense, Matt Gertz, Oct. 14, 2020. Conservative media are spending a lot of time and energy trying to use a flimsy (at best) New York Post story about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden to upend the presidential election. The problem for them is that the story doesn't make sense.

Matt Gertz explains: "The implication is that Joe Biden improperly used his position as vice president to benefit his son’s Ukrainian business interests.

But as we learned when Giuliani and his allies pushed the story last year, that isn’t what happened. Biden did pressure the Ukrainian government to force the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin , to resign.

But he did so because the U.S. government had determined that Shokin wasn’t doing enough to fight corruption in the country -- an assessment shared by American allies and the International Monetary Fund. And at the time Biden acted, the Ukrainian investigation into Burisma Holdings, the company Hunter Biden was linked to, had reportedly been moribund for a year. But the story is even thinner than that -- the email the Post cites does not actually show that Hunter Biden 'introduced' Joe Biden to the Burisma executive. ... the Post does not appear to have produced any other reporting indicating such a meeting took place."

The real story: The real story appears to be how these emails were created and ended up in the possession of Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal attorney and frequent guest in right-wing media. And there are already reports that there are investigations looking into possible ties to Russian intelligence. We also know that Trump was personally warned about Giuliani possibly running with Russia disinformation in 2019 by his own national security adviser.

Many Trump media allies have suggested that they learned about the Biden smear campaign around the same time that Russian intelligence discussed stolen Burisma emails.

Along these lines, Media Matters' Alex Kaplan identified a user on pro-Trump message board The Donald who was hyping the Post's story days in advance. The user had a display name that used neo-Nazi code words.

Other salient information: We've put relevant information on this story into one key document. One thing of note: The New York Post story was co-written by a former producer for Sean Hannity's Fox News show.

Don't fall for the trap: A CBS reporter shouted a question to Joe Biden on the tarmac about the pseudo-scandal, uncritically lifting it up. This kind of attention is just what Giuliani, Trump, and Steve Bannon are looking for. This mirrors the network running dozens of stories about Hillary Clinton's email in 2016.

Oct. 13

The Daily Beast, Justice Department Sues Melania Trump’s Former BFF Over Dishy Tell-All, Blake Montgomery and Pilar Melendez, Oct. 13, 2020. The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Melania Trump’s former best friend, accusing her of breaking a non-disclosure agreement and not submitting a draft of her tell-all book about her relationship with the first lady to the federal government for pre-publication review.

stephanie winston wolkoff cover Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the planner of President Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, penned Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady about the sudden souring of her relationship with the first lady. The look into Melania’s inner circle, published nearly two months ago, painted an unflattering portrait of the first lady, as did several clandestine recordings Wolkoff later shared.

Filed in Washington, D.C. District Court, the lawsuit accuses Wolkoff of breach of contract and breach of fiduciary obligations. Justice Department prosecutors contend that a “gratuitous services agreement” Wolkoff and Melania Trump signed in August 2017 had no end date and that Wolkoff had access to sensitive “deliberative information” about the the first lady’s duties, similar to claims the agency made when attempting to keep the book, which was published in September, from store shelves.

“This was a contract with the United States and therefore enforceable by the United States,” Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said.

Wolkoff’s attorneys previously called the claims “unfounded and meritless” and said the contract had been terminated more than two years ago.

Justice Department lawyers wrote, “Ms. Wolkoff agreed, among other things, ‘that [she was] specifically prohibited from publishing, reproducing or otherwise divulging any such information to any unauthorized person or entity in whole or in part.’” The Department has requested the court redirect any profits earned from the book to the federal government via a constructive trust.

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New York Times, Trump Campaign Suggests Omarosa Manigault Newman Pay for $1 Million in Ad, Maggie Haberman, Oct. 13, 2020. The suggestion emerged in an arbitration case over the critical comments Ms. Manigault Newman, a former White House aide, made about President Trump in her 2018 book Unhinged.’

Omarosa Manigault Newman was a contestant on the first season of The Apprentice and later served as an adviser to President Trump at the White House.

The Trump campaign has suggested that Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former White House aide, pay for an ad campaign costing nearly $1 million as a “corrective” remedy for her critical comments about President Trump in her 2018 book and in subsequent interviews.

The recommendation was made in a document filed by the Trump campaign from an expert witness last week as part of an ongoing arbitration case; The Times reviewed the document.

The witness, Eric W. Rose, a crisis management expert, detailed a lengthy advertising proposal across several platforms that would cost just over $846,000. He did not suggest a time frame by which the ad campaign would need to take place. But the proposal mentions several times the impressions Ms. Manigault Newman’s comments could have left with “voters,” and was filed a few weeks before the election.

“It would be my recommendation that Ms. Manigault Newman pays for the corrective ads/corrective statements outlined above to counteract the long-term adverse effects of information that appeared as a result of Ms. Manigault Newman violating her confidentially agreement,” Mr. Rose wrote. He concluded: “If corrective ads are not placed, voters may continue to hold beliefs about the president as a result of Ms. Manigault Newman’s statements.”

Ms. Manigault Newman’s lawyer, John Phillips, said that the Trump campaign’s submission of Mr. Rose’s document was the height of “weaponized litigation.”

“Friday, we found out their bullets are commercials they want Omarosa to go do,” he said, referring to the report’s suggestion that only an ad campaign could “remedy” what had been said. “This isn’t free speech. It’s speech with a gun to your head.”

President Trump’s lawyers filed an arbitration case against Ms. Manigault Newman after she published a tell-all book, “Unhinged,” in August 2018, arguing she violated a nondisclosure agreement she had signed when the Trump campaign hired her in 2016. In her book she described Mr. Trump as a racist and misogynist who had made disparaging comments about Black people and women over the years.
Keep up with Election 2020

Ms. Manigault Newman had previously worked with Mr. Trump when she appeared on several seasons of his “Apprentice” reality shows.

Mr. Phillips said the document from Mr. Rose was filed after Ms. Manigault Newman’s side in the arbitration fight had sought an explanation for how they could prove “damages” were owed. Mr. Phillips said that the campaign couldn’t justify it by claiming a loss of donations, since it has raised more than $1 billion.

Washington Post, Perspective: In a stunning rebuke, a federal judge hammers the Trump administration for snatching back stimulus payments from incarcerated individuals, Michelle Singletary, Oct. 13, 2020 (print ed.). While millions of Americans wait anxiously to see if another stimulus package will ever see the light of day, a federal judge in California has rapped the knuckles of Treasury and the IRS for withholding and requiring the return of relief money from incarcerated people.

A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of incarcerated individuals argued that the decision to deny the payments was arbitrary and against the law.

djt quizzical uncredited palmer Custom Judge Phyllis Hamilton of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed and ordered the Treasury Department and the IRS to reverse their decision to disallow stimulus funds to prisoners solely based on their incarcerated status. The government has filed an appeal.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (Cares) Act provides economic impact payments or stimulus payments of up to $1,200 for individuals and up to $2,400 for taxpayers filing a joint tax return.

The Cares Act specifically excluded some people: nonresident aliens, an estate or trust and people who are dependents on someone else’s tax return. The law did not exclude payments to incarcerated individuals.

Initially, the IRS sent nearly 85,000 payments totaling $100 million to incarcerated people, according to a June report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). After TIGTA raised concerns about the payments to prisoners, the IRS reversed course, declaring in an FAQ on irs.gov that such payments to people in local, state and federal correctional facilities were not allowed under the Cares Act.

Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan donate $100 million more to election administrators, despite conservative pushback, Michael Scherer, Oct. 13, 2020. The new donations come on top of $300 million already given by the couple amid concerns over a smaller-than-needed level of federal funding.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced Tuesday an additional $100 million in donations to local governments to pay for polling place rentals, poll workers, personal protective equipment and other election administration costs over the coming weeks.

The donation, which follows a previous gift of $300 million for state and local governments to help fund U.S. elections, comes in the face of a lawsuits from a conservative legal group seeking to block the use of private funds for the state and local administration of elections, an expense that has historically been paid for by governments.

But Zuckerberg has been unmoved by legal threats, arguing in a Facebook post expected to go live Tuesday that his decision to fund election administration does not have a partisan political motive.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Commentary: Pompeo releases Clinton's emails: Nada, Wayne Madsen, Oct. 13, 2020. Many of the classified emails were wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped Small heavily redacted by the intelligence community stakeholders, so what Trump and the far-right wing Judicial Watch -- which sued for the emails -- obtained was a large cache of newspaper and magazine clippings, letters, foreign policy thoughts contained in emails from U.S. diplomats and other parties, scheduling and travel matters, speech preparation, Sunday talk show comments, United Nations votes, and generally, the same type of information contained in State Department cables released by WikiLeaks' Julian Assange.

Ironically, some of the Clinton emails released by Pompeo refer to the angst among State Department employees caused by Assange's release of State Department cables, many of which were classified.

There are no "smoking guns" in the Clinton emails and, once again, Trump has been proven to be an exaggerator and confabulator of the highest degree.

While the emails indicate that Clinton was uncomfortably friendly with the likes of disgraced General and former Central Intelligence Agency director David Petraeus (who she referred to as "Dave"), there is nothing in the emails that suggests any criminal wrongdoing on her part or that of her staff.

Washington Post, Anchorage mayor apologizes for ‘inappropriate messaging relationship’ with news anchor, Katie Shepherd, Oct. 13, 2020. On Friday afternoon, veteran Anchorage news anchor Maureen “Maria” Athens published a video on Facebook leveling unsubstantiated allegations that the city’s married mayor had posted inappropriate photos online. Hours later, Athens posted a nude photo, allegedly of the mayor, to bolster her case.

The saga soon turned even stranger. The mayor quickly denied the allegations, calling Athens “hostile and unwell,” and the news station she worked for also rejected her claims. By the end of the day, Athens was arrested for allegedly assaulting the station’s manager.

But on Monday afternoon, Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz (D) issued a public apology and admitted to engaging in an “inappropriate messaging relationship” with Athens, 41.

“I apologize to the people of Anchorage for a major lapse in judgment I made several years ago when I had a consensual, inappropriate messaging relationship with reporter Maria Athens,” Berkowitz, 58, said in a statement shared with The Washington Post on Monday. “I’m embarrassed and ashamed for the hurt I’ve caused my family and our community. I take responsibility for my actions.”

The backstory of the scandal, which has transfixed Anchorage, remains murky, with Berkowitz continuing to deny Athens’s claims and noting that law enforcement also investigated and found he’d done nothing wrong. Athens, meanwhile, didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Post, and it is not clear if she is being represented by an attorney.

The Democrat became mayor of Alaska’s most populous city in 2015. Before that, Berkowitz served as a state representative from 1997 to 2007, when he unsuccessfully ran for lieutenant governor. He is in his last term as mayor and not up for reelection this year.

Athens has worked as an anchor and reporter for Your Alaska Link, which consists of the KTBY and KYUR stations.

The video Athens posted on Facebook appears to have been shot inside the news studio with a cellphone held by another person. In the video, Athens accuses the mayor, without evidence or sourcing, of posting inappropriate photos on an “underage girls website.” She pledged to reveal more details on her news broadcast later that night. Thousands of people shared, commented and reacted to the post, which is still live on Athens’s Facebook page.

In the hours after the post, Berkowitz emphatically denied the allegation.

“The slanderous allegations from Your Alaska Link reporter Maria Athens are categorically false and appear to be the product of someone who is hostile and unwell,” the mayor’s office said in a statement on Friday. “We spoke with Ms. Athens’ employer, general manager Scott Centers, who emphatically disavowed his employee’s comments.”

Later that night, Athens was arrested at the Your Alaska Link station after getting into a physical altercation with Centers, the station’s general manager. Court records noted that Centers was also in a romantic relationship with the reporter, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

Oct. 11

julian assange facts wikileaks Custom

OpEdNews, Opinion: A horror story in 2 parts (Part II): A Travesty of Justice as UK Caters to US Desire to Crush Assange, Ron Ridenour, Oct. 11, 2020. The second indictment of alleged violations of the Espionage Act belatedly filed by the US against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, shown above, actually should not include him since there is no contention that he spied for any warring enemy, nor is he a U.S. citizen or resident, which the 1917 law targeted.

The original indictment focused on allegations that Assange had criminally aided Chelsea Manning in "hacking" into and downloading secret documents that show U.S. war crimes. That case went sour when the government prosecutors could not find any evidence. Furthermore, Manning (at that time while known as Bradley Manning) was a private in the US Army working in Iraq as an intelligence analyst and was authorized to download those documents so she had no need of assistance from Assange.

Hence the second indictment admitted Assange is a publisher, but claimed he had put government informant lives in danger - a different crime. Ample defense evidence was presented showing how Assange had carefully redacted the names of informants. Some names were mentioned by The Guardian and other mass media, but that was because of a choice by those editors who chose not redact their names.

Part of the prosecution's case was now built on Assange's ordering 18-year-old Sigurdur Thordarson to hack into Iceland politicians' phone conversations. Even if earlier charges fell apart, the new allegation could still form grounds for extradition. The new charges included using FBI informant Thordarson, but he had been convicted in Iceland for fraud, embezzlement, and impersonating Assange. He served time in an Icelandic prison, and was diagnosed as a sociopath. Significantly, Iceland has not sought to prosecute Assange or Wikileaks for any crime.

In 2010-11, Thordarson worked with Wikileaks first as a volunteer and for some months on staff. In August, 2011, he contacted the U.S. embassy in Reykjavik to give them information about Assange and Wikileaks. Eight FBI agents and a prosecutor flew to Iceland in a private jet to interview him. The Icelandic government had the courage to tell them to leave, fearing that the FBI and a mole sought to frame Assange. The FBI took their pigeon to ever-compliant Denmark to interview him. They did this several times.

In 2013-5, Thordarson was also tried for various sexual offenses, promising boys from 15-20 years of age cars and money in exchange for sex. This is the man whom the U.S. government had as its key witness in the new indictment. The UK hearing judge appeared to have no problem with that.

Another problem with the government's admitting that Assange is a publisher is that under the US Constitution's First Amendment journalist-publishers have special protection against prosecution for engaging in free-speech and press activities. So, in another change of tactic, the US government now interprets the Espionage Act to mean that anyone, journalists and publishers alike, can be charged with crimes of violating the Espionage Act. That includes any and all media personnel in the entire world - perhaps ordinary citizens too, who simply access Wikileaks materials. It's a fact that journalists and editors and publishers the world over who have been ignoring or misreporting on this case should be paying close heed to because of the dangerous precedent it is setting.

Edward Snowden wrote about reading former British ambassador Craig Murray's daily accounts of court proceedings: "Read this and tell me the show trial of Assange doesn't read like something from Kafka. The judge permits the charges to be changed so frequently the defense doesn't know what they are. The most basic needs are denied. No one can hear what the defendant says-a farce."

Oct. 9

OpEdNews, Opinion: A horror story in two parts -- Part I: Will England Send Assange-the-Messenger to America's Dungeons? Ron Ridenour, Oct. 9, 2020. Most people might be excused for not knowing it, because the story is mainly ignored, or is shamelessly misreported in the corporate media when it does get any attention. A courageous Australian journalist, abandoned by his own country, is being railroaded by a British court towards extradition to the US where he could face life in prison in solitary confinement for the "crime of espionage"-exposing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What Julian Assange and his organization Wikileaks have revealed for the whole world to see is the systematic devastation of peoples, of lands, and perennial military pollution of planet earth. The main perpetrator is the most powerful and self-declared "greatest democratic nation" in the world, the United States of America-accompanied by its European and Commonwealth vassal states, plus proxy allies in the Middle East and Zionist Israel.

The villainous perpetrators are the prosecutors. The truth-telling hero is their prisoner.

That is what the British extradition hearing holding Julian Assange's fate in its hands is all about. The testimony aspect of the court case has ended after four grueling weeks. While awaiting closing arguments and the judge's decision, the truth-teller is forced to deteriorate in a prison cell where he has been languishing for 18 months.

The defense and prosecution are now preparing for closing arguments, which, however, will not be held orally. The public will be denied court interaction. The extradition judge, Vanessa Baraitser, will take only written arguments on November 16. She will make her ruling on extradition January 4, 2021.

Magistrate Baraitser noted in this purportedly "non-political" court case that the election might have an impact on the hearing. She said, "I agree that one way or the other my decision will come after an election in the United States. For that reason, I find no reason not to give you the four weeks," to prepare closing arguments, she told the arguing parties.

Assange and his publication Wikileaks have not murdered anyone. Nevertheless, Assange is treated as a dangerous criminal, because he and his staff have published well over 10 million government/military secret documents showing crimes and corruption of scores of governments, above all how the United States, with its always faithful "United" Kingdom, have committed massive war crimes during their "war on terror". This three-decade-long war has resulted in the deaths of three to five million humans, and forced between 37 and 58 million to flee their bombed out countries seeking refuge in neighboring countries and in Europe.

Wikileaks' disclosures are clearly in the "public interest". Yet the public's interest is not allowed as evidence in United States grand jury courts nor in the British courts created as part of the Magna Carta-heralded by "Lord" "Baron" "King's Counsel" Alfred Thompson Denning as "the greatest constitutional document of all times - the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot". The Magna Carta is a forbearer to the U.S. Constitution.

Julian Assange has been held in isolation 23 hours every day at Belmarsh high-security prison since he was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy, in London, on April 11, 2019. This was just the beginning of a "charade of justice", as former British ambassador Craig Murray has called court proceedings against Julian. (1)

President Donald Trump successfully pressured, or to put it more accurately bribed, Ecuador's new president, Lenin Moreno, to expel Assange from its embassy in London. Moreno also expunged Assange's Ecuadoran citizenship. In return, the U.S. saw to it that Ecuador got a much-needed loan from the International Monetary Fund, and improved trade deals. Ecuador would realign its foreign policy to meet U.S. terms, such as recognizing Juan Guadió as the self-declared president of Venezuela, and have Ecuador's troops trained by the U.S.

Moreno also met with Trump in Washington D.C. Trump and about what he termed this "great meeting," said, "We're working on military options including the purchase of a lot of our military equipment."

Upon expulsion (actually more of a kidnapping by British Metropolitan police) from Ecuador's embassy, Assange was immediately convicted of jumping bail. He had been given 15 minutes with his lawyer before the hearing. A judge called him a narcissist. He was sentenced to 50 weeks in the country's hardest prison.

Oct. 9

JFK Assassination Analysis

vincent salandria resized

Vincent Salandria, an attorney and pioneering researcher into flaws in the Warren Commission's 1964 report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is shown above in a file photo. He died this summer in Philadelphia. His works include, via People and the Pursuit of Truth (via Ratical), The Design of the Warren Report to Fall to Pieces, April, 1977.

Kennedys and King, Sylvia Meagher and Clay Shaw vs. Jim Garrison, James DiEugenio, below left, Oct. 9, 2020. Having recently recounted Vincent Salandria's faithful support of Jim Garrison, Jim DiEugenio now examines Sylvia Meagher's own relationship to Jim Garrison and her unflinching defense of Clay Shaw to the point of stubbornly refusing to consider the last year and a half of Garrison’s investigation and files.

In writing my elegy for Vincent Salandria, I reviewed his career in the JFK field, cataloguing his achievements and his characteristics as a critic — the first critic — of the Warren Report.

In reviewing that impressive record, I was again struck by his personal relationship and his lifelong fairness to New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. What made this aspect more salient was something I may have underplayed in my article: Salandria spent decades as a practicing attorney in Philadelphia. In my article, I noted that Vince was a high school teacher in 1964 when he encountered Arlen Specter talking about the Warren Report at a Philadelphia bar association event. That was true, but Salandria taught part time. He practiced law in the afternoons, and after he retired as a teacher, he worked for the Philadelphia school system as an attorney.

Salandria had attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. That university is a member of the Ivy League and their law school is habitually rated in the top ten of the US News and World Report rankings in the field. (For 2021, they are rated number 7).

Therefore, Salandria was one of the few early critics who was also a lawyer. In fact, in the early critical period of 1964–66, aside from Mark Lane, he may have been the only one. This placed him in a position to not only understand more precisely what the Warren Commission had done with the evidence, but also to understand what Jim Garrison, right, was up against when he began his criminal investigation in New Orleans. As I noted in my requiem, Salandria told me that at his first personal meeting with Garrison he told him he probably would not succeed in his attempt to flush out the conspiracy by beginning at the lower level and leveraging them against the upper level. But he would be able to learn something about the plot by the acts of those who would try and interfere with his inquiry.

With what the Assassination Records and Review Board declassified about New Orleans in this regard, Salandria — as he usually was — proved to be prescient in that prediction. For as we now know, very soon after Garrison’s investigation was made public, the CIA was recruiting local attorneys in New Orleans to defend certain suspects and defendants (e.g. lawyers like James Quaid, Edward Baldwin, and Steve Plotkin).

In September, at the request of Director Richard Helms, the Agency assembled its first meeting of the Garrison Group. At that meeting, Ray Rocca, James Angleton’s first assistant, declared that if things were to proceed as they were, Clay Shaw, would be convicted. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 270) The meeting was convened by Helms in order to consider the implications of Garrison’s actions before during and after the trial of Shaw, left. From the declassified record, the result was that certain counter measures were now taken to obstruct, cripple, and negate Garrison’s inquiry (e.g. blocking service of subpoenas, flipping witnesses, recruiting infiltrators). (Ibid, pp. 271–85)

I should add here another key action taken by the Agency around this time. In April of 1967, they issued worldwide a memorandum which was titled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report”. This memo was essentially a call to action to all station chiefs to use their assets in order to attack the critics of the Commission. It even outlined techniques to use in the attacks, for instance: accuse them of being interested in monetary gain, of having been biased from the start, or of having leftist political orientation. As author Lance deHaven Smith has noted, it was around this time that the New York Times began to use the phrase “conspiracy theorist” in a much more profuse and pernicious manner than before.

Later — in July of 1968 — the CIA distributed an attack article on Jim Garrison which had been written by Edward Epstein and published in The New Yorker. The memo advised all station chiefs to use the article in order to brief any political leaders; or assign it to assets in order to counter any attacks. This important memo, and the article’s author, should be kept in mind as we progress.

Since Salandria predicted that things like the above would occur, and since he visited Garrison in New Orleans and served as an advisor for the Shaw trial, he appreciated what Garrison was doing in the face of the forces arrayed against him. Some others who did so were Mark Lane, Penn Jones, Maggie Field, Ray Marcus, and, at the time, Harold Weisberg. (Lane and Weisberg were actually working with the DA.)

But there was a prominent Commission critic who, quite early, did not appreciate the warnings Salandria had issued about what Garrison was doing or the countermeasures taken against him. That critic was Sylvia Meagher, below left, of New York. At a rather early date, she staked out a position that separated her from the above writers and researchers. She also fostered a counter-movement in the critical community against Garrison. That movement would eventually include Josiah Thompson, Peter Scott, Paul Hoch, and, later, Anthony Summers.

sylvia meagher I am going to say some adverse things about Meagher in this regard, but I want to make it clear at the outset that none of this should detract from her achievements in the field. Her subject indexes to both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee volumes were and are valuable assets to the research community. Her critique of the Warren Commission, Accessories After the Fact, is still one of the signal achievements in the literature on the case.

It is one thing to expose a patently phony murder investigation, especially one that furnished the critic with 26 volumes of testimony and exhibits in order to dismantle itself — since so much of the 26 volumes contradicted, or at least compromised, the conclusions in the report. It’s quite another to try and find out what actually happened in a complex political assassination and what the smoke and mirrors were all about.

As Vincent Salandria once said, the Warren Report was just too easy to tear apart -- to the point that he came to think that it was designed to collapse [as argued in his 1977 article, The Design of the Warren Report to Fall to Pieces, cited above].

Oct. 8

Washington Post, Facebook bans marketing firm running ‘troll farm’ for pro-Trump youth group, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Oct. 8, 2020. Facebook said Thursday that it will permanently ban from its platform an Arizona-based marketing firm running what experts described as a domestic "troll farm” following an investigation of the deceptive behavior prompted by a Washington Post article last month.

The firm, Rally Forge, was “working on behalf of Turning Point USA,” Facebook concluded in an inquiry that led to the removal of 200 accounts and 55 pages, as well as 76 Instagram accounts — many of them operated by teenagers in the Phoenix area. The fake accounts, some with either cartoonlike Bitmoji profiles or images generated by artificial intelligence, complemented the real accounts of users involved in the effort, which largely entailed leaving comments sympathetic to President Trump and other conservative causes across social media.

Facebook stopped short of penalizing Turning Point USA, the prominent conservative youth organization based in Phoenix, or its president, Charlie Kirk, 26, saying it could not determine the extent to which the group’s leaders were aware of the specific violations carried out on their behalf, such as the use of fake accounts. Twitter also acted against the operation on Thursday, suspending 262 accounts involved in “platform manipulation and spam" — in addition to the several hundred accounts already removed last month following questions from The Post — but similarly did not boot Turning Point USA, a tax-exempt nonprofit group founded in 2012, or its affiliates from the online platform.

The Phoenix-based firm, Rally Forge, enlisted teenagers to coordinate pro-Trump posts across social media in a secretive operation that involved the use of fake accounts. The effort was uncovered last month by a Post investigation.

Washington Post, Opinion: No more presidential debates this year? Not a problem. We’ve seen enough, Perspective, Margaret Sullivan, right, Oct. 8, 2020. The first presidential debate — just over a week ago, if calculated in ordinary time — was a nightmare.

Moderator Chris Wallace failed to keep President Trump under control, and the dominant memory is of three White men in their 70s shouting over one another’s voices.

The one and only vice-presidential debate Wednesday night was a different kind of mess, but no more useful to the voting public. USA Today’s Susan Page asked some excellent questions, but the candidates dodged them, giving mini-speeches about the subjects of their choice instead.

Page failed to effectively follow up by demanding germane answers; nor did she successfully enforce time limits — meaning that the dominant memory of that night is of a fly lingering on Mike Pence’s white hair or Kamala Harris’s pained smiling (following the ironclad women’s rule for expressing disagreement) as she repeated the phrase, “I’m speaking.”

Harris wouldn’t answer a reasonable question about whether a Biden administration would seek to add seats to the Supreme Court. Pence wouldn’t address the even more consequential issue of what he would do if Trump refused to leave office, as he’s suggested he might if he doesn’t like the results of next month’s election. (And after he failed to speak up for a peaceful transfer of power, noted Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Page’s only follow-up “was to ask a kid’s question about why people in politics don’t get along.”)

With these dispiriting events still fresh in one’s mind, a sensation of welcome relief flooded in when the presidential debate commission announced Thursday morning that, given Trump’s recent covid-19 diagnosis and general public health concerns, the second Trump-Biden debate would not be done in person next week but rather remotely.

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Washington Post, Susan Page responds to debate critics: ‘The refusal to answer a question, I thought, could be telling,’ Jeremy Barr, Oct. 8, 2020. The Pence-Harris debate moderator (shown in a file photo) was criticized for failing to enforce the rules or ask follow-up questions.

Susan Page has no regrets about how she chose to moderate the debate between Vice President Pence and Sen. Kamala D. Harris on Wednesday night.

“I felt good about how it went,” Page told The Washington Post as she headed to the airport in Utah on Thursday morning. “I felt it was a relatively civil debate, and one that was focused on issues that mattered to voters.”

Like Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who moderated the first showdown between President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden last week, Page faced criticism for failing to ask enough follow-up questions or cut short the candidate who talked beyond the allotted time ― in this case Pence, who repeatedly ignored her very diplomatic pleas ("Thank you,” she said, over and over again) to wrap up his answers in adherence with the agreed-upon rules of the debate.

Page said Thursday that she intentionally led off with very specific questions that she believed would obviate the need for follow-ups. “I tried to ask the question so narrowly the first time around that it seemed unlikely that the second time around I was going to get a more direct response,” she said. “Some people would have handled that differently.”

She argued that “the refusal to answer a question, I thought, could be telling — maybe not as telling as if they had actually answered it — but that was not without some value." Both candidates dodged questions about whether they had discussed what would happen in the event of a “presidential disability” that would require them to take over the presidency.

Idea Logical Company, Analysis: 7 ways book publishing will change over the next few years, Mike Shatzkin, Oct. 8, 2020. A prior post described the new structure of the book publishing ecosystem. In the past three decades, we have migrated away from a world where a publisher needed to own a substantial infrastructure to deliver printed books to thousands of retail locations. And “back then” and for most of the time since, most book readers both found the books they wanted and purchased them in those stores.

Both the market and the nature of the infrastructure have changed. Now more than half the book sales and an even greater amount of the “discovery” takes place online and a lot of the discovery and a lion’s share of the purchases happen at a single account: Amazon. You don’t need a big organization to cover a single account nor a big infrastructure to service it. The other half of the sales in the US, and sales around the world, are now facilitated by another single account, Ingram Content Group.

Ingram provides every component of the fixed-cost infrastructure that any book publisher requires and, in fact, provides all or any part of that infrastructure to an ever-growing number of publishers. Many of them are new players enabled by this change of circumstances to create a publishing company with a fraction of the investment that would have been required three decades ago.

But many of them are longtime publishers who are shedding fixed costs for variable ones by relying increasingly on Ingram. (And, it should be noted, pure sales and distribution services are also provided by the large publishers who are continuing to do it themselves in a shrinking market.)

Oct. 7

New York Times, House Lawmakers Condemn Big Tech’s ‘Monopoly Power,’ Cecilia Kang and David McCabe, Oct. 7, 2020 (print ed.). In a report led by Democrats, lawmakers said Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook needed to be checked and recommended reforming antitrust laws. Here are 12 accusations in the scathing report on the four tech giants.

House lawmakers who spent the last 16 months investigating the practices of the world’s largest technology companies said on Tuesday that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google had exercised and abused their monopoly power and called for the most sweeping changes to antitrust laws in half a century.

In a 449-page report that was presented by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic leadership, lawmakers said the four companies had turned from “scrappy” start-ups into “the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” The lawmakers said the companies had abused their dominant positions, setting and often dictating prices and rules for commerce, search, advertising, social networking and publishing.

To amend the inequities, the lawmakers recommended restoring competition by effectively breaking up the companies, emboldening the agencies that police market concentration and throwing up hurdles for the companies to acquire start-ups. They also proposed reforming antitrust laws, in the biggest potential shift since the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976 created stronger reviews of big mergers.

The House Report is here.

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Palmer Report, Opinion: Carly Fiorina and Fox News just dropped a house on Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, Oct. 7, 2020. Carly Fiorina, above, a Republican who ran for president in 2016, went on Fox News this morning and endorsed Joe Biden. Here’s what stands out as remarkable. Fox had to know Fiorina was going to do this (she’d been publicly siding with Biden for awhile), yet they booked her anyway.

It’s becoming clear that for all its nonsensical and dishonest pro-Trump rhetoric, Fox News is now trying to prepare its audience for a post-Trump future. Of course Carly Fiorina’s endorsement of Joe Biden comes after 2016 Republican presidential candidate John Kasich did the same last month.

Washington Post, Opinion: The Commission on Presidential Debates should be disbanded, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 7, 2020. The Commission on Presidential jennifer rubin new headshot Debates allowed President Trump to debate last week without proof of testing negative for the coronavirus and without forcing Trump’s entourage at the event to abide by the commission’s rule on mask-wearing. Circumstantial evidence strongly suggests Trump’s Rose Garden ceremony for the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was a superspreader event, making it entirely possible that Trump was positive when he debated without a mask on Sept. 29. Given this, the commission’s insistence on in-person live debates has become a public health hazard.

On Wednesday night, the commission will allow Vice President Pence to appear at the vice-presidential debate, even though he, too, was at the Rose Garden event and sat immediately in front of at least one person who tested positive (Sen. Mike Lee of Utah). Pence will be separated from Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) by the skimpiest of plexiglass panels.

What is clear is that the commission is allowing the White House to call the shots. Commission co-chair Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. told the Los Angeles Times: “There will be a plexiglass divider between the two candidates and the candidates and the moderator. The Trump campaign agreed to that so long as we don’t surround Vice President Pence all the way around.” It should not be Pence’s call. The plexiglass is for others’ protection, not just his.

This should be the last debate overseen by the commission, which plainly has failed to provide a safe environment and set a good example for a pandemic-plagued country. Any future debates with Trump should be remote, as we simply cannot trust him or his doctors to tell us when he was infected, how serious his case is and what, if any, symptoms he is still experiencing.

There is no need at all for in-person presidential debates during a pandemic. In 1960, a third of the famous Nixon-Kennedy debates was remote. Doing so again would solve two problems: maintaining health standards and making it easier to prevent Trump’s interruptions. He can be muted when his opponent is speaking.

Why does the Commission on Presidential Debates allow reckless conduct from Team Trump? Perhaps it wants good ratings. Perhaps it does not want to enrage Trump. Perhaps it figures a remote debate won’t attract as many viewers. Inertia might paralyze the commission’s members.

It really does not matter what the reason is for the commission’s fecklessness. What matters is that the candidates, moderator and audience remain safe. The best and logical way to do this, which does not depend on the White House for accurate information, is to have remote debates. The onus should not be on the Biden camp to demand this.

The commission might see the light after Wednesday night’s debate. But if its leaders fear incurring the ire of the president, they should consider that such unnecessary events under these circumstances is the perfect description of reckless endangerment, a crime in virtually all, if not all, states. Perhaps the commission should be held liable should anyone fall ill because of these debates.

e jean carroll headshot Washington Post, Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll fight Justice Dept. intervention in Trump defamation case, Shayna Jacobs, Oct. 6, 2020. The former magazine columnist sued the president in New York state court, but the case was moved to federal court after the U.S. government stepped in.

Oct. 4

New York Times, In Biden’s Home State, Republican Centrism Gives Way to the Fringe, Elizabeth Williamson, Oct. 4, 2020. The Republican Party’s slide from statewide power to irrelevance in Delaware mirrored its swerve from moderation to the fringe. Now a QAnon fan is running for the Senate. “People are so tired of George Bush-era politics. Nationalist populism is the future,” said Lauren Witzke, a Republican Senate candidate in Delaware. “America First is the future. And that is what I am.”

Lauren Witzke, a dabbler in QAnon, a self-proclaimed “flat earther” and the Republican Party’s nominee in Delaware for the Senate, was exhorting her supporters last month to “Go get ’em — America First,” as they squared off against a handful of Black Lives Matter protesters.

Gathered with her in the parking lot of the Republican Party headquarters here was a self-appointed security guard with a gun on his hip, a political adviser whose losing clients include candidates accused of racism and anti-Semitism, and a smattering of Proud Boys, the far-right brawlers whom President Trump told to “stand back and stand by.”

Across the street, Keandra McDole, sister of a wheelchair-bound Black man who was killed in 2015 by the Delaware police, chanted “Lauren Witzke’s got to go,” above the din of revving car engines and calls of “Trump, Trump, Trump” and “K.K.K.” The “security” man pointed his handgun toward the protesters.

“This is ridiculous,” Tori Parker, a Republican Party consultant, said as she scanned the scene from the Black Lives Matter side. “It’s sad that voters feel like they only have a choice between democratic socialism and white supremacy.”

Ms. Witzke’s ascent in Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s home state may be the nadir of the Delaware Republican Party’s rapid swerve from patrician moderation to the far-right fringe. And its plunge from power to irrelevance is an object lesson for other states like Colorado, Oregon and California, where Republicans running statewide are facing a choice: Appeal to the vocal extreme or find some way to assemble a more centrist coalition that could actually elect them.

Ten years ago, Michael Castle, a former Republican governor, sitting House member and pro-business moderate, was supposed to be a shoo-in for the Senate seat that Mr. Biden gave up to become vice president. Then he was blindsided in the Republican primary by Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party candidate with a sideline in witchcraft who was crushed in the general election by Chris Coons, a relatively unknown Democratic county executive, by a vote of 57 percent to 40 percent.

Oct. 3

Washington Post, Media Criticisim Opinion: The new details on Kimberly Guilfoyle’s time at Fox News are horrific, Erik Wemple, Oct. 3, 2020. At the media-mobbed presidential debate at Hofstra University in 2016, the Erik Wemple Blog spotted then-Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle. This was just a few months after Guilfoyle helped to spearhead a campaign to stick up for Roger Ailes, the Fox News chief who’d been accused of sexual harassment by Gretchen Carlson and, eventually, several others.

Those allegations bore out, and Ailes found himself out of a job. So we asked Guilfoyle if she’d apologized to Carlson. Her face dropped and she turned around faster than a nuclear centrifuge. No answer.

New reporting may help explain Guilfoyle’s reticence.

In November 2018, a female colleague of Guilfoyle’s sent a draft complaint to Fox News executives regarding the treatment she said she received from the cable news star, who bantered with her fellow roundtable chatterboxes on the popular Fox News program “The Five.” The allegations are so bizarre as to defy categorization — sexual harassment, sexual abuse, psychological torture?

Have a look:

among other things, she said that she was frequently required to work at Guilfoyle’s New York apartment while the Fox host displayed herself naked, and was shown photographs of the genitalia of men with whom Guilfoyle had had sexual relations. The draft complaint also alleged that Guilfoyle spoke incessantly and luridly about her sex life, and on one occasion demanded a massage of her bare thighs; other times, she said, Guilfoyle told her to submit to a Fox employee’s demands for sexual favors, encouraged her to sleep with wealthy and powerful men, asked her to critique her naked body, demanded that she share a room with her on business trips, required her to sleep over at her apartment, and exposed herself to her, making her feel deeply uncomfortable.

The complaint runs 42 pages. It was never filed in a court, and Fox News paid more than $4 million to the employee, who left the network.

Those revelations come from a report by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, a journalist who has documented the close ties between the No. 1 cable news network and Trump world (New Yorker, Investigation: The Secret History of Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Departure from Fox).

They build on the work of Yashar Ali, who in 2018 nailed down many of the particulars regarding Guilfoyle’s exit, which was initially presented as a voluntary thing, though Mayer reports that she was forced out in July 2018. She moved on to work at a pro-Trump super PAC. In January, the Trump campaign announced she would head up joint fundraising between the campaign and the Republican National Committee. Guilfoyle is dating Donald Trump Jr., with whom she makes frequent appearances for the president.

The Trump campaign referred an inquiry to Guilfoyle’s employment attorney, John Singer. He noted that he has no connection to the campaign and referred this blog to his 2018 statement, which read, in part, “Any accusations of Kimberly engaging in inappropriate work-place conduct are unequivocally baseless and have been viciously made by disgruntled and self-interested employees.”

Guilfoyle issued this statement to the New Yorker: “In my 30-year career working for the SF District Attorney’s Office, the LA District Attorney’s Office, in media and in politics, I have never engaged in any workplace misconduct of any kind. During my career, I have served as a mentor to countless women, with many of whom I remain exceptionally close to this day.”

roger ailes w What does all of this say about Fox News? Well, the same things that we’ve known about Fox News for some time. First is the cruelty. The allegations in the draft complaint recall workplace brutality of the sort that arose in the reporting on Ailes, a paranoid and abusive network head. Over 20 years, Ailes subjected a Fox News booker to a regime of psychological torture and sexual coercion, the details of which don’t belong in a family newspaper. At one point, Ailes allegedly took a videotape of the woman dancing for him in a black garter and stockings, and kept the videotape in a safe-deposit box, just in case the woman decided to blow the whistle.

Second is the bullying approach to stifling allegations. As Mayer reports, the colleague who alleged the harassment by Guilfoyle joined Fox News out of college in 2015.

The employee declined the money, triggering another level of mistreatment, Mayer reported. If the employee was too revelatory with Paul, Weiss, Guilfoyle suggested that some aspects of her personal life could be outed. Associates of Guilfoyle contacted Mayer during her work on the story with details on the woman, “evidently in hopes of damaging her credibility and leading me not to publish this report.”

None of that worked. But Guilfoyle, a lawyer and former prosecutor in San Francisco, surely had some evidence that it could have been successful.

There are a lot of moving pieces to the cultural backdrop here. One is that Ailes built Fox News to objectify the female “talent” on air, so it’s no wonder that the mind-set has outlived him. Another is money — there’s way too much of it sloshing around in the bank

Washington Post, House votes to condemn QAnon conspiracy theory, Donna Cassata, Oct. 2, 2020. Seventeen Republicans voted against the bipartisan resolution, an indication of how the baseless online movement — which the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat — is gaining traction in the GOP.

The House voted overwhelmingly Friday to condemn the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory as the online movement identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat by the FBI has gained traction with some in the Republican Party.

The vote was 371 to 18 for the resolution sponsored by Reps. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) and Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) and came days after Malinowski said he received death threats from QAnon supporters after a false GOP ad accused him of lobbying “to protect sexual predators.”

Seventeen Republicans and one independent voted against the resoultion condemning QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that has been a central vector of misinformation about the coronavirus, on the same day the president said he and his wife had tested positive for the virus.

Adherents of QAnon believe President Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. In August, Trump gave a major boost to the baseless theory, saying that he appreciated the support of its followers, calling them “people that love our country.”

QAnon, which took root on anonymous message boards in 2017, has been identified by the FBI as among the extremist views “very likely” to motivate violence. Its adherents, according to law enforcement, have been arrested in numerous incidents, including two murders, a kidnapping, vandalism of a church and a heavily armed standoff near the Hoover Dam.

“This dangerous ideology is radicalizing violence at an alarming rate – yet, for far too long, Republicans have refused to denounce QAnon and its conspiracy theories,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a statement after the vote “At the same time, social media platforms that have facilitated the rise of QAnon must be held accountable.”

Malinowski said he has faced attacks online from QAnon supporters and received threats after the National Republican Congressional Committee ran an ad that falsely said Malinowski tried to block a provision in a 2006 crime bill that would have expanded registration requirements for sex offenders.

Malinowski, a freshman who worked on national security issues in the Clinton and Obama administrations, was the director of Human Rights Watch from 2001 to 2013.

Oct. 2

Washington Post, In a new ruling, judge says census count must continue through October, In a new ruling, judge says census count must continue through October, Tara Bahrampour, Oct. 2, 2020. The decision follows a tense week in which the government appeared to try to circumvent a preliminary injunction against ending the count early.

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Washington Post, Judge rejects John Bolton bid to dismiss government lawsuit seeking book proceeds, Spencer S. Hsu, Oct. 2, 2020 (print ed.). A federal judge on Thursday rejected John Bolton’s bid to dismiss a government lawsuit seeking the proceeds of his memoir, ruling that the former Trump national security adviser was required to let the White House complete a prepublication review.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Washington, D.C., said the government had sufficiently alleged that Bolton violated a nondisclosure agreement by not waiting for written White House authorization before giving his publisher a manuscript for “The Room Where It Happened,” an explosive account of his 17 months at Trump’s top security adviser that was published in June.

“The government has the power to prevent harm to the national security,” Lamberth wrote in a 26-page opinion. “While the government may not prevent Bolton from publishing unclassified materials, it may require him to undergo a reasonable prepublication review process. The . . . agreements are thus consistent with the First Amendment.”

john bolton room where cover Custom Bolton’s memoir, The Room Where It Happened, was published in June.

In a statement, lead Bolton attorney Charles J. Cooper said, “The Court’s decision, which we are still studying, means that the case will now move forward to the phase in which the parties will develop and present their evidence to the Court.”

Legal analysts said Lamberth’s opinion underscored that Bolton is in serious legal jeopardy and made it more difficult for other national security professionals to publish without risk of being sued by the government.

“This is a horrible new precedent,” Mark S. Zaid, a lawyer who specializes in national security and whistleblower cases, said in an email. “Before this case the U.S. Government had never pursued anyone for simply sharing a draft manuscript with lawyers, literary agents or publishers, even though by law it was improper to do so. As long as the manuscript was approved before actual publication, the U.S. Government was satisfied. But now the rules have changed, and any dissemination can create liability. “

Bolton has alleged that Trump appointees took unprecedented steps to hijack the prepublication review by erroneously claiming the book contained classified information after the National Security Council’s career senior director for information security told Bolton she had finished her own months-long review and declared it did not.

Bolton asserted that the White House sought to block the book to protect Trump from political embarrassment before November’s election.

Lamberth’s opinion gave a close reading to the terms of agreement Bolton signed. The opinion rejected Bolton’s assertion that the government had to prove he knowingly disclosed materials that “are, relate to, or purport to be” Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information — the highest level of classification, concerning intelligence sources and methods — “or describe activities that produce or relate to SCI.”

Jacob Wohl, whose supposed investment acumen as a 17-year-old, was featured by Fox Business News (screenshot)

Jacob Wohl, above, whose supposed investment acumen as a 17-year-old, was featured by Fox Business News (screenshots). Separate from his investment activities, Wohl has become known as a promoter of scandal allegations against perceived opponents of Donald Trump and other Republicans. On May 7, 2020, Reason Magazine published a column quoting Diana Andrade, shown below right in a photo with Wohl when she said they were dating, in a story headlined as follows: Reason, She Said Anthony Fauci Sexually Assaulted Her. Now She Says Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman Paid Her to Lie.

Washington Post, Conservative operatives face felony charges in connection with robocalls seeking to mislead voters, Meryl Kornfield, Oct. 2, 2020 (print ed.). Two right-wing operatives infamous for inventing outlandish conspiracy theories face felony charges in Michigan for allegedly intimidating voters with inaccurate robocalls that discouraged residents in urban areas from casting their ballots by mail.

Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were charged with four felonies of intimidating voters, conspiring to violate election law and using a computer to commit a crime, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Thursday. Thousands of residents from at least five states received the robocall aimed at discouraging absentee voting at a time when many Americans are expected to vote by mail rather than in person during the coronavirus pandemic.

Each charge against the pair carries a five- or seven-year sentence if they are convicted in Michigan — adding up to a maximum 12 years as some sentences for the charges would be concurrent. Wohl and Burkman, who live in Los Angeles and Arlington, Va., respectively, have not yet been arraigned, Nessel’s office said, adding that it is “too early to say if formal extradition will be necessary or if they will present themselves here voluntarily in the very near future.”

Nearly 12,000 residents with phone numbers from the 313 area code in Detroit were targeted, Nessel’s office said. Attorneys general in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois reported similar robocalls made to urban residents, amounting to an estimated 85,000 calls nationally, according to the Michigan office.

The caller, who claims to work for a civil rights organization founded by Wohl and Burkman, falsely says personal information for those who vote by mail will be shared with police tracking down warrants, credit card companies collecting outstanding debt, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requiring mandatory vaccinations. The caller tells voters to not be “finessed into giving your private information to the man.” Officials said the call exploited “racially-charged stereotypes.”

Robocall targets battleground states with falsehoods about mail-in voting

“Any effort to interfere with, intimidate or intentionally mislead Michigan voters will be met with swift and severe consequences,” Nessel said in a statement. “This effort specifically targeted minority voters in an attempt to deter them from voting in the November election. We’re all well aware of the frustrations caused by the millions of nuisance robocalls flooding our cell phones and landlines each day, but this particular message poses grave consequences for our democracy and the principles upon which it was built. Michigan voters are entitled to a full, free and fair election in November and my office will not hesitate to pursue those who jeopardize that.”

Washington Post, Federal judge orders Edward Snowden to forfeit book, speech proceeds totaling more than $5 million, Ellen Nakashima, Oct. 2, 2020 (print ed.). A federal court issued a final judgment this week ordering former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to forfeit all proceeds from his memoir and paid speeches, totaling at least $5.2 million so far.

The ruling Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria follows a December opinion by O’Grady that Snowden violated his obligations, under secrecy agreements he signed, to clear any book containing intelligence-related information with the government before publication.

“Intelligence information should protect our nation, not provide personal profit,” said G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. “This judgment will ensure that Edward Snowden receives no monetary benefits from breaching the trust placed in him.”

Snowden may appeal the December ruling on his liability. His attorney, Lawrence Lustberg, said Snowden “is still in the process of deciding on next steps.” Lustberg said the judgment allows Snowden “to take all lawful steps” to resist government efforts to collect the moneys at issue.

Snowden separately has been facing espionage charges since 2013, when he exposed top-secret NSA programs that touched off a global debate about the proper scope of U.S. surveillance but also drew condemnation from two successive U.S. administrations as harming national security.

Judge grants government proceeds from Snowden’s book

Snowden, who lives in Russia, where he initially received asylum and now has residency, published an autobiography in September 2019 explaining his motives for leaking material that revealed sensitive surveillance programs. The NSA eventually ended its mass collection of data about Americans’ phone calls after one of his leaks forced the government to confirm the program’s existence.

Snowden did not seek pre-publication approval from the CIA, a previous employer, or the NSA as required under the secrecy agreements he signed as a contractor. Snowden acknowledged breaking the rules in a “Daily Show” interview, saying he didn’t want to “let the CIA edit [my] life story.”

The Justice Department last year sued to cut off his profits from the book, “Permanent Record,” as well as from his paid speeches.

Snowden’s attorneys argued last year that Snowden preferred to risk future royalties rather than subject his work to government censorship. They also said nothing in his public talks revealed new information.

Snowden has said he would like to return to the United States, but only if he would be allowed to defend himself at trial by asserting his actions were in the public interest. That type of defense does not exist under U.S. law.

Washington Post, Opinion: To the Fox News reporter who’s ‘tired of it’: Clean up your own house, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 2, 2020. John Roberts, Fox News’s jennifer rubin new headshot chief White House correspondent, grew frustrated with White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday when she would not give a definitive statement that President Trump denounces white supremacists after he refused to do so in the presidential debate Tuesday. He later lost patience, saying: “Stop deflecting. Stop blaming the media,” Roberts declared. “I’m tired of it!” Really?

Let’s stipulate that Roberts is not akin to the “Fox & Friends” hosts or Fox’s evening lineup of Trump sycophants when it comes to distorting reality and cheerleading Trump. (Disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.) However, the White House has been deflecting like this for nearly four years. It has refused to answer all sorts of questions about Russian President Vladimir Putin, about Trump’s finances, about Trump’s embrace of racists and about any topic that would reveal Trump to be clueless or malicious. McEnany is just the most egregious practitioner of the non-response or the out-and-out falsehood. Roberts cannot possibly have just figured this out.

Roberts should look closer to home, if he’s “tired of it.” It is his network that allows Trump on air to spin bizarre conspiracy theories and blatant lies about his opponent. It is Fox News that has become a cesspool of anti-democratic (small “d”) and racist tropes. It is Fox News that tries to avoid — or to borrow a word, “deflects” — topics injurious to Trump, such as the New York Times bombshell about his taxes.

It would be hard to find one entity on the planet more responsible than John Roberts’s employer for enabling Trump, keeping his base in line, misleading the public about Trump’s corruption, excusing his culpability and giving him a sense of invincibility. It is not the only one, but it certainly leads the pack of Pravda-like outlets whose job is to defend Trump by deceiving viewers and readers if need be.

Oct. 1

New York Times, Chris Wallace Calls Debate ‘a Terrible Missed Opportunity,’ Michael M. Grynbaum, Oct. 1, 2020 (print ed.). The anchor conceded he was initially “reluctant” to step in during the matchup. “I’ve never been through anything like this,” he said.

New York Times, Drudge Report, a Trump Ally in 2016, Stops Boosting Him for 2020, Tiffany Hsu, Oct. 1, 2020 (print ed.). A rift between the president and the online news pioneer Matt Drudge is playing out in pithy headlines and needling tweets as the campaign heats up. Something has changed at Drudge Report, the influential site known for its tabloid-poetry headlines and conservative take on the news, and don’t think the president hasn’t noticed.

Matt Drudge, right, a web pioneer who went live with his site in 1995, was seen as an important media champion of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign. “A large measure of why Trump is the nominee goes to Matt Drudge,” Carl Bernstein said four years ago. And Mr. Trump has expressed his appreciation for the fedora-wearing web journalist, calling him “a great gentleman.”

But nowadays, like CNN, The New York Times and many other outlets, Drudge Report is just one more purveyor of “fake news,” in the Trump view.

For anyone who had not stopped by the site since it developed a reputation for lifting Mr. Trump and his brand of conservatism, the welcome page on Monday made for an arresting sight. At the top were images of stickers being sold by the Biden-Harris campaign that read, “I paid more income taxes than Donald Trump.”

Below that appeared a scroll of headlines linking to news stories from various sites, all of them written in Mr. Drudge’s staccato style, many of them related to a New York Times investigation of Mr. Trump’s troubled financial history.

Mr. Drudge also did not pull any punches after Tuesday’s presidential debate: “Chaos reigns in hell debate … Undecided voters describe President as a ‘crackhead,’ ‘arrogant’ in focus group … Joe faces down raging Don.”

kimberly guilfoyle rnc 1

jane mayer cspan New Yorker, Investigation: The Secret History of Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Departure from Fox, Jane Mayer, right, Oct. 1, 2020. A former assistant at Fox accused Kimberly Guilfoyle (shown at this summer's Republican National Convention), who is now one of the Trump campaign’s top fund-raising officials, of sexual harassment—and of attempting to buy her silence.

As President Donald Trump heads into the 2020 elections, he faces a daunting gender gap: according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, he trails Joe Biden by thirty percentage points among female voters. As part of his campaign, Trump has been doing all he can to showcase female stars in the Republican Party, from nominating Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court to naming Kimberly Guilfoyle, the former Fox News host and legal analyst, his campaign’s finance chair.

Guilfoyle, however, may not be an ideal emissary. In November, 2018, a young woman who had been one of Guilfoyle’s assistants at Fox News sent company executives a confidential, forty-two-page draft complaint that accused Guilfoyle of repeated sexual harassment, and demanded monetary relief. The document, which resulted in a multimillion-dollar out-of-court settlement, raises serious questions about Guilfoyle’s fitness as a character witness for Trump, let alone as a top campaign official.

In the 2020 campaign, Trump has spotlighted no woman more brightly than Guilfoyle. She was given an opening-night speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. And this fall Guilfoyle, who is Donald Trump, Jr.,’s girlfriend, has been crisscrossing the country as a Trump surrogate, on what is billed as the “Four More Tour.” At a recent “Women for Trump” rally in Pennsylvania, Guilfoyle claimed that the President was creating “eighteen hundred new female-owned businesses in the United States a day,” and praised Trump for promoting school choice, which, she said, was supported by “single mothers like myself.”

Guilfoyle has maintained that her decision to move from television news to a political campaign was entirely voluntary. In fact, Fox News forced her out in July, 2018 — several years before her contract’s expiration date. At the time, she was a co-host of the political chat show “The Five.” Media reports suggested that she had been accused of workplace impropriety, including displaying lewd pictures of male genitalia to colleagues, but few additional details of misbehavior emerged. Guilfoyle publicly denied any wrongdoing, and last year a lawyer representing her told The New Yorker that “any suggestion” she had “engaged in misconduct at Fox is patently false.” But, as I reported at the time, shortly after Guilfoyle left her job, Fox secretly paid an undisclosed sum to the assistant, who no longer works at the company. Recently, two well-informed sources told me that Fox, in order to avoid going to trial, had agreed to pay the woman upward of four million dollars.

Until now, the specific accusations against Guilfoyle have remained largely hidden. The draft complaint, which was never filed in court, is covered by a nondisclosure agreement. The former assistant has not been publicly identified, and, out of respect for the rights of alleged victims of sexual harassment, The New Yorker is honoring her confidentiality. Reached for comment, she said, “I wish you well. But I have nothing to say.”

The woman was hired in 2015, just out of college, to work as an assistant for Guilfoyle and another former Fox host, Eric Bolling.

According to a dozen well-informed sources familiar with her complaints, the assistant alleged that Guilfoyle, her direct supervisor, subjected her frequently to degrading, abusive, and sexually inappropriate behavior; among other things, she said that she was frequently required to work at Guilfoyle’s New York apartment while the Fox host displayed herself naked, and was shown photographs of the genitalia of men with whom Guilfoyle had had sexual relations.

The draft complaint also alleged that Guilfoyle spoke incessantly and luridly about her sex life, and on one occasion demanded a massage of her bare thighs; other times, she said, Guilfoyle told her to submit to a Fox employee’s demands for sexual favors, encouraged her to sleep with wealthy and powerful men, asked her to critique her naked body, demanded that she share a room with her on business trips, required her to sleep over at her apartment, and exposed herself to her, making her feel deeply uncomfortable.

As serious as the draft complaint’s sexual-harassment allegations were, equally disturbing was what the assistant described as a coverup attempt by Guilfoyle, whose conduct was about to come under investigation by a team of outside lawyers.

In July, 2016, the network had hired the New York-based law firm Paul, Weiss to investigate sexual misconduct at the company, which, under the leadership of Roger Ailes, had a long history of flagrant harassment and gender discrimination. According to those familiar with the assistant’s draft complaint, during a phone call on August 6, 2017, she alleged that Guilfoyle tried to buy her silence, offering to arrange a payment to her if she agreed to lie to the Paul, Weiss lawyers about her experiences. The alleged offering of hush money brings to mind Trump’s payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, in order to cover up his sexual impropriety.

By 2017, the Paul, Weiss lawyers had begun investigating accusations of workplace sexual misconduct involving Eric Bolling, with whom Guilfoyle shared kimberly guilfoyle smile w the assistant. Guilfoyle, shown at left in a file photo, and Bolling were close, and it was all but inevitable that if the assistant accused Bolling of sexual harassment — as in fact she did — Guilfoyle’s conduct would come under scrutiny next. (Bolling, whose employment Fox ended in September, 2017, declined to comment; he has denied any wrongdoing, and is now a host at Sinclair Broadcast Group.)

According to the assistant, as the investigation into Bolling gained momentum, Guilfoyle told her that she needed to know what the assistant would say if she were asked about sexual harassment, and warned her that she could cause great damage if she said the wrong thing. Guilfoyle, she said, told her that, in exchange for demonstrating what Guilfoyle called loyalty, she would work out a payment to take care of her — possibly, she said, with funds from Bolling. The assistant alleged that Guilfoyle mentioned sums as large as a million dollars, and also other inducements, including a private-plane ride to Rome, a percentage of Guilfoyle’s future speaking fees, and an on-air reporting opportunity.

People close to Guilfoyle called the assistant’s allegation untrue, and said they were shocked that she would fabricate such a false claim. But a well-informed source independently confirmed to me that Guilfoyle had discussed the topic of raising hush money.

When the assistant declined the offer of money, Guilfoyle warned — in a manner that the assistant regarded as threatening — that, if she spoke candidly to the lawyers, some aspects of the assistant’s private life that Guilfoyle knew about might be exposed. In fact, as I reported on this story, associates of Guilfoyle’s contacted me, offering personal details about the assistant, evidently in hopes of damaging her credibility and leading me not to publish this report.

Guilfoyle declined to be interviewed for this story but issued a statement: “In my 30-year career working for the SF District Attorney’s Office, the LA District Attorney’s Office, in media and in politics, I have never engaged in any workplace misconduct of any kind. During my career, I have served as a mentor to countless women, with many of whom I remain exceptionally close to this day.”

September

Sept. 27

Washington Post, TikTok push showcases ‘central planner’ Trump and his hands-on approach to world’s largest economy, David J. Lynch, Sept. 27, 2020. The whirl of presidential action reflects President Trump’s determination to command the $19 trillion U.S. economy with the same hands-on vigor he brought to his Manhattan real estate firm.

Sept. 26

Media Matters, Opinion: The Supreme Court is way more important than right-wing media let on, John Whitehouse, Sept. 26, 2020. This week: What Fox News doesn't want people to know about a far right Supreme Court, how the media mishandled Trump's stunning refusal to commit to a peaceful transition, 200,000 are dead in the United States from the pandemic, CBS News runs with GOP spin, and more.

As expected, President Donald Trump officially nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on Saturday evening. If you watched Fox News coverage of the nomination (and like I've said before, I don't recommend it), you've seen a lot of talk about Barrett's faith, intelligence, and personal life.

What you don't see on Fox News is a lot of honest talk about the policy consequences of the Supreme Court with a 6-3 right-wing majority. The most they'll talk about is that Roe v. Wade is endangered (and that is an understatement).

Fox News is especially dismissing concerns that a Court with Barrett would invalidate the Affordable Care Act, including protections for pre-existing conditions. Barrett is on record praising late Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in a 2012 case that would have invalidated the entire law. But in the few moments discussing health care on air on Saturday, Fox personalities scoffed at the likelihood.

Others are not being as coy. Fox News host Mark Levin railed at the Affordable Care Act on Twitter. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) admitted to George Stephanopoulos that the Supreme Court possible striking down the ACA "shouldn't tarnish Judge Barrett."

The fact of the matter is that Trump promised to appoint far right judges who would dismantle popular provisions in the law and prevent further such laws. That's where the focus of this confirmation fight should be.

Also: Fox News on Sunday morning hosted network contributor and noted bigot Robert Jeffress to complain about an alleged anti-Catholic bias regarding Judge Barrett, even as a majority of current Supreme Court justices are Catholic. Meanwhile, Jeffress has called Catholicism a "counterfeit religion," the product of a "Babylonian mystery religion," and a product of "the genius of Satan." Once again, the hypocrisy is the point.

A federal appeals court on Sunday stayed a lower court’s injunction that would have allowed mail ballots in Wisconsin to count if postmarked by Election Day and received up to six days later. The typical deadline for mail ballots to be received is 8 p.m. on Election Day.

The injunction, a victory for Democrats in a closely watched swing state, is on hold pending further review, according to the order issued Sunday afternoon by the Seventh Circuit. District Judge William Conley, who issued the injunction last week, had expressed fears that tens of thousands of voters could be disenfranchised.

“Election workers’ and voters’ experiences during Wisconsin’s primary election in April, which took place at the outset of the COVID-19 crisis, have convinced the court that some, limited relief from statutory deadlines for mail-in registration and absentee voting is again necessary to avoid an untenable impingement on Wisconsin citizens’ right to vote,” Conley wrote in a 69-page opinion.

The Seventh Circuit’s judges include Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. Pushing for Barrett’s swift appointment, which would cement a conservative majority, Trump has suggested the Supreme Court could play a decisive role in the presidential election.

The Seventh Circuit’s order was not signed and did not include an explanation or the number of judges who agreed.

Conley had also told the state to extend its online and mail-in voter registration deadline by one week, from Oct. 14 to Oct. 21. He said voters who requested but did not receive mail ballots must have the option of accessing replacement ballots online or via email between Oct. 22 and Oct. 29.

Conley had put his injunction extending ballot-counting time on hold for seven days to allow the other side time to appeal.

Sept. 25

New York Times, Karen McDougal’s defamation suit against Fox News is dismissed, Michael M. Grynbaum and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Updated Sept. 25, 2020. Fox News won a legal victory on Thursday after a federal judge dismissed a defamation suit brought against its host Tucker Carlson, right, by a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Donald J. Trump before he was president.

The suit, filed last year, stemmed from a 2018 episode of Mr. Carlson’s show in which he accused the model, Karen McDougal, of djt karen mcdougal blue dress extorting Mr. Trump. She sold the rights to her story of an affair to The National Enquirer in 2016, which did not publish the story, a transaction that involved Mr. Trump’s former longtime lawyer, Michael D. Cohen.

Ms. McDougal, shown at left, said Mr. Carlson’s remarks harmed her reputation, but Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, of United States District Court in Manhattan, said the host’s comments were protected by the First Amendment.

“The statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate, and, as such, are not actionable as defamation,” she wrote.

New York Times, Alphabet Settles Shareholder Suits Over Sexual Harassment Claims, Daisuke Wakabayashi, Sept. 25, 2020. Google’s parent company was hit with a wave of lawsuits after The New York Times reported that an accused executive had received a $90 million exit package.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has settled a series of shareholder lawsuits over its handling of sexual harassment claims, agreeing to greater oversight by its board of directors in future cases of sexual misconduct and committing to spend $310 million over the next decade on corporate diversity programs.

The settlement, filed on Friday in California Superior Court, also said employees would no longer be forced to settle disputes with Alphabet in private arbitration. Workers had demanded that change after details of sexual harassment cases at the company became public two years ago.

In addition, Alphabet said it would limit confidentiality restrictions when settling harassment and discrimination cases and ban workplace romances between managers and subordinates.

The Silicon Valley company was hit by a wave of shareholder lawsuits after The New York Times reported in 2018 that the board of directors had approved a $90 million exit package for a star executive, Andy Rubin, even after an investigation deemed a sexual harassment claim against him credible. Mr. Rubin has denied the claim and others against him.

john bolton room where cover Custom Washington Post, U.S. judge questions Bolton’s political motives as he battles White House lawsuit for book profits, Spencer S. Hsu, Sept. 25, 2020 (print ed.). Attorneys for former Trump national security adviser John Bolton urged a federal judge Thursday to halt the government’s efforts to seize the proceeds from his memoir and accused White House aides of improperly trying to stall publication of the book because it reveals unflattering material about the president.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Washington, D.C., voiced doubt, saying Bolton attorneys were mounting their own “political diatribe” in alleging Trump aides took unprecedented steps and politicized a pre-publication review of Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened.

“Isn’t the question whether the information is classified or not?” Lamberth prodded Bolton’s defense. “You’ve engaged in that whole political diatribe, but it really has no place in what we’re arguing today.”

The oral argument came after a lawyer for the career government official who conducted the initial review for classified information in Bolton’s manuscript contended in a letter to the court that Trump aides had “commandeered” the process, then erroneously claimed the memoir contained classified information and failed to propose edits to facilitate publication.

On Thursday, the parties gathered for a video court hearing in the lawsuit brought by the Trump administration in June seeking to halt release of Bolton’s book, a blistering account of his 17 months as the president’s top security adviser. Among other disclosures, the book reports that Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win reelection, confirms that Trump attempted to use military aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son and says Trump expressed willingness to halt or obstruct criminal investigations as personal favors to authoritarian foreign leaders.

michael pack

Washington Post,Washington Post, Head of government media agency flouts subpoena, angering Democrats and Republicans, Karoun Demirjianm, Sept. 25, 2020 (print ed.). The head of the government’s main international broadcasting agency flouted a subpoena for congressional testimony Thursday, angering both Democrats and Republicans already alarmed by his management tactics.

Michael Pack, chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and similar institutions, was issued a subpoena by the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week after he reneged on a promise to appear before the panel citing unspecified “administrative proceedings,” according to the panel’s chairman, Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.)

Engel said Thursday that Pack (shown above in a file photo from a previous appearance) “manufactured this conflict to get out of being here today.”

Spokesmen for the U.S. Agency for Global Media did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pack has been the subject of intense scrutiny and controversy that commenced before he was confirmed to his position less than four months ago. In his brief tenure, he has ousted the heads of VOA’s sister operations Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Open Technology Fund, frozen spending, and refused to renew the visas of foreign journalists — a move he has defended as an effort to root out potential spies.

Washington Post, Opinion: Rewrite that list of debate topics, Chris Wallace. And put the climate crisis at No. 1, Margaret Sullivan, right, Sept. 25, 2020 (print ed.). When the wildfires are burning, we must have our candidates address how the planet is heating up — and dispense with topics of partisan pandering.

The past few months should have forced even the staunchest climate-crisis deniers to yank their heads out of the warming sand.

The temperature in Death Valley hit 130 degrees, the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth. Drought-fueled wildfires in the West are still raging, sending smoke all the way to the East Coast after destroying millions of acres and thousands of buildings, and causing more than 25 deaths. And tropical storms, one after another, endlessly roiled the Atlantic.

Our planet is in serious, irrevocable trouble. There’s no bigger issue.

Which is why it’s flat-out wrong that Fox News’s Chris Wallace — and those who advised him — didn’t see fit to put climate change on his topic list for Tuesday’s first presidential debate.

Instead, as the veteran newsman picked the subjects that will occupy each 15-minute segment of the 90-minute debate from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, we got these: the candidates’ records, the Supreme Court, covid-19, the economy, “race and violence in our cities,” and election integrity.

Sept. 24

harold evans newsroom

New York Times, Harold Evans Dies at 92; Crusading Newspaperman With a Second Act, Robert D. McFadden, Sept. 24, 2020. In Britain, he helped redefine high-quality newspapers and challenged legal restrictions on the press. In America, he brought new scope and glitz to book publishing as the head of Random House.

Harold Evans, the crusading British newspaperman who was forced out as editor of The Times of London by Rupert Murdoch in 1982 and reinvented himself in the United States as a publisher, author and literary luminary, died on Wednesday night in New York City. He was 92.

harold evans good times cover His wife, the editor Tina Brown, confirmed his death in a statement. He is shown above in a London newsroom and at right in more recent years.

In Britain, he helped redefine high-quality newspapers and pushed back legal restrictions on the press. In the United States, he edited national magazines, introduced new scope and glitz to book publishing as the head of Random House, wrote history books and a best-selling memoir, and, with Ms. Brown, who edited Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, dazzled and upset the cognoscenti.

Justice Integrity Project Editor's Note: Evans appeared on the weekly radio show, Washington Update, co-hosted by JIP Editor Andrew Kreig for seven years, to discuss his memoir, Good Times, Bad Times, in an hour-long interview.

New York Times, Right-Wing Media Stars Mislead on Covid-19 Death Toll, Tiffany Hsu, Sept. 24, 2020. Using a bogus interpretation of C.D.C. data, radio hosts like Mark Levin cast doubt on 200,000 pandemic deaths.

When the coronavirus death toll in the United States passed 200,000 on Tuesday, matching projections made by White House experts this spring, many of the right-wing media personalities who had mocked the estimates as overblown were quiet.

The death toll, tracked by Johns Hopkins University and a New York Times database, is most likely an undercount, many public health experts believe. At least 266,000 more people have died in the United States during the pandemic than would have been the case during a typical year.

Mark Levin, the host of a syndicated radio show and a Fox News program, declared on Twitter on Wednesday that “THE U.S. DID NOT SURPASS 200,000 COVID-19 DEATHS.” As evidence, he cited data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that 94 percent of the reported deaths involved underlying health problems and that 6 percent of the people who died had no illness or medical condition other than Covid-19.

Mr. Levin was one of several popular radio hosts who have used the C.D.C. statistic to make a case that the pandemic death toll was inflated, a false claim that was also promoted by a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory and amplified by President Trump in a post that Twitter removed last month.

Business Insider, Press freedom advocates are slamming Trump for glorifying violence against reporters, Sarah Al-Arshani, Sept. 24, 2020. Press freedom organizations say they're shocked, but not surprised, by Trump's remarks; They also warned that this sort of rhetoric is dangerous for reporters and the American people.

Press organizations have urged reporters to keep holding President Donald Trump accountable after he applauded physical aggression toward journalists covering his campaign.

"They grabbed a guy — 'I'm a reporter! I'm a reporter!' — 'Get out of here!' They threw him aside like a bag of popcorn. But honestly, when you watch the crap we've all had to take ... it's actually a beautiful sight," Trump said Tuesday, in reference to an MSNBC reporter who was hit by a rubber bullet while covering protests in Minnesota in May.

John Donnelly, right, the chair of the press freedom team at the National Press Club, told Business Insider "a statement that glorifies violence against reporters is anathema to the American constitution."

Donnelly said that Trump's latest comments follow a long list of broadsides against journalists, which ultimately pose a threat to democracy itself.

"What he is doing is akin to what a Duterte or an Erdogan or a Putin might do," Donnelly added, referring to the president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"Not what you would expect from a president of the United States and not what we have seen from the president of the United States up to this point. So it is extremely concerning for reporters, but it is par for the course for this president," Donnelly said.

In its own statement, the Society of Professional Journalists said it was "appalled" by Trump's latest remarks applauding violence against the news media.
"Promoting physical contact against journalists who are just trying to do their jobs during a pandemic is sickening and frankly, un-American. The president of the United States should be above calling a journalist 'a little bag of popcorn' and calling a journalist's forceful removal 'a beautiful sight,'" the statement read.

Elisa Lees Muñoz, the executive director for the International Women's Media Foundation told Business Insider she was shocked but not surprised by Trump's comments.

She said Trump's remarks continue to put reporters at risk on the ground, and online.

According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, at least 201 journalists have been attacked so far this year. There have also been more than 800 reports of aggression against reporters during Black Lives Matter protests.

"We know that journalists are being physically harmed on the ground, but to have it be mocked, and praised was beyond the pale, even for this president and this administration," Muñoz said.

She added that some of Trump's rhetoric has even been adopted by leaders abroad who have used it as justification to attack reporters there, especially women.

"It's happened in the Philippines. It's happened in Mexico, and in Brazil," Muñoz said.

Donnelly said Trump's repeated use of the phrase "fake news" is meant to attack news organizations and the credibility of their reporting, he says what it amounts to is an attempt to deflect criticism and accountability.

"First of all, there is such a thing as actual fake news. It is misinformation often created by America's adversaries and spewed online," Donnelly said. "But when the president says fake news, he means news that doesn't serve his agenda or hurts him politically."

Donnelly urged the press to continue calling out Trump when necessary and to keep telling the truth.

"There's a temptation to say, 'Oh, there's Trump being Trump again,' and to just move on, but we have to call out every single time he does this as unacceptable because it is beyond the pale. He is attacking a pillar of our country."

Sept. 23

Gothamist, NYU Warns Students After Professor Allegedly Declares Masks "Ineffective" In Slowing COVID Spread, Jen Chung, Sept. 23, 2020. Administrators at New York University, one of the few colleges in the area reopening for in-person learning, had to step in after one of its professors allegedly told his students that masks were not effective in mitigating the spread of coronavirus.

"It pains us to comment in any way on a faculty member’s comments, and we do so advisedly now; however, we do not feel we have a choice," school administrators said in an email reminding students that masks are required. "The matter is too important to your health and the health of those around you."

The comes after a student, Julia Jackson, wrote on Twitter that Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media, culture, and communication, recently told students that "wearing masks doesn't prevent the spread of COVID-19":

The email, sent on Monday, was addressed to Miller's students from NYU's Steinhardt School dean, Jack Knott, and Dr. Carlo Ciotoli, who leads the school's COVID-19 response.

It reads, "Amid reports that your professor, Mark Crispin Miller, has been saying that masks are ineffective in checking the spread of COVID-19, we refer to the most authoritative public health guidance, which recommends wearing a mask as an effective way to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The evidence backs it up. And we remind you that wearing a mask is required at NYU," with links to the CDC's website and NYU's mask guidance.

mark crispin miller Miller, right, is known for his controversial views: He was included on a conservative watchlist of radical professors, for allegedly comparing President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, and has suggested the 9/11 attacks were an inside job (his departmental chair, at the time, said in 2017 that he was "entitled to his views").

On his website, Miller called his student's tweets "venomous" and insisted he never specifically told his class not to wear masks.

"Here’s the thread that prompted NYU to email my students, referring them to the CDC’s 'authoritative' position on face masks (that is, the one the CDC now takes, having said the opposite before April), and reaffirming NYU’s strict mask mandate (which I never urged the class to violate)," Miller writes. "I’ve been teaching propaganda (how to study it, not do it) for years now; and while there’s always disagreement, and resistance—both good things—I’ve never had anything like this happen."

Jackson, though, argued in her Twitter thread, that there's a public health emergency:

"The safety of the NYU community, as well as the New York City community, is our top priority," NYU spokesman John Beckman said in a statement to Gothamist. "Mask-wearing is a requirement at NYU for all students and faculty; we communicate it repeatedly to students and employees. Amid the reports about this online class, we have communicated directly with the students in it to remind them of the guidance from health authorities, the evidence supporting it, and that everyone on campus has to wear a mask and follow the other rules, such as maintaining social distancing and being tested regularly. We are pleased to report that the NYU community has embraced this guidance, and we have seen a high degree of compliance with our health rules."

Last week, an NYU dorm was put under lockdown after four students tested positive for the coronavirus. According to the school's COVID dashboard, for the seven-day period between September 12th and September 18th, there have been 53 new cases from almost 12,000 tests, for a positivity rate of 0.43%.

New York Times, Americans Have Lost $145 Million to Coronavirus Fraud, Christina Morales and Christine Hauser, Sept. 23, 2020. More than 200,000 complaints of scams and fraud have been filed so far this year, data from the Federal Trade Commission shows. Schemes related to the coronavirus peaked in the spring, and they focused on federal stimulus payments and other forms of financial relief, personal protective equipment, and unemployment and other government benefits, the commission reported.

The data was compiled by the commission’s Consumer Sentinel Network, which provides law enforcement agencies and the public with information about rampant forms of fraud. The network has tracked about 206,000 reports of fraud, identity theft, spam telephone calls and other potential scams related to the coronavirus that were submitted to the F.T.C. from Jan. 1 through Sept. 22.

According to Monica Vaca, director of the F.T.C.’s division of consumer response and operations, what is breathtaking about the reports is that the problems encompass so many aspects of consumers’ lives.

New York Times, Trump Turns Attack on MSNBC Journalist Into Rally Fodder, Katie Robertson, Sept. 23, 2020. At multiple campaign stops, the president has gotten laughs by inaccurately recounting Ali Velshi’s being hit by a rubber bullet while covering a protest.

Claims of “fake news” have long been a staple of President Trump’s rally speeches. But in recent days, with the election less than six weeks off, he has made his rhetorical attacks on the news media more personal, with repeated references to a specific reporter’s suffering an injury while on the job.

At a rally in Bemidji, Minn., on Friday, Mr. Trump went after the MSNBC anchor and correspondent Ali Velshi by name, describing a moment when Mr. Velshi was hit in a knee by a rubber bullet in May while reporting on a Minneapolis protest prompted by the police killing of George Floyd. (The incident was captured live on MSNBC.)

“It was the most beautiful thing,” Mr. Trump said, after incorrectly stating that Mr. Velshi had been hit by a tear-gas canister. He added, “It’s called law and order.”

The president brought up the incident again the next day at a rally in Fayetteville, N.C., to more applause.

New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to Retire as New York Times Company Chairman, Marc Tracy, Sept. 23, 2020. A changing of the guard is complete as he steps back from the board of the news organization he led to 61 Pulitzer Prizes.

The New York Times Company announced on Wednesday that Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. will retire as the chairman and as an active member of its board of directors on Dec. 31, completing a generational shift at a newspaper that has been in the same family for more than 120 years. He will be succeeded as the board’s chairman by his son, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher.

Mr. Sulzberger, 69, served as publisher of The Times from 1992 to 2017. He made sweeping changes during his tenure, taking the print newspaper from black and white to color starting in 1993 — a move viewed with suspicion by some traditionalists — and later transforming it into a digital publication. He became chairman in 1997 and will assume the title of chairman emeritus.

His retirement concludes a changing of the guard, coming nearly three years after his son became the publisher and weeks after Meredith Kopit Levien, previously the chief operating officer, replaced Mark Thompson as the chief executive and president. Mr. Thompson, who held the chief executive job for eight years, was appointed to that role by the elder Mr. Sulzberger.

Sept. 21

New York Times, Analysis: Jeff Zucker Helped Create Donald Trump. That Show May Be Ending, Ben Smith, Sept. 21, 2020 (print ed.). The coziness between the TV executive and Mr. Trump is a Frankenstein story for the cable news era. But then the monster got away, our columnist writes.

Washington Post, TikTok says Oracle can review its source code, but deal won’t allow tech transfers, Eva Dou, Sept. 21, 2020. China's TikTok sought to tamp down domestic controversy over its deal with Oracle and Walmart, saying in a blog post Monday that there would be no technology transfer to Oracle, though the U.S. company would be able to check its software for safety.

The statement by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, reflected the awkward situation confronting TikTok as it navigates the same political pressures that U.S. companies have long faced in the China market. For years, U.S. firms have been the ones issuing the assurances that their Chinese partner couldn’t access their data except for safety checks.

“The current plan does not involve the transfer of any algorithms or technology,” ByteDance said in the post on its official WeChat account. “Oracle has the authority to check the source code of TikTok USA.”

The TikTok deal has been a vivid example of the Trump administration’s policy of reciprocity toward Chinese businesses. Supporters of the approach say it’s only fair to treat Chinese companies by the same standards to which U.S. companies are held in China. Critics say the United States should not stoop to the strong-arm negotiating tactics that it criticizes other governments for using.U.S. officials have followed Beijing’s playbook in demanding the viral-video app give the government a cut of the deal, and in applying eleventh-hour pressure in threatening to remove TikTok from U.S. app stores.

New York Times, James Levine Was Fired Over Sexual Misconduct, Then Was Paid $3.5 Million, James B. Stewart and Michael Cooper, Updated Sept. 21, 2020. The terms of a settlement last summer between the Metropolitan Opera and the renowned conductor had not been previously disclosed.

Last summer, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, convened the executive committee of the company’s board to announce the end of one of the highest-profile, messiest feuds in the Met’s nearly 140-year history. A bitter court battle had concluded between the company and the james levine 40 years cover conductor James Levine, right, who had shaped the Met’s artistic identity for more than four decades before his career was engulfed by allegations of sexual improprieties.

Mr. Gelb told the committee that the resolution was advantageous to the Met. But the settlement, whose terms have not been publicly disclosed until now, called for the company and its insurer to pay Mr. Levine $3.5 million, according to two people familiar with its terms.

The Met had fired Mr. Levine in 2018 after an internal investigation uncovered what the company called credible evidence of “sexually abusive and harassing conduct toward vulnerable artists in the early stages of their careers.” Rather than going quietly, Mr. Levine sued the company for breach of contract and defamation, seeking at least $5.8 million. The Met countersued, revealing lurid details of its investigation and claiming that Mr. Levine’s misconduct had violated his duties. It sought roughly the same amount.

Wall Sreet on Parade, Analysis: 3-Count Felon, JPMorgan Chase, Caught Laundering More Dirty Money, Pam Martens and Russ Martens, right, Sept. 21, 2020. russ martens pam martens The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has once again managed to do what federal bank regulators refuse to do in the United States – come clean with the American people about our dirty Wall Street banks.

ICIJ dropped a bombshell investigative report yesterday about money laundering for criminals at some of the biggest banks on Wall Street, but you won’t find a peep about it on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal or New York Times’ print editions.

JPMorgan Chase has already pleaded guilty to three criminal felony counts brought by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014. Two of those counts related to money laundering and failure to file suspicious activity reports on the business bank account it held for Bernie Madoff for decades. JPMorgan Chase actually told U.K. regulators that it suspected Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme but it failed to share those concerns with U.S. regulators, even though it was required under law to do so.

The third felony count brought by the U.S. Department of Justice came one year later, in 2015. It related to JPMorgan’s involvement in a bank cartel that was engaged in rigging foreign exchange trading.

The ICIJ investigation is based on secret documents leaked from FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a unit of the U.S. Treasury. The documents “show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.”

The report has much to say about JPMorgan Chase:

JPMorgan Chase was involved in moving illicit funds for the fugitive, Jho Low, involving the notorious looting of public funds in Malaysia. Jho Low has been accused by multiple jurisdictions of playing a key role in the embezzlement of more than $4.5 billion from a Malaysian economic development fund, 1MDB. JPMorgan Chase moved $1.2 billion in money for Jho Low from 2013 to 2016, according to the report.

paul manafort cnn The ICIJ bombshell includes the charge that JPMorgan also “processed more than $50 million in payments over a decade, the records show, for Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump (shown at right in a 2016 file photo). The bank shuttled at least $6.9 million in Manafort transactions in the 14 months after he resigned from the campaign amid a swirl of money laundering and corruption allegations spawning from his work with a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.”

More troubling activity at JPMorgan Chase includes the following, according to ICIJ investigators:

“JPMorgan also moved money for companies and people tied to corruption scandals in Venezuela that have helped create one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. One in three Venezuelans is not getting enough to eat, the UN reported this year, and millions have fled the country.

“One of the Venezuelans who got help from JPMorgan was Alejandro ‘Piojo’ Isturiz, a former government official who has been charged by U.S. authorities as a player in an international money laundering scheme. Prosecutors allege that between 2011 and 2013 Isturiz and others solicited bribes to rig government energy contracts. The bank moved more than $63 million for companies linked to Isturiz and the money laundering scheme between 2012 and 2016, the FinCEN Files show…”

Sept. 20

New York Times, U.S. Judge Temporarily Halts Trump’s WeChat Ban, Ana Swanson and David McCabe, Sept. 20, 2020. A federal judge has issued an injunction against President Trump’s executive order banning the Chinese social media app WeChat from carrying out commercial transactions in the United States after Sunday, presenting at least a temporary setback in the president’s efforts to block an app that he has labeled a national security threat.

The ruling, which came Sunday morning, will temporarily halt Mr. Trump’s efforts to bar WeChat, which is owned by the Chinese company Tencent Holdings, from operating in the United States. The Trump administration has said the app offers China a conduit to collect data on Americans and to censor the news and information shared by WeChat’s more than a billion monthly active users.

In her decision, Judge Laurel Beeler of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California said that she had chosen to grant the motion because the plaintiffs had raised serious questions about whether the order would harm First Amendment rights, and that it placed significant hardship on the plaintiffs.

The U.S. government could now appeal to the Ninth Circuit court to seek to overturn the stay.

The motion for a preliminary injunction was filed Aug. 27 by the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance, a nonprofit group whose trustees include several prominent Chinese-American lawyers. The group says it has no connection to Tencent Holdings or any of its affiliates.

Julian Assange Indicter Julian Assange (Photo by The Indicter Magazine).

CraigMurrayBlog, Your Man in the Public Gallery: Assange Hearing Day 13, Craig Murray, right, Sept. 20, 2020. Friday gave us the most emotionally charged craig murray newer moments yet at the Assange hearing, showed that strange and sharp twists in the story are still arriving at the Old Bailey, and brought into sharp focus some questions about the handling and validity of evidence, which I will address in comment.

The first witness of the day was Nicky Hager, the veteran New Zealand investigative journalist. Hager’s co-authored book “Hit and Run” detailed a disastrous New Zealand SAS raid in Afghanistan, “Operation Burnham”, that achieved nothing but the deaths of civilians, including a child. Hager was the object of much calumny and insult, and even of police raids on his home, but in July an official government report found that all the major facts of his book were correct, and the New Zealand military had run dangerously out of control: “Ministers were not able to exercise the democratic control of the military. The military do not exist for their own purpose, they are meant to be controlled by their minister who is accountable to Parliament.”

Edward Fitzgerald took Hager through his evidence. Hager stated that journalists had a duty to serve the public, and that they could not do this without access to secret sources of classified information. This was even more necessary for the public good in time of war. Claims of harm are always made by governments against any such disclosures. It is always stated. Such claims had been frequently made against him throughout his career. No evidence had ever emerged to back up any of these claims that anybody had been harmed as a result of his journalism.

When Wikileaks had released the Afghan War Logs, they had been an invaluable source to journalists. They showed details of regular patrols, CIA financed local forces, aid and reconstruction ops, technical intelligence ops, special ops and psychological ops, among others. They had contributed much to his books on Afghanistan. Information marked as confidential is essential to public understanding of the war. He freqently used leaked material. You had to judge whether it was in the higher public interest to inform the public. Decisions of war and peace were of the very highest public interest. If the public were being misled about the conduct and course of the war, how could democratic choices be made?

Edward Fitzgerald then asked about the collateral murder video and what they revealed about the rules of engagement. Hager said that the Collateral Murder video had “the most profound effect throughout the world”. The publication of that video and the words “”Look at those dead bastards” had changed world opinion on the subject of civilian casualties. In fact the Rules of Engagement had been changed to put more emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties, as a direct result.

Historian, human rights activist and former UK ambassador Craign Murray has been covering the Assange extradition hearings in London. About Craig Murray.

The Sun, Anti-pedophile subreddit used by QAnon fans is banned after moderator 'admits addiction to child porn & pre-teen girls,' Nicole Darfrah, Sept. 20, 2020. An anti-pedophile message board has been banned after one of its moderators confessed to being obsessed with child pornography.

The Reddit page called “PedoGate” – used by QAnon followers – was banned from the platform this week after a moderator called Benjamin posted his confession online.

Sept. 19

Washington Post, College newspaper reporters are the journalism heroes for the pandemic era, Elahe Izadi, Sept. 19, 2020. In New York, it was the Washington Square News that first reported a covid-19 outbreak in a college dorm. In Gainesville, Fla., the Alligator is the newspaper that has been painstakingly updating a map of local cases. And the Daily Gamecock alerted the public to the ways that University of South Carolina officials were withholding information about covid-19 clusters.

While the pandemic economy has devastated the local news business, there remains a cadre of small newspapers that are more energized than ever, producing essential work from the center of the nation’s newest coronavirus hot spots.

Those would be college newspapers, whose student journalists have been kept busy breaking news of campus outbreaks, pushing for transparency from administrators and publishing scathing editorials about controversial reopening plans.

Student-run newspapers have been reporting about the prevalence of covid-19 at fraternity and sorority houses, in campus residences halls and among student athletes. Professional media outlets have been crediting them for scoops, like the one at NYU. And student newspaper editorials taking school administrators to task for reopening plans — like Notre Dame’s the Observer’s front-page editorial titled “Don’t make us write obituaries" and the University of North Carolina’s Daily Tar Heel’s f-bomb headline — have made national news.

Sept.18

Washington Post, Trump administration bans WeChat, TikTok from app stores beginning on Sunday, Jeanne Whalen, Sept. 18, 2020. The White House will take action to curb WeChat’s use beginning Sunday, and will give TikTok until Nov. 12 until further bans kick in. The move is expected to sharply raise tensions with Beijing.

National Press Club, Statement On DOJ Decision Related To Al Jazeera Filing Under FARA, John Donnelly, Sept. 18, 2020. In response to the Justice Department’s Monday order for a U.S.-based affiliate of Al Jazeera to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), National Press Club President Michael Freedman and National Press Club Journalism Institute President Angela Greiling Keane released the following joint statement.

national press club logo “We disagree with the U.S, Department of Justice (DOJ) decision to require AJ+ to file under FARA. This order effectively says the U.S. government views Al Jazeera to be a propaganda arm of the Qatari government rather than the independent news organizations that journalists all over the world know it to be, particularly though its coverage of the pro-Democracy Arab Spring movement of the past decade.

“Further, the timing of this FARA announcement the day before the UAE formally signed an agreement normalizing relations with Israel is of note. The UAE has made undercutting Al Jazeera’s journalism one of its priorities since it worked with Saudi Arabia in 2017 to impose a blockade on Qatar, which provides state funding to the news organization.

“We object to this mischaracterization of AJ+ which produces news videos and other content in multiple languages for digital distribution, as a foreign agent. We can only conclude that the Trump Administration is buckling to the demands of the UAE, which wants to suppress independent news gathering in the region – reporting that can expose the systemic inequality, corruption and incompetence of many of the region’s rulers

“While the Qatari government funds Al Jazeera, it does not control the network’s editorial decisions. Other prominent examples exist of international news outlets receiving foreign government funding, yet still being viewed as credible journalism organizations that do not have to file under FARA, These include: the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and AFP.

“FARA was developed during World War II to block Nazi propaganda from influencing Americans. It requires designated foreign entitites to reveal their sources of funding and to file regular public disclosures about their activity. The classification of Al Jazeera under FARA seems wholly political. The Trump Administration has close ties to UAE and Saudi Arabia even as the United States shares long-term strategic interests with Qatar exemplified by the Air Force’s reliance on the large air base at Al Udeid.

“Americans interest is in the growth and proliferation of independent media throughout the Middle East that can serve as a check on corrupt and unresponsive governments. Calling Al Jazeera a propaganda outlet instead of the independent news organization it is sends exactly the wrong message.”

Sept. 17

robert martin montgomery independent Montgomery Independent, Obituary: Robert A. Martin, Staff report, Sept. 17, 2020. Robert A. Martin, age 79, former editor and publisher of the Montgomery Independent passed away on Sept 15, 2020 after an extended illness. He is survived by his wife, Nancy, four children: Jeffrey Archer Martin (Betsy) of Montgomery, AL.; Jennifer Martin Cargile of Denver, CO.; James Douglas Martin of Montgomery, AL.; Jeremy Willis Martin (Anthea) of Denver, CO.; and ten grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents Calvin Grady Martin and Lou Sellie Box Martin.

Martin (shown at right in a Montgomery Independent photo) began his newspaper career with The Florence Times of Florence, Alabama, now known as The Times Daily, while attending Florence State University, now the University of North Alabama (UNA). As a college student, Marin began in the mail room, worked in circulation and started covering high school football games. He became a sports reporter and eventually sports editor. He continued to advance at The Times ultimately becoming its executive editor.

In 1972 Martin, with family in tow, followed newly elected Chief Justice Howell Heflin to Montgomery where he began a 25-year career with the Administrative Office of the Courts working under Chief Justice Heflin, C.C. “Bo” Torbert, Sonny Hornsby and Perry Hooper, Sr. Martin earned his Juris Doctor from Jones School of Law in 1989.

Throughout his career in both the newspaper business and as director of the courts, Martin became friends with and met many important figures, not the least of which was President John Kennedy. He also wrote many interesting stories about famous people in Alabama and the south. One of those was Buford Pusser, the sheriff depicted in the famous movie Walking Tall. Pusser was the Sheriff of McNairy County, Tennessee, not far from Florence.

While at the AOC, Bob played vital role in passing the Judicial Article, which unified and standardized the public’s interaction with Alabama Courts. After spending 25 years working for the State of Alabama, Martin felt a call to continue his first career, the news business. Martin purchased The Montgomery Independent in March, 1997 and soon after retired from the State of Alabama to dedicate all of his time to the publication. His primary goal as editor and publisher of the Montgomery Independent was to remain dedicated to covering the community affairs, especially those events that received little or no attention from other media outlets.

Martin’s weekly editorial was syndicated in other newspapers throughout the state and was a regular guest on Alabama Public Television’s For the Record and Capitol Journal. One area of excellence for the newspaper under Martin’s leadership was state government reporting and opinion. Martin worked diligently to provide a variety of commentary related to state issues, which became a hallmark of the newspaper along with its reporting of local society events and the coverage of high school sports.

Bob served as President of the Alabama Press Association (APA) Journalism Foundation in 2008. Felicia Mason, Executive Director of the APA remembers Martin’s service to the foundation. “Bob has provided sound leadership to APA through his service on the APA Board and as president of the APA Journalism Foundation. His interest in journalism education helped countless students through the grants, internships and scholarships offered through the Foundation. He was a staunch advocate for programs supporting high school journalism and for the Newspapers In Education programs, which provided newspapers to classrooms throughout the State.”

Martin often said he cherished the time he spent with the state and is especially proud of his long, ongoing efforts to improve the justice system in Alabama, “My time with the Courts was very rewarding and exciting, but my first love was always newspapering,” Martin said using one of his favorite phrases. Martin was a member of the U.S Army Reserve Unit in Sheffield, the Fighting 336th Army APU.

Further background: Inside Alabama Politics, Martin retires, Montgomery Independent to remain in family, Staff report, Aug. 8, 2017. Owner and longtime publisher of The Montgomery Independent, Robert A. Martin has retired. Over the last several years Bob has been gradually passing the duties of running the newspaper to his oldest son, Jeff Martin. Effective August 1, Bob decided to complete the handover.

While at the AOC [Administrative Office of the Courts], Bob played a vital role in passing the Judicial Article, which unified and standardized the public’s interaction with Alabama courts. Having the same form in Huntsville courts and Mobile courts may seem like a no-brainer today, but for many years it wasn’t that organized.

“It was while he was working for Chief Justice Heflin when I first met Bob. He had worked on what became a constitutional amendment to create the unified judicial system, which as far as I am concerned has been an outstanding example of a judicial system. Any kind of judiciary is going to have its shortcomings but the system our state created is second to none in the United States, and Bob played a big part in that. Bob has been a friend of mine and a servant to the people of Alabama. Now that he has decided to retire, I think he deserves the rest,” said longtime Circuit Judge and former state Senator Jerry Fielding.

Martin said he cherishes the time he spent with the state and is especially proud of his long, ongoing efforts to improve the justice system in Alabama. “My time with the Courts was very rewarding and exciting, but my first love was always “newspapering,”’ Martin said using one of his favorite phrases.

After spending 25 years working for the State of Alabama, Bob felt a call to continue his first career, the news business. Martin purchased The Montgomery Independent in March, 1997 and soon after retired from the State of Alabama to dedicate all of his time to the publication.

His primary goal as editor and publisher of The Montgomery Independent was to remain dedicated to covering community affairs, especially those events that received little or no attention from other media outlets. Martin’s weekly editorial was syndicated in other newspapers throughout the state and he appeared regularly on Alabama Public Television’s For the Record and Capitol Journal.

One area of excellence for the newspaper under Martin’s leadership was state government reporting and opinion. Martin worked diligently to provide a variety of commentary related to state issues, which became a hallmark of the newspaper along with its reporting of local society events and the coverage of high school sports.

In 2003 he founded another newspaper, The Millbrook Independent, along with Art Parker, who was also serving as the sports editor of The Montgomery Independent. That publication enjoyed more than a dozen years of success until the company sold it in 2015 and Parker returned to the Montgomery paper. Today Parker serves as editor and handles the day-to-day operations of The Montgomery Independent.

Bob served as President of the Alabama Press Association (APA) Journalism Foundation in 2008. Felicia Mason, Executive Director of the APA remembers Martin’s service to the foundation.

“Bob has provided sound leadership to APA through his service on the APA Board and as president of the APA Journalism Foundation. His interest in journalism education helped countless students through the grants, internships and scholarships offered through the Foundation. He was a staunch advocate for programs supporting high school journalism and for the Newspapers In Education programs, which provided newspapers to classrooms throughout the state.”

In addition to his many professional acquaintances some have become close, dear friends. Retired Clerk of the Alabama Supreme Court Robert Esdale is one such person.

“I consider Bob Martin one of the real pluses in my life. He is a dear friend and a fellow Atlanta Braves fanatic. He and I had season tickets to the Atlanta Braves for more than 20 years,” Esdale said.

Bob & Jeff attending one of many Auburn games together

Longtime Montgomery lawyer Tommy Gallion said that he counts Bob not only as a true friend but one of the great journalists in Montgomery history.

“Bob was one of the last true journalists. He came from a time when facts and citing sources was important. Far from the fake news of today. For Bob it was more important to be right than to be first. In addition to that he has been a true friend of mine for many years,” Gallion said.

Montgomery businessman Milton McGregor has known Bob as a customer, advisor and political ally. He also considers him a close personal friend.

“I have never known anyone in the media with as much integrity as Bob Martin. He is an honest person and I am delighted to call him my friend,” McGregor said.

Sept. 16

susan page screenshot

Washington Post, Opinion: The cozy media-political cocktail circuit needs a cooling-off. Now is the perfect time, Margaret Sullivan, right, Sept. 16, 2020 margaret sullivan 2015 photo (print ed.). From the perspective of the Washington women involved in “Girls’ Night Out,” the social gathering was friendly, professionally helpful, and harmless.

And they largely stayed out of the public eye — until last week when one such event went embarrassingly public.

seema verma official The 2018 party at the home of USA Today’s Washington bureau chief Susan Page (shown above in a screenshot) was thrown for two Trump administration honorees, one of them Seema Verma, left, who had been appointed administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

A congressional investigation into Verma’s use of taxpayer funds to hire public-relations consultants found that about $3,000 went to Republican consultant Pam Stevens for her work organizing this party. As it happens, Stevens has had a longtime role managing the “Girls’ Night Out” guest lists — sending out invitations and gathering RSVPs. But in this case, she was also working for Verma, paid to elevate the Trump appointee’s “brand.”

SaveJournalism.org, Advocacy: Sen. Blumenthal to Google: “You’re driving [newspapers] out of business,” Morgan Caplan, Sept. 16, 2020. The Senate Judiciary Committee picked up where the House left off last month, with a bipartisan grilling of Google during a hearing in which the harm to the journalism industry featured prominently. Citing research showing Google is taking up to 70% of ad revenue from news outlets, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) said to Google, “[y]ou’re depriving these news organizations of the revenue they need to keep going when the First Amendment is already under assault.”

richard blumenthal portrait Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), left, zeroed in on how Google uses its multi-platform dominance with Search, its Chrome browser, and Android mobile operating system to harvest data on a newspaper’s readers, using the Hartford Courant [and New Haven Register] as an example.

Google is then able to use that data to go to advertisers who would buy space in the Courant and enable them to reach the Courant’s readers with ads at a lower cost. Sen. Blumenthal told Google, “you’re driving [papers] out of business…engaging in conduct that cuts their payrolls so there are fewer employees at those papers nationwide.” C-SPAN coverage here.

David Dinielli, Senior Advisor of Omidyar Network, spotlighted Google’s misuse of the journalism industry by hammering into the advertisement model that news publishers have been forced into while Google reaps the benefits, noting that “if you are an advertiser or a publisher all roads lead to Google.” Dinielli also made a crucial point that without advertising revenue streaming through newsrooms there is less content creation. Less content creation ensures a lower quality of local news reporting -- an asset that consumers need more than ever as the country faces crisis after crisis.

The following is a statement from Laura Bassett, former Senior Politics Reporter for HuffPost who was laid off in January 2019, and co-founder of the Save Journalism Project:

A bipartisan group of Senators exposed Google’s abuse of its market power to harm the journalism industry in a critical Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday. While journalists are risking their lives to report on a global pandemic, wildfires, the fight for social justice and elections, Google is exploiting its multi-platform dominance to drive newspapers out of business. The time has come to use the antitrust laws to stop Google from using their monopoly power to harm the journalism industry before it’s too late.

Journalism in America is facing an existential threat from the monopolistic control of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple. Big tech’s dominance over the digital advertising market and their unrivaled capacity to monetize its platforms are having drastic effects on journalism as a whole.

Sept. 15

C-SPAN, Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), a former Washington Post reporter and Connecticut Attorney General, challenges Google's business practices with questions and comments directed at Donald Harrison, Google president for Global Partnerships and Corporate Development, Sept. 15, 2020 (6:15 min. video).

Craig Murray Blog via Information Clearing House, Commentary: Assange Hearing Day 9, Craig Murray, right, Sept. 15, 2020. Things became not craig murray uk ambassador merely dramatic in the Assange courtroom today, but spiteful and nasty.

There were two real issues, the evidence and the procedure. On the evidence, there were stark details of the dreadful regime Assange will face in US jails if extradited. On the procedure, we saw behaviour from the prosecution QC that went well beyond normal cross examination and was a real attempt to denigrate and even humiliate the witness. I hope to prove that to you by a straightforward exposition of what happened today in court, after which I shall add further comment.

Today’s witness was Eric Lewis. A practicing US attorney for 35 years, Eric Lewis has a doctorate in law from Yale and a masters in criminology from Cambridge. He is former professor in law at Georgetown University, an elected member of both the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He is Chairman of Reprieve. He has represented high profile clients in national security and terrorism cases, including Seymour Hersh and Guantanamo Bay internees.

Lewis had submitted five statements to the court, between October 2019 and August 2020, addressing the ever-changing indictments and charges brought by the prosecution. He was initially led through the permitted brief half-hour summary of his statements by defence QC Edward Fitzgerald. (I am told I am not currently allowed to publish the defence statements or links to them. I shall try to clarify this tomorrow.)

Eric Lewis testified that no publisher had ever been successfully prosecuted for publishing national security information in the USA. Following the Wikileaks publications including the diplomatic cables and the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, Assange had not been prosecuted because the First Amendment was considered insuperable and because of the New York Times problem – there was no way just to prosecute Assange without prosecuting the New York Times for publishing the same material. The New York Times had successfully pleaded the First Amendment for its publication of the Pentagon Papers, which had been upheld in a landmark Supreme Court judgment.

Lewis here gave evidence that mirrored that already reported of Prof Feldstein, Trevor Timm and Prof Rogers, so I shall not repeat all of it. He said that credible sources had stated the Obama administration had decided not to prosecute Assange, notably Matthew Miller, a highly respected Justice Department figure who had been close to Attorney General Holder and would have been unlikely to brief the media without Holder’s knowledge and approval.

Eric Lewis then gave testimony on the change of policy towards prosecuting Assange from the Trump administration. Again this mostly mirrored the earlier witnesses. He added detail of Mike Pompeo stating the free speech argument for Wikileaks was “a perversion of what our great country stands for”, and claiming that the First Amendment did not apply to foreigners.

Attorney General Sessions had accordingly stated that it was “a priority for the Justice Department” to arrest Julian Assange. He had pressured prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia to bring a case. In December 2017 an arrest warrant had been issued, with the indictment to be filled in later. The first indictment of a single count had been launched in March 2018, its timing possibly dictated by a limitation deadline.

In May 2019 a new superseding indictment increased the counts from one to eighteen, seventeen of which related to espionage. This tougher stance followed the appointment of William Barr as Attorney General just four months previously. The plain intention of the first superseding indictment was to get round the New York Times problem by trying to differentiate Assange’s actions with Manning from those of other journalists. It showed that the Justice Department was very serious and very aggressive in acting on the statements of Trump administration officials. Barr was plainly acting at the behest of Trump. This represented a clear abuse of the criminal enforcement power of the state.

The prosecution of a publisher in this way was unprecedented. Yet the facts were the same in 2018 as they had been in 2012 and 13; there was no new evidence behind the decision to prosecute. Crucially, the affidavits of US Assistant Attorney Gordon Kromberg present no legal basis for the taking of a different decision to that of 2013. There is no explanation of why the dossier was lying around with no action for five or six years.

The Trump administration had in fact taken a different political decision through the Presidential spokesperson Sarah Sanders who had boasted that only this administration had acted against Assange and “taken this process seriously.”

Edward Fitzgerald QC then turned to the question of probable sentencing and led Lewis through his evidence on this point. Eric Lewis confirmed that if Julian Assange were convicted he could very probably spend the rest of his life in prison. The charges had not been pleaded as one count, which it had been open to the prosecution to do. The judge would have discretion to sentence the counts either concurrently or consecutively. Under current sentencing guidelines, Assange’s sentence if convicted could range from “best case” 20 years to a maximum of 175 years. It was disingenuous of Gordon Kromberg to suggest a minimal sentence, given that Chelsea Manning had been sentenced to 35 years and the prosecution had requested 60.

It had been a government choice to charge the alleged offences as espionage. The history of espionage convictions in the USA had generally resulted in whole life sentences. 20 to 30 years had been lighter sentences for espionage. The multiple charges approach of the indictment showed a government intention to obtain a very lengthy sentence. Of course the final decision would lay with the judge, but it would be decades.

Edward Fitzgerald then led on to the question of detention conditions. On the question of remand, Gordon Kromberg had agreed that Julian Assange would be placed in the Alexandria City Jail, and there was a “risk” that he would be held there under Special Administrative Measures. In fact this was a near certainty. Assange faced serious charges related to national security, and had seen millions of items of classified information which the authorities would be concerned he might pass on to other prisoners. He would be subject to Special Administrative Measures both pre- and post-conviction.

After conviction Julian Assange would be held in the supermax prison ADX Florence, Colorado. There were at least four national security prisoners currently there in the H block. Under SAMS Assange would be kept in a small cell for 22 or 23 hours a day and not allowed to meet any other prisoners. He would be allowed out once a day for brief exercise or recreation excluded from other prisoners, but shackled.

Fitzgerald then led Lewis to the 2017 decision by the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, in which the evidence provided by the Wikileaks release of US war logs and diplomatic cables provided essential evidence. This had been denounced by Trump, John Bolton and Pompeo. The ICC prosecutor’s US visa had been cancelled to hinder his investigation. An Executive Order had been issued imposing financial sanctions and blocking the banking access of any non US national who assisted the ICC investigation into crimes alleged against any US citizen. This would affect Julian Assange.

Coverage continued in much greater detail on the Craig Murray Blog. Craig John Murray is a British former diplomat turned political activist, human rights campaigner, blogger and whistleblower. Between 2002 and 2004, he was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan during which time he exposed the violations of human rights in Uzbekistan by the Karimov administration.

New York Times, TikTok’s Proposed Deal Seeks to Mollify U.S. and China, David McCabe, Ana Swanson and Erin Griffith, Updated Sept. 15, 2020. The Chinese-owned app designed a compromise to satisfy U.S. security concerns. The terms are now under review by the Trump administration.

Washington Post, A Washington lawmaker shared conspiracy theories. She threatened a reporter who wrote about it, Jaclyn Peiser, Sept. 15, 2020. Daniel Walters was surprised to see an incoming call from Washington state Rep. Jenny Graham (R) on Aug. 27. The Spokane, Wash., journalist wrote a story that day about Graham sharing false articles on Facebook, including a story claiming that thousands of missing children are kept in dungeons and raped by demons.

But Walters was unable to pick up in time. When he called the state representative back, she unleashed a barrage of hateful insults.

“You c---------!” Graham said twice. “Don’t ever call me again.”

Before Walters could get some answers as to why Graham was upset, the line disconnected.

For days following the phone call, Graham took to Facebook, posting attacks against the reporter and calling his story false. On Monday, Walters wrote a follow-up piece in the Inlander, an alt-weekly newspaper in Spokane, fact-checking his earlier story and including the full recording of his interview with Graham, as well as the audio from a threatening voice mail she left him.

Sept. 14

Wall Sreet on Parade, Analysis: Citigroup, Closely Tied to the Clintons, Had a Senior V.P. Outed as a QAnon Promoter, a Conspiracy Group that Reviles the Clintons, Pam Martens and Russ Martens, right, Sept. 14, 2020. This is the perfect litmus test of just how little mainstream media knows about the dangerous Wall Street banks. Last Thursday, the fact-checking website, Logically, outed Jason Gelinas, who was living a secret-life as a promoter of the conspiracy group, QAnon, while also holding down a Senior V.P. technology position at Citigroup, a giant Wall Street bank that played a key role in the financial and economic collapse of 2008.

But instead of headlining the story as “Citigroup V.P Outed as QAnon Promoter,” dozens of headlines described Gelinas as “NJ Man.” (Check out the “NJ Man” headlines here.) As far as we’re aware, there is no context in which the state of New Jersey would be relevant to this story, but there certainly is relevance when it comes to Citigroup.

Citigroup has remained strangely silent about the matter, declining to respond to a request from a Bloomberg News reporter as well as an email inquiry sent by Wall Street On Parade. It’s an embarrassment to Citigroup for sure. A leaked FBI memo that specifically names QAnon, indicated that such groups may pose a domestic terrorism threat. That’s not exactly someone you want in a senior role in technology security at one of the largest banks in the country.

QAnon’s conspiracy theories stem from an anonymous poster known as “Q,” whom QAnon followers believe is a person inside the Trump administration helping the President uncover and expose an evil cartel that includes child sex traffickers. In the eyes of QAnon commenters, Trump has taken on super action figure status while Hillary and Bill Clinton have been designated permanent roles in the evil cartel.

Deconstructing the posts on the various QAnon websites, it’s very hard not to draw the conclusion that Q is someone in the Trump campaign, or a zealous Trump supporter, simply trying to throw red meat to Trump’s base and keep them engaged.

We located a French language website, DisSept.com, which has a direct link to the QAnon website set up by Gelinas, QMap.pub, (now taken down but visible at the Wayback Machine) and echoes the same themes: Trump is out to save the U.S. while the Clintons are pure evil.

A website analytics firm, SimilarWeb.com, shows that DisSept.com was the main referral site to QMap, although the bulk of QMap’s 10 million visitors a month in May, June and July were coming directly to the site, not through a referral site.

There is heavy irony in Citigroup now being outed as the employer of Gelinas, whose LinkedIn resume (also now removed) indicated he had worked for the bank for the past 17 years. Citigroup has a heavy history with the Clintons. President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary was Robert Rubin. After Rubin helped to engineer the 1999 repeal of the 1933 banking legislation known as the Glass-Steagall Act, allowing federally-insured banks to merge with Wall Street trading casinos, Rubin became a member of the Citigroup Board of Directors and reaped $120 million in compensation over the next decade. Citigroup desperately needed the repeal of this legislation because it had already illegally merged Citicorp with Salomon Brothers the prior year.

Sandy Weill, the Co-CEO at Citigroup in 1999, who lobbied for the repeal of Glass-Steagall, was given a commemorative pen from the Clinton signing ceremony that repealed the legislation. Just nine years after the repeal, Wall Street banks like Citigroup blew up Wall Street, taking down the U.S. economy in the process.

According to PolitiFact, Citigroup was the bank that provided the Clintons (shown in a file photo at right) with a $1.995 million mortgage to buy their Washington, D.C. residence in 2000, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton via flickr and Karen Smith Murphy as President Bill Clinton’s second term in the White House was ending.

Citigroup also paid Bill Clinton hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees after he left the White House according to financial disclosure forms. The bank also committed at least $5.5 million to the Clinton Global Initiative — a nonprofit created by Bill Clinton in 2005, after leaving the White House. The nonprofit previously brought global leaders together annually to make action commitments.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Citigroup was the number one contributor to Hillary Clinton’s reelection run for the Senate in 2006. Goldman Sachs was number two. The banks are not allowed to donate directly to the candidate. The money comes from bank employees, their spouses, and the banks’ political action committees.

New York Times, Opinion: The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. Then Its Own Scandal Hit, Ben Smith, Sept. 14, 2020 (print ed.). Internal documents show how a source ended up in jail — and the fallout in the newsroom.

Where were you when you first heard about the Snowden leak? The huge breach of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program in June 2013 was one of the proudest moments in modern journalism, and one of the purest: A brave and disgusted whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, right, revealed the government’s extensive surveillance of American and foreign citizens. Two journalists protected their source, revealed his secrets and won the blessings of the Establishment — a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar for it.

One of the people who fell in love with that story was Pierre Omidyar, the earnest if remote billionaire founder of eBay. That October, he pledged $250 million for a new institution led by those two journalists, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Mr. Omidyar was the benefactor of journalists’ dreams. He promised total independence for a new nonprofit news site, The Intercept, under the umbrella of his First Look Media.

The Intercept was founded in the belief that “the prime value of journalism is that it imposes transparency, and thus accountability, on those who wield the greatest governmental and corporate power.” The outlet’s first mission was to set up a secure archive of Mr. Snowden’s documents, and to keep mining them for stories.

All the drama would make this another colorful story about extreme newsroom dysfunction had The Intercept not caught the attention of a naïve National Security Agency linguist with the improbable name of Reality Winner in 2017. Ms. Winner, then 25, had been listening to the site’s podcast. She printed out a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software that seemed to address some of Mr. Greenwald’s doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and mailed it to The Intercept’s Washington, D.C., post office box in early May.

reality winner mug Custom The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained markings that showed exactly where and when it had been printed, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker.

On June 3, about three weeks after Ms. Winner, shown at left in a mug shot, sent her letter, two F.B.I. agents showed up at her home in Georgia to arrest her. They announced the arrest soon after The Intercept’s article was published on June 5.

“They sold her out, and they messed it up so that she would get caught, and they didn’t protect their source,” her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, said in a telephone interview last week. “The best years of her life are being spent in a system where she doesn’t belong.”

Failing to protect an anonymous leaker is a cardinal sin in journalism, though the remarkable thing in this instance is that The Intercept didn’t seem to try to protect its source. The outlet immediately opened an investigation into its blunder, which confirmed the details that the Justice Department had gleefully announced after it arrested Ms. Winner. They included the fact that The Intercept led the authorities to Ms. Winner when it circulated the document in an effort to verify it, and then published the document, complete with the identifying markings, on the internet.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Should Bob Woodward have revealed that Trump lied sooner? Robert Harrington, Sept. 14, 2020. When a crime is committed it’s sometimes a favorite pastime of a certain kind of armchair cynic to find people other than the criminal to blame. The most repulsive of the type are the blamers of rape victims. Far less abhorrent but still representative of the breed are those who insist that Bob Woodward should have come forward sooner with the taped revelation that Donald Trump deliberately misled the American people about coronavirus. Put another way, could lives have been saved had Bob Woodward come forward sooner with the tape proving Trump was lying?

Let me start by interjecting the personal. I’m not a huge fan of Bob Woodward. I’ve always thought there was something just a little bit sleazy about him and that he didn’t always deserve the accolades he so generously receives. From his involvement in the “Jimmy’s World” scandal (in which he supported a Washington Post inner city story about an 8 year old heroin addict that turned out to be entirely fictional) to his highly questionable claim of a deathbed interview with CIA Director William Casey, to his rather clumsy, unimaginative interview style, he’s never exactly been my favorite. Of the two famous Watergate reporters I always thought Bernstein was the smart one.

What’s more, had I been in Woodward’s position, I would like to think I would have announced to the world right away that Trump was lying about coronavirus and I had the tapes to prove it. To be sure, I doubt that it would have done any good. When you stop to think about it, it still hasn’t done any good, really, and that carries my point. But announce I would have, all the same. And it would have come, I think, at no loss to my soon-to-be-released book.

With those preliminaries out of the way, it isn’t Bob Woodward’s job to warn the American people about the dangers of coronavirus, it’s the job of the president of the United States. Trump’s failure to do so is his shame, and he shares that shame with nobody. Bob Woodward is no more responsible for the inner workings of Donald Trump than Lindsey Graham is responsible for Trump’s moronic decision to do the Woodward interview in the first place. The buck stops there, and we need to stop suggesting otherwise.

Donald Trump deliberately misled the American people, knowing with crystalline clarity, in advance, that people would die. He did it to protect his precious stock market with the insane belief that it would enhance his re-election chances. He made the decision to voluntarily trade 200,000 American lives (so far) in exchange for four more years as America’s first criminal president, went home, had dinner and slept like a baby. Donald Trump is the evil at work here. He gets the blame and no one else.

If there’s any doubt left among you that Donald Trump is a psychopathic murderer, wholly without an ounce of human compassion, a murderer who would kill anyone any time to advance his shot at re-election, now is the time to abandon that doubt. Donald Trump isn’t just your garden variety corrupt Republican, he is as evil and as ruthless and as heartless and as vicious as any serial murderer you have ever read about. Trump is a dead-eyed killer.

There are a million reasons why Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States, this has been another one. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.x

Washington Post, Opinion: The egregious gaslighting around Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Philip Bump, Sept. 14, 2020. Likely recognizing the political danger of having taken this deceptive approach, Trump and his allies have fallen back on whataboutism as a defense. On Sunday, Trump highlighted a segment from Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld, in which Gutfeld presented various Democratic leaders and media personalities similarly downplaying the threat.

Unable to leave well enough alone, Trump took Gutfeld’s extremely generous argument further.

“I was right, these people were all wrong, and now they criticize me,” Trump wrote. “Such hypocrisy!”

This is unmitigated gaslighting. The people in the video were no more wrong than Trump in the excerpted quotes — and were subsequently far more proactive in realistically addressing the threat.

Trump was informed at the end of January that the pandemic would be “the biggest national security threat” he faced as president. Trump and Woodward spoke on Feb. 7, at which point Trump explained the risks. Yet he and his team failed to act with any sense of urgency for weeks.

Sept. 13

Washington Post, Consumer Tech Investigation: The 5G lie: The network of the future is still slow, Geoffrey A. Fowler, Sept. 13, 2020 (print ed.). We speed tested 5G phones against 4G ones. America’s new nationwide 5G networks weren’t much faster — and in some places they were slower.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock — which in 2020 actually sounds soothing — you’ve probably heard there’s a new cellphone technology called 5G. Any iPhone or Galaxy owner knows the law of Gs: Every additional G makes downloads faster. 3G sent pictures. 4G streamed video.

sprint tmobile logos Apple is planning to hold a launch event on Sept. 15, where it could unveil its first 5G-enabled iPhones. Samsung’s entire flagship lineup is now 5G-equipped. So these 2020 models are going to really fly, right?

Well, hold on just a minute.

Washington Post, Bezos’s likely Amazon successor is an executive made in Bezos’s image, Jay Greene, Sept. 13, 2020 (print ed.). Andy Jassy, the leader of Amazon’s cloud computing business, is now the clear heir apparent to Jeff Bezos after the announced retirement of the retail operations chief. There are few chief executives more identified with the companies they run than Jeff Bezos.

jeffrey bezos washington post But the 56-year-old Amazon founder, and the world’s wealthiest person, left, will one day need to pass on the reins of the e-commerce giant. And an heir apparent has emerged in recent weeks: Andy Jassy, the 52-year-old head of Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the company’s cloud computing business, who was one of two No. 2s in Amazon’s corner offices.

The likelihood of Jassy’s being Bezos’s successor increased when the other deputy, Jeff Wilke, who ran Amazon’s retail business, last month unexpectedly announced plans to retire early next year.

Sept. 10

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump caught bragging that he helped cover up murder of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Bill Palmer, Sept. 10, 2020. This morning Palmer Report predicted with certainty that there would be more bombshells about Donald Trump coming from Bob Woodward this week. After all, Woodward’s book is still five days away from launch, meaning he was going to give more advance details to the press. Sure enough, that’s happening already this afternoon.

It turns out Donald Trump bragged to Woodward that he helped cover up the murder of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi, by pressuring Congress into dropping the investigation into Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right.

Mohammed Bin Salman Al-Saud Trump went so far as to say “I saved his ass” in reference to Bin Salman, which is likely true, considering what dire straits Bin Salman was in at the time.

This is a confession to a murder coverup, since Trump’s actions helped a murderer avoid being brought to justice. This comes on top of Trump’s coronavirus admissions, which are tantamount to a taped confession to negligent homicide.

The Independent, Assange extradition hearing paused over fears lawyer exposed to coronavirus, Lizzie Dearden, Sept. 10, 2020. Wikileaks founder is battling being sent to US on 18 charges over leaked cables. Julian Assange’s extradition hearing has been paused over fears that a lawyer may have been exposed to coronavirus. The Wikileaks founder is battling against attempts to send him to the US for trial for allegedly conspiring to hack government computers and violating an espionage law over the release of confidential cables in 2010 and 2011.

Judge Vanessa Baraitser adjourned the case until Monday after being told one of the lawyers involved had been exposed to the virus.

Mr Assange has been held on remand at HMP Belmarsh for a year after serving a 50-week jail sentence for breaching bail conditions by fleeing to London’s Ecuadorian embassy in 2012. His current extradition hearing, which was previously delayed by the coronavirus outbreak, is expected to last for around a month.

Wednesday’s hearing was told that the Australian’s political opinions put him in the ”crosshairs“ of the Donald Trump administration. Professor Paul Rogers told the Old Bailey that Wikileaks’ revelations were ”significant“ in showing how the US coalition's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were going wrong despite public claims of their success.

The emeritus professor of peace studies at Bradford University said leaked documents published by Wikileaks exposed details of an extra 15,000 civilians killed in Iraq. Asked by Mr Fitzgerald QC if he believed the charges against Mr Assange are motivated by ”criminal justice concerns“ or political considerations, Prof Rogers said: ”I have to say it appears to be the latter. This does appear to be a political trial.“

Washington Post, Susan Page of USA Today criticized for hosting off-the-record event honoring Trump appointees, Jeremy Barr, Sept. 10, 2020. USA Today is defending longtime Washington bureau chief Susan Page, after a congressional investigation revealed that she hosted a “Girls’ Night Out” event at her home in honor of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema seema verma official Verma, right, in November 2018.

Page, a longtime member of the D.C. press corps, was recently picked by the Commission on Presidential Debates to host the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 7.

Her leading role in hosting the event at her home raised eyebrows on social media from observers who suggested that it conflicted with her ability to cover the administration as an impartial journalist. Reporters are supposed to maintain an arm’s-length relationship with their sources, and hosting parties for them arguably compromises this role.

The investigation targeted Verma’s “use of taxpayer funds to retain communications consultants with strong Republican political ties.” A report, including billing documents, was released on Thursday. The investigation was conducted by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Senate Committee on Finance (minority party members) and Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (minority party members).

A Politico article on Thursday called attention to Verma’s spending on public-relations consultants but did not identify Page as a host of an event.

According to the investigation, taxpayers paid $2,933 for organizing the “Girls’ Night Out” event.

But USA Today spokesperson Chrissy Terrell said on Thursday afternoon that Page was “unaware” that the CMS was billed for the event, which the newspaper said was held to honor “two women who had recently gotten significant appointments, Heather Wilson to head the Air Force and Seema Verma to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — both milestone moments to be recognized.”

The newspaper defended Page’s decision to host the gathering, which the publication said are “routinely hosted” by female journalists to “honor significant accomplishments of both Democratic and Republican women,” with the journalists footing the bill. (Page paid $4,025 for catering, plus several hundred dollars for beverages and more money tips for the wait staff.)

“USA Today is fully aware of these long-standing events that recognize the accomplishments of women and fall well within the ethical standards that our journalists are expected to uphold,” the publication said, adding that Page “was not paid or reimbursed by the federal government” for the event.

Republican communications consultant Pam Stevens, who was reportedly “working to raise the brand of Verma,” is the longtime organizer of the social gatherings and sends out the invitations.

Page and the other attendees at the mixer were not aware that Verma was a client of Stevens, according to people with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

The publication said that “PBS NewsHour” anchor Judy Woodruff, “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell, CBS News correspondent Rita Braver and NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell have hosted similar events in the past, which are considered to be off-the-record for reporting purposes and are held at either host’s homes or a restaurant. (The January 2017 gathering hosted at Woodruff’s home was "to welcome Kellyanne Conway and Katie Walsh and the women of the Trump White House,” according to an invitation)

The congressional investigation into Verma concluded that her consultants “charged CMS nearly $6 million for work that included boosting her public profile and personal brand, serving as her preferred communications advisers, arranging private meetings for her with media personalities and other high-profile individuals, and routinely traveling with her to events across the country.”

Sept. 9

Washington Post, Opinion: Should Bob Woodward have reported Trump’s virus revelations sooner? Here’s how he defends his decision, Margaret Sullivan, right, Sept. 9, 2020. Critics say the scoop was too important to hold for his new book.

Two waves of outrage greeted the news on Wednesday of Bob Woodward’s latest White House chronicle, a book titled “Rage.”

The first was Trump’s disclosure to Woodward that he knew as early as February — even as he was dismissing the novel coronavirus publicly — that the looming pandemic was far deadlier than the flu. The second was that Woodward, long associated with The Washington Post, didn’t reveal this to the public sooner.

bob woodward rage I took the questions and complaints to Woodward, who initially was reluctant to speak on the record until after a “60 Minutes” segment airs on Sunday because he had promised the publisher and CBS not to give any interviews until then. But because my questions were about process, rather than the content of the book, he agreed to address the ethical issues.
The fact that this second outrage mostly circulated among journalists talking to one another made it no less furious: If the famous Watergate reporter knew that Trump was lying to the public about a matter of life and death, why didn’t he reveal it immediately?

Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans

Woodward is hardly the first journalist to save juicy information for a book. But “is this traditional practice still ethical?” tweeted David Boardman, dean of the Temple University journalism school and a former longtime editor of the Seattle Times.

Sept. 7

Washington Post, Opinion: Here’s what the media must do to fend off an election-night disaster, Margaret Sullivan, right, Sept. 7, 2020 (print ed.). There are margaret sullivan 2015 photo lessons to take from the Iowa caucuses, the midterms and the 2000 election. Is the media paying attention?

This time, with the stakes of the election so high, news organizations need to get it right. They need to do two things, primarily, and do them extraordinarily well.

First, in every way possible, they must prepare the public for uncertainty, and start doing this now. Granted, the audience doesn’t really show up in force until election night itself, but news reports, pundit panels and special programming can help plow the ground for public understanding of the unpredictability — or even chaos — to come.

Second, on election night and in the days (weeks? months?) to follow, news organizations will need to do the near-impossible: reject their ingrained instincts to find a clear narrative — including the answer to the question “who won?” — and stay with the uncertainty, if that’s indeed what’s happening.

New York Times, Opinion: Journalists Aren’t the Enemy of the People. But We’re Not Your Friends, Either, Ben Smith, Sept. 7, 2020 (print ed.). Our columnist writes that President Trump will try to put the media on the ballot, and reporters face the temptation to posture for those eager to oust him.

WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange, center, an Australian, obtained political asylum for years at Ecuador's Embassy in London (Photo Collage by The Indicter Magazine).

Washington Post, U.S. extradition trial for founder of WikiLeaks starts in London, William Booth, Sept. 7, 2020 (print ed.). Federal prosecutors want to try Julian Assange, an Australian anti-secrecy activist, for allegedly violating the Espionage Act.

The long-delayed evidentiary hearing in the extradition case of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to the courtroom here Monday.

U.S. prosecutors say the Australian publisher and activist violated the Espionage Act by conspiring to obtain and disclose hundreds of thousands of pages of secret government documents, including classified diplomatic cables and sensitive reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

julian assange facts wikileaks Custom Prosecutors have also charged Assange with conspiracy to commit “computer intrusions” by helping army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning try to hack a password to get access to even more files. In a superceding indictment unsealed in June, prosecutors say he also solicited hackers to break into Icelandic government computers to steal information. They want Assange transported to Northern Virginia to face federal charges.Washington Post,

Assange is fighting the extradition. His lawyers argue that the crimes of which he’s accused are “purely political offenses” and say British treaty law should protect him from forced transfer.

The WikiLeaks publisher appeared in court Monday at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court in London, where Assange’s lawyers will call witnesses to testify in person or via remote video link. Assange wore a suit and tie and watched the proceedings from behind a glass wall. He answered “no” when asked by the judge if he would consent to being extradited to the United States.

The judge and lawyers were in the courtroom, but as a precaution against the coronavirus, most observers and journalists will be limited to watching via tightly controlled virtual links. The hearings will not be broadcast to the public. They are expected to last three weeks.

Sept. 4

New York Times, Trump Angrily Denies Report He Called Fallen Soldiers ‘Losers,’ Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 4, 2020. The report, in The Atlantic (Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers:’ Trump), could be problematic for President Trump because he is counting on strong support among the military in the election.

President Trump confronted a crisis on Friday that could undercut badly needed support in the military community for his re-election campaign as he sought to dispute a report that he privately referred to American soldiers killed in combat as “losers” and “suckers.”

Mr. Trump, who has long portrayed himself as a champion of the armed forces and boasted of rebuilding a military depleted after years of overseas wars, came under intense fire from Democrats and other opponents who said the magazine report demonstrated his actual contempt for those who serve their country in uniform.

The campaign of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, blasted out a series of statements and organized a conference call for reporters with Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who represented Virginia at the Democratic National Convention last month, and Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat severely wounded while serving as a helicopter pilot in Iraq, who slammed Mr. Trump during the convention as the “coward in chief.”

Palmer Report, Opinion: Fox News confirms Donald Trump made deranged remarks about the troops, Bill Palmer, Sept. 4, 2020. After the Atlantic reported Donald Trump’s remarks about U.S. troops being “losers” and “suckers,” the Associated Press and Washington Post each independently confirmed the remarks. But Trump still decided that it’s fake news, because he doesn’t like any of those news outlets. Now his problem has gotten bigger.

Jennifer Griffin from Fox News is confirming on Twitter that the Atlantic story is true. Fox is confirming that Trump said that “Anyone who went [to Vietnam] was a sucker” and that having wounded veterans in military parades is “not a good look.”

In the normal world, no one cares what a rag like Fox News says. But in the world of disinformed people who were steered toward Trump by Fox News to begin with, it’s a big deal that even Fox is now confirming Trump really did say these horrible things about the troops.

Washington Post, Trump said U.S. soldiers injured and killed in war were ‘losers,’ magazine reports, Colby Itkowitz, Alex Horton and Carol D. Leonnig, Sept. 4, 2020. President Trump called U.S. soldiers injured or killed in war “losers,” questioned the country’s reverence for them and expressed confusion over why anyone would choose to serve, according to a new report that the White House has called “patently false.”

djt smiling file The report, published late Thursday by the Atlantic, cites four unnamed people with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s comments. It says Trump disparaged the military service of the late former president George H.W. Bush, objected to wounded veterans being involved in a military parade, and canceled a visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he didn’t care about honoring those killed in war.

The White House released a sharply worded statement defending Trump — who has insulted POWs, traded barbs with grieving families of the dead and said before he was president that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was his own “personal Vietnam” — against accusations that he doesn’t respect the military.

New York Times, Trump Says He Will Reverse Plan to Close Military Newspaper, Helene Cooper, Sept. 4, 2020. The reversal on the Stars and Stripes newspaper came as President Trump was in full defensive mode over reports he’d disparaged military personnel.

President Trump said late Friday that he planned to reverse Pentagon budget cuts that would have permanently closed Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that has both informed and spoken for American troops over the decades.

stars strips logo Custom Under Defense Department spending plans, the paper would cease print and online publication by the last day of September, a move seen as expanding the Trump administration’s war on news media to include those paid by the government to cover the military.

Yet, while the demise of Stars and Stripes had been in budget cuts first proposed by Mr. Trump’s Pentagon in February, the president announced the paper would continue to publish.

“The United States of America will NOT be cutting funding to @starsandstripes magazine under my watch,” Mr. Trump posted on Twitter several hours after major news organizations began publishing stories about the pending closure of the newspaper. “It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!”

Begun during the Civil War, Stripes has more recently frustrated presidents and defense secretaries during the “forever wars” that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by elevating the voices of those in uniform who contradicted commanders and political leaders.

But while the newspaper found enough backers in Congress and among retired military officers to keep it alive during previous administrations, that support has been unable to reverse Defense Department plans to zero-out the Stars and Stripes budget during a Trump presidency marked by continuing battles with journalists.

A bipartisan group of 11 Democratic and four Republican senators called on the Defense Department to maintain funding for the publication, which has about 1.3 million readers online and in print. In a letter on Wednesday to Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, the senators said the Pentagon, with its budget of more than $700 billion, could surely find the $15.5 million in federal funding mark esper needed to keep Stars and Stripes going.

The challenge facing Stars and Stripes — maintaining editorial independence from the government while depending on government funding — is playing out in other parts of the Trump administration.

Similar efforts to weaken federally funded news outlets are underway at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees international broadcast outlets like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcast Networks.

In February, Mr. Esper, left, who was appointed by Mr. Trump last year, proposed ending the Defense Department’s funding to Stars and Stripes.

office.

Washington Post, Pentagon reaffirms Microsoft’s JEDI cloud contract, dealing a blow to Amazon, Aaron Gregg, Sept. 4, 2020. The Defense Department decided almost a year ago to award its $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract to Microsoft, but it opted for a do-over when a bid protest from Amazon uncovered a mistake in how prices were evaluated.

The Pentagon reaffirmed its controversial decision to give its largest-ever cloud computing contract to Microsoft instead of to market-leader Amazon, defying a court decision that blocked the earlier award amid criticism that President Trump’s animosity toward Amazon influenced the decision.

With Amazon likely to continue its legal challenge, the decision means there is still no end to the bitter legal fight that has held up the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, commonly known as JEDI, for close to two years. An Amazon representative did not immediately respond to questions on whether it would appeal the decision.

“The Department has completed its comprehensive re-evaluation of the JEDI Cloud proposals and determined that Microsoft’s proposal continues to represent the best value to the Government,” said Russ Goemaere, a Defense Department spokesman. He added that contract performance cannot begin until after Feb. 13 because of an existing court order, but the department hopes to begin work on JEDI soon.

“DoD is eager to begin delivering this capability to our men and women in uniform,” Goemaere added.

Last summer, President Trump asked for an investigation into the contract over concerns that the contract requirements had been tailored for Amazon. Newly installed Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper then launched his own “review” of the department’s approach. The Pentagon then awarded JEDI to Microsoft, prompting a lawsuit from Amazon.

In its bid protest Amazon alleged that Trump’s interest in the JEDI contract was motivated by his antipathy toward Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. Bezos, who bought The Post in 2013, does not weigh in on The Post’s coverage decisions, the news organization’s leaders have said.

That lawsuit halted the department’s progress on JEDI just as it was getting started. A judge concluded that officials had erred when they evaluated the two competing applications. The Pentagon asked to redo the award. By again giving the contract to Microsoft, the Defense Department is arguing that the mistakes it made were not significant enough to affect the outcome.

Amazon had been widely expected to get the contract to consolidate much of the Pentagon’s cloud computing efforts under one vendor when JEDI was initially put out for bids in early 2018. But what appeared to be a likely path was derailed in July of last year when Trump, urged on by members of Congress and lobbied aggressively by Amazon’s competitors, directed Esper to reexamine the bidding process. Defense Department spokespeople and officials have insisted Trump did not “order” or “pressure” Esper to pick any specific bidder, and Esper told the Defense Department inspector general that his review was prompted primarily by pressure from Congress. In October, the Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft.

U.S. Media News

New York Times, Editorial Board: Congress Must Be Clear: No Doctored Videos, Editorial Board, Sept. 4, 2020. A congressman posted a manipulated video. That ought to be taken seriously. Last weekend, Representative Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican, shared a video clip featuring Ady Barkan, a progressive activist, asking Joe Biden, “Do we agree that we can redirect some of the funding for police?”

To which Mr. Biden responded, “Yes, absolutely.”

Except that Mr. Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and communicates with the aid of a computerized voice, had not included the words “for police” in his question. Those were spliced in by Mr. Scalise’s team, making it seem as though Mr. Biden was expressing direct support for defunding the police — something he explicitly opposes, no matter how loudly Republicans claim otherwise. Mr. Biden’s criminal justice plan, in fact, includes $300 million in additional funding for police departments.

Outraged by the violation, Mr. Barkan called out the congressman. “@SteveScalise, These are not my words,” he tweeted on Sunday afternoon. “I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts. You and your team have doctored my words for your own political gain. Please remove this video immediately. You owe the entire disability community an apology.”

Washington Post, The QAnon problem facing local journalism this election season, Elahe Izadi, Sept. 4, 2020. As supporters of the bogus conspiracy theory run for office, reporters grapple with how to cover them. The 16 candidates who sought the Republican nomination in the open race for Tennessee’s 1st Congressional District this year included a former state senator, two former mayors, a pharmacist — and two supporters of the bogus conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

The quandary, then, for the Knoxville News Sentinel: How on earth to responsibly explain QAnon — a murky cultlike belief system that, according to law enforcement, has inspired violence among some of its proponents — to the newspaper’s readers?

Ultimately, said executive editor Joel Christopher, the newsroom made a calculation that both candidates were extreme long shots. So they punted on the question entirely — and devoted no ink at all to the QAnon connections. In the end, the two candidates only received 3.3 percent of the total vote.

“But if anyone thinks this is going to vanish, they’re delusional,” Christopher said. “We’re going to have to tackle it at some point.”

Sept. 3

Washington Post, Network of news sites must register as political committee due to Democratic links, GOP-affiliated group alleges, Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Sept. 3, 2020. The complaint comes as researchers raise concerns about political outfits masquerading as news sites.

A new complaint filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission alleges that a national network of local media websites must register as a political committee because of its ties to a Democratic-aligned group.

Courier Newsroom, which includes seven news sites concentrated in presidential swing states, is backed by ACRONYM, a politically active nonprofit run by Democratic strategist Tara McGowan.

Federal election laws and regulations do not apply to media outlets unless they are “owned or controlled by” a political party, committee or candidate and are acting as a media outlet rather than a political one.

But the complaint, filed by Americans for Public Trust, a watchdog group affiliated with former Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt, a Republican, alleges that Courier Newsroom is not eligible for that exemption and that the media group failed to register as a political group and report its donors and expenses as is required of political groups under federal law.

Washington Post, Trump and the right loved Clay Travis. The fight over college football sealed their bond, Ben Strauss, Sept. 3, 2020. This summer, as the pandemic, protests over racial injustice and the approaching election collided with the return of sports, Clay Travis’s nascent mini-media empire has morphed into the go-to platform for Republicans hoping to win over sports fans.

For fans of college football, hope came Wednesday in the form of a presidential tweet.

“Had a very productive conversation with Kevin Warren, Commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, about immediately starting up Big Ten football," President Trump tweeted. "On the one yard line!”

Though the fate of Big Ten football remains unclear, the tweet offered a momentary boost to fans, whose fall suddenly looked less desolate, and to Trump, for whom empty college football stadiums could signal to some swing-state voters his failure to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

But it was perhaps an even bigger moment for Clay Travis, who reportedly brokered the phone call, completing his only-in-2020 transformation from abrasive sports blogger to influential conservative sports radio host to apparent Trump campaign surrogate.

Sept. 2

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Commentary: British fascism catching up with America's, Wayne Madsen, Sept. 2, 2020. Britain's far-right government of wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped Small Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson has taken a step toward the type of fascist governance that has taken hold under Donald Trump in America.

In June, Trump installed extreme right-winger Michael Pack as the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Pack has responsibility for U.S. government broadcasting, including the Voice of America (VOA). Pack's marching orders were to transform the VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and other broadcast divisions into a pro-Trump and anti-Democratic Party version of Fox News.

Pack's new counterpart at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Director-General Tim Davie, is ramping up a far-right purge of the network's news and entertainment divisions.

August

Aug. 31

Palmer Report, Opinion: Steve Scalise forced to cave after getting caught posting doctored video, Bill Palmer, Aug. 31, 2020. In the latest reminder that there are no limits to how low Donald Trump’s allies will sink to try to salvage his failing 2020 bid, Republican Congressman Steve Scalise tweeted a doctored video on Sunday that set off a furor. It showed footage of health care advocate Ady Barkan, an ALS patient who speaks with a computerized voice. Scalise’s video added words to Barkan’s computerized voice that Barkan never said.

Ady Barkan tweeted this in response to Scalise’s deranged fake video: “These are not my words. I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts. You and your team have doctored my words for your own political gain. Please remove this video immediately. You owe the entire disability community an apology.”

Leaders from Joe Biden to Nancy Pelosi quickly condemned Steve Scalise and demanded that he delete the video. Twitter slapped a “manipulated media” warning on Scalise’s video, but didn’t delete it outright. Finally, late on Sunday night, Scalise deleted the tweet and announced that he would remove the doctored clip of Barkan from the video going forward. Score one for the good guys. Scalise is a scumbag.

Associated Press via Chron.com, VOA journalists protest new US global media chief's moves, Matthew Lee, Aug. 31, 2020. A group of journalists at Voice of America is protesting moves made by the U.S.-funded outlet’s new chief that they say are endangering their colleagues and the international broadcaster’s credibility as a news source.

In a letter to VOA management sent on Monday, 14 senior VOA journalists expressed deep concern and profound disappointment with steps U.S. Agency for Global Media head Michael Pack has taken that they say also threaten to harm American national security.

The signatories said they were “compelled to express our profound disappointment with the actions and comments of the chief executive officer of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which endanger the personal security of VOA reporters at home and abroad, as well as threatening to harm U.S. national security objectives.”

Aug. 30

Washington Post, Review: Charting Fox News’s slide from serious news outlet to ‘state media,’ Jane Eisner, Aug. 30, 2020 (print ed.). CNN’s Brian Stelter contends that Fox aids Trump in manipulating the truth and the public.

Brian Stelter’s new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, covers much the same ground and offers much the same argument, but in a catty, chatty tone that makes for an easy read, though a less substantive one. Drawing on three years of interviews with more than 140 staffers at Fox and 180 former staffers and other knowledgeable sources, Stelter describes how the network evolved from a serious news operation with a decidedly conservative perspective to what he asserts is essentially “state-supported TV.”

Stelter, chief media correspondent for CNN Worldwide, does not assume Mayer’s detached, neutral tone. As he writes in his opening: “What you’ll get in these pages is not the Stelter in a navy blue blazer that you see on CNN. I’m writing this book as a citizen; as an advocate for factual journalism; and a new dad who thinks about what kind of world my children are going to inherit.”

Jane Eisner, a regular contributor to Book World, is the director of academic affairs at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Washington Post, Outpouring of grief after Chadwick Boseman’s death: ‘This is a crushing blow,’ Emily Yahr, Aug. 30, 2020 (print ed.). Remembering 'Black Panther' actor Chadwick Boseman. The shock of the tragic news amplified the devastated reaction worldwide, as thousands fans, as well as Hollywood stars, politicians and athletes, mourned the beloved actor on social media.

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump treats naturalization like a game show prize, Suketu Mehta, Aug. 30, 2020 (print ed.). It was the most unnatural of naturalization ceremonies: On Tuesday, the Republican National Convention showcased footage of the most anti-immigrant president in U.S. history personally bestowing citizenship, as might an emperor, upon a group of five new Americans selected for their public relations value to his reelection campaign.

Chad Wolf, an official instrumental in creating the horrific family separation policy (and whose appointment as acting homeland security secretary a congressional watchdog deemed invalid), administered the oath.

The White House initially suggested that the citizenship and immigration agency find someone from Mexico; perhaps no one was immediately available from central casting. The only other thing missing was for Stephen Miller to cut the welcome cake for the assembled Muslims, Africans, Middle Easterners, Latinos and Indians. It was like watching a photo op staged by Stalin commending a bunch of Jewish doctors for their medical expertise, or the Taliban’s Mohammad Omar praising a group of Buddhists for their sculpting prowess, or Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailing a family of Muslims for their excellent biryani.

At least two of our newest citizens seem to have been entirely unaware that this most sacred of ceremonies would be broadcast at the Republican convention, to make the president seem kinder and gentler for suburbanites queasy about his policy of yanking screaming babies from their mothers at the border. So the five — two of them Muslims, a group that their host, during his first presidential campaign, proposed banning from entering the United States — looked on, with an unsmiling bust of Abraham Lincoln as backdrop, and cheered. What choice did they have? It was a humiliating spectacle and physically risky, to boot — none of them had a mask on, and neither did any of the eminences present. The masks wouldn’t look good on TV; they would be off-message for a convention that is a celebration of, above all, the inalienable right of Americans to commit mass suicide.

The new citizens are here among us because of provisions that Trump has spent his entire term trying to eliminate.

Suketu Mehta is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, and the author, most recently, of "This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto."

Aug. 28

Washington Post, Robocall targets battleground states with falsehoods about mail-in voting, Meryl Kornfield, Aug. 28, 2020 (print ed.). The recorded message features a woman who says she works for “Project 1599,” founded by the right-wing operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who deny involvement in the call.

The call falsely warned Michigan and Pennsylvania residents that voting by mail would subject them to police scrutiny and debt collection, Michigan officials say.

Officials launched an investigation Thursday into what they said was an erroneous, racist robocall aimed at discouraging voters in battleground states from casting their ballots by mail.

The recorded message features a woman who says she works for “Project 1599,” founded by the right-wing operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, and falsely warns that personal information of those who vote by mail will be shared with police tracking down warrants and credit card companies collecting outstanding debt, according to recordings of the call reviewed by The Washington Post. Wohl and Burkman denied their involvement in the call, blaming “leftist pranksters.”

“Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man,” the recording says. “Stay safe and beware of vote-by-mail.”

It’s not known how many people were targeted in Democratic-leaning Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Announcing the inquiry into the call’s origin, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel rebutted the misinformation, warning residents that the recorded message may precede more flagrant falsehoods directed at voters as the November election nears.

How to prevent your mail ballot from being rejected

Washington Post, Perspective: Farewell to Kellyanne Conway, the ultimate Woman for Trump, Monica Hesse, Aug. 28, 2020 (print ed.). Kellyanne Conway had a two-word weapon that she deployed with shrewd skill during her almost-four-year stint at the White House, and it left her targets defenseless.

kellyanne conway talking For Kellyanne Conway, right, “Excuse me” really meant “Excuse you.” It was a shaming. It implied that the other party was in the wrong for not permitting her bulldozing, browbeating and bloviating. It relied, successfully, on the assumption that nobody wanted to be seen interrupting a tiny blond woman on live television. And so it excused her.

She is brilliant. She is terrifying.

She is also gone, theoretically. Earlier this week, Conway announced she would be resigning from her role as senior adviser to the president. Her Wednesday speech at the Republican National Convention was a farewell of sorts, the last time we can expect to see her behaving as an official mouthpiece for Trump before she retreats to her new “less drama, more mama” lifestyle.

She used her very presence to bat away charges of sexism against Trump. Again and again she reminded us — as she did again Wednesday — Trump had named her the first female campaign manager of a winning presidential ticket. How could he possibly be sexist?

Ever since the dawn of the #MeToo movement, affronted male readers have occasionally written me to say they are tired of reading about toxic masculinity all the time and wondering whether there was a female corollary: toxic femininity. If there is, I can’t help but think it looks like Kellyanne Conway: someone who takes the stereotypical gentle niceties we once sent girls to charm school to learn — and uses them to sow information chaos.

Excuse me, she would say, needling a news anchor to permit her to barge into the conversation and take it in a more alternative-factsy direction.

Excuse me, she would say to fellow guests who tried, unsuccessfully, to join in with their own opinions. It was a filibuster of false manners, a prim reminder that she would not be yielding the floor.

Aug. 26

nicholas sandmann rnc screenshot

OpEdNews, Opinion: Nick Sandmann: GOP's Poster Child for Fake Victimhood, Thomas Knapp, Aug. 26, 2020. A common complaint among Republicans is that their opponents are mainly in the business of manufacturing victims and turning those victims into Democratic voters.

But grievance-based politics is nothing new, nor does America's political "left" enjoy a monopoly on it. For proof of that latter claim, one need look no further than the case of Nick Sandmann.

"I'm the teenager who was defamed by the media," Sandmann told the Republican National Convention on August 26. But, he said, "I would not be canceled."

Leaving aside the question of precisely how turning him into a celebrity (with stories that, while initially mildly inaccurate, were almost instantly corrected as more information came in) constitutes an instance of the "cancel culture" he decries, let's be clear about what he, and his handlers, are up to:

Nick Sandmann publicly plays the victim for money. That's his job, and it will probably remain his job until he's stretched his proverbial 15 minutes as far as they can be stretched.

After participating in an anti-abortion protest in Washington, DC, Sandmann went through a tense moment with some other protesters, who were agitated about other issues, and his motives were (mistakenly, but not libelously in any sane universe) misinterpreted by journalists based on partial video.

Lawyers Todd McMurtry and Lin Wood offered Sandmann a lucrative career opportunity, representing him in frivolous/malicious defamation lawsuits that media companies settled rather than fight.

The settlement amounts weren't publicly disclosed, but while they likely came to pennies on the demanded dollar, they also probably brought Sandmann more wealth than a life of real work would have. It's hard to blame a teenager for jumping on a get-rich-quick scheme, as presented by two experienced ambulance chasers. Especially one that's actually worked out for him.

Now the Republicans are attempting to parlay Sandmann's faux victimhood into votes by creating a new victim category: "Whiny, white, Christian abortion opponent."

Not that such a bloc would vote Democrat absent the attention. But Republicans are afraid the people resembling that description might not bother to vote at all. And they need every vote they can get.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Congressman’s old social media posts about sex with 15-year-old girls, rape surface in South Florida re-election fight, Skyler Swisher, Aug. 26, 2020 (print ed.). South Florida Congressman Brian Mast joked about rape and referenced sex with 15-year-old girls in old Facebook comments to a friend who is now his campaign manager.

The messages were posted years ago, but they’ve surfaced in Mast’s tough re-election fight against Democratic challenger Pam Keith.

brian mast headshot Mast, left, a 40-year-old Republican, represents one of South Florida’s most competitive swing districts. He apologized for the remarks on Tuesday.

Two years later, LeDonni asked in a May 20, 2011, post: “Anyone have any good pick up lines for this weekend considering according to the crazy christian radio guy the world may end on sunday?”

“How about don’t turn this rape into a murder,” Mast responded.

In a statement Tuesday, Mast apologized for the posts.

“A decade ago when I was in the Army, and following my injury, I made disgusting and inappropriate jokes that I am embarrassed to have associated with my name today,” he said. “I am sorry about that part of who I was, and I strive every day to be a better example for my kids.”

Mast is a decorated war veteran. He lost his legs and a finger when a bomb exploded under him in September 2010 in Afghanistan.

After the explosion, Mast was hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center into 2012, where he underwent numerous surgeries, learned to walk again and was often heavily medicated.

LeDonni has been a senior campaign advisor and political consultant for Mast since he first was elected in 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Pam Keith The posts were public on LeDonni’s Facebook page, but they were removed from view after Mast’s campaign was contacted by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Keith, right, a former Navy JAG officer, condemned the posts in a statement.

“This is disgusting, unacceptable and dishonorable behavior for any man, let alone a sitting member of Congress,” Keith said. “Rape, violence and intimidation of women and children are not Brian Mast’s punchline — his words are an insult and betrayal to the women he claims to represent.”

Keith hasn’t held back on social media. In March 2020, Keith responded to a comment that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden might have raped someone.

“That means he still has LOTS of rape to do to catch up to Trump. Also .... I highly doubt that’s true,” she wrote.iological study in what happens when the midwest migrates to an area that was once part of Georgia.

Washington Post, As a sale of the National Enquirer collapses, some wonder if the tabloid is too hot to handle, Sarah Ellison and Jonathan O'Connell, Aug. 26, 2020 (print ed.). In the spring of 2019, the National Enquirer appeared once again to be riding out another storm in its long, tumultuous history.

The gossip tabloid was embroiled in political scandal, but that was hardly anything new — if anything, that was part of its business model. Circulation was down, but that was the case for the entire publishing industry. Its parent company had put it up for sale, but a surprisingly appropriate new buyer had emerged for this impulse-buy fixture of the supermarket checkout lines — Hudson News, perhaps the last thriving operator of newsstands in the country.

david pecker cropped But a year and a half later, that long-stalled sale has fallen through, and questions surround the Enquirer’s future as never before. Its longtime publisher and champion, David Pecker, right, has been sidelined within the company, and the chief of the hedge fund that now owns it has to contend with pension fund investors who are uncomfortable with the tabloid’s role in alleged scheming to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

And last week, when parent company American Media Inc. announced its merger with an unlikely partner — a distribution company specializing in products like face masks and hand sanitizer, which like AMI is currently owned by Chatham Asset Management — the news release cited AMI titles like Us Weekly, Life & Style, and Men’s Journal. But strikingly, it made no mention of the Enquirer, its former flagship.

The collapse of the deal AMI announced last year to sell the Enquirer and two of its lesser-known tabloid cousins — the National Examiner and the Globe — to James Cohen, CEO of Hudson News, for an eye-popping $100 million raised questions for some industry observers as to whether the Enquirer had become too hot to handle.

Last year, Chatham pushed Pecker — then the CEO and chairman of AMI — to sell the Enquirer. Though the tabloid continues to be a lucrative property, it was coming off an unusually high-profile slate of scandals.

In the first scandal, Pecker and his top deputy, Dylan Howard, avoided indictment for campaign finance violations in 2018 by entering into non-prosecution agreements with federal investigators for their role in buying and then burying the story of a former Playboy model who alleged having an affair with then-candidate Trump. The two men admitted that they did so to tilt the election in favor of Trump, a longtime business friend of Pecker’s.

Not long after that agreement was made public, AMI published a controversial scoop in January 2019 about the extramarital affair of Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post. Bezos then accused Pecker and Howard of attempting to blackmail him by threatening to publish intimate photos of his that they claimed to have obtained. The Bezos allegations threw their deal with prosecutors into jeopardy, and federal investigators explored whether they had broken the law, which could have nullified the deal.

Aug. 24

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump is ‘Fox’s Frankenstein,’ insiders told CNN’s Brian Stelter — and here’s the toll it’s taken, Margaret margaret sullivan 2015 photo Sullivan, right, Aug. 24, 2020 (print ed.). If anyone was born to write a juicy book about the democracy-threatening relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump, it had to be Brian Stelter.

After all, at not quite 35, the Maryland native has been reporting on cable news for more than 15 years. As a college undergraduate, he started a blog, CableNewser, that he eventually sold to a digital-publishing company.

And as CNN’s chief media correspondent, he is so ubiquitous — writing stories, producing a popular newsletter, tweeting prolifically and hosting the Sunday media-centric show, “Reliable Sources” — that Columbia Journalism Review called him “unavoidable.”

Turning this bottomless drive and energy to one of the most consequential media stories of our time, the symbiotic ties between Fox News and Trump, Stelter talked to hundreds of current and former network employees for a new book to be published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster: “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.” (I obtained an early copy and interviewed Stelter last week.)

Aug. 22

New York Times, Facebook Braces Itself for Trump to Cast Doubt on Election Results, Mike Isaac and Sheera Fre, Aug. 22, 2020 (print ed.). The world’s biggest social network is working out what steps to take should President Trump use its platform to dispute the vote.

Facebook spent years preparing to ward off any tampering on its site ahead of November’s presidential election. Now the social network is getting ready in case President Trump interferes once the vote is over.

Employees at the Silicon Valley company are laying out contingency plans and walking through postelection scenarios that include attempts by Mr. Trump or his campaign to use the platform to delegitimize the results, people with knowledge of Facebook’s plans said.

Facebook is preparing steps to take should Mr. Trump wrongly claim on the site that he won another four-year term, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Facebook is also working through how it might act if Mr. Trump tries to invalidate the results by declaring that the Postal Service lost mail-in ballots or that other groups meddled with the vote, the people said.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and some of his lieutenants have started holding daily meetings about minimizing how the platform can be used to dispute the election, the people said. They have discussed a “kill switch” to shut off political advertising after Election Day since the ads, which Facebook does not police for truthfulness, could be used to spread misinformation, the people said.
Opinion:

Palmer Report, Opinion: Down goes Donald Trump’s pal David Pecker, Bill Palmer, right, Aug. 22, 2020. David Pecker used his tabloid publication the National Enquirer to publish one fake story about Hillary Clinton after another, in order to help his pal Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Pecker then helped Trump silence the women who wanted to come forward against him. Then Pecker got caught up in Trump’s criminal plot to blackmail Jeff Bezos.

All things considered, it’s amazing David Pecker isn’t in prison yet. But Pecker is just about broke, and now the National Enquirer’s parent company is being sold off and folded into some other company in a merger. Notably, on Friday night it was reported that Pecker was not going to be a part of the newly formed company, and had instead been pushed out entirely.

david pecker cropped This leaves the question of whether the newly formed company is pushing out Pecker as simply a business decision, or if there’s an expectation that Pecker, right, is about to finally be indicted. Considering the SDNY just arrested Donald Trump’s longtime henchman Steve Bannon, it’s pretty clear that Trump and Bill Barr aren’t able to stop whatever the SDNY is planning to do.

At the least, David Pecker’s criminal plotting with Donald Trump has cost Pecker his company and has effectively ruined him. At worst, Pecker will end up being the next Trump henchman to face the handcuffs. And if that does happen, Trump will simply claim that he barely knew the guy. Of course Pecker, having nothing left to lose, could be inclined to cut a plea deal against Trump at that point.

Washington Post, Commentary: A ‘loud mouth’ writer says the White House broke its own briefing-room rules. So he did the same, Paul Farhi, Aug. 22, 2020 (print ed.). Brian Karem saw the White House skirting the rules of its own briefing room. So he’s decided they no longer apply to him either.

Upset that the White House is trying to “pack” news briefings, as he put it, with Trump-friendly correspondents, Karem showed up to Wednesday’s briefing despite strict space limits that barred him from the room that day.

Karem, a correspondent for Playboy and a former CNN contributor, stood at the back of the room during the President Trump’s late-afternoon briefing and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s session earlier in the day, shouting questions at both as they finished addressing the media.

Neither responded. But Karem thinks he made his point.

“I’m there to ask questions — that’s my job — whether they answer the questions or not,” he said. “I’m doing my damn job and whoever doesn’t like it, tough.”

Yes, but in the covid-19 era, the White House press staff and the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) agreed in March to limit entry to the briefing room to just 14 journalists, plus a few technicians and photographers, to maintain social distancing. For months, reporters from dozens of news organizations have taken turns cycling through the room in a rotation maintained by the WHCA.

Karem said he considers those rules null and void, inasmuch as the White House itself has unilaterally breached them. Last week, McEnany admitted representatives from two far-right outfits, the Gateway Pundit and Epoch Times, exceeding the limits. In early April, Trump himself made room for One America Network, a conservative cable outlet that Trump has repeatedly praised, including on Sunday.

Karem — who calls himself a “ ‘Loud Mouth’ WH reporter” in his Twitter bio — doesn’t take issue with OAN or Gateway Pundit’s representatives being in the room. But since Trump “tore up the rules,” he said it doesn’t make sense to play by them any longer. “If they don’t follow the guidelines, why should anyone else?” he asks.

So on Wednesday, Karem used his “hard pass” — which permits holders to come and go from the White House grounds after a basic security check — to enter the workspace behind the briefing room. When Trump and McEnany’s briefings started, he stood about 12 feet behind the seating area and six feet behind the spot the White House carved out for OAN.

Aug. 20

New York Times, The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump, Matthew Rosenberg and Maggie Haberman, Aug. 20, 2020. As President Trump all but endorses the conspiracy theory, it is shifting from the fringes of the internet to become an offline political movement.

Late last month, as the Texas Republican Party was shifting into campaign mode, it unveiled a new slogan, lifting a rallying cry straight from a once-unthinkable source: the internet-driven conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

The new catchphrase, “We Are the Storm,” is an unsubtle cue to a group that the F.B.I. has labeled a potential domestic terrorist threat. It is instantly recognizable among QAnon adherents, signaling what they claim is a coming conflagration between President Trump and what they allege, falsely, is a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile Democrats who seek to dominate America and the world.

Aug. 19

Washington Post, Judge orders Tavis Smiley to pay $2.6 million, $1 million more than originally sought by PBS, Keith L. Alexander, Aug. 19, 2020. Six women accused the former talk show host of sexual harassment.

A District judge ordered former PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley to pay the network more than $2.6 million. The amount was about $1 million more than what PBS originally argued in court that Smiley owed after it was forced to cancel his contract upon learning six female employees had accused him of sexual harassment.

tavis smiley Custom A D.C. Superior Court jury ruled March 4 that Smiley had violated his PBS contract. On Aug. 5, Judge Yvonne Williams who oversaw the three-week trial heard additional arguments from PBS and determined Smiley must pay PBS $1.9 million in damages associated with his final two seasons with the network, and another $703,000 in losses connected to the network’s underwriters who put up the funds to enable PBS to cover Smiley’s contract.

n her 10-page ruling, Williams wrote: “The court determines that the amount sought by PBS in liquidated damages is reasonable because it is the amount it paid to produce Season 13 and 14 of ‘The Tavis Smiley Show.’ ”

Smiley’s attorneys could not be reached for comment on Judge Williams’s ruling on the damages.

The harassment accusations and subsequent verdict led to a dizzying downfall for Smiley, 55, who was awarded a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and whose nightly show for 14 years became a must visit for politicians, actors, singers and authors who also wanted to reach African Americans within PBS’s core adult audience.

During the trial, six women testified through video deposition that during their tenure with his company, Smiley had pressured them for sex or told lewd jokes.

Smiley took the stand twice and admitted to having intimate relationships with two of the women. PBS stipulates in its contracts that such relationships among its employees or contractors are prohibited. Smiley testified he never used his position as their boss to pressure or threaten them. He also said any jokes were innocent and not intended to offend.

Aug. 18

Washington Post, The newsroom was the beating heart of a local newspaper. What’s lost when the owner shuts it down? Elahe Izadi, Aug. 18, 2020. The coronavirus crisis is devastating the news industry. Many newspapers won’t survive it.

Through war, depression and every kind of turmoil the country endured over the past 100 years, the Morning Call’s newsroom was on the same downtown corner in Allentown, Pa. Until now.

Hit this year by a pandemic and an economic downturn, Tribune Publishing informed journalists at the Morning Call and four of its other newspapers Wednesday that their newsrooms would permanently close.

“These decisions were not made lightly or hastily,” reads a memo sent to reporters for the Capital Gazette of Annapolis that promised to continue “our in-depth community coverage.” Other shuttered newsrooms include the New York Daily News, the Carroll County Times of Westminster, Md., and the Orlando Sentinel. An Aurora, Ill. bureau of the Chicago Tribune was also closed.

Like office workers across the United States, journalists have been pushed by covid-19 to retreat from communal spaces and into remote work. Now some are confronting the very real possibility that they may never again work in a physical newsrooms — a touchstone of journalism — and what that could mean for the future of their profession.

“People need to know that we’re a presence in Allentown and that we’re there to cover their communities, their school boards, their municipalities,” said Jennifer Sheehan, a features and entertainment reporter for the Morning Call. “When you don’t even have a physical location, it’s almost like you’re not there, even though you are.”

The pandemic era has forced news organizations to figure out new ways to produce high-caliber journalism, collaborating via video conferencing and messaging platforms. But in newsrooms — the original open-plan offices — reporters across disparate beats can shape each others’ ideas. Young journalists sharpen their skills by overhearing how veteran reporters conduct their interviews.

Aug. 17

New York Times, Virus Misinformation Becomes a New Front for Doctors to Battle, Staff reports, Aug. 17, 2020. Some doctors say patients are more inclined to believe social media posts than professionals. New York’s gyms can reopen on Aug. 24, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said. Students and teachers will be screened for infection even as the Los Angeles school district begins instruction remotely. The Democratic National Convention begins today and will be conducted almost entirely online. Here’s the latest.

Doctors on the front lines of the pandemic say they are fighting not just the coronavirus, but also a never-ending scourge of misinformation about the disease that is hurting patients. Some say they regularly treat people more inclined to believe what they read on social media than what a medical professional tells them.

Before the pandemic, medical professionals had grown accustomed to dealing with patients misled by online information, a phenomenon they called Dr. Google. But in interviews, more than a dozen doctors and misinformation researchers in the United States and Europe said the volume related to the virus was like nothing they had seen before.

According to the doctors and researchers, several factors are to blame: leaders like President Trump who amplify fringe theories; social media platforms that are not doing enough to stamp out false information; and individuals who are too quick to believe what they see online.

New York Times, Analysis: The Month Old Hollywood Finally, Actually Died, Ben Smith, Aug. 17, 2020. The streaming services are in charge, and bringing a ruthless new culture with them.

For decades, the best thing about being a Hollywood executive, really, was how you got fired. Studio executives would be gradually, gently, even lovingly, nudged aside, given months to shape their own narratives and find new work, or even promoted. When Amy Pascal was pushed out of Sony Pictures in 2015, she got an exit package and production deal worth a reported $40 million.

That, of course, was before streaming services arrived, upending everything with a ruthless logic and coldhearted efficiency.

That was never more clear than on Aug. 7, when WarnerMedia abruptly eliminated the jobs of hundreds of employees, emptying the executive suite at the once-great studio that built Hollywood, and is now the subsidiary of AT&T. In a series of brisk video calls, executives who imagined they were studio eminences were reminded that they work — or used to work — at the video division of a phone company. The chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, Bob Greenblatt, learned that he’d been fired the morning of the day the news broke, two people he spoke to told me. Jeffrey Schlesinger, a 37-year company veteran who ran the lucrative international licensing business, complained to friends that he had less than an hour’s notice, two other people told me.

“We’re in the brutal final scenes of Hollywood as people here knew it, as streaming investment and infrastructure take precedence,” said Janice Min, the former Hollywood Reporter co-president who did a brief stretch as an executive at the streaming platform Quibi. “Politesse and production deal kiss-offs for those at the top, and, more importantly, the financial fire hose to float a bureaucracy, seem to be disappearing. It’s like a club, already shut down by the pandemic, running out of dues to feed all its members.”

Law & Crime, Indictment Reveals Real Reason Behind Arrest of InfoWars Correspondent Millie Weaver, Jerry Lambe, Aug. 17, 2020. Millicent “Millie” Weaver, 29, the correspondent for the Alex Jones-helmed conspiracy-theory website InfoWars, was arrested Friday at her Ohio home and charged with several felonies stemming from a dispute with her mother, documents filed in the Portage County Common Pleas Court show.

millie weaver maga hat Weaver’s arrest, which came hours before she was scheduled to release a “documentary” claiming to show that President Donald Trump was set-up by government officials in the Russia scandal, gave rise to a slew of conspiracy theories, but the truth appears far more mundane.

Weaver, left, along with her brother, Charles L. Weaver Jr., and boyfriend Gavon Wince, were all charged with one count each of robbery, tampering with evidence, obstructing justice, and domestic violence, stemming from an incident with Weaver’s mother Felicia McCarron.

According to the indictment from the Portage County Grand Jury, all three were charged with robbery (a second-degree felony) for “attempting or committing a theft offense, or in fleeing immediately after the attempt or offense, recklessly inflict, attempt to inflict, or threaten to inflict physical harm upon Felicia McCarron.”

The trio also face charges of evidence tampering (a third-degree felony), obstructing justice (a fifth-degree felony), and domestic violence (a first degree misdemeanor). The obstruction charge stems from allegedly communicating “false information” about the dispute in order to hinder law enforcement’s investigation.

A YouTube user claiming to be McCarron reportedly wrote that the charges stemmed from a “family dispute” over a $50 cell phone. That post expressed shock, surprise and disapproval of the charges.

New York Times, Special Prosecutor Finds ‘Abuses of Discretion’ in Jussie Smollett Case, Julia Jacobs, Aug. 17, 2020. A special prosecutor tasked with reinvestigating the case against Jussie Smollett has found that the Cook County state’s attorney’s office did not violate the law in its handling of the case but did abuse its discretion in deciding to drop charges and put out false or misleading public statements about why they did so.

jussie smollett mugshot The findings, published in a news release on Monday, conclude the investigation by the special prosecutor, Dan K. Webb, who was appointed last year after a judge ruled that the state’s attorney, Kim Foxx, had not properly handled the Smollett case the first time. In February, Mr. Webb announced that a grand jury had revived the criminal case against Mr. Smollett, right, indicting him on charges that he lied to the police in connection with an alleged hate crime attack against him.

The second part of Mr. Webb’s investigation involved determining whether any person or office engaged in wrongdoing while handling the Smollett case. In the news release, Mr. Webb’s office said that it unearthed evidence that supports “substantial abuses of discretion and operational failures” by the state’s attorney’s office in prosecuting the initial case in 2019.

Mr. Webb’s office found that lawyers who work in the office’s criminal division were “surprised” or “shocked” by the terms under which prosecutors dropped the charges against Mr. Smollett, just a month after his arrest.

An investigation has found that the state’s attorney’s office did not violate the law in its handling of the case against the actor Jussie Smollett, but it cited substantial “operational failures.”

Aug. 16

Salon, Analysis: What is QAnon? A not-so-brief introduction to the conspiracy theory that's eating America, Robert Guffey, Aug. 16, 2020. (This is the first article in a series.)_ Do millions of Americans really believe Donald Trump is saving children from underground demons? It seems that way.

I've been involved in the wild world of conspiracy theories for 24 years now, ever since I published my first article in the pages of Paranoia Magazine in the spring of 1996 when I was 24 years old. What most impressed me about Paranoia was the anarchy of information available within its pages. It wasn't a right-wing conspiracy magazine. It wasn't a left-wing conspiracy magazine. It didn't even exist between these two poles. Its editorial mission (or non-mission) was beholden to values (or non-values) that lay far beyond these limiting parameters, a dedication to cataloging and analyzing the extremes of fringe beliefs from multiple points of view. As Marshall McLuhan once said, "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." The editors of Paranoia dedicated themselves to not having a point of view. It was the exact opposite of propaganda. By its very nature, propaganda excludes any information that contradicts or undermines the message the dedicated propagandist is intent on disseminating.

Conspiracy theories have always been used by what we now call "persuasion engineers" as tools of mass indoctrination. A good conspiracy theory that seems plausible and frightening enough can be worth more than a thousand well-reasoned stump speeches.
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In my first book, "Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form," I broke conspiracy theories down into five distinct categories: 1) Insanity, 2) Disinformation, 3) Misinformation, 4) Satire, and 5) Legitimate Research. Some theories manage to merge two or more categories into one. Only on very rare occasions do such theories manage to combine all five categories. The most recent — and arguably most impactful — strain of this hybrid form of conspiracy-mongering first emerged in 2017, promulgated by an anonymous 4chan poster known only as "Q" — or "QAnon." You've been hearing a lot about this lately, most likely. At least one QAnon supporter is almost certain to be elected to Congress in November, and devotees of this particular conspiracy theory are eagerly supporting the re-election of Donald Trump.

The average person, who has not spent the past couple of decades studying the origins of conspiracy theories (a reasonable choice, I might add), would probably not recognize the origins of most of the quasi-surreal elements that make up the convoluted QAnon narrative.

Earlier this year, in March, I was talking to a friend about COVID-19 and the national lockdown. He's 10 years older than me and lives in a small town in the Midwest. I live in Long Beach, California. While chatting with him on the phone about all the unexpected difficulties that have arisen from teaching my English classes online, he suddenly volunteered the opinion that COVID-19 would be a positive development in 2020.

As of May 28, only 10 days after being posted, this video had already received 33,105 views and only 34 dislikes. I've seen YouTube videos of random kids opening birthday presents get more dislikes than that. The Blessed to Teach YouTube channel has 92,600 subscribers.

If it's not clear to you yet, let me spell this out: Even as you're reading these words, there are thousands of "Christian Patriots" living in the United States who sincerely believe that Donald Trump saved them from being eaten by demons when he entered the White House. This is not hyperbole. This is a literal interpretation of what they believe.

This is the mentality you're dealing with. No amount of logic, common sense or reason can combat such convoluted delusions. These people are clearly the product of incessant brainwashing, and yet they think everyone else in the country is mind-controlled to such an extreme degree that people who do not support Trump are either A) soulless demon-worshippers or B) poor unfortunates incapable of understanding the obvious truths being unveiled by geniuses like "Rick B2T" and his pal "Gene." On Nov. 18, 1978, hundreds of "True Believers" in Guyana held similar beliefs, only seconds before they literally drank the Kool-Aid.

You might assume that most of Rick's viewers are hardcore evangelicals dwelling in a deep pit in the Ozarks. But my friend wasn't raised a hardcore Christian and had never expressed such views in my presence over the course of many, many years. Something happened to change him radically between the emergence of QAnon in 2017 and the advent of the national lockdown in 2020. Even a regular Joe can be swayed by nonsense with a fair amount of ease.

Nonsense has always been an essential part of the American landscape, from Salem witch hunts in the 1690s to New Age UFO cults in the 1990s, but QAnon takes this tradition of nonsense to a whole new level.

Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. His books include the novel "Until the Last Dog Dies" and "Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security." Visit his website.

Heavy.com, Millie Weaver: Filmmaker Arrested Hours Before ‘Shadow Gate,’ Erin Laviola, Aug. 16, 2020. Millie Weaver is a conservative filmmaker who was arrested at her home in northeastern Ohio hours before she was scheduled to debut her new documentary called Shadow Gate on YouTube.

Weaver, shown at right and below at left, claimed she had uncovered a plot, orchestrated by both major political parties, against President Donald Trump and that the documentary would explain how it all worked.

The timing of her arrest flamed conspiracy theories online, with critics wondering whether the arrest was related to the Shadow Gate documentary. Heavy confirmed with the Portage County Jail that Weaver, along with her significant other, Gavin Wince, were both arrested on August 14 on felony charges including robbery and domestic violence. There is no evidence to suggest her arrest was related to the documentary.

The Portage County Sheriff further confirmed via email that Weaver was arrested on an indictment from the Portage County Grand Jury. Heavy has reached out to the county prosecutor’s office to ask about obtaining a copy of the affidavit.

Here’s what you need to know:

Millicent Weaver and Gavin Wince were both arrested by the Portage County Sheriff’s Office on August 14. Inmate records show they were booked into the Portage County Jail around 1:50 a.m.

Heavy confirmed with the Portage County Jail, over the phone, that Weaver and her partner are both facing four charges: Robbery; Tampering with evidence; Obstructing justice; Domestic violence.

The Portage County Jail official Heavy spoke with referred to Weaver’s partner as her husband. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, in a separate report, described Wince as Weaver’s boyfriend. Heavy has not independently verified whether the couple is married.

millie weaver maga hat Weaver was being held over the weekend without a bond. She was expected to face a judge on Monday, August 17, although it was not clear whether she would physically appear in court or remotely. Weaver is the mother of two children. The official at the Portage County Jail did not have information about who was caring for the two children while their parents were behind bars.

Weaver live-streamed the August 14 arrest on her official Facebook page. Author Mike Dice, who wrote a 2019 book called The Liberal Media Industrial Complex, shared the video on Twitter and the clip has been viewed more than 1 million times.

In the clip, Weaver is recording the interaction with a sheriff’s deputy with her phone pointing at the ground. She asks, “You’re saying a grand jury indicted me? For what?” The deputy asks Weaver to get her shoes and that paperwork would be waiting for them at the jail. Weaver cooperates as one of her children can be heard making noises off-camera.

As Weaver walks into her home, she directs her comments to viewers. “Guys, I don’t know what’s happening right now. The police have just shown up at my house and they said that they’re arresting me. They said that a grand jury indicted me for something. I have no idea what. This is crazy.”

Since her arrest, a GoFundMe campaign was launched on Weaver’s behalf to help pay for her legal defense. As of this writing, thousands of donors had given more than $108,000.

In Ohio, a ‘Secret Indictment’ Simply Means the Indictment is Sealed Until After the Accused Has Been Arrested

One of the details about Millie Weaver’s arrest that has sparked intrigue online was that she was arrested on a secret indictment. This is a standard procedure under Ohio law. The legal code explains that “secret indictments shall not be docketed by name until after the apprehension of the accused.”

Weaver Claimed to Uncover Knowledge of a Coup Against President Trump

Weaver had described Shadow Gate as the “biggest whistleblowing event ever” on her website. Weaver claimed in a trailer ahead of the film’s release that she had spoken with two people with knowledge of a secret organization of “contractors.” She claimed the contractors were “hired by government officials to frame the Trump campaign, set him up for the Russia collusion investigation, provided witnesses for the impeachment hearings and provided administrative support services to the Department of Justice during the Mueller investigation.”

Weaver also claimed these “contractors” were responsible for creating the “fake news in mainstream media.” She alleged that the “shadow government” was responsible for spurring the recent nationwide protests and promoting the “defund the police” movement.

Weaver goes on to accuse Republicans and Democrats of working together in a plot to bring down President Trump. “Both parties are equally guilty of covering up what should turn out to be an even bigger scandal. Shadow Gate: the tactical and operational role the shadow government played behind the scenes carrying out the coup against President Trump. We’re going to be looking behind the puppets at who the real puppet master, string-pullers are.”

The film was shared to YouTube after Weaver’s arrest. But as of August 16, the documentary had been “removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.”

Weaver Contributes to Infowars & Host Alex Jones Dismissed a Conspiracy Theory That Weaver’s Arrest Was Staged

Weaver was named by Newsmax as one of the “30 Most Influential Republicans Under 30” in 2017. The site described her as a “former model” who “made a name for herself as a political activist, reporter, and satirist.”

Newsmax noted that Weaver was “most known for her contributions to Infowars.com and the videos on her YouTube channel.” Her channel, which includes videos promoting theories about a corrupt “deep state” and claims that riots in Minneapolis were preplanned by a “leftist radicalization” group, currently has more than 400,000 subscribers.

Weaver has visited the White House at least twice. She shared on Instagram in January that White House staff had invited her to tour the West Wing. She wrote in part, “I’m glad to see that my hard work is recognized and appreciated! We truly have the greatest country and the greatest President! #Trump2020.” Weaver posted about another visit on March 7, writing, “It was nice to be back at The White House. Big things coming! Stay tuned.”

Weaver is a contributor to Infowars and the site describes her as one of its reporters. Infowars host Alex Jones said in a video statement that he had known Weaver for at least eight years and described her as a “good Christian lady.” He added that Weaver contributed to Infowars as a freelancer.

Jones disputed an online conspiracy theory that claimed the arrest was “staged” in order to promote her Shadow Gate film. In the clip, Jones also suggested the arrest could be related to a family dispute, specifically a dispute with Weaver’s mother.

Aug. 13

margaret sullivan 2015 photo Washington Post, Opinion: Tucker Carlson’s mangling of Kamala Harris’s name was all about disrespect, Margaret Sullivan, right, Aug.13, 2020 (print ed.). The Fox News host had a mini-meltdown when a guest mildly corrected his pronunciation.

Strategic Culture Foundation, Opinion: CIA-Sponsored Propaganda Has Been Around for 75 Years, Wayne Madsen (shown below at left), Aug. 13, 2020. The release of a report by the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), billed as the Donald Trump administration’s “dedicated center for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda, cites the Strategic Culture Foundation in Russia, Canada’s Global Research Center, and other on-line publications as “proxy sites” for Russian intelligence and the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The State Department’s report is titled, “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem” and it is not much different than the series of reports issued by the State Department’s “International Information Program” in the mid-2000s that were used to debase U.S. journalists and authors critical of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney neo-conservative wars of choice. Those diatribes, like the recent one masquerading as a “special report,” were written on the U.S. taxpayers’ dime and represent a squandering of money.

Diagrams in the recent State Department report depict various on-line publications and Internet sites as coronavirus microbes. The Mike Pompeo-led State Department, which has, along with the Trump White House, issued a daily dose of pabulum that can only be described as conspiracy theory-based rantings from congenital liars and reality-challenged fabulists and fanatical right-wingers, have no ethical or political grounds to proclaim virtuousness when it comes to spewing forth propaganda and outright lies.

One could easily issue a multi-volume report that deals with America’s propaganda factory both during the Cold War and in its aftermath. A major focus of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency from its very inception was the penetration of the news media, including the assignment of CIA agents to the newsrooms and editorial offices of America’s largest media operations, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hearst Newspapers, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and other major newspapers and broadcast networks.

The CIA also thoroughly infiltrated America’s political polling companies, including Gallup, Harris, and Roper. Details concerning the CIA’s Operation MOCKINGBIRD and “The Mighty Wurlitzer” propaganda and news influencing operations can easily be found in the annals of America’s post-World War II history. These are activities that the U.S. corporate media, as well as the CIA and State Department would prefer to have global consumers of news ignore.

As far as the State Department’s “Propaganda Ecosystem” report and its earlier incarnation, the International Information Program (IIP), are concerned, they are remnants of U.S. Cold War-era disinformation shops. The IIP’s chief propagandist was a one-time colleague of disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff in formulating pro-apartheid propaganda for South Africa’s minority apartheid government in the 1980s – Project Babushka. In the 1980s, through a front organization in Washington established by South Africa’s military establishment – the International Freedom Foundation (IFF) – propaganda was regularly churned out to argue against sanctions imposed on the apartheid regime. Serving as chairman of the editorial advisory board for the IFF’s publication branch—a group that pumped out all sorts of propaganda claiming that the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela were Communists – was none other than the far-right Republican Senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms.

Today, Helms has been replaced by similar vile right-wing political creatures like Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Ron Johnson of wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped Small Wisconsin, who are always willing to carry the political tripe doled out by the Trump White House and Pompeo State Department.

Operating out of the State Department, the IIP launched vicious attacks on two American writers – this one included – as well as the Argentine newspaper Clarin, the Sunday Mirror (London), Quinto Dia (Venezuela), and other publications over their reports on the George W. Bush administration’s covert and war crime operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Southeast Asia, Iran, and Pakistan. The IIP even attacked The Los Angeles Times over its story on the kidnapping of poor children from poverty-ravished Latin American barrios for the purpose of organ harvesting. The IIP’s true masters in Israel were upset about the coverage because it involved Israeli human organ brokers.

Aug. 12

New York Times, The Daily News Is Now a Newspaper Without a Newsroom, Marc Tracy, Aug. 12, 2020. Tribune Publishing said that it was permanently closing the tabloid’s office in Lower Manhattan. Plans for a future workplace are uncertain. A tabloid once famous for its bustling, big-city newsroom no longer has a newsroom.

In a move that was almost unthinkable before the coronavirus pandemic, Tribune Publishing said on Wednesday that The Daily News, once the largest-circulation newspaper in the country, was permanently closing its physical newsroom at 4 New York Plaza in Lower Manhattan. The same day, Tribune, the Chicago newspaper chain that has owned The News since 2017, told employees that it was closing four of its other newspapers’ offices.

“We have determined that we do not need to reopen this office in order to maintain our current operations,” Toni Martinez, a human resources executive at Tribune Publishing, wrote in an email to the staff that was reviewed by The New York Times. “With this announcement, we are also beginning to look at strategic opportunities and alternatives for future occupancy.”

The paper will continue to be published. The company made no promises about a future physical location. “As we progress through the pandemic and as needs change, we will reconsider our need for physical offices,” said a Tribune Publishing spokesman, Max Reinsdorf.

Newspapers across the country have been struggling for more than a decade because of punishing industry trends like the move away from revenue-generating print products and the nationalization of news. The pandemic, which has sharply squeezed advertising revenue, has added to the publications’ woes.

Washington Post, Sumner Redstone 1923–2020: Dealmaker and titan of media dies at 97, David Marino-Nachison and Adam Bernstein, Aug. 12, 2020. The mogul’s Viacom empire included Paramount Pictures film studios, CBS and MTV.

sumner redstone resized boston university Sumner Redstone, right, a combative and daring dealmaker who in his 60s turned his family’s movie theater chain into one of the world’s largest media empires, with holdings that included Paramount Pictures film studios, CBS, MTV and the publishing house Simon & Schuster, died Aug. 11 at 97.

His media holding company, National Amusements, announced the death in a statement but did not provide additional details. A spokeswoman, Sara Evans, did not specify the cause but said it was not related to the novel coronavirus.

In recent years, as the mogul’s mental and physical decline became increasingly apparent, legal and public-relations battles erupted among his presumed successors, members of the family and an array of other hangers-on. All had a stake in inheriting chunks of his $40 billion business empire, his personal fortune or both.

New York Times, QAnon Followers Are Hijacking #SaveTheChildren, Kevin Roose, Aug. 12, 2020. Fans of the pro-Trump conspiracy theory are clogging anti-trafficking hotlines and raising false fears about child exploitation, our columnist writes.

QAnon first surfaced in 2017 with a series of anonymous posts on the internet forum 4chan claiming to reveal high-level government intelligence about crimes by top Democrats. It has since spawned one of the most disturbing and consequential conspiracy theory communities in modern history.

Its followers have committed serious crimes, and its online vigilantes have made a sport of harassing and doxxing their perceived enemies. The F.B.I. has cited QAnon as a potential domestic terror threat, and social networks have begun trying to pull QAnon groups off their platforms. Dozens of QAnon-affiliated candidates are running for office this year. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, won a primary runoff Tuesday for a House seat in Georgia, drawing a congratulatory tweet from Mr. Trump.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Commentary: NBC Universal doesn't want anyone to see skit of Trump buying two young children, Wayne Madsen, Aug. 12, 2020. Donald Trump and his litigious murder of attorneys apparently are embarrassed about a comedy skit Trump made about him buying two young children sitting in the back seat of a car parked in front of one of his properties in Manhattan.

When the parking valet informs Trump that he will have to wait until the mother of the children moves her car in order to park Trump's car, Trump announces he will buy the mother's car, children included.

NBC Universal prevailed upon YouTube to take down the Trump clip the editor included in a video to illustrate Trump's lackadaisical attitude toward "buying," i.e., the sex trafficking, of children.

Aug. 10

Washington Post, Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai arrested under national security law, Shibani Mahtani, Aug. 10, 2020. In an operation that spanned more than 12 hours, Hong Kong police on Monday arrested media tycoon and activist Jimmy Lai, his sons and at least seven others and raided his newsroom under a sweeping national security law that China recently imposed on Hong Kong.

Those swept up included Agnes Chow, a 23-year old activist who rose to prominence alongside Joshua Wong and Nathan Law as a student protester in 2014. Police said that most of those arrested were suspected of colluding with foreign powers, a crime punishable by life in prison.

Taken together, the dramatic events quashed any doubt that Beijing would use the national security law as a mere deterrent and underscored the increasingly precarious plight of pro-democracy activists and journalists in Hong Kong. Lai, 71, and Chow are the most prominent of those arrested under the law to date.

Just after dawn, officers arrived at Lai's home and that of his sons to question and arrest them. Four other senior executives at his media group, Next Digital, were also arrested, according to the company and Mark Simon, a close aide to Lai. Next Digital is the parent company of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy news outlet critical of Beijing that Lai founded in 1995.

Shortly afterward, more than 200 police entered Next Digital’s offices, according to the company’s Facebook page and a live-stream of the raid, and searched Apple Daily’s newsroom. They rifled through reporters’ desks and papers, told employees to show identification cards and warned journalists to stop filming and photographing the raid. By the end of the operation, police had seized 25 boxes of material.

Legal Schnauzer, Commentary: Legal Schnauzer winds up in the middle of Facebook's effort to remove fraudulent accounts associated with Trump ally and GOP dirty trickster, Roger Stone, Roger Shuler, Aug. 10, 2020. In January 2017, we published a post in which I expressed suspicions that someone associated with Donald Trump ally and GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone had targeted Legal Schnauzer for a stream of vile, profane, and threatening comments. Turns out we were right.

Facebook made international headlines last Friday with reports that the cybersecurity firm Graphika had determined that Stone and his associates created a disinformation network that prompted Facebook to launch a takedown effort of fake accounts that stretched from Canada to Brazil, from Ecuador to Ukraine. From a report at the South Florida SunSentinel, which covers Stone's home base of Fort Lauderdale:

Roger Stone spent a half-century honing his skills as a political operator and building a reputation as a stop-at-nothing dirty trickster, in support of a range of big-name politicians and causes, including Donald Trump and Richard Nixon.

Now, a report from the cybersecurity firm Graphika suggests that Stone — who in recent years has become one of Fort Lauderdale’s best-known residents — was able to translate his real-world approach to the online world, exploiting the social media platform Facebook as he pursued goals that included promoting Trump and himself.

A closer look at the document shows how the Sunshine State emerged as an epicenter for the disinformation network, which set out to meddle in Florida politics and beyond.

The social media giant ultimately took down a network of 54 Facebook accounts, 50 pages and four from Instagram, another social media site it owns. A map showed 15 locations of the accounts were in Florida, mostly along the east coast from Vero Beach to Miami; a handful were elsewhere.

Some pages associated with Stone promoted Stone, and often his books. Some attempted to influence legislation and criticized enemies — including Hillary Clinton — sometimes with negative messages. Some used fake names and were illustrated with faces found on the internet.

“Our investigation linked this network to Roger Stone and his associates,” Facebook said. Some had links to the far-right group Proud Boys, Facebook said.

Facebook apparently spared no expense in tracking the Stone network. From Facebook's report on its internal investigation:

We found this network as part of our internal investigation into suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior in the region. Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to political consultants and former government employees in Ecuador and Estraterra, a Canada-based PR firm. Estraterra is now banned from our platforms.

Several of these Pages had links to Proud Boys, a hate group we banned in 2018. Some Pages appeared to have acquired followers from Pakistan and Egypt to make themselves seem more popular than they were. This network — which was also active on other internet platforms — was most active between 2015 and 2017. Since then, the majority of these accounts have been dormant, and some were permanently deleted by the users. The Page admins and account owners posted about local politics in Florida, Roger Stone and his Pages, websites, books, and media appearances.

Stone's social network unraveled primarily because of his ties to the Proud Boys and Robert Mueller's investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal from the 2016 presidential election. From the internal Facebook report:

We first started looking into this network as part of our investigation into the Proud Boys’ attempts to return to Facebook after we had designated and banned them from the platform. We identified the full scope of this network following the recent public release of search warrants pertaining to the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in response to a joint petition from The New York Times, CNN, the Associated Press, The Washington Post, and Politico. Our investigation linked this network to Roger Stone and his associates.

How does Legal Schnauzer enter the picture? The SunSentinel explains:

The [Facebook] report, issued last month, tied one example of online harassment by the network to a Sarah Jameson Facebook account, which purported to be a woman living in Plantation.

Roger Shuler, who writes an online blog called “Legal Schnauzer,” said he received a barrage of profanity-laden emails from some claiming to be a “Sarah Jameson” in 2015 and 2016. The person emailing was upset over Shuler’s critical posts about then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions and federal Judge Bill Pryor.

Shuler said he looked up Jameson’s Facebook page and found a “Roger Stone shrine.” It seemed bizarre enough for him to write on his blog about the account with only 18 friends and posts promoting Stone.

“I definitely had suspicions that it was a fake account or a false identity,” Shuler said. “It was kind of like a fan-girl page. Not much in-depth information. Whoever it was seemed to like Roger Stone for some reason.”

“It made me wonder: Roger Stone is known for dirty tricks. Was he involved in some of this?” Shuler added.

The Mueller search warrants apparently helped prove, among other things, that Stone and Co. targeted Legal Schnauzer for what likely can best be described as a cyber harassment and cyber stalking campaign. Ours is the only blog mentioned in the Graphika report as a specific target of the Stone network:

Similarly, a Facebook account called “Sarah Jameson” that Facebook identified as part of the network matched names and profile pictures with an account called @S_jameson82 on Twitter. The Twitter account was created in 2016 and stopped posting in early 2017; of its 20 most recent posts, 11 focused on Stone or advertised his books. Most of the rest focused on Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016 and the controversy over his ban on immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries in early 2017.

Aug. 9

Media Matters, Advocacy: Sunday show coverage of COVID-19 relief negotiations was again filled with false equivalency, Cydney Hargis, Aug. 9, 2020. For months, Republicans failed to make a proposal, and still are split on whether to continue COVID-19 aid at all. Instead of focusing on what was needed, Sunday shows instead frequently just blamed both sides for not coming to an agreement.

President Trump signed four executive orders following a congressional gridlock over negotiations about the second COVID-19 relief bill, which Republicans refused to enter into until the eleventh hour. Sunday political shows, however, continued with their false equivalency that both parties are to blame which forced the president’s hand.

The economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic have been devastating for millions of Americas. The Census Bureau estimated that sometime before July 21, nearly 30 million Americans did not have enough to eat. Millions are still unemployed, and the Congressional Budget Office expects the unemployment rate to remain “elevated” through 2021. Forty million people are reportedly at risk of being kicked out of their homes due to the pandemic, especially as eviction moratoriums across the country come to an end. The ending of enhanced unemployment benefits looks set to become an economic catastrophe.

Aug. 5

New York Times, Facebook Removes, and Twitter Blocks, Trump Campaign’s Misleading Video, Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel, Aug. 5, 2020. It was the first time Facebook took down a post by President Trump’s campaign for spreading virus misin

Facebook took down a video posted by the campaign of President Trump on Wednesday in which he claimed children were immune to the coronavirus, a violation of the social network’s rules against misinformation around the virus.

It was the first time Facebook has removed a post by Mr. Trump’s campaign for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus, though the social network has previously taken down other ads and posts by the campaign for violating other policies. In June, for example, Facebook took down campaign ads that used a Nazi-related symbol, which broke the company’s rules against organized hate.

The action on Wednesday did not signal a change to Facebook’s fierce defense of free expression. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has said the social network is not an arbiter of truth and that it is in the public’s interest to see what political leaders post — even if they include falsehoods by politicians like Mr. Trump. Mr. Zuckerberg has stood by the position, even as other social media companies like Twitter have ramped up their rule enforcement with regard to the president’s speech.

The stance has put Facebook under tremendous pressure from employees, advertisers and civil-rights leaders, who have opposed permitting Mr. Trump to spread falsehoods around mail-in voting on the site and to allow comments and threatening language around the Black Lives Matter protests to remain up.

Aug. 4

Media Matters, Advocacy: Right-wing media struggle to handle Trump’s train wreck Axios interview, Eric Kleefield, Aug. 4, 2020. “They are dying, that's true. And it is what it is,” is what President Donald Trump said in reference to the coronavirus outbreak in America during an interview with Axios on HBO, which aired this week.

Trump's lies were repeatedly exposed through simple follow-up questions by Axios political correspondent Jonathan Swan. He also attacked recently deceased civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) for not attending his inauguration, suggested the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, and complemented Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

But even beyond all of that, the interview will be remembered for Trump's wild lies about the COVID-19 pandemic. The president didn't even understand Swan's point that the United States has had more people die from the pandemic per capita than many other countries. When asked about additional efforts to contain the pandemic, Trump just said "It is what it is. ... It's under control as much as you can control it." He also said "manuals" and "books" say not to test too much, and never explained what he was talking about, instead changing the subject.

Trump's answers were immediately widely panned. Fox News didn't mention the interview very much at all.

Beyond Fox, right-wing media struggled to applaud the president’s performance. Some tried, including right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who said about the interview, “Trump is a realist. He deals with things as they are. I am a realist. I’m Mr. Literal. I am the mayor of Realville. You know me. One of my all-time favorite, little, short, philosophical sayings: It is what it is.”

Aug. 3

New York Times, Opinion: How the News Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong, Ben Smith, Aug. 3, 2020 (print ed.). We may not know the results for days, and maybe weeks. So it’s time to rethink “election night.”

kayleigh mcenany djt New York Times, Kayleigh McEnany Heckles the Press. Is That All? Katie Rogers and Maggie Haberman, Aug. 3, 2020 (print ed.). President Trump does not always watch her briefings, and even his allies say she risks being known more for “hitting the press with a two-by-four” than advancing his priorities.

Palmer Report, Opinion: We haven’t won this yet, Robert Harrington, Aug. 3, 2020. I was interviewed on Wednesday for two hours by The Mystic-Skeptic Radio Show, a media entity that doubles as a podcast. The pre-recording of my interview is slated to go out on “Radio Free Nashville” sometime in late August. The two hosts, young-ish progressives, were eager to see progressive policies enacted that they doubted that Joe Biden and the DNC machine were equal to.

I did my best to introduce them to reality as I saw it, pointing out that, yes, that painting near the Captain’s Table might look better over by the Grand Staircase, but didn’t they think we had better attend to the task at hand first, namely getting the damned passengers off the Titanic?

I’m deeply puzzled by people who are in such a hurry to see certain pet programs succeed and yet are blind to the greater peril. I think single-payer healthcare for all Americans, for instance, is a cracking good idea, long overdue. As an American living in England I’m atypically positioned to comprehend the difference between the two systems.

But one thing at a time, please. Politics, I cautioned my hosts, is a long game, one of give and take, a game of conceding small concessions for larger ones. You can seldom get everything all your own way overnight, and revolutions too fast sometimes spawn counterrevolutions. These matters must be handled delicately, to invoke the Wicked Witch of the West.

It seems, though, that the older one gets the more time one has. Put another way, the younger one is the more in a rush. So I caution my younger readers to have patience. We have paid a terrible price for Trump, let’s at least learn a lesson that can partly justify that price. Once we’re in charge we can use our newly empowered sense of urgency to shore up the nation against another Trump ever happening again. Then we can get down to the business of fixing the nation and healing the planet.

If we get back in charge, that is, and there’s the rub. Engagious, a focus group company, claims that focus groups they have conducted over the past year suggest that swing voters in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida favor Donald Trump two to one. They studied the oddball voter who voted for, say, Romney in 2012 and Clinton in 2016, or Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. In other words, the Unpredictables may turn out to be a subset of the Deplorables. This is cause for concern, but not alarm.

As British athletics commentator Brendan Foster once put it, races aren’t run on paper, they’re run at races. What we need to realize above all else is Biden may look to be way ahead in the polls but he hasn’t won yet. The race is still on for November third, not August third. Even so, these focus groups sometimes pick up on trends that polls miss, and that is another reason why we must not be wholly reliant on polls.

Washington Post, The Lincoln Project’s plan for preserving the union: Drive Trump out of office by driving him nuts, Roxanne Roberts, Aug. 3, 2020 (print ed.). Your house is on fire. Do you care who the firemen are?

That is a central question of the 2020 election. Donald Trump has managed to do one thing no other president has done: Bring Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, boomers and millennials together in unprecedented numbers to try to defeat him in November. For Americans who believe the president is a raging threat to democracy, purity tests are out. Results are in.

abraham lincoln 1860 matthew brady cooper union Which explains the spectacular rise of the Lincoln Project, a group of Republican Never Trumpers who have moved rent free into the president’s head. Their viral videos and tweets mocking his leadership, his intelligence and his patriotism — aimed both at Republican voters who are wavering and Trump himself — have attracted millions of dollars, via donors from both parties. More than 10,000 people attended a virtual town hall last month and about 80,000 others watched it on a live stream. Lifelong Democrats are organizing fundraisers for the project.

The “Mourning in America” ad attacks Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus outbreak. “#TrumpIsNotWell” questions his mental and physical fitness. “Bounty” asks why Trump won’t confront Vladimir Putin about U.S. intelligence reports that Russia offered bounties for the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan.

The ads are slick, scathing and more shocking than anything Joe Biden’s official campaign has produced. The newest release, “Wake Up,” is a dark comic satire about a george conway post coma victim hearing about Trump’s last three years. “Republicans, we need to wake up. This guy was in a coma. What’s your excuse?”

“Donald Trump is so completely at odds with every institution in America and so completely at odds with anything that the Republican Party allegedly stood for: the rule of law, constitutional fealty, institutions, norms, traditions, all of those things are out the window,” says Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the group with George Conway, right. “So you’re either going to make a choice between Trump or this country. We made the choice for the country, even if it doesn’t immediately seem to fit with all of our ideological or political priors.”

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Commentary: Trump and Hitler analogy: Not wanted in some circles, Wayne Madsen, Aug. 3, 2020. It is not often that the editor has an article rejected for publication. However, as the presidential election draws nearer, certain circles find the comparisons of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler to be politically unpalatable.

Trump is not the only right-wing leader who is dismantling local and regional government in violation of constitutional norms. Not one to be intimidated, the article that got some armbands in a twist abroad is republished here in its entirety.

Palmer Report, Opinion: TikTok just won and Donald Trump just lost, Bill Palmer, Aug. 3, 2020. Palmer Report, Opinion: In the latest sign that Donald Trump fancies himself a vengeful tyrant, he announced this weekend that he was banning the TikTok video app in the United States, simply because too many of its users have humiliated him. And in the latest sign that Trump is increasingly an empty suit, he’s now quietly backing down from that proclamation already.

On Sunday night, Donald Trump gave TikTok’s China-based parent company forty-five days to sell TikTok to Microsoft or another bidder. In response, Microsoft confirmed it’s indeed seeking to acquire TikTok. Here’s the thing: nothing has changed.

TikTok was already for sale, and Microsoft was already attempting to buy it, before Donald Trump threw his little tantrum. Donald Trump has backed down in such a manner that things are now back to precisely what they had been, meaning he 100% caved. TikTok, its parent company, its users, and Microsoft all won. Trump lost.

When Trump faces any amount of pushback these days, he usually tepidly backs down.

Aug. 1

larry klayman resized eric bolling judy mikovits sinclair pandemic Washington Post, Sinclair yanked a pandemic conspiracy theory program. But it has stayed in line with Trump on coronavirus, Paul Farhi, Aug. 1, 2020 (print ed.). Eric Bolling’s interview with the discredited “Plandemic” theorist represented an extreme edge of the typical commentary from one of the nation’s largest TV groups.

Editor's Note: Sinclair's America This Week host Eric Bolling, shown at center in adjoining photo, interviewing Judy Mikovits, right, of the conspiracy theory video Plandemic and her attorney Larry Klayman, left, about their plans to sue Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Washington Post, Trump says he’ll bar TikTok from operating in U.S., Ellen Nakashima, Rachel Lerman and Jeanne Whalen, Aug. 1, 2020 (print ed.). The ban would come amid rising tension with China. The president also told reporters Friday night the administration may take other actions targeted at TikTok.

Washington Post, James Murdoch resigns from News Corp. board over ‘disagreements’ about editorial content, Jeremy Barr, Aug. 1, 2020 (print ed.). James Murdoch, son of media baron Rupert Murdoch and the former chief executive of Fox News parent company 21st Century Fox — now called Fox Corp. — has resigned his seat on the board of the Murdoch-controlled News Corp., citing concerns about the company’s content and decision-making.

The abrupt resignation came in a tersely worded letter sent by Murdoch to the board of the company, which owns Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones and the New York Post, among other holdings.

“My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” Murdoch wrote in the letter, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

His resignation is the strongest sign yet that Murdoch, 47, has broken ideologically from his family’s media holdings, which include the cable news channel that he once had oversight over.

While his father, who remains the company’s executive chairman, is influential in Republican politics, Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, have long been major donors to left-leaning causes and political candidates. They very publicly donated $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League in August 2017 after the protests in Charlottesville, calling out “hate and bigotry.”

Whistleblowing Revelations

"You never volunteer to be a whistleblower; it falls into your lap."

-- Wayne Madsen

charlotte dennett

OpEdNews, 2020 Annual Whistleblower Summit Features "Telling Stories Almost Too Big to Hear," Marta Steele, Aug. 1, 2020. This year's annual Whistleblower Summit, held on Zoom in combination with a dynamic film festival, featured a world-class panel, "Telling Stories Almost Too Big to Hear," organized by the well-known activist and attorney Andrew Kreig,

The four panelists, all expert whistleblowers who have spoken truth to power, included Charlotte Dennett, author of The Crash of Flight 3804 (shown above), the story of her investigations into the death of her father in a 1947 plane crash en route to report on his work investigating the huge oil industries in the Middle East.

don siegelman stealing our democracy Custom Wayne Madsen, left, author of 18 books and master investigative reporter, began this segment of his career with "an A to Z encyclopedia of covert groups focused on the most sensitive issues on Earth, encompassing the intelligence backgrounds of U.S. politicians and judges before they were elected to office."

Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, right, told his story of a meteoric career up the political ranks in the bright red state of Alabama despite his extremely progressive background and how Karl Rove and his cronies stepped in to ruin him even as he was being short-listed as a Democratic candidate for president in the 2004 general election. He has recently published an amazing memoir, Stealing Our Democracy: How the Political Assassination of a Governor Threatens Our Nation.

Dr. William Pepper, a close associate of both Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. (with whom he is shown below) in the 1960s, told an amazing life story of investigating the assassinations of both, risking his life in the process.

mlk william pepper plot to kill cover 300x169

July

July 30

bo john lewis eulogy cspan

Media Matters, Commentary: Right-wing media attack Barack Obama's eulogy for John Lewis, Jason Campbell, July 30, 2020. After the first Black president eulogizes a civil rights hero (above), conservatives lash out: “Barack Obama is a national disgrace”

Former President Barack Obama delivered a eulogy today for Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), commemorating the civil rights icon and longtime member of the House of Representatives. Obama praised Lewis’ history of promoting civil rights and called for action to continue the late congressman’s legacy, including ending the Senate legislative filibuster and passing a new Voting Rights Act.

Right-wing media was quick to criticize Obama’s eulogy, claiming the former president had politicized the event. Some conservative media personalities mocked Obama and derided his speech as a campaign event for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Even following a solemn funeral in which this country’s first Black president praised the legacy of a champion for civil rights, right-wing media continued to demonstrate its shameless hatemongering.

Sean Hannity spent large chunks of his radio show complaining about Obama's eulogy, including accusing the former president of lying and claiming that voter suppression is a myth even though multiple Republican figures have admitted otherwise. Sen. Lindsey Graham told Hannity that “Donald Trump has done more to help the people they're talking about at the funeral than President Obama did.”

July 29

Media Matters, Commentary: Tucker Carlson's coverage of Breitbart's "Frontline Doctors" video, Nikki McCann Ramirez, July 29, 2020. Tucker Carlson’s deceitful coverage of Breitbart's COVID-19 “Frontline Doctors” video. Late on July 27, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook removed a hyperviral video riddled with misinformation related to the novel coronavirus posted by the far-right media outlet Breitbart.

President Donald Trump and other prominent conservatives had shared the video, and its removal sparked cries of censorship from conservatives, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who on Tuesday night covered the story through cherry-picked snippets, outlandish accusations, and misrepresentation.

Carlson opened his show by claiming that with “the ruthlessness of Chinese authoritarians but with double the self-righteousness,” technology companies had collaborated with Democrats to pull the video from social media, viewing it as “a threat to Joe Biden's campaign.” Carlson claimed out-of-control tech companies were wielding unchecked power to silence “a group of physicians giving a press conference about medical advances in the fight against COVID.” In reality, the video was a hodgepodge of largely debunked medical claims.

July 27

Washington Post, Congress prepares for epic clash with Big Tech, Tony Romm, July 27, 2020. Congress brought the country’s big banks to heel after the financial crisis, cowed a tobacco industry for imperiling public health and forced airline leaders to atone for years of treating their passengers poorly.

Now, lawmakers are set to turn their attention to technology, channeling long-simmering frustrations with Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google into a high-profile hearing that some Democrats and Republicans hope will usher in sweeping changes throughout Silicon Valley.

On Wednesday, the industry’s four most powerful chief executives are set to appear, swear an oath and submit to a grilling from House lawmakers who have been probing the Web’s most recognizable names to determine whether they have become too big and powerful. The focus is antitrust, and the extent to which a quartet of digital behemoths — representing a nearly $5 trillion slice of the U.S. economy — has harmed competition, consumers and the country writ large.

margaret sullivan 2015 photo Washington Post, Perspective: Media coverage of the 2016 campaign was a disaster. Now’s the last chance to get 2020 right, Margaret Sullivan, right, July 27, 2020 (print ed.). How did the news media mess up in the 100 days leading up to the 2016 presidential election? Let me count the ways.

Journalists relied too much on what opinion polls were saying and often presented a skewed interpretation of their meaning. That fed the sense that Hillary Clinton would be the inevitable winner.

They vastly overplayed the Clinton email story, particularly the “reopened investigation” aspect in October. Given Donald Trump’s background and behavior, the emphasis was astonishingly out of whack with reality.

News organizations failed to understand the tear-it-all-down mood of large segments of the voting public, or the racism and sexism that often fueled it.

July 26

Washington Post, Sinclair stations delay airing interview with ‘Plandemic’ researcher amid backlash, Meryl Kornfield, After facing intense scrutiny for planning to air a baseless conspiracy theory that infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci helped to create the coronavirus, conservative TV broadcaster Sinclair Broadcast Group announced Saturday that it will delay the segment to edit the context of the claims.

Sinclair, which has 191 stations across the country, received backlash this week after “America This Week” host Eric Bolling interviewed Judy Mikovits, a former medical researcher featured in the debunked “Plandemic” conspiracy online film.

In the Sinclair interview, Mikovits claimed that Fauci “manufactured” the coronavirus and shipped it to Wuhan, China, where the outbreak originated. A chyron during the segment reads, “DID DR. FAUCI CREATE COVID-19?”

Mikovits and her lawyer Larry Klayman dropped other unfounded allegations during the show, including President Trump soft-pedaling relations with China because he has evidence of the country’s involvement with the inception of the virus.

The show was released online earlier this week before it was to be aired on local news channels. The segment was first reported by Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog. As of Saturday afternoon, the show was pulled from Sinclair websites.

Bolling, a former Fox News personality, did not challenge Mikovits’s assertions, calling what she said a “hefty claim.” He later told The Washington Post via text that he brought Fox News medical contributor Nicole Saphier on the show after to provide an He later told The Washington Post via text that he brought Fox News medical contributor Nicole Saphier on the show after to opposing viewpoint.

Saphier said during her interview that it was “highly unlikely” Fauci was responsible for the coronavirus.

Fauci, right, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has come under heavy criticism by some conservatives as he has stated positions opposite of the president over the virus and measures needed to contain its spread. Trump, while at times praising the doctor, also has been critical at times.

A Sinclair spokesperson did not respond to requests from The Post for comment, but the company issued a statement saying that it is not “aligning with or endorsing the viewpoints” aired in the segment, but adding that it is “a supporter of free speech and a marketplace of ideas and viewpoints, even if incredibly controversial.”

“We will spend the coming days bringing together other viewpoints and provide additional context,” the company later shared. “All stations have been notified not to air this and will instead be re-airing last week’s episode in its place.”

We hear your feedback regarding a segment on this week's "America This Week." At no juncture are we aligning with or endorsing the viewpoints of Dr. Mikovitz or Mr. Klayman or endorsing the "Plandemic" documentary. Full stop.

— Sinclair Broadcast Group (@WeAreSinclair) July 25, 2020

Based in Maryland, Sinclair owns and operates local news stations across the country and has endured criticism for its anchors parroting Trump’s remarks.

“As a propaganda machine, Sinclair is far more dangerous than OANN,” New York University professor Jay Rosen tweeted following the news of the interview with Mikovits. “Although it’s emerging a little more as itself lately, it is still for the most part a stealth network that operates through local 'community’ stations that present to the viewer as ABC CBS NBC & Fox affiliates.”

Mikovits did not respond to a request for comment but previously told The Post that her troubles stem from a cabal aimed at dismantling her career.

Virus Victims, Responses

New York Times, Coronavirus Live Updates: U.S. Nears National Peak as 18 States Set Single-Day Records, Staff reports, July 26, 2020 (print ed.). Friday was the fourth day running that the United States reported over 1,100 deaths. Pirate attacks are among the crime patterns shifting in the pandemic. New research sheds light on male vulnerability to severe Covid-19. South Carolina announced 80 new deaths on Saturday, a single-day record.

California. South Carolina. North Dakota, Kentucky. Hawaii. Those are among the 18 states that set single-day case records in the last week, putting the country on track to breaking a national single-day record for new coronavirus cases set less than two weeks ago.

More than 73,500 cases were reported on Friday, according to a New York Times database, approaching the country’s record of 75,697 cases, set on July 16. Since June 24, the seven-day average has more than doubled, to more than 66,100 on Friday from 31,402.

California's San Quentin prison (Aerial view by ABC-TV 7, San Francisco).

California's San Quentin prison (Aerial view by ABC-TV 7, San Francisco).

Washington Post, Guest Opinion: Inside San Quentin prison, you sit and wait until covid-19 comes for you, Joe Garcia, July 26, 2020 (print ed.). Joe Garcia is incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison, where he is a staff member of the San Quentin News and an editorial liaison for the Prison Journalism Project.

As a working prison journalist, I wanted to keep my eyes and ears wide-open. I wanted to detail everything going on around me as covid-19 raged out of control here. But a fog crept through me. Was it just a cold, a sinus infection, influenza — all things I’ve battled before? I woke to strange chills in the night; there was an acrid aftertaste along the back of my tongue. Maybe I just needed to pull out a blanket.

Is this what covid-19 feels like? My temperature had been normal every day. My breathing remained strong and clear. I wanted to believe that meant I was fine.

On June 22 and 23, everyone in my building, San Quentin’s North Block, lined up for covid-19 testing. I had just begun to feel weirdly awful. I overheard other guys describing the same things I was feeling. None of us wanted to alert the medical staff. So, you admit you’re sick? Well, let’s remove you from the few familiar comforts you have and throw you in an empty cell for a 14-day quarantine. That’s the protocol we all feared worse than covid-19.

Eventually, I did receive a notice informing me that I’d tested positive for covid-19 — one more number in a group that has now passed 2,000. Fifteen San Quentin inmates have died.

July 25

HuffPost, Sinclair To Push Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory Via Massive Local News Network: Reports, Sara Boboltz, July 25, 2020. The conservative company owns a huge swath of the local news market in the U.S.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the local news behemoth that runs nearly 200 stations across the country, is reportedly set to promote a baseless and inflammatory conspiracy theory about the origin of the coronavirus on some of its channels.

Eric Bolling, a former Fox News host who now hosts a program for Sinclair called “America This Week,” spent several minutes on his latest show interviewing Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who is a central character in the conspiracy film “Plandemic,” Media Matters was first to report.

The episode was streamed online this week and is expected to air over an unknown number of Sinclair’s stations this weekend, according to Media Matters and CNN Business.

“Plandemic” is a 26-minute concoction that argues America’s top doctors ― particularly Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force and the nation’s leading expert on infectious disease ― cannot be trusted to provide information on the crisis.

The film was banned from Facebook and YouTube when it started gaining traction earlier this year for providing false information on COVID-19.

Now, key elements of the conspiracy theory will be shown across Sinclair’s vast network of stations, which cover roughly 40% of the American market.

It’s not the first time the company’s conservative leadership has sought to use its platform to push unsubstantiated right-wing theories. In 2018, Sinclair instructed anchors to recite a “must-run” segment decrying the “troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”

Mikovits told Bolling that she believes Fauci “manufactured the coronaviruses in monkey cell lines” and shipped them to Wuhan, China, where the illness was first detected.

Contrary to her claims, scientists believe the virus has a natural origin, having evolved to infect humans from bats by way of some unknown intermediary animal. Because Wuhan’s live animal markets bring together animals that would not otherwise normally mix, they provide the perfect environment for such a virus to emerge in the human population. The genetic makeup of the novel coronavirus is also not similar enough to any known human pathogen to have originated in a lab.

Mikovits is a known figure in the anti-vaccine movement whose body of work includes a study on chronic fatigue syndrome that was roundly criticized in the scientific community and abruptly retracted in 2011. She has since attempted to position herself as a victim whose work has been continually suppressed by “Big Pharma.”

July 23

Media Matters for America, Criticism/Advocacy: Sinclair gives “Plandemic" conspiracy theorists a platform to spread their lies about Dr. Fauci and the coronavirus, John Whitehouse on coverage by Zachary Pleat with research from Alex Kaplan and Pam Vogel, July 23, 2020.

For years, Media Matters has covered the right-wing propaganda that Sinclair Broadcasting puts on local television channels across the country. The instance this week may have been the worst example yet.

larry klayman resized eric bolling judy mikovits sinclair pandemic The latest example of Sinclair's "America This Week" features host Eric Bolling, shown at center in adjoining photo, interviewing Judy Mikovits, right, of the conspiracy theory video Plandemic and her attorney Larry Klayman, left, about their plans to sue Dr. Anthony Fauci. Bolling introduced the prerecorded interview by referring to Mikotivs as “an expert in virology” who previously “worked with Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

As Zach Pleat meticulously documented, Mikovits may be the most prominent COVID-19 conspiracy theorist in the country. She gained notoriety after she made multiple false and misleading claims about the coronavirus and public health in Plandemic. The viral video featured various lies, including about vaccines and the COVID-19 death count. She also reportedly made false claims about Fauci in the video, and defended a bogus bleach product as a treatment for the disease. YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms all removed Plandemic for violations of their terms of service.

Bolling didn't mention any of that, instead allowing them to peddle conspiracy theories, like accusing Fauci of having "manufactured the coronaviruses" and shipped them to Wuhan, China. (This, obviously, did not happen.)

When the interview was over, Bolling brought on a Fox News medical contributor to react. During that portion of the show, Bolling hypothesized -- again without evidence -- that China “accelerated the virus” while researching a vaccine and “it somehow leaked out of a laboratory.” Experts have long established that the novel coronavirus was not made in a lab and there is no evidence that it leaked from one.

Media Matters reported about this segment on Thursday. After outrage grew, Sinclair finally responded on Saturday, announcing first that it supported free speech even if it was "controversial."

Hours later, the company issued a statement that it would ask local stations to delaying airing this episode. This was too late. We already found that the segment aired on at least one local Sinclair station in West Virginia, and possibly more.

Sinclair has pushed far-right propaganda for years, and Bolling made his mark at Fox where he pushed birtherism and other conspiracy theories, before leaving Fox for Sinclair after allegedly sending explicit pictures to multiple colleagues. The only difference now is how many people might risk getting sick and even die because of them.

An aerial view of the California Institution for Women, right (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation).

Washington Post, Inmates witnessed a suicide attempt. They received coloring pages instead of counseling, Eileen Guo, July 26, 2020. Inmates at the California Institution for Women try to cope with the mental toll of the coronavirus.

On a morning in mid-May, Anna "C.J." Rugg, a 38-year-old transgender man who had tested positive for the coronavirus at the California Institution for Women, set his room in the medical isolation unit on fire.

"I made my room an inferno," he told The Washington Post by JPay, the inmate emailing system, and "laid down on the floor and waited for the smoke to get me."

Rugg had serious health issues and struggled with acceptance since coming out in prison as transgender, but it was the extra stresses of covid-19 measures that pushed him over the edge. “This lockdown is too much,” he wrote to Arlene Veronesi, a close friend and former cellmate. “I lost it. Don’t hate me.”

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, incarcerated individuals in California’s 35 state prisons faced poor mental health care. The situation is especially dire for the rapidly increasing number of female prisoners, who make up 4 percent of the state’s incarcerated population but 11 percent of suicides, according to 2016 figures. Seven women committed suicide between 2013 and 2016 at the California Institution for Women, a 1398-bed prison currently housing close to 1500 women; in 2018, a woman experiencing a psychotic episode waited hours for care, ripping out and swallowing her own eye before receiving treatment.

Multiple state audits of the prison have found slow response rates to mental health incidents as a major factor in suicides. A class-action lawsuit filed in 1990, on behalf of all of California’s incarcerated individuals receiving mental health services, is ongoing.

The pandemic has exacerbated the lack of mental health care at CIW. Inmates have refused tests, temperature checks and other measures meant to contain the virus’s spread to avoid being put in isolation, and four women have attempted suicide while in quarantine or isolation for the coronavirus. “Rather than treat[ing] their mental health,” the pandemic has shifted the entire correctional health care system’s priority to “basically just trying to keep people alive,” said Michael Bien, lead counsel in the class-action lawsuit.

When CIW’s first positive coronavirus test came back on April 6, correctional officials quarantined women to their own cells if they might have been exposed. Prison officials put whole housing units into lockdown and moved positive patients into separate medical isolation units.

But a number of inmates say that CIW staff never told them what was happening.

On the same day as the first positive test at CIW, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) issued guidance requiring all staff to wear face masks. It was “our first time seeing any staff in a mask,” Rianne Theriaultodom, an incarcerated woman who was in the medical isolation unit with Rugg, told The Post via JPay. This left the women “confused and terrified” about the disease’s progression in their facility.

Washington Post, Trump’s chief economic adviser says federal eviction ban will be extended, Meryl Kornfield and Marisa Iati, July 26, 2020.

July 22

Washington Post, NPR may be ‘public’ radio, but it’s feeling the economic pain of the pandemic. More trouble lies ahead, Paul Farhi, July 22, 2020 (print ed.). NPR reporter Kelsey Snell would normally have spent last week covering Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell as the congressional correspondent for “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” But it wasn’t a normal week for Snell or anyone else at NPR.

Instead, she was out of work — one of dozens in NPR’s 520-person Washington newsroom who are going on unpaid week-long furloughs at some point during this shutdown summer, under a cost-saving agreement between NPR’s management and its newsroom.

“Please support your local public radio station!” she tweeted before ducking out for the week.

For decades, the P in NPR stood for “public,” as in publicly supported, noncommercial radio and digital news. Yet with its growing dependence on corporate advertising, NPR has found itself on equally troubled footing as its for-profit competitors, all of them reliant on the same pool of advertising dollars that have dried up during the coronavirus pandemic.

A sharp downturn in “underwriting” — public broadcasting’s euphemism for its tasteful style of advertising — prompted NPR to adopt a package of pay cuts, furloughs and other concessions in April. Yet NPR will still show a deficit of about $10 million when its fiscal year closes in September, its widest in years, chief executive John Lansing said in an interview.

The new year starting in October figures to be even tougher. Without another round of givebacks, Lansing is projecting a deficit of $30 million to $43 million — by far the largest in NPR’s 50-year history.

djt michael cohen

Washington Post, Michael Cohen’s book to allege Trump made racist comments about Obama and Nelson Mandela, lawsuit says, Shayna Jacobs, July 22, 2020 (print ed.). The book manuscript being drafted by President Trump's ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, above left, alleges that Trump has made racist comments about his predecessor Barack Obama and the late South African leader Nelson nelson mandela 2008 w Mandela (shown at right in 2008), according to court filings made public Monday night that contend Cohen was sent back to prison this month as retaliation.

The filings from Cohen’s attorneys seek his immediate release from federal custody following his rearrest July 9, less than two months after he was allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence on home confinement because of the coronavirus pandemic.

His lawsuit alleges that Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was detained at the federal courthouse in Manhattan during a meeting with probation officers, who had asked him to sign a gag order prohibiting him from speaking to the media or publishing a book while serving the rest of his sentence.

July 20

Former Fox News Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry, left, and Fox prime time stars Tucker Carlson, center, and Sean Hannity (Fox News screenshots).

Former Fox News Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry, left, and Fox prime time stars Tucker Carlson, center, and Sean Hannity (Fox News screenshots).

Washington Post, Opinion: Fox News faces allegations of sexual harassment, rape, Erik Wemple, July 20, 2020. For the past few years, Fox News has kept telling us that it learned its lesson: The culture of sexual harassment that started with longtime chief Roger Ailes and extended to disgraced former anchor Bill O’Reilly and others had been addressed. New, accountable lines of authority were drawn up; a new HR apparatus was in place; a so-called Workplace Professionalism and Inclusion Council (WPIC) sprung into action.

Has it all done any good? Not according to a fresh lawsuit brimming with horrific allegations.

cathy areu left jennifer eckhart On Monday, former Fox Business associate producer Jennifer Eckhart, shown at right in the adjoining photo, and former Fox News guest Cathy Areu, at left, brought a complaint against the network claiming yet more misconduct that key executives allegedly failed to thwart. The complaint, filed by Douglas Wigdor and Michael Willemin of Wigdor LLP, includes misconduct allegations directed at former host Ed Henry, prime-time mainstays Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity (portrayed above) and media correspondent/host Howard Kurtz.

The most disturbing allegations relate to Henry, a former Fox News host and correspondent who had a stormy tenure at the network. Henry was suspended for roughly four months in 2016 after carrying on an extramarital relationship with a Las Vegas hostess on company time. He returned to work and again climbed the hierarchy, becoming a co-host of the morning program “America’s Newsroom.”

Earlier this month, however, Fox News announced it had fired Henry over sexual misconduct allegations the network received on June 25. “Based on investigative findings, Ed has been terminated,” said top Fox News officials in a memo to colleagues. The conduct in question took place “years ago,” said the memo. At the time, Wigdor told the media that the firm wasn’t in a position to “share any further information.”

Now the other shoe has dropped. The complaint is detailed and not suitable for republication in a family newspaper such as this one.

Ed Henry, former Fox chief white house correspondent It begins with a caution in red ink: “TRIGGER WARNING: THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS HIGHLY GRAPHIC INFORMATION OF A SEXUAL NATURE, INCLUDING SEXUAL ASSAULT.” It then alleges that Henry “preyed upon, manipulated and groomed Ms. Eckhart starting at the young age of 24, by exerting his abuse of power over her and her career. Mr. Henry not only leveraged this imbalance of power for control over his victim, Ms. Eckhart, but asked her to be his ‘sex slave’ and his ‘little whore,’ and threatened punishment and retaliation if Ms. Eckhart did not comply with his sexual demands.”

According to the document, Henry raped Eckhart at a hotel where the network puts up visiting employees. Eckhart was “helpless and restrained in metal handcuffs, as Mr. Henry preformed sadistic acts on her without her consent that left her injured, bruised and battered with bloody wrists.”

Included in the complaint are alleged text messages between Henry and Eckhart — messages that “establish Mr. Henry’s delusions and prove his violence,” according to the complaint. “Gona make you my little whore again,” reads one of them. Fox has denied allegations against others accused.

CBS News interview with plaintiffs Jennifer Eckhart and Cathy Areu here.

July 17

Washington Post, Analysis: Twitter just proved it can’t keep the accounts of global leaders safe, Cat Zakrzewski, July 17, 2020 (print ed.). The massive Twitter breach yesterday wasn't just disruptive. It was a sobering reminder that even the most powerful social networks are vulnerable to attacks.

The hack impacted everyone from Joe Biden to Elon Musk, raising new concerns about Twitter’s ability to keep global leaders’ accounts safe. It's sure to have wide-ranging implications for the service that has become a core communication channel in American society, disseminating everything from President Trump's rockets to corporate news.

“The problem is that we all rely on Twitter as this public space that is safe and secure, and we know that the tweets that someone like a Joe Biden is sending out are authentic,” Harper Reed, an entrepreneur who served as the 2012 Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, told me. “Twitter has proven to us that may not be true.”

Accounts belonging to prominent billionaires and politicians began posting similar messages yesterday afternoon asking for money to be sent to cryptocurrency accounts, Rachel Lerman, Joseph Marks and I reported. The messages received thousands of likes before they were taken off Twitter, and in some instances, they were posted again from the same account.

New York Times, Opinion: Do Progressives Have a Free Speech Problem? Michelle Goldberg, July 17, 2020 (print ed.). The illiberal left is a lot less threatening than the right. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

An acquaintance came to me a few weeks ago with the rough draft of a letter about free speech and asked me to sign. I declined, in part because it denounced “cancel culture.” As I wrote in an email, the phrase “‘cancel culture,’ while it describes something real, has been rendered sort of useless because it’s so often used by right-wing whiners like Ivanka Trump who think protests against them violate their free speech.”

A little later my acquaintance came back to me with a new version, which didn’t mention “cancel culture.” Like the people who wrote the letter, I think left-wing illiberalism is a problem, though I’ve mostly stopped writing about it since Donald Trump was elected, because it seems like complaining about a bee sting when you have Stage IV cancer.

So I signed. The statement, published in Harper’s Magazine as “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” spawned takes and countertakes, most of them, despite my modest effort, about “cancel culture.” nefit enormously from a vaccine, they remain distrustful of a medical establishment with a history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis study and surgical experiments on enslaved people — not to mention the ongoing disparities they confront in the U.S. health-care system.

Daily Beast, Fox News Staffers Erupt Over Network’s Racism: Bosses ‘Created a White Supremacist Cell,’ Lachlan Cartwright, Lloyd Grove, Andrew Kirell, Noah Shachtman, Justin Baragona, July 17, 2020. A heated early-June phone call between Fox execs and Black staffers was just the beginning of an internal revolt against racism at the network, insiders told The Daily Beast.

Four days after Fox News aired a particularly tone-deaf graphic connecting the killings of Black men—including George Floyd and Martin Luther King Jr.—to stock market gains, many of the network’s Black staffers took part in a phone call with company brass to confront Fox’s increasingly racist and hostile rhetoric towards the protests against police brutality.

It did not go well.

The call on June 9 lasted more than 90 minutes and included Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, President Jay Wallace, and HR chief Kevin Lord, people familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. It was led by Scott, who is white, and Marsheila J. Hayes, the vice president of diversity and inclusion at Fox Corporation, who is Black.

It was almost immediately rife with tension. One staffer directly asked why Bret Baier—the anchor of the network’s key weekday news broadcast, Special Report, which aired the offensive graphic—was not on the call, nor any other white on-air talent. (Baier had previously apologized for the “major screw-up,” noting that, because the show bears his name, “the buck stops with me.” Fox News also apologized for the “insensitivity” of the infographic, adding that it “should have never aired on television without full context.”)

Other participants on the call expressed anger and distress about rampant racism at Fox, both on- and off-air.

July 16

Washington Post, Analysis: Twitter just proved it can’t keep the accounts of global leaders safe, Cat Zakrzewski, July 16, 2020. The massive Twitter breach yesterday wasn't just disruptive. It was a sobering reminder that even the most powerful social networks are vulnerable to attacks.

Washington Post, Twitter hack hits prominent accounts, July 16, 2020.

Washington Post, Apple wins victory against E.U. as court rules it does not have to pay $14.8 billion in back taxes, Michael Birnbaum, July 16, 2020 (print ed.). An appeals court crimped the European Union’s aggressive antitrust enforcement effort against the tech giant.

Mediaite, Photographer Catches Topics in Kayleigh McEnany’s Briefing Binder: Obama, Hate, Golf, Mueller, Lies, LGBT and More, Reed Richardson, July 16, 2020. A Reuters photograph of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s vast briefing binder offered a peek behind the curtain of the Trump administration’s messaging priorities.

Taken from the side of the White House briefing room podium, the photograph catches McEnany, right, opening the book, exposing dozens of alphabetized tabs with short category names. During her tenure, McEnany has developed a reputation for flipping open her briefing book after a particularly confrontational question and reading verbatim from pre-written responses, which often included canned attacks on the press or praise from allies.

In the photo ta kayleigh mcenany white house file Custom ken at Thursday’s White House briefing, McEnany’s tabs include a number evergreen topics, but several recent ones as well. “Covid” and “Test” as well as “PPE,” “Masks,” “CDC,” and “Cases” suggest a healthy amount of prepared remarks on the raging pandemic. But also included in the binder were more ephemeral topics, like “Goya” about the controversy over the Trump-led counter-backlash to a liberal boycott of the food company, “Mary” which, presumably, refers to the president’s niece and her damning tell-all book, and “Hogan,” which likely alluded to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s scathing Washington Post essay condemning Trump’s pandemic response. Also included were notable files on former President Barack “Obama,” as well as subjects used to frequently criticize Trump like “Golf,” “Russia,” “Hate,” and a misspelled “Meuller.”

But many of the tabs spoke to this White House’s favorite boogeymen, with categories such as “Media,” “Lies,” “China,” “BLM,” “Privil” suggesting white privilege, and one simply labeled “Absurd.” “Statues” was also included as was “LGBT.” Notably, one tab was labeled “Karl,” which might be an oppo brief against ABC News White House correspondent Jon Karl, who has frequently clashed with Trump at press conferences.

Finally, in what appeared to be the last tab, at the bottom of the book, was one labeled “Wins.”

Mediaite, ‘They’re All Cowards’: Spurs Coach Popovich Shreds Texas Leaders Over Pandemic Response, Says Team is Safer in Florida, Sarah Rumpf, July 16, 2020. ‘They’re All Cowards’: Spurs Coach Popovich Shreds Texas Leaders Over Pandemic Response, Says Team is Safer in Florida.

Gregg Popovich is well known for not doing two things: losing games and holding his tongue. The outspoken San Antonio Spurs head coach lived up to his reputation during a media session Thursday, calling out Texas state leaders as “cowards” for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic and saying that he feels that his team is safer in Florida.

The Spurs, like other NBA teams, are currently in what the league has deemed the “bubble” in Orlando, Florida, quarantined to their hotel rooms, gyms, and courts, and practicing for an upcoming end to the 2019–20 season, like none other in history.

Coronavirus cases have been spiking in a number of areas around the country, including both the Spurs’ home state of Texas, and Florida where they are now. A reporter for a San Antonio CBS-TV station asked Popovich what he thought about those outbreaks, and he responded by calling the bubble “one of the safest places you could be.”

Wearing a black t-shirt that said in all-capital letters “VOTE: YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT,” Popovich turned his comments to the situation in Texas.

“We’ve been all over the map in Texas,” he said. “Nobody knows what the hell’s going on. You know, we have a lieutenant governor [Dan Patrick] who’s decided he doesn’t want to listen to [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and those people anymore.”

“Well, that makes a lot of sense,” Popovich added, the sarcastic tone clear in his voice. “Come on. How safe can that be?”

Popovich called the messaging coming from state leaders “ridiculous,” and turned his criticism towards Gov. Greg Abbott.

Mediaite, WATCH: Mary Trump Claims ‘Virulently Racist’ Donald Trump Has Used N-Word, Anti-Semitic Slurs, KJ Edelman, July 16, 2020. Mary Trump claimed that she has heard her uncle, President Donald Trump, use the N-word and anti-Semitic slurs in a new interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Thursday night. A preview clip of the interview aired on the Thursday evening edition of NBC Nightly News.

“I have to press you on it a little bit just to ask if the president, if your uncle, was an exception to that in your family or if he — if you heard — you ever heard him express either his anti-Semitic slurs or other sentiments like that,” Maddow asked the president’s niece, who is on a book tour for her tell-all Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. “Or do you mean this was an ambient thing in your family but you can’t say you ever heard it from him or did you hear it from him, too?”

“Oh yeah, of course I did,” Mary said. “And I don’t think that should surprise anybody, given how virulently racist he is today.” Maddow then had Trump specifically confirm one-by-one that she had heard her uncle use both the N-word and anti-Semitic slurs.

The 55-year-old psychologist started her press tour for her book this week after a judge ruled that she was allowed to speak freely about it. In its first day, the book sold almost 1 million copies.

In excerpts from her book, she has accused Trump of cheating on his SATs, detailed how he was humiliated and “destroyed” by his father, and explain how Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, mocked her brother for running in the 2016 election and for only going to church for PR purposes.

In Mary’s first interview with ABC News on Tuesday, she said she initially supported him but now wants him to resign. She also said he’s “utterly incapable of leading” and needed to “stop this” and “make up” for not acting sooner.

July 15

Washington Post, The conservative alternative to Twitter wants to be a place for free speech for all. It turns out, rules still apply, Rachel Lerman,July 15, 2020. A crackdown by Twitter and Facebook against messages from President Trump that the companies said violate their policies is fueling Parler’s rise. But the site is quickly discovering the limits of free expression.

July 14

Washington Post, Analysis: 'A lot of uncertainty’: Staffers at renowned McClatchy newspapers mull bankruptcy sale, Paul Farhi, July 14, 2020. America’s newest newspaper baron is a hedge fund whose co-founder and chief executive has ties to President Trump’s most tabloid-worthy stories and whose publishing assets include the National Enquirer.

Chatham Asset Management, the winner of a bankruptcy court auction for the McClatchy Co., will take over a continent-spanning chain of 30 prominent daily newspapers, including the Miami Herald, the Sacramento Bee and the Charlotte Observer.

The agreement, still subject to final court approval, will elevate Chatham and its chief executive, Anthony Melchiorre, to major-player status in an industry that faced existential challenges even before the coronavirus pandemic pulverized many news organizations. Like its peers, McClatchy has been desiccated after years of deserting advertisers, disappearing readers and evaporating profit.

Chatham has announced few specific plans for McClatchy, to which it has loaned money for more than a decade. But its emergence as the company’s controlling shareholder has sparked a new round of hope and anxiety in McClatchy’s weary newsrooms.

“We don’t know what they’re up to, and that’s an ominous feeling,” said Mary Ellen Klas, the Miami Herald’s Tallahassee bureau chief, on Monday, a day after the sale. “We fear that they’re efficiency experts, not journalists, and that’s a daunting prospect if you care about reporting the news. There’s a lot of uncertainty.”

By Klas’s count, the Herald now has about 130 journalists left, down from about 400 when McClatchy acquired the newspaper in 2006 in its ill-starred takeover of the Knight Ridder chain for $4.5 billion.

“We’ve been cut to the bone,” said Klas’s colleague, investigative reporter Julie K. Brown. “I am hopeful that they understand that to be profitable, you need good journalism. That means you need people. Investigative reporting is grueling and expensive. You have to invest in it.” Brown’s articles on the victims of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in late 2018 helped revive interest in the case and led to his arrest.

McClatchy, hobbled by debt and pension obligations, filed for Chapter 11 protection in February. Under a restructuring plan submitted to a bankruptcy court in New York, Chatham — its largest investor outside of the McClatchy family and biggest debt-holder — will emerge as the sole owner and take the company private. The companies did not put a price on the deal announced Sunday, but in an earlier filing, Chatham offered roughly $300 million in a combination of restructured debt and at least $30 million in cash.

The shedding of much of McClatchy’s debt through bankruptcy court gives Chatham some financial breathing room, said Rick Edmonds, a media-business analyst at the Poynter Institute. It’s possible, he said, that Melchiorre could sell some McClatchy titles to raise money or that he would consider merging the company with another chain owner to cut costs further.

Chatham — named by Melchiorre after the suburban New Jersey township where the firm is based — is among a group of private-equity firms that have emerged in the past decade as the newly dominant players in the newspaper business. Its peers include Alden Global Capital, Fortress Investment Group and Apollo Global Management. Fortress and Apollo control the largest publisher, Gannett Co., which owns USA Today and 250 other dailies; Alden owns Digital First Media, which publishes some 50 papers, including the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News.

Heath Freeman is the hedge fund guy who says he wants to save local news. Somehow, no one’s buying it.

Though newspapers have been declining for years, these investors have wrung profits from them through severe cost-cutting measures, including layoffs and the sale of assets such as the papers’ headquarters buildings. The strategy, sometimes derided as “vulture capitalism,” has gradually weakened newspapers but has been financially lucrative.

Melchiorre, 52, is a former Wall Street junk-bond trader who co-founded Chatham in 2003. Chatham became involved in publishing through its 2014 acquisition of American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer. It later acquired a Canadian company, Postmedia, which owns the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and the Montreal Gazette.

Enquirer publisher David Pecker and AMI admitted in 2018 that they had funneled $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal in 2016 to suppress her story of a 10-month affair with Trump, starting in 2006, to help his presidential election prospects. The admission about the tactic — known as “catch and kill” — came as part of a non-prosecution agreement with the Justice Department; in exchange, Pecker and AMI agreed to cooperate with an investigation.

Melchiorre and his wife were guests at the White House in July 2017 for a dinner with Trump that was arranged by Pecker, according to “The Fixers,” a book by Wall Street Journal reporters Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld that detailed AMI’s catch-and-kill methods. The dinner included Kacy Grine, a French businessman and adviser to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and Dylan Howard, then the editorial director of AMI.

AMI went on to produce a glossy magazine that praised Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, an unusual subject choice for a company known for its supermarket tabloids. The CIA later concluded that Salman approved the killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist who wrote for The Washington Post.

Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos, who owns The Post, has also suggested that Salman’s intelligence services were behind the hacking of his cellphone around the time the Enquirer published a story exposing his extramarital affair last year. Bezos said Howard used the intimate photos to try to blackmail him into making statements supportive of AMI; instead, Bezos made the allegations public.

Months later, the scandal-weary Chatham ordered AMI to sell the National Enquirer. Though it was soon announced that Hudson News, owner of a chain of airport newsstands, had made a winning offer to buy the tabloid, more than a year later the deal has apparently not been finalized.

Chatham in a statement said that it was “pleased with the outcome of the auction” for McClatchy and that it was “committed to preserving newsroom jobs and independent journalism that serve and inform local communities during this important time.”

The mayors of Miami-Dade County, Fla., Kansas City, Mo., Raleigh, N.C., and Lexington, Ky., all wrote to the bankruptcy court judge asking that he approve a sale to a responsible steward of journalism.

“Our community needs a strong daily paper that is locally rooted and locally invested in our community, motivated by the desire to serve the broader public interest and not the narrow bottom line,” Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin wrote. “Please consider paths for each of the local McClatchy papers that will help sustain and support strong, independent journalism.”

Washington Post, Fact Checker Analysis: Trump ad falsely suggests Biden supports defunding police, Glenn Kessler, July 14, 2020. The Trump campaign is spending big money to promote a Four-Pinocchio ad with a false narrative.

“Joe Biden’s supporters are fighting to defund police departments. Violent crime has exploded. You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

— Text of a Trump campaign ad, “Abolished,” over images of violence and a recording of a police answering machine, released July 2, 2020.

The Trump campaign has a problem. Former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has firmly rejected calls from left-wing activists to “defund police.” But clearly the Trump campaign wants to tag him with the somewhat confusing slogan. So it produced an ad that slickly tries to get around this uncomfortable fact.

The Trump campaign must think the effort is a winner. Ben Taber, an account manager at Advertising Analytics, says that as of July 13, the Trump campaign had spent $6.7 million placing the ad on network television and on local stations in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada, Iowa, New Mexico and Michigan.

Washington Post, Lincoln Project video editor is out over crude tweets about female anatomy, Amanda Becker, July 14, 2020. A video editor who shaped the buzzy Lincoln Project ads needling President Trump is no longer affiliated with the Republican organization over a series of past tweets in which he used offensive slang for female anatomy to insult political rivals.

Ben Howe, who came of age politically making anti-Obama ads during the rise of the tea party, did not publicly tout his work for the super PAC formed by a group of high-level Republican operatives who have broken ranks with the party over Trump’s presidency until a recent interview with Vanity Fair. He was described in the article as “the creative mind, video editor, and, he said, sometimes narrating voice on many of the group’s ads.”

The 19th, a nonprofit news outlet, had emailed the Lincoln Project about a series of Twitter posts made by Howe in the years after Trump’s election that deployed female anatomy as an insult, calling rivals a “vagina” or “twat,” or in some instances using a more profane term.

“Based on these unacceptable and offensive posts, and those that came to light last week, Ben Howe is no longer affiliated with the Lincoln Project, effective immediately,” Keith Edwards, the group’s spokesman, said in a statement.

Last week, the Daily Dot resurfaced tweets from Howe that defended Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. They were published by Talking Points Memo shortly after they were made in 2014 and have since been deleted.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Ivanka Trump just made a total mess for herself, Bill Palmer, July 14, 2020. By the time Tuesday night rolled around, Ivanka Trump had already thoroughly embarrassed ivanka trump goya pose resized july 14 2020 herself by rolling out a “Find Something New” campaign which encouraged unemployed Americans to simply find a new career by magic wand or something. The Trumps never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, so Ivanka found a way to humiliate herself even further.

Ivanka Trump posted this tweet – and yes, it’s real:

Ivanka Trump
@IvankaTrump

If it’s Goya, it has to be good.
Si es Goya, tiene que ser bueno.

That’s right, Ivanka Trump is now doing straight up product placement, like something out of The Price Is Right, to try to reward a brand that’s facing widespread boycotts because its CEO came out in support of a sinking Donald Trump. The thing is, Ivanka just stepped in it. This idiotic photo of her will be thrown back in her face for as long as she’s in the public eye.

nsa headquarters strategic culture foundation

Headquarters of the National Security Agency in Maryland.

The Corbett Report via YouTube, Conspiracy Theorists Are Wrong!!! . . . Even When They're Right! James Corbett, right, July 14, 2020 (13:34 min. video). The host reviews;Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, a new book by Pulitzer-winning Washington Post national security reporter Barton Gellman.

Corbett found remarkable the book's description of the FIRSTFRUITS scoop in 2005 by independent journalist Wayne Madsen' about an operation at the National Security Agency (NSA), where Madsen had worked for a year many years previous on detail from his work as a Navy intelligence officer.

In 2005, Madsen, below left, reported based on sources that an operation codenamed FIRSTFRUITS was targeting journalists and their sources, an undertaking at odds with the historic and supposed ban at NSA on spying on Americans.

Madsen's revelations were ignored by other journalists but were confirmed nearly a decade later in mainstream media accounts, including those based on the 2013 revelations of former NSA and CIA analyst Edward Snowden. Gellman was awarded a Pulitzer along with two others, Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian and independent filmmaker Laura Poitras, based on their reporting of Snowden's revelations.

Corbett writes that Gellman unwittingly reveals in his account his own deep biases in favor of establishment theories and sources.

"Then came the day," Corbett quotes Gellman as writing, "I found my name in the Snowden archives" as well as verifacation that the NSA had a database called FIRSTFRUITS focused on journalists, as Madsen had reported, and located in the NSA's Denial and Deception unit within the agency's Signals Intelligence Unit.

Washington Post, New York Times shreds Trump campaign lawsuit over Russia op-ed, Erik Wemple, July 14, 2020 (print ed.). The Times filed a motion Thursday to dismiss a complaint the Trump campaign filed in February over an opinion piece the newspaper published in 2019 by former executive editor Max Frankel. Coming just after Attorney General William P. Barr’s faulty summary of the Mueller report, Frankel argued that while there may not have been criminal cooperation/collusion/conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians, there was a more ambient “overarching deal."

The complaint, filed in New York State Supreme Court and drafted by attorney Charles Harder, rests on a disingenuous reading of the Frankel column as a literal assertion of conspiracy that was refuted by the Mueller report. In fact, the column made no such case, as is clear from the headline and the very first paragraph. The lawsuit is a time-wasting joke, as the Erik Wemple Blog outlined at the time.

There’s more to the story, though. In its motion to dismiss, the Times argues that Frankel’s article is straight-up opinion and not a statement of fact. That distinction is central to the paper’s defense, since “[o]nly false statements can be grounds for a libel action,” as the motion states. To boost its argument in this regard, the newspaper made reference to a case the New York State Supreme Court decided a few years ago: Cheri Jacobus v. Donald J. Trump, Corey Lewandowski, and Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.

New York Times, Radio Host Loses Her Show Over English-Only Rant, Derrick Bryson Taylor and Allyson Waller, July 14, 2020. A New Hampshire radio station has severed ties with a conservative radio host who berated landscape workers for speaking Spanish in a widely shared video.

The host, Dianna Ploss, “is no longer associated or affiliated in any way with WSMN or Bartis-Russell Broadcasting LLC,” WSMN Broadcasting said in a statement on Sunday. “We at WSMN value freedom of speech, freedom of expression and assembly. We will not tolerate discrimination, racism or hatred.”

The station added that it would continue to present on-air opportunities for “discussion, education and the exchange of opinions and ideas.”

Ms. Ploss, who hosted “The Dianna Ploss Show,” recorded herself on Friday confronting several employees of Morin’s Landscaping as they were setting up potted trees on Main Street in Nashua, N.H., about 35 miles south of Concord, the capital.

One of the workers responds that they did not work for the state.

Ms. Ploss goes on to ask if any of the workers are in the country illegally. “Speak English,” Ms. Ploss repeats to the workers.

In the video, Ms. Ploss is confronted by a man who asks why she is harassing the workers. “He’s a Black man, and he’s going to protect the brown man from this white woman who’s practicing white privilege because she happened to walk by and heard this guy talking to all of these guys, doing this work, in Spanish,” she says.

Ms. Ploss couldn’t be reached for comment on Tuesday.

A fervent supporter of President Trump, Ms. Ploss has more than 43,000 followers on Facebook and more than 34,000 on Twitter. Calling herself an “America First Activist,” she hosts weekly shows on Facebook Live and leads the group “Massachusetts 4 Trump.”

George Russell, the owner of WSMN Broadcasting, said Tuesday that Ms. Ploss’s conservative show was no longer airing on the station, adding that she had been a host at the station for two and a half years.

July 13

Washington Post, Chatham hedge fund wins auction for bankrupt news publisher McClatchy, Jacob Bogage, July 13, 2020. The deal, pending court approval, would take the publisher of the Miami Herald and Kansas City Star out of family control.

Jersey-based hedge fund Chatham Asset Management submitted the winning bid for the McClatchy Co., five months after the publisher of the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star and more than two dozen other newspapers filed for bankruptcy.

The companies did not put a price on the deal announced Sunday, which comes after a judge rejected a last-minute challenge by another hedge fund. But in an earlier filling, Chatham offered roughly $300 million in a combination of restructured debt and at least $30 million in cash.

The plan is subject to bankruptcy court approval; a hearing is set for July 24.

McClatchy, hobbled by debt and pension obligations, filed for Chapter 11 protection in February. Under the restructuring plan submitted to U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, Chatham, its largest investor outside of the McClatchy family, would emerge as the sole owner and take the company private.

The publisher has said it received interest from more than 20 companies, but could provide no details about any of the bids after Judge Michael E. Wiles ordered them sealed.

Competing hedge fund Alden Global Capital filed an emergency motion to delay the bankruptcy auction, but the bid was denied. Its media business, run under the name Digital First Media, owns 98 newspapers, including the Denver Post, Orange County Register, San Jose Mercury News and St. Paul Pioneer Press.

But even before the coronavirus recession took hold, local publishers had long struggled with online business models and dozens of papers were snapped up by private-equity firms — including Alden and GateHouse Media, which now owns Gannett — that pursued profitability through steep retrenchments.

New York Times, Columnist: While America Looks Away, Autocrats Crack Down on Digital News Sites, Ben Smith, July 13, 2020 (print ed.). Around the world, independent journalism is on the defensive. Independent journalism is on the defensive, from Hungary to Malaysia.

Like many American media types, I spent a lot of time last week reading heated arguments about free speech. I was wondering if I, too, could count myself as a “veteran of the Twitter wars” when Steven Gan distracted me by telling me about his car.

Mr. Gan, the co-founder and editor in chief of Malaysia’s most important political news site, is leaving his hatchback at home on Monday morning and catching a ride to court with a colleague. That’s because Mr. Gan thinks there’s a good chance he’ll be going straight from the courthouse to jail.

The nominal charge against him is contempt of court, a charge brought because his site, Malaysiakini, briefly hosted user comments insulting the judiciary. But his real crime, in the eyes of the government, appears to be his years of straightforward journalism, often chronicling the corruption of the faction that recently retook power in Malaysia.

“Power is consolidating power” around the world, said Maria Ressa, the co-founder of the Filipino site Rappler, who has been watching with alarm and sympathy from Manila, across the South China Sea. “By taking out independent news groups, it’s easier for the voice with the loudest megaphone to shape reality.”

Washington Post, New York Times shreds Trump campaign lawsuit over Russia op-ed, Erik Wemple, July 13, 2020. The Times filed a motion Thursday to dismiss a complaint the Trump campaign filed in February over an opinion piece the newspaper published in 2019 by former executive editor Max Frankel. Coming just after Attorney General William P. Barr’s faulty summary of the Mueller report, Frankel argued that while there may not have been criminal cooperation/collusion/conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians, there was a more ambient “overarching deal."

July 11

tucker carlson djt

Washington Post, Tucker Carlson’s chief writer resigns over racist and sexist posts, the latest trouble for Fox’s most controversial star, Sarah Ellison, July 11, 2020. Following an inquiry from a reporter, it took less than a day for Fox News to receive the resignation of Tucker Carlson’s chief writer, who was exposed for the racist and sexist messages he had been covertly sharing on an online forum.

Among his posts, Blake Neff had smeared black people as lazy and criminal, stated that he would not get medical care from an Asian doctor, used homophobic slurs and repeatedly mocked a female college acquaintance by reposting her Facebook messages and photos for several years.

Top newsroom officials called Neff’s posts “horrendous” and “deeply offensive” in a memo to staff Saturday, a day after they were exposed in a CNN story. “FOX News Media strongly condemns this horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior,” said the memo from Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace, the chief executive and president of Fox News, respectively. “Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.”

July 8

Washington Post Magazine, Commentary: Goodbye to the Hometown Paper, Margaret Sullivan, right, July 8, 2020 (July 12 print ed.). Over her long career as a journalist, Margaret Sullivan has watched the decline of local news with growing alarm. Now it’s vanishing, leaving our very democracy in peril,

In the summer of 2019, with a certain amount of trepidation, I attended a party at the Buffalo News, the daily newspaper serving my hometown of Buffalo and the surrounding region. It would be the first time I’d been back in the building since I’d stepped down as editor in 2012 to become the public editor of the New York Times.

Between 2008 and 2017, American newspapers cut 45 percent of their newsroom staffs; even deeper cutbacks came in the years after that. Some of the most trusted sources of news are slipping away, never to return. The consequences may not always be obvious, but they are insidious. As a major PEN America study concluded in 2019: “As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of chris collins o local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.” Democracy weakens, in other words, and loses its foundations.

The tight connection between local news and good citizenship became abundantly clear in 2018 for Nate McMurray, the Democratic candidate for Congress in a heavily Republican district in western New York.

Although the supervisor of the town of Grand Island was battling a party enrollment skewed against him, he had one monumental advantage: His Republican opponent, incumbent Rep. Chris Collins, left, had just been indicted on insider trading charges.

The Buffalo News’s Washington correspondent, Jerry Zremski, had broken the story, and the paper had followed developments diligently for months. Many who would likely have voted for the incumbent crossed the aisle to vote blue. But that wasn’t always the case in the farther-flung parts of the sprawling congressional district that were less served by strong local news.

The problem, as McMurray saw it, was that voters in those parts were shockingly uninformed. “I’d be going door-to-door, or meeting with people at a diner or a fair, for example, and in the most isolated areas, a lot of people had no idea that their own congressman had been indicted,” McMurray told me. One of the toughest places, he said, was Orleans County, which University of North Carolina journalism professor Penny Muse Abernathy identifies as a “news desert” — i.e., a place with little or no local news.

July 7

The Grayzone, Opinion: How the Pentagon failed to sell Afghan government’s bunk ‘Bountygate’ story to US intelligence agencies, Gareth Porter, July 7, 2020. Another New York TimesRussiagate bombshell turns out to be a dud, as dodgy stories spun out by Afghan intelligence and exploited by the Pentagon ultimately failed to convince US intelligence agencies. The New York Times dropped another Russiagate bombshell on June 26 with a sensational front-page story headlined, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.” A predictable media and political frenzy followed, reviving the anti-Russian hysteria that has excited the Beltway establishment for the past four years.

But a closer look at the reporting by the Times and other mainstream outlets vying to confirm its coverage reveals another scandal not unlike Russiagate itself: the core elements of the story appear to have been fabricated by Afghan government intelligence to derail a potential US troop withdrawal from the country. And they were leaked to the Times and other outlets by US national security state officials who shared an agenda with their Afghan allies.

In the days following the story’s publication, the maneuvers of the Afghan regime and US national security bureaucracy encountered an unexpected political obstacle: US intelligence agencies began offering a series of low confidence assessments in the Afghan government’s self-interested intelligence claims, judging them to be highly suspect at best, and altogether bogus at worst.

In light of this dramatic development, the Times’ initial report appears to have been the product of a sensationalistic disinformation dump aimed at prolonging the failed Afghan war in the face of President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw US troops from it.

The Times not only broke the Bountygate story but commissioned squads of reporters comprising nine different correspondents to write eight articles hyping the supposed scandal in the course of eight days. Its coverage displayed the paper’s usual habit of regurgitating bits of dubious information furnished to its correspondents by faceless national security sources. In the days after the Times’ dramatic publication, its correspondent squads were forced to revise the story line to correct an account that ultimately turned out to be false on practically every important point.

The Bountygate saga began on June 26, with a Times report declaring, “The United States concluded months ago” that the Russians “had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.” The report suggested that US intelligence analysts had reached a firm conclusion on Russian bounties as early as January. A follow-up Times report portrayed the shocking discovery of the lurid Russian plot thanks to the recovery of a large amount of U.S. cash from a “raid on a Taliban outpost.” That article sourced its claim to the interrogations of “captured Afghan militants and criminals.”

However, subsequent reporting revealed that the “US intelligence reports” about a Russian plot to distribute bounties through Afghan middlemen were not generated by US intelligence at all.

The Times reported first on June 28, then again on June 30, that a large amount of cash found at a “Taliban outpost” or a “Taliban site” had led U.S. intelligence to suspect the Russian plot. But the Times had to walk that claim back, revealing on July 1 that the raid that turned up $500,000 in cash had in fact targeted the Kabul home of Rahmatullah Azizi, an Afghan businessmen said to have been involved in both drug trafficking and contracting for part of the billions of dollars the United States spent on construction projects.

AP via Washington Post, Tucker Carlson’s continued ‘coward’ attack on Sen. Tammy Duckworth draws swift backlash, Jeremy Barr, July 8, 2020. Fox News host Tucker Carlson is drawing heat from prominent Democrats, including presidential candidate Joe Biden, for his attacks on Sen. Tammy Duckworth.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has escalated his criticism of Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), lambasting the double-amputee combat veteran as a “coward,” “fraud” and “moron” on his second night of attacks against her. While Carlson is no stranger to criticism, the reaction to his latest remarks has been particularly swift.

On the Monday night edition of his prime-time show, Carlson called Duckworth “a deeply silly and unimpressive person” who “[hates] America,” taking issue with comments she made on CNN about having a “national dialogue” regarding monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson amid the larger reckoning on race following the killing of George Floyd.

In response, Duckworth responded on Twitter that Carlson should “walk a mile in my legs and then tell me whether or not I love America.” (In 2004, Duckworth lost both her legs when a Blackhawk helicopter she was co-piloting was shot down in Iraq.)

But, on Tuesday night, Carlson ratcheted up his criticism of the senator even further. “What a coward,” he said. “Tammy Duckworth is also a fraud.”

Two Democratic senators who have appeared recently as guests on Fox News criticized Carlson’s comments in statements to The Washington Post on Wednesday afternoon.

“Tucker Carlson’s comments were reprehensible, and I have no interest in appearing on his hateful, pro-Trump propaganda show,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “His baseless attacks on decorated war veteran Tammy Duckworth are just another attempt to distract Americans from the facts and the truth of Donald Trump’s failed leadership.”

“Senator Duckworth has made incredible sacrifices serving our country and for Tucker Carlson, who is not a veteran, to suggest she holds America in anything other than the highest regard is ludicrous,” said Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). “I will continue appearing on Fox News with hosts that engage in fair and robust debates about the issues facing our country. I will not surrender to the political division people like Tucker Carlson are trying to sow.”

Washington Post, Auditors call Facebook’s decision to prioritize free speech above other values a ‘tremendous setback,’ Elizabeth Dwoskin and Cat Zakrzewski, July 8, 2020. Civil rights auditors hired by Facebook criticized the social media giant's choice to leave untouched several posts by President Trump.

Washington Post, Opinion: What Lincoln’s life teaches us about monuments, David Von Drehle, July 8, 2020.
Washington Post, Opinion: ICE is putting international students in a terrible position — and hurting America, Margarita Konaev, July 8, 2020.

July 6

Washington Post, Tell-all book by President Trump’s niece to be published two weeks earlier on July 14, Michael Kranish, July 6, 2020. A highly anticipated book by Mary L. Trump, the niece of President Trump, will be published two weeks earlier than planned after a court last week allowed Simon & Schuster to continue distributing copies. The book will be published on July 14 mary trump cover because of intense interest in it, the publisher announced Monday.

While the publisher last week was released from a temporary restraining order, Mary Trump is still under the order and is contesting it. In the meantime, her publisher released the book jacket and a news release that promised a sweeping indictment of the president’s psychological makeup.

“From this explosive book,” the news release said, “we learn how Donald acquired twisted behaviors and values” such as that “cheating is a way of life,” “taking responsibility for your failures is discouraged” and “qualities like empathy, kindness and expertise are punished.” It did not provide specifics, leaving that for the book’s publication.

The back cover of the book, also released Monday, said that “Donald is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning or evolving.” It says that Donald Trump feared his father’s rejection and “suffered deprivations that would scar him for life.”

kayleigh mcenany djt

Washington Post, Analysis: McEnany butchers her defense of Trump’s Bubba Wallace tweet, Aaron Blake, July 6, 2020. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was pressed Monday on President Trump’s tweet that NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace should have “apologized” for his handling of an incident in which a noose-like rope appeared in his garage at a race.

In the process, though, McEnany misstated several key facts about the situation and offered an implausible argument for Trump’s motivation to tweet it.

Washington Post, Facebook, Google, Twitter halt review of Hong Kong requests for data, Rachel Lerman, July 6, 2020. The social media giants said they would pause reviewing such requests from Hong Kong until they had reviewed the new national security law imposed by the Chinese government.

July 5

Washington Post, Investigation: Militias flocked to Gettysburg to foil a supposed antifa flag burning, an apparent hoax created on social media, Shawn Boburg and Dalton Bennett, July 4, 2020. For weeks, a mysterious figure on social media talked up plans for antifa protesters to converge on this historical site on Independence Day to burn American flags, an event that seemed at times to border on the farcical.

“Let’s get together and burn flags in protest of thugs and animals in blue,” the anonymous person behind a Facebook page called Left Behind USA wrote in mid-June. There would be antifa face paint, the person wrote, and organizers would “be giving away free small flags to children to safely throw into the fire.”

As word spread, self-proclaimed militias, bikers, skinheads and far-right groups from outside the state issued a call to action, pledging in online videos and posts to come to Gettysburg to protect the Civil War monuments and the nation’s flag from desecration. Some said they would bring firearms and use force if necessary.

On Saturday afternoon, in the hours before the flag burning was to start, they flooded in by the hundreds — heavily armed and unaware, it seemed, that the mysterious Internet poster was not who the person claimed to be.

Biographical details — some from the person’s Facebook page and others provided to The Washington Post in a series of messages — did not match official records. An image the person once posted on a profile page was a picture of a man taken by a German photographer for a stock photo service.

The episode at Gettysburg is a stark illustration of how shadowy figures on social media have stoked fears about the protests against racial injustice and excessive police force that have swept across the nation since the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25.

Armed vigilantes lined the streets of small Idaho towns last month after false claims circulated online about antifa, a loose collection of activists who oppose fascism and have sometimes embraced property damage and violent protest in recent years. Similar hoaxes have befallen towns in New Jersey, South Dakota and Michigan in recent weeks.

It is not always clear who has made these false claims and why, whether they seek to advance a political agenda, antagonize people with whom they disagree or achieve some other goal.

Social media companies have in recent weeks shut down a handful of fake accounts created by white supremacist groups posing as antifa operatives in a bid to undermine peaceful protests.

In response to messages from The Post, the person managing the Left Behind USA account identified himself as 39-year-old Alan Jeffs, a lifelong Democrat-turned-anarchist from Pittsburgh who now lives in Des Moines.

The Post examined real estate, court and voter records, as well as other public documents, but could find no such person.

July 4

Washington Post, Prospect of vaccine unites anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and hippie moms in Germany, Loveday Morris and William Glucroft, July 4, 2020 (print ed.). German health experts have warned that even if a coronavirus vaccine is approved, refusals could open the way to a resurgence of the virus.

While much of the world is aching for a coronavirus vaccine, Lilia Löffler is adamant that her three children won't be getting any jabs.

Shrugging off light rain to join a two-hour bike protest of shutdown rules, Löffler said that previously she vaccinated all her kids.

But she changed her mind after what she’s been hearing at demonstrations and reading on the Internet during the pandemic. She noted that her 6-year-old son is supposed to get a shot for measles ahead of school in the fall.“But he won’t get that,” she said. Or any other vaccination.

The possibility that Germany’s anti-vaccination movement may gain new adherents like Löffler has been a concern for health authorities, as the coronavirus unites a mishmash of groups resistant to the prospect of a vaccine, from far-right conspiracy theorists to hippie moms.

michael pack

New York Times, New Trump Appointee Puts Global Internet Freedom at Risk, Critics Say, Pranshu Verma and Edward Wong, July 4, 2020. A battle involving Michael Pack and a U.S.-funded tech group revolves around software from Falun Gong, the secretive, anti-Beijing spiritual movement with pro-Trump elements.

When Michael Pack, above, a conservative filmmaker and ally of Stephen K. Bannon, recently fired the heads of four U.S. government-funded news outlets, many became alarmed that he would turn the independently operated organizations, as well as the Voice of America, into “Trump TV.”

But Mr. Pack, the new chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, also cleaned house last month at the lesser-known Open Technology Fund, an internet freedom group overseen by the agency Mr. Pack now runs.

Many worry that the move could have an even greater effect.

In less than a decade, the Open Technology Fund has quietly become integral to the world’s repressed communities. Over two billion people in 60 countries rely on tools developed and supported by the fund, like Signal and Tor, to connect to the internet securely and send encrypted messages in authoritarian societies.

After Mr. Pack was confirmed for his new post on June 4, following a personal campaign of support by President Trump, Mr. Pack fired the technology group’s top officials and bipartisan board, an action now being fought in the courts. A federal judge on Thursday ruled in Mr. Pack’s favor, a decision that plaintiffs will likely appeal.

On Friday, Mr. Pack appointed an interim chief executive, James M. Miles, to head the fund, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Miles is little known in the internet freedom community, and his appointment needs approval from the fund’s new board, which is stacked with Trump administration officials and chaired by Mr. Pack.

The move was a victory for a lobbying effort backed by religious freedom advocates displeased with the fund’s work and who are often allied with conservative political figures.

epoch times This battle revolves around software developed by Falun Gong, the secretive spiritual movement persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party.

Some Falun Gong members have become notable players in American politics. The Epoch Times, a newspaper started by Falun Gong practitioners, has spent millions of dollars on pro-Trump ads, including conspiratorial ones, on Facebook and YouTube — and was even banned by Facebook last year from buying more ads because it had tried to evade advertising rules.

Now, allies of Falun Gong are making a big push for the Open Technology Fund and the State Department to give money to some of the group’s software, notably Ultrasurf, developed about a decade ago by a Falun Gong member.

June

June 29

maria ressa rappler

Journalist Maria Ressa

USA Today, Opinion: Why Maria Ressa's fight for free speech and a free press should be America's fight, too, Kathy Kiely, June 29, 2020. Americans should care because powerful US companies are aiding and abetting Ressa’s censors and our tax dollars are going to Duterte's government.

Americans should care because powerful US companies are aiding and abetting Ressa’s censors and our tax dollars are going to Duterte's government. In the middle of a worldwide pandemic and a paroxysm of racial resentments in the United States, it would be tempting to avoid hurting our heads even further with the details of a complicated legal battle now unfolding in a faraway place.

But if we believe in democracy and want to preserve it, journalist Maria Ressa’s battle for freedom must be ours as well.

rodrigo duterte philippines president Ressa’s legal team was back in a Philippine court Monday to appeal the libel verdict handed down this month against her. It’s the latest twist in a legal battle that rivals Charles Dickens' famous novel Bleak House, a powerful allegory in which, as in Ressa’s case, legal technicalities end up overriding basic human morality and common sense.

A former CNN reporter raised in New Jersey after her parents fled martial law in the Philippines, Ressa eventually returned to her home country and founded Rappler, an innovative online news outlet.

Its investigations have drawn the ire of Rodrigo Duterte, right, the unsavory but hugely popular president.

Duterte does not brook criticism. He has already locked up one Philippine senator who criticized him, and he recently shut down one of the country’s leading broadcast networks. Against Rappler, Duterte is engaged in what might be called censorship by trial: Over the past 15 months, 11 cases have been leveled against the news organization or its employees. Ressa herself has had to post bail eight times just to stay out of jail.

Strategic Culture Foundation, Opinion: Trump’s ‘Alternate History’ and Rejection of Facts, Wayne Madsen, right, wayne madsen screen shot June 29, 2020. Future historians will scratch their heads when researching the annals and archives of the Donald Trump administration. Trump’s denial of basic facts about history, science, and even the weather will undoubtedly result in his administration and the subsequent fall-out from it being called the “Age of Unreason.” Trump and his administration often seize on erroneous information and turn them into, in what is in their minds, irrefutable facts. One example has been Trump’s insistence that the 1918 influenza occurred in 1917. Trump and his advisers discount the fact that the “1918 flu” is thus named because it was first detected in 1918, not in 1917.

Trump eschews facts as often as he is able. The 1918 flu, incorrectly called the “Spanish flu” was first detected in the United States on March 4, 1918. “Patient zero” was identified as Albert Gitchell, a U.S. Army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas.

Facts matter, except for a select group of fascist and proto-fascist leaders who include Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, right, Colombian President Ivan Duque, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and a few other delusional presidents and prime ministers scattered around the globe.

Trump’s logic on the Covid-19 virus is as bizarre as his botching the time line of the 1918 flu. Trump repeatedly claimed the United States had more cases of Covid-19 because it was conducting more tests. Trump also admitted that he ordered less tests because that action would result in fewer cases. Of course, such a statement is that of a madman and is similar to someone claiming that if he or she was not tested for cancer, they would not contract cancer.

It is historical revisionism by Trump and his acolytes that presents the most danger for the United States and the world. George Orwell’s novel about a dystopian fascistic future, “1984,” introduced the quote, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” That fascist precept, a canon of fictional Oceania’s “Ministry of Truth,” is dominant in Trump’s administration and Republican Party, the latter having become a personal political vehicle for would-be dictator Trump.

Alteration of American history lies at the heart of Trump’s attempt to re-brand the Old Confederacy. Trump has held up politicians and generals of the Confederate States of America, over which the United States was ultimately victorious in the U.S. Civil War, as part of the “heritage” of America. “Heritage” is a word that has become synonymous with adulation of the Confederacy, Jim Crow-era racism, plantation system slavery, and esteem for Confederate leaders. In order to re-write history, Trump and his Republicans have acted to develop fictional stories about the past.

In Mississippi, the Republicans opposed to removing the Confederate battle flag from the state flag have incorrectly stated that the flag was designed by “an African-American Confederate soldier.” State senator Kathy Chism, a Republican supporter of Trump, wrote on Facebook about the black Confederate soldier, who she failed to identify, “I can only imagine how proud he was that his art, his flag design was chosen to represent our State and now we want to strip him of his pride, his hard work. I’m sure he put a lot of thought into this design.” Chism made up the entire claim.

First, there were no black soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. Second, the current Mississippi flag was designed in 1894 by one of her predecessors in the state Senate, Edward Scudder, a white man who wanted to honor the Confederacy. Scudder’s wife actually sewed the flag as both she and her husband were ardent supporters of the segregationist South. What better way to both honor the Confederacy and send a strong message to Mississippi’s large black population than to place the flag of a defeated secessionist and racist confederation of states on the flag of Mississippi!

Another disturbing alteration of history can be linked directly to the neo-fascist global movement of former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon. The neo-fascist catechism holds forth that Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were not far-right-wingers but represented “left-wing socialism.” This false historical narrative, pushed by officials in both the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations, reasons that because “National Socialism,” the political tenet of the Nazis, contain the word “socialism,” that makes Hitler and his Nazis “socialists.” Those who believe such codswallop refuse to recognize that Germany’s true Socialists and Communists were either executed by Hitler’s paramilitary forces or sent to the death camps, where few survived. To Hitler, socialism represented Bolshevik Marxism, Socialism, and Communism. There was absolutely nothing “leftist” about Hitler and his Nazis.

Trump and his supporters’ entire campaign to paint the news as “fake” and history, as we know it, as false is an Orwellian attempt to own the past, dictate the present, and control the future. Trump has given more than one “wink and nod” to an extreme fringe of right-wingers, who call themselves “Qanon,” who believe that even more far-out fantasies are true. One is that John F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of the 35th president who died along with his wife and sister-in-law in a 1999 plane crash, faked his own death in order to re-emerge one day to join Trump in battling an international pedophile ring. Several Qanon followers have emerged to join Trump on the Republican ballot in several states for the November 3 election. Qanon has a major outlet for their bizarre views on a cable “news” network, One America News Network, which is based in San Diego, California.

Washington Post,Trump and Biden both want to repeal this tech rule. They’re both wrong, Editorial Board, June 29, 2020. Section 230 does not need a revocation. It needs a revision. President Trump and Joe Biden both think Internet platforms have it too easy — but for very different reasons.

Neither really gets it right.“REVOKE 230!” the president tweeted late last month, the day after signing an executive order seeking to punish platforms for alleged systematic anti-conservative censorship that the evidence says doesn’t exist. “Section 230 . . . immediately should be revoked,” his Democratic rival told the New York Times. Mr. Biden is of the opposite opinion: that companies aren’t removing enough harmful material.

Proposals on the table today try to address both sets of concerns.Mr. Biden at least has a better handle than Mr. Trump on the purpose of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was designed to encourage Internet sites to moderate content without worrying about being punished for anything illicit that got through.

The legislation, which shields companies from liability for content posted by third parties, has sometimes offered sites too free a pass — permitting them to refuse to remove illegal activity and even, at times, to solicit it. Yet wholesale repeal would certainly threaten the Web as we know it.

martin baron at 2018 pulitzers wikimedia commons New York Times, Marty Baron Made The Post Great Again. Now, the News Is Changing, Ben Smith, June 29, 2020 (print ed.). The ultimate old-school editor, right, is grappling with a moment of cultural reckoning, our columnist Ben Smith writes.At the heart of The Washington Post’s identity is Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor since 2013.

June 27

Washington Post, Facebook will label violating posts from public figures going forward, Rachel Lerman, June 27, 2020 (print ed.). Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will start labeling posts it deems newsworthy but that also violates its policies, marking a major about-turn from the company’s previous hands-off stance.

In a town hall that was streamed live Friday, Zuckerberg said the company will also remove content that incites violence or attempts to suppress voting — no matter who says it.

“There are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies that I’m announcing today,” he said.

Twitter labels Trump tweet on force

Social media companies are under an especially bright spotlight this year in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, facing pressure to control hate speech and misinformation on their sites — something that still haunts them from rampant disinformation that spread online during the 2016 campaign.

New York Times, ‘PizzaGate’ Conspiracy Theory Thrives Anew in the TikTok Era, Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel, June 27, 2020. The false theory targeting Democrats, now fueled by QAnon and teenagers on TikTok, is entangling new targets like Justin Bieber.

Four minutes into a video that was posted on Instagram last month, Justin Bieber leaned into the camera and adjusted the front of his black knit beanie. For some of his 130 million followers, it was a signal.

In the video, someone had posted a comment asking Mr. Bieber to touch his hat if he had been a victim of a child-trafficking ring known as PizzaGate. Thousands of comments were flooding in, and there was no evidence that Mr. Bieber had seen that message. But the pop star’s innocuous gesture set off a flurry of online activity, which highlighted the resurgence of one of social media’s early conspiracy theories.

Viewers quickly uploaded hundreds of videos online analyzing Mr. Bieber’s action. The videos were translated into Spanish, Portuguese and other languages, amassing millions of views. Fans then left thousands of comments on Mr. Bieber’s social media posts asking him if he was safe. Within days, searches for “Justin and PizzaGate” soared on Google, and the hashtag #savebieber started trending.

Four years ago, ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the baseless notion that Hillary Clinton and Democratic elites were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria spread across the internet, illustrating how a crackpot idea with no truth to it could blossom on social media — and how dangerous it could be. In December 2016, a vigilante gunman showed up at the restaurant with an assault rifle and opened fire into a closet.

In the years afterward, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube managed to largely suppress PizzaGate. But now, just months before the next presidential election, the conspiracy theory is making a comeback on these platforms — and on new ones such as TikTok — underlining the limits of their efforts to stamp out dangerous speech online and how little has changed despite rising public frustration.

June 26

NBC News via Yahoo News, Trump signs executive order to punish vandalism against federal monuments, Dartunorro Clark, June 26, 2020. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to protect federal monuments after a rash of recent incidents involving the vandalism of statues memorializing the Confederacy and some of the nation's Founding Fathers.

"I just had the privilege of signing a very strong Executive Order protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues - and combatting recent Criminal Violence. Long prison terms for these lawless acts against our Great Country!" Trump said in a tweet.

The order would "reinforce" existing federal law, which criminalizes the destruction of federal monuments. For instance, the Veterans’ Memorials Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003 imposes a fine and up to 10 years in prison on anyone who vandalizes a monument.

"Individuals and organizations have the right to peacefully advocate for either the removal or the construction of any monument," the order states. "But no individual or group has the right to damage, deface, or remove any monument by use of force."

It also threatens to withhold federal funding from state and local law enforcement agencies that "fail to protect monuments, memorials, and statues."
The protests against racism and police brutality prompted by the killing of George Floyd has reignited the debate around statues and other monuments honoring the Confederacy and slave-holding presidents, such as George Washington and Andrew Jackson. After violence prompted by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, there was a public outcry to remove Confederate symbols across the country.

Earlier this week, protesters defaced a statue of President Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square outside the White House and tried to topple it, but police pepper-sprayed demonstrators to protect the monument. Jackson was a slaveholder and oversaw the expulsion of Native Americans in which they were forcibly moved further west by the federal government. Roughly 4,000 Cherokees died on that journey, known as the "Trail of Tears."

Julian Assange Indicter Julian Assange (Photo by The Indicter Magazine).

Medium, Opinion: Demasking the Torture of Julian Assange; On the occasion of the International Day in Support of Torture Victims, Nils Melzer (UN Special Rapporteur on Torture), June 26, 2020. I know, you may think I am deluded. How could life in an Embassy with a cat and a skateboard ever amount to torture?

That’s exactly what I thought, too, when Assange first appealed to my office for protection. Like most of the public, I had been subconsciously poisoned by the relentless smear campaign, which had been disseminated over the years. So it took a second knock on my door to get my reluctant attention.

But once I looked into the facts of this case, what I found filled me with repulsion and disbelief.

Surely, I thought, Assange must be a rapist! But what I found is that he has never been charged with a sexual offence. True, soon after the United States had encouraged allies to Swedish flag find reasons to prosecute Assange, Swedish prosecution informed the tabloid press that he was suspected of having raped two women.

Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilen Strangely, however, the women themselves never claimed to have been raped, nor did they intend to report a criminal offence. Go figure.

Moreover, the forensic examination of a condom submitted as evidence, supposedly worn and torn during intercourse with Assange, revealed no DNA whatsoever — neither his, nor hers, nor anybody else’s. Go figure again. One woman even texted that she only wanted Assange to take an HIV test, but that the police were “keen on getting their hands on him.” Go figure, once more.

Ever since, both Sweden and Britain have done everything to prevent Assange from confronting these allegations without simultaneously having to expose himself to US extradition and, thus, to a show-trial followed by life in jail. His last refuge had been the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Alright, I thought, but surely Assange must be a hacker! But what I found is that all his disclosures had been freely leaked to him, and that no one accuses him of having hacked a single computer. In fact, the only arguable hacking-charge against him relates to his alleged unsuccessful attempt to help breaking a password which, had it been successful, might have helped his source to cover her tracks. In short: a rather isolated, speculative, and inconsequential chain of events; a bit like trying to prosecute a driver who unsuccessfully attempted to exceed the speed-limit, but failed because their car was too weak.

Well then, I thought, at least we know for sure that Assange is a Russian spy, has interfered with US elections, and negligently caused people’s deaths! But all I found is that he consistently published true information of inherent public interest without any breach of trust, duty or allegiance. Yes, he exposed war crimes, corruption and abuse, but let’s not confuse national security with governmental impunity.

Yes, the facts he disclosed empowered US voters to take more informed decisions, but isn’t that simply democracy? Yes, there are ethical discussions to be had regarding the legitimacy of unredacted disclosures. But if actual harm had really been caused, how come neither Assange nor Wikileaks ever faced related criminal charges or civil lawsuits for just compensation?

But surely, I found myself pleading, Assange must be a selfish narcissist, skateboarding through the Ecuadorian Embassy and smearing feces on the walls? Well, all I heard from Embassy staff is that the inevitable inconveniences of his accommodation at their offices were handled with mutual respect and consideration. This changed only after the election of President Moreno, when they were suddenly instructed to find smears against Assange and, when they didn’t, they were soon replaced. The President even took it upon himself to bless the world with his gossip, and to personally strip Assange of his asylum and citizenship without any due process of law.

In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed. Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide.

And thus, a legal precedent is being set, through the backdoor of our own complacency, which in the future can and will be applied just as well to disclosures by The Guardian, the New York Times and ABC News.

Very well, you may say, but what does slander have to do with torture? Well, this is a slippery slope. What may look like mere «mudslinging» in public debate, quickly becomes “mobbing” when used against the defenseless, and even “persecution” once the State is involved. Now just add purposefulness and severe suffering, and what you get is full-fledged psychological torture.

Yes, living in an Embassy with a cat and a skateboard may seem like a sweet deal when you believe the rest of the lies. But when no one remembers the reason for the hate you endure, when no one even wants to hear the truth, when neither the courts nor the media hold the powerful to account, then your refuge really is but a rubber boat in a shark-pool, and neither your cat nor your skateboard will save your life.

Even so, you may say, why spend so much breath on Assange, when countless others are tortured worldwide? Because this is not only about protecting Assange, but about preventing a precedent likely to seal the fate of Western democracy. For once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, it will be too late to correct the course. We will have surrendered our voice to censorship and our fate to unrestrained tyranny.

This Op-Ed has been offered for publication to the Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Canberra Times, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek. None responded positively.

djt karen mcdougal blue dress

Washington Post, Opinion: The recklessness of Tucker Carlson, Karen McDougal, Erik Wemple, June 26, 2020. On his highly rated prime-time program, Fox News host Tucker Carlson commonly faults others for not properly loving America — for not sufficiently adoring its freedoms, opportunities and promise. He even goes as far as to say that Democrats “hate” the place.

Among the reasons Carlson should indeed appreciate this country: His brand of tendentious broadcasting enjoys generous protection under the First Amendment. A case now making its way through federal courts, though, may test that proposition.

tucker carlson djt In a complaint filed in December, former Playboy model Karen McDougal (shown above with Trump) sued Fox News over a “Tucker Carlson Tonight” segment in which the host accused her of “extortion” in her dealings with Donald Trump.

“Two women approach Donald Trump and threaten to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money,” argued Carlson in a December 2018 segment. “Now that sounds like a classic case of extortion. Yet for whatever reason, Trump caves to it, and he directs Michael Cohen to pay the ransom. Now, more than two years later, Trump is a felon for doing this. It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

One of the reasons that the sequence outlined by Carlson doesn’t make any sense is that it’s false. Those “two women” are Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) and McDougal, both of whom received hush money for keeping quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.

In McDougal’s case, she didn’t “approach Donald Trump”; through an attorney, she approached American Media Inc., whose holdings included the National Enquirer; AMI paid karen mcdougal playboy McDougal $150,000 for the rights to the story as well as columns on fitness. Then the company essentially buried the story. Trump and his then-attorney, Michael Cohen, were coordinating the whole “catch and kill” operation with AMI executive David Pecker.

In her lawsuit, McDougal (shown iat right on a Playboy cover) alleged that Carlson’s representations were “intentionally false and made with reckless disregard for the truth.” Those words are deliberate: Under First Amendment law, there’s a high bar for defaming a public figure such as McDougal. The “actual malice” standard requires proof that the offending, false statement was made knowingly or with “reckless disregard" for the truth.

Lawyers for Fox News argue that the suit fails on at least two levels. For one, they point to the heavy requirements to prove “reckless disregard” under First Amendment law. That very issue lies at the center of a defamation case filed by former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin against the New York Times in 2017, over an editorial alleging that her political action committee had somehow incited the murderous rampage of Jared Lee Loughner in 2011. It wasn’t true. To prove, however, that the editorial page acted with reckless disregard, Palin would have to show "more than a departure from reasonably prudent conduct,” according to an opinion from Justice John Paul Stevens in the 1989 Supreme Court case Harte-Hanks Communications v. Connaughton. "There must be sufficient evidence to permit the conclusion that the defendant in fact entertained serious doubts as to the truth of his publication.”

Serious doubts? Tucker Carlson doesn’t do serious doubts.

In last week’s oral argument, federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil (a longtime Federalist Society member nominated by Trump) pushed attorney Eric Bernstein, representing McDougal, to cite facts proving that Carlson had acted with actual malice. “I believe that the facts supporting that he was reckless is that he — first of all, Fox has reported on this story before and no one has ever said any of the things that he was saying that night, which is that my client approached and threatened [Trump],” said Bernstein, who later said Carlson had concocted the tale out of “thin air.”

Yet the judge continued to press: “Don’t you need to allege facts to support it? It’s not enough to just recite the standard under the case law,” said Vyskocil.

June 25

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Opinion: Sanders-Trotskyist - Neo-Nazi collusion in statue destruction? Wayne Madsen, June 25, 2020. The world has witnessed in the past collusion between ostensibly left-wing Trotskyists and right-wing fascists, including Nazis. One of the Trotskyist left figures who agitates for even more widespread destruction and removal of non-racist oriented statues is Shaun King, a darling of the Bernie Sanders left and a writer for Glenn Greenwald's "The Intercept," Daily Kos, and a supporter of Black Lives Matter. It is noteworthy that King's part-time employer, Greenwald, once represented in court convicted neo-Nazi terrorist Matthew Hale.

King jumped the shark on statue removal when he recently advocated tearing down statues of Jesus, claiming that his depiction as a white man represents "a form of white supremacy." Such extremism is the favorite tool of the so-called "far-left," including Trotskyists and anarcho-syndicalists.

A provocateur like King serves two purposes. One is moving the goal post to include other targets in a radicalized "cultural revolution." The other is to provide the extreme right with another cause célèbre to rally Trump's increasingly shrinking base. There are already reports of priceless stained glass windows in churches being smashed by either provocateurs of the extreme left or extreme right or both acting in concert.

King, who claims to be fully African-American but reportedly had a white father, knows full-well where his call to remove Jesus statues leads: vandalizing of churches and cemeteries of many sects, from Roman Catholics to Greek Orthodox. It also provides the religious right with a rallying cry to continue to fleece their congregations in drumming up more financial support for Trump's flagging re-election campaign.

Daily Beast, Judge Tosses Trump Family Attempt to Block Mary Trump’s Tell-All, Lachlan Cartwright and Asawin Suebsaeng, June 25, 2020. A Queens County Surrogate Court Judge cited “several improprieties” in Robert Trump’s attempt to block niece Mary’s tell-all. A New York judge has tossed an application by President Donald Trump’s brother to try and halt the publication of his niece’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

Queens County Surrogate Court Judge Peter Kelly cited “several improprieties” in Robert Trump’s filing that rendered it “fatally defective”—including that it was based on the official disposition of patriarch Fred Trump Sr.’s estate, which wrapped up in 2001 and is thus for legal purposes “nonexistent.” That settlement included a confidentiality clause that niece Mary Trump signed, and which the elder Trumps have argued prevents her from publishing the sort of titillating family secrets her memoir is set to contain.

But Kelly asserted that his court could not provide the declaratory judgment blocking the book that Robert sought, and recommended the Trump brother try his luck in the New York State Supreme Court, which oversees civil and criminal matters. The Surrogate Court strictly handles the wills and assets of the deceased.

Daily Beast, Trump Brother Was in ICU Just Before Suing Over Tell-All, Lachlan Cartwright and Asawin Suebsaeng, June 25, 2020. Robert Trump, Donald’s younger brother, spent at least 10 days in a neuro intensive care unit just before launching legal action to stop the publication of his niece’s book.

Robert, 72, had been at Mount Sinai hospital’s neurosciences intensive care unit (NSICU) in New York since at least June 11th, being treated for a serious condition. He was discharged on Sunday and, despite his stay in the hospital, he wasted no time in filing and signing complicated legal documents aided by his celebrity attorney Charles Harder and releasing a statement.

On its website Mount Sinai boasts that its 16-bed NSICU specializes in “state of the art, compassionate care of patients who suffer from subarachnoid hemorrhage, acute ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, subdural hematomas, coma, tumors of the brain and spine, severe or prolonged seizures, neuro-infections, [and] spinal cord injury among others.”

Robert did not respond to multiple requests for comment Wednesday and his attorney, Harder, declined to comment.

Mary Trump’s high-powered legal team, which includes the renowned First Amendment attorney Theodore Boutrous of the law firm Gibson Dunn, are expected to file their response in the coming days.

June 24

Washington Post, Trump family seeks to block book by niece that calls him ‘world’s most dangerous man,’ Michael Kranish, June 24, 2020 (print ed.). Presales of the book, slated for a July 28 publication, have soared on the basis of a description from publisher Simon & Schuster that says it will reveal decades of family secrets, including a “nightmare of traumas” that explain President Trump’s psychology.

President Trump’s brother on Tuesday petitioned a New York court to block the publication of a book by Mary L. Trump that describes the president, her uncle, as the “world’s most dangerous man.”

Presales of the book, slated for publication on July 28, have soared to the top of bestseller lists on the basis of a description from publisher Simon & Schuster that it will reveal decades of family secrets, including a “nightmare of traumas” that explain the psychology of the man who is now president.

President Trump told the Axios news service earlier this week that Mary Trump is “not allowed” to write the book, because she signed a nondisclosure agreement in 2001 that settled her suit against him and his siblings over her inheritance from her grandfather Fred Trump Sr., the president’s father. President Trump said the agreement was a “very powerful one” that “covers everything.”

Yahoo News, Devin Nunes can’t sue Twitter over statements by fake cow, judge rules, Kate Irby, June 24, 2020. A judge has ruled that Rep. Devin Nunes has no right to sue Twitter over statements made by a fake Internet cow, someone parodying his mother and a Republican strategist.

Judge John Marshall said in a decision Friday that Twitter was “immune from the defamation claims of” Nunes, R-Tulare, due to federal law that says social media companies are not liable for what people post on their platforms.

Nunes, right, “seeks to have the court treat Twitter as the publisher or speaker of the content provided by others based on its allowing or not allowing certain content to be on its internet platform,” Marshall wrote. “The court refuses to do so.”

Nunes sued Twitter, the two parody accounts known as Deivn Nunes’ Cow and Deivn Nunes’ Mom and strategist Liz Mair in March 2019. He alleged the latter three had defamed him online, ruining his reputation and causing him to win his 2018 election by a narrower margin than normal. He accused Twitter of being negligent for allowing the alleged defamation.

Twitter’s lawyers, in their motion to dismiss the suit, argued that Twitter was immune from the lawsuit due to federal law. The law, known as Section 230, says that social media companies like Twitter are not liable for what third parties post on their platform. The only exception is if Twitter personally helped develop or create the content. Both Twitter and Nunes agreed the company did not do that in this case.

Nunes’ lawyer, Steven Biss, argued that Twitter’s actions in allegedly favoring more liberal content over conservation content and allegedly promoting tweets that made fun of Nunes meant that Section 230 protections should not apply.

Washington Post, White House correspondents’ dinner canceled over coronavirus concerns, Nina Zafar, June 24, 2020 (print ed.). The White House Correspondents’ Association canceled its annual dinner after consulting “with medical experts, government authorities and our own members.”

June 23

New York Times, Tennessee Newspaper Fires Advertising Manager After Anti-Muslim Ad, Staff Report, Aimee Ortiz, June 23, 2020 (print ed.). The Tennessean apologized for the ad on Sunday in a statement that said its advertising standards forbid hate speech. The Tennessean newspaper and Gannett, its parent company, fired an advertising manager on Monday, a day after the newspaper published a full-page ad from a biblical prophecy group claiming “Islam” would detonate a bomb in Nashville.

The manager who was fired “agreed to proceed with the ad without fully reviewing the content” after it had been flagged by a sales executive, Kathy Jack-Romero, the president of local sales for Gannett, said in a Tennessean article published on Monday.

An internal investigation found that three advertising staff members had the opportunity to review the ad before it published, she said, adding that “the sales and design teams did not fully read the context of the ad content in its entirety and subsequently approved it.”

Ron Jeremy, center, with attorney Stuart Goldfarb at right in Los Angeles Superior Court (LA Times pool photo distributed via AP on in Los Angeles Superior Court June 23, 2020).

Porn star Ron Jeremy, center, with attorney Stuart Goldfarb at right in Los Angeles Superior Court (LA Times pool photo distributed via AP on June 23, 2020).

Forbes, Adult Film Star Ron Jeremy Charged With Sexually Assaulting Four Women, Lisette Voytko, June 23, 2020. Adult film star Ron Jeremy, 67, was charged Tuesday with sexually assaulting four women in 2014, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, and could face 90 years in prison if convicted as charged.

Jeremy, whose full given name is Ronald Jeremy Hyatt, was charged with “three counts each of forcible rape and forcible penetration by a foreign object and one count each of forcible oral copulation and sexual battery,” according to the district attorney’s statement.

He is accused of raping a 25-year-old woman in West Hollywood in May 2014 and raping a 30-year-old woman at a local bar in July 2019.

Jeremy (shown above in a Los Angeles Times pool photo on June 23 in Los Angeles Superior Court with his attorney) is also accused of sexually assaulting two more women, ages 33 and 46, at that same bar in separate 2017 incidents.

Jeremy has faced accusations of sexual assault in the past. He told Rolling Stone in 2017 that he denies all allegations, calling them “pure lies or buyer’s remorse,” and added “I have never and would never rape anyone.” At the time, Jeremy also expressed support for women and men coming forward about being sexually assaulted, saying, “These real predators need to be taken down.” Jeremy, a prolific adult film star, reportedly made the Guinness Book of World Records for having made the most appearances in adult films.

June 22

Washington Post Magazine, The Stars and Stripes newspaper has long supported the troops. Now it needs Congress’s support, Graham Vyse, June 22, 2020 (June 28 print ed.). By mid-March, coronavirus response efforts were underway worldwide. President Trump had declared a national emergency. France was in lockdown. And Japanese public schools were closed.

stars strips logo Custom But schools on American military bases in Japan planned to remain open, much to the dismay of nervous parents. Then the news appeared in Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-subsidized but editorially independent newspaper that covers the U.S. armed forces at home and abroad. “School is such an easy place for viruses and germs to spread,” one Navy spouse fretted to the publication, “and it seems like too much of a risk.” A day later, closures were announced.

Stars and Stripes has been chronicling the military angle of the covid-19 crisis for months now: sailors infected on Navy ships, face masks purchased for the Department of Defense workforce, stimulus checks cut for veterans. But in the midst of the pandemic, the newspaper faces an unprecedented threat all its own: In February, the Trump administration proposed eliminating all of the publication’s federal support in 2021. That’s more than $15 million a year, about half its budget. “I can’t think of a graver threat to its independence,” the paper’s ombudsman, Ernie Gates, told me recently. “That’s a fatal cut.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper justifies the cut by saying the publication’s money should be spent on “higher-priority issues,” including space and nuclear programs. But considering that Stars and Stripes represents a minuscule fraction of the department’s $705 billion budget — “decimal dust,” as editorial director Terry Leonard puts it — critics see the proposal as consistent with the president’s broader war on journalism. “It’s another obnoxious assault by the Trump administration on freedom of the press,” says Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a Marine veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee, who blasts the defunding plan as “un-American.”

Now Moulton’s committee — and ultimately the rest of Congress — must decide whether to support the appropriation by the fall, preserving a news organization with a unique civic role. This deliberation comes as the coronavirus economic crisis exacerbates the news industry’s financial woes, adding to what The Washington Post recently described as a “tsunami of layoffs, cutbacks, furloughs and closures” washing over American newsrooms.

Stars and Stripes, which dates back to the Civil War, has published continuously since World War II.

New York Times, What’s Facebook’s Deal With Donald Trump? Ben Smith, June 22, 2020 (print ed.). Mark Zuckerberg has forged an uneasy alliance with the Trump administration. He may have gotten too close. Last Nov. 20, NBC News broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump and a Facebook board member, Peter Thiel, had dined together at the White House the previous month. “It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and Thiel discussed,” the report said.

That was it. Nothing else has emerged since. Not the date, not who arranged the menu, the venue, the seating, not the full guest list. And not whether some kind of deal got done between two of the most powerful men in the world. The news cycle moved on, and the dinner became one of the unsolved mysteries of American power.

But I was able to pry some of those details loose last week from White House officials along with current and former senior Facebook employees and people they speak to. Most said they would only talk on the condition their names not be used, since the company is not eager to call attention to Mr. Zuckerberg’s relationship with the president.

New York Times, Tennessee Newspaper Apologizes for ‘Utterly Indefensible’ Anti-Muslim Ad, Bryan Pietsch, Updated June 22, 2020. The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville is investigating how it came to publish a full-page ad on Sunday by a biblical prophecy group claiming “Islam” would detonate a bomb in the city.

The ad, which included a photo collage of President Trump, Pope Francis and burning American flags, urged readers to visit a website offering more details. The ad was credited to the group Ministry of Future for America, which says its mission is to “proclaim the final warning message” from the Bible.

Addressed to “Dear Citizen of Nashville,” the eight-paragraph ad spanned the full length of the newspaper page, and discussed Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Democratic Party and Sept. 11. It claimed Trump’s presidency was part of a prophecy, warned of “another civil war,” and said that “Islam is going to detonate a nuclear device” in Nashville.

The full-page ad, which appeared in Sunday’s editions of The Tennessean and claimed “Islam” would detonate a nuclear device in Nashville, “should have never been published,” the editor said.

June 19

jacob hornberger new Future of Freedom Foundation, Opinion: Fear in the JFK Assassination, Part 2 (of 2), Jacob G. Hornberger, right, June 23, 2020. Let’s now move to the autopsy that the U.S. military conducted on the President John F. Kennedy’s body on the evening of the assassination, November 22, 1963.

Texas law required the autopsy to be conducted in Texas. Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas Medical Examiner, insisted on conducting the autopsy immediately upon Kennedy’s death. An armed team of Secret Service agents, brandishing their guns, refused to permit that to happen and forced their way out of Parkland Hospital. Operating on orders, their objective was to get the president’s body to the airport, where Vice President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. His objective: to put the autopsy in the hands of the U.S. military.

In the 1970s, the U.S. House of Representatives opened up a new investigation into Kennedy’s assassination. During and after those hearings, a group of Navy enlisted men came forward with a remarkable story. They stated that they had secretly carried Kennedy’s body into the morgue at Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland about an hour-and-a-half before the body was officially brought into the morgue.

They also stated that they had all been sworn to secrecy immediately after the autopsy and had been threatened with severe punishment, including criminal prosecution, if they ever revealed to anyone the classified secrets about the autopsy that they had acquired.
The Boyajian Report

In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board, which was formed to enforce the JFK Records Act, uncovered an official document that had been kept secret for more than 30 years. It became known as the Boyajian Report. It had been created by Marine Sergeant Roger Boyajian immediately after the autopsy. Boyajian gave a copy of the report to the ARRB. Boyajian and his report confirmed that his team carried the president’s body into the morgue in a cheap military-style shipping casket at 6:35 p.m., about 1 and 1/2 hours before 8 p.m., the time that the body was officially brought into the morgue in the expensive, ornate casket into which it had been placed in Dallas.

On the night of the autopsy, one of the autopsy physicians, Admiral James Humes, telephoned U.S. Army Colonel Pierre Finck asking him to come to the morgue and assist with the autopsy. That phone call was made at 8 p.m. During the conversation, Humes told Finck that they already had some x-rays made of the president’s head. Yet, how could they have x-rays of the president’s head, given that the president’s body was being officially brought into the morgue at 8 p.m.? Humes’s testimony inadvertently confirmed the accuracy of the Boyajian Report and the statements of the enlisted men who had secretly carried the president’s body into the morgue an hour-and-a-half before the official 8 p.m. time that the body was brought into the morgue.

The Magic Bullet

During the autopsy, Finck began to “dissect” the president’s neck wound, a wound that later became embroiled in what became known as the “magic bullet” controversy. As Finck began the procedure, he was ordered by some unknown figure to cease and desist and to leave the wound alone. Finck complied with the order. The order showed that the three autopsy physicians were not in charge of the autopsy and that there was a higher force within the deep state that was orchestrating and directing the overall operation.
The brain examinations

It’s worth mentioning the brain examinations that took place as part of the autopsy. In an autopsy, there is only one brain examination. In the Kennedy autopsy, there were two, the second of which involved a brain that could not possibly have belonged to the president. Rather than detail the circumstances surrounding that unusual occurrence, I’ll simply link to the following two articles that the mainstream press published about it for those who might be interested in that aspect of the autopsy:

Newly Released JFK Documents Raise Questions About Medical Evidence by Deb Riechmann in the November 9, 1998, issue of the Washington Post.
Archive Photos Not of JFK’s Brain, Concludes Aides to Review Board by George Lardner Jr. in the November 10, 1998, issue of the Washington Post.

It is also worth noting that when Congress enacted the JFK Records Act mandating that federal agencies had to release their long-secret records relating to the assassination, the law that brought the ARRB into existence to enforce the law expressly prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the assassination. It was a provision that the ARRB board strictly enforced on the ARRB staff, which thereby prevented the staff from investigating the two separate brain examinations once they were discovered or, for that matter, anything else.

It’s is also worth noting that there are still thousands of assassination-related records that the National Archives is keeping secret, owing to a request by the CIA to President Trump early in his administration to continue keeping them secret, a request that Trump granted. The CIA’s reason for the continued secrecy? The CIA told Trump that the disclosure of the 56-year-old records to the American people would endanger “national security.”

June 22

June 21

djt tulsa rally 6 20 20 crowd shot 1 Custom

Photo via Twitter of President Trump's campaign rally in Tulsa on June 20, showing empty blue seats in upper decks. Tulsa's fire marshall announced attendance at 6,200 for the 19,000 seat area, far below Trump estimates of up to a million attendees and also substantially below estimates of many cable pundits Saturday night who estimated the area was two-thirds or half-filled.

New York Times, TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally, Taylor Lorenz, Kellen Browning and Sheera Frenkel, June 21, 2020. Did a successful prank inflate attendance expectations for the president’s rally? TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.

The trend quickly spread on TikTok, where videos with millions of views instructed viewers to do the same, as CNN reported on Tuesday. “Oh no, I signed up for a Trump rally, and I can’t go,” one woman joked, along with a fake cough, in a TikTok posted on June 15.

Thousands of other users posted similar tweets and videos to TikTok that racked up millions of views. Representatives for TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism,” said the YouTuber Elijah Daniel, 26, who participated alexandria ocasio cortez in the social media campaign. “K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly. They all know the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get where they want.”

Many users deleted their posts after 24 to 48 hours in order to conceal their plan and keep it from spreading into the mainstream internet. “The majority of people who made them deleted them after the first day because we didn’t want the Trump campaign to catch wind,” Mr. Daniel said. “These kids are smart and they thought of everything.”

Twitter users on Saturday night were quick to declare the social media campaign’s victory. “Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, left, tweeted in response to Mr. Parscale, who had tweeted that “radical protestors” had “interfered” with attendance

June 19

jeffrey epstein who killed graphic consortium news Custom

Consortium News, Analysis: Epstein Case Documentaries Won’t Touch Tales of Intel Ties, Elizabeth Vos, right, June 19, 2020. Two new documentaries on the Jeffery Epstein affair delve into lurid details & give voice to his victims, but both scratch the surface of the political & intelligence dimensions of the scandal.

Investigation Discovery premiered a three-hour special, “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” on May 31, the first segment in a three-part series, that focused on Epstein’s August 2019 death in federal custody. The series addresses Epstein’s alleged co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, his links with billionaire Leslie Wexner, founder of the Victoria Secrets clothing line, and others, as well as the non-prosecution deal he was given.

The special followed on the heels of Netflix’s release of “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich,” a mini-series that draws on a book of the same name by James Patterson.

Promotional material for “Who Killed Jeffery Epstein?” promises that: “… exclusive interviews and in-depth investigations reveal new clues about his seedy underworld, privileged life and controversial death. The three-hour special looks to answer the questions surrounding the death of this enigmatic figure.” Netflix billed its series this way: “Stories from survivors fuel this docuseries examining how convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein used his wealth and power to carry out his abuses.”

Neither documentary however deals at all with Epstein’s suspected ties to the world of intelligence.

robert maxwell with papers file Absent from both are Maxwell’s reported links to Israeli intelligence through her father, Robert Maxwell, former owner of The New York Daily News and The Mirror newspaper in London. Maxwell essentially received a state funeral in Israel and was buried on the Mount of Olives after he mysteriously fell off his yacht in 1991 in the Atlantic Ocean.

In an interview with Consortium News, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe said Epstein did not work with Mossad. “Military intelligence was who he was working with,” said Ben-Menashe. “Big difference,” he said. “He never worked with Mossad, and Robert Maxwell never did, either. It was military intelligence.”

In Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales, a book published in December, Ben-Menashe is quoted as saying he worked with Robert Maxwell who introduced his daughter and Epstein to Israeli intelligence, after which they engaged in a blackmail operation for Israel. “[Epstein] was taking photos of politicians f**king fourteen-year-old girls — if you want to get it straight. They [Epstein and Maxwell] would just blackmail people, they would just blackmail people like that,” he says in the book.

Victims’ Voices

alexander acosta o cropped Custom The Netflix and Investigation Discovery productions allow survivors to recount their experiences in interviews as well as taped police recordings and focus on the sweetheart plea deal provided to Epstein by former Trump Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, right, during Acosta’s tenure as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

Each series outlines Epstein’s relationships with Wexner (below left), Maxwell, and a variety of elite figures. Investigation Discovery focuses on the controversy surrounding Epstein’s death while Netflix’s “Filthy Rich” examines the second attempt to prosecute Epstein in the context of the Me Too movement.

leslie wexner youtube cropped screenshot american academy of achievement Omitting the intelligence aspect of Epstein’s history allows the Establishment media to portray his case as a mysterious and unsolvable aberration, rather than perhaps a continuation of business-as-usual amongst those in power.

The glaring refusal to address Epstein’s intelligence involvement becomes clear when Investigation Discovery and Netflix’s programs discuss the role of Acosta in securing Epstein’s “sweetheart” plea deal, but do not reference Acosta’s widely reported explanation as to why Acosta agreed to the deal. As reported by The Daily Beast, Acosta claimed that he cut the non-prosecution deal because he had been told that “Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

Independent journalist Whitney Webb has reported on Epstein’s many ties with intelligence, telling CNLive! in August last year that there is evidence this included with the CIA.

“I think that one of the goals of this [Netflix] documentary is to basically imply that Epstein was the head of the operation and that now that he is dead, all of that activity has ceased,” Webb said. “If they had actually bothered to explore the intelligence angle, in some of the more obvious facts about the case, like Leslie Wexner’s role, for example, it becomes clear that Epstein was really just more of a manager of this type of operation, [and] that these activities continue.”

New York Times, Ex-Pentagon Analyst Sentenced to 30 Months in Leak Case, Adam Goldman, June 19, 2020 (print ed.). The former counterterrorism analyst had pleaded guilty to sharing classified information with reporters about foreign weapon systems. A former Pentagon counterterrorism analyst was sentenced by a federal judge on Thursday to more than two years in prison for sharing national security secrets with a pair of reporters and a consultant.

The former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Henry Kyle Frese, 32, had pleaded guilty this year in federal court in Alexandria, Va., to willful transmission of top-secret national henry frese amanda macias combo Custom defense information, namely about foreign countries’ weapons systems. He had faced up to 10 years in prison.

“Frese repeatedly passed classified information to a reporter, sometimes in response to her requests, all for personal gain,” John C. Demers, the top national security official at the Justice Department, said in a statement.

The arrest of Mr. Frese was part of the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on illegal leaks of classified information, a push that dates to the second half of the George W. Bush administration and intensified under former President Barack Obama.

Mr. Frese, shown at right in a mug shot, admitted to sharing information from April 2018 to September 2019 with the two journalists, identified as Journalist 1 and Journalist 2 in court documents.

According to court documents and social media posts, Journalist 1 was Amanda Macias, shown above right, a national security reporter at CNBC, who was Mr. Frese’s girlfriend and shared a home with him.

Ms. Macias published eight articles that contained classified information related to those weapons systems, prosecutors said. The articles contained sensitive material taken from classified intelligence reports, they said.

In May 2018, Ms. Macias reported that China had installed anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missile system in the South China Sea. Mr. Frese shared a link to the article that she had posted on Twitter.

Prosecutors said that at least 30 times in 2018, Mr. Frese searched classified government systems for information he discussed with the reporters.

And from early 2018 to October 2019, Mr. Frese communicated with an employee of an overseas consulting group using social media, according to court papers. On at least two occasions, prosecutors said, Mr. Frese transmitted classified information to the consultant, who was not named.

As part of its investigation, the F.B.I. wiretapped Mr. Frese’s cellphone and intercepted some of his text messages and phone calls. The government also obtained data from Twitter, where he communicated with one of the reporters.

Mr. Frese’s lawyers had argued in a court filing shortly before he was sentenced that he did not deserve more than 12 months and one day, noting that his disclosures included no sources or methods of intelligence-gathering, which are among the government’s most closely held secrets.

In April 2018, prosecutors said, Ms. Macias introduced Mr. Frese to Journalist 2, who has been identified as Courtney Kube, a reporter for NBC News covering the Pentagon. Mr. Frese said that he was “down” to help Ms. Kube if it helped Ms. Macias’s career “progress.” Note: Both CNBC and NBC are owned by Comcast. Neither reporter was accused of any wrongdoing. Neither has reportedly commented on the case.

The lawyers said Mr. Frese met Ms. Macias after a traumatic breakup with a long-term girlfriend. His lawyers said Ms. Macias’s “career was stalling, and she would ask Mr. Frese to share information.” They said he was a “dedicated patriot” who was “particularly susceptible to pressure and influence.”

“Mr. Frese engaged in his regrettable behavior at a time of clouded judgment and in a misguided effort to salvage a relationship that was not worth saving,” his lawyers wrote in a court document filed on Wednesday. “For that he will always be sorry.”

June 18

Washington Post, After departure of VOA editors, official fires heads of sister organizations, Paul Farhi, June 18, 2020. Michael Pack, a controversial Trump appointee, dismissed the director of Radio Free Europe and three other government-funded but otherwise independent news broadcasting operations.

The directors of four federally funded agencies that produce news and information for international audiences have been fired by a new chief executive appointed by President Trump, in a purge that has raised concerns among Democrats about editorial meddling.

Combined with the resignation of the director and deputy director of Voice of America on Monday, the firings ordered by Michael Pack, the new head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, represents a clean sweep of top officials who manage government-funded but otherwise independent news broadcasting operations.

The speed and sweep of the firings — Pack began work only Monday after a bruising Senate confirmation battle — raised fears that Trump was trying to exert greater control over the output of such venerable organizations as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting and the Open Technology Fund, the agencies whose heads Pack removed via a brief letter late Wednesday.

Palmer Report, Opinion: CNN exposes Donald Trump for posting fake story that he falsely claimed was from CNN, Bill Palmer, June 18, 2020. On Thursday evening Donald Trump tweeted a video that was problematic on several levels. First, it falsely claimed that CNN had aired a story about a “racist baby” on the loose. Second, it ruined what had been a popular feel-good meme. And for good measure, the fake video somehow misspelled “toddler.”

Twitter responded by slapping a “Manipulated Media” warning label on Donald Trump’s tweet. CNN piled on, using its @CNNPR account to post this response: “CNN did cover this story – exactly as it happened. Just as we reported your positions on race (and poll numbers). We’ll continue working with facts rather than tweeting fake videos that exploit innocent children. We invite you to do the same. Be better.” CNN then linked to its original story from last September, which accurately reported on the two toddlers in question.

Both CNBC and NBC are owned by Comcast. Neither reporter was accused of any wrongdoing. Neither has commented on the case.

June 16

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New York Times, Trump Administration Sues to Try to Delay Publication of Bolton’s Book, Maggie Haberman and Katie Benner, June 16, 2020. The Trump administration sued theformer national security adviser John R. Bolton, above, on Tuesday to try to delay the publication of his highly anticipated memoir about his time in the White House, saying it contained classified information that would compromise national security if it became public.

The book, The Room Where It Happened, is set for release on June 23. Administration officials have repeatedly warned Mr. Bolton against publishing the book.

Mr. Bolton “had negotiated a book deal allegedly worth about $2 million and had drafted a 500-plus-page manuscript rife with classified information, which he proposed to release to the world,” the Justice Department said in a lawsuit against Mr. Bolton filed in federal court in Washington.

Mr. Bolton’s lawyer, Charles Cooper, has said that his client acted in good faith and that the Trump administration is abusing a standard review process to prevent Mr. Bolton from revealing information that is merely embarrassing to President Trump, but not a threat to national security.

On Monday, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Bolton of violating policies related to classified information by moving ahead with the book.

But the book has already been printed and bound and has shipped to warehouses, which could make it more difficult for the administration to stop Mr. Bolton’s account from becoming public.

Mr. Bolton submitted the manuscript to the administration for review in January. At the time, the impeachment inquiry was underway into whether Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine constituted an abuse of power.

Democrats asked Mr. Bolton to testify voluntarily in the House impeachment inquiry, but he declined, and they never sought a subpoena, fearing a protracted court fight. Mr. Bolton offered to testify in the impeachment trial in the Senate, where Republicans control the majority. They declined to call him.

June 15

Washington Post, Top Voice of America editors resign amid strife with White House, Paul Farhi and Elahe Izadi, June 15, 2020. The White House in April accused the international news service of promoting Chinese propaganda in its coronavirus reporting.

The top two editors at Voice of America resigned Monday amid White House criticism of the government-funded but editorially independent news agency and as a new overseer loyal to President Trump was about to take office.

It wasn’t immediately clear why VOA Director Amanda Bennett and Deputy Director Sandy Sugawara submitted their resignations. In a memo to staff on Monday, they jointly wrote, “It is time for us to leave,” but cited no specific reason other than the arrival of Michael Pack, a Trump appointee who will head the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. Pack is an ally of Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist.

They added, “As the Senate-confirmed C.E.O., he has the right to replace us with his own VOA leadership.”

Their departure comes amid concerns within the agency that the Trump administration is seeking to exert greater control over what and how VOA reports.

The organization’s relationship with the Trump administration was already fraught, but over the weekend, a new rift developed. After news emerged that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had instructed its communications staff to deny interviews to VOA reporters — a policy prompted by the White House’s criticism of the agency — Bennett issued a strongly worded statement condemning the policy.

“Efforts such as those outlined in the CDC memo can result in the kind of chilling effect on our journalism that we regularly see in the markets we broadcast to that have no free press,” she wrote.

The White House in April launched an extraordinary public attack on VOA, accusing it of promoting Chinese government propaganda in its reporting on the coronavirus outbreak. It also said VOA advanced the views of regimes of countries hostile toward the United States, such as Iran.

New York Times, The Pandemic Claims New Victims: Prestigious Medical Journals, Roni Caryn Rabin, June 15, 2020. Two major study retractions in one month have left researchers wondering if the peer review process is broken. One study promised that popular blood-pressure drugs were safe for people infected with the coronavirus. Another paper warned that anti-malaria drugs endorsed by President Trump actually were dangerous to these patients.

The studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, were retracted shortly after publication, following an outcry from researchers who saw obvious flaws.

The hasty retractions, on the same day this month, have alarmed scientists worldwide who fear that the rush for research on the coronavirus has overwhelmed the peer review process and opened the door to fraud, threatening the credibility of respected medical journals just when they are needed most.

Peer review is supposed to safeguard the quality of scientific research. When a journal receives a manuscript, the editors ask three or more experts in the field for comments. The reviewers’ written assessments may force revisions in a paper or prompt the journal to reject the work altogether. The system, widely adopted by medical journals in the middle of the 20th century, undergirds scientific discourse around the world.

Washington Post, Opinion: John Bolton made a tragic mistake. It’s not the one you might think, George T. Conway III, June 15, 2020 (print ed.). John Bolton made a mistake. It’s not the one you may think it is.

The former national security adviser’s memoir about his experiences working for President Trump will arrive on June 23. For months, the book has triggered criticism that Bolton put commercial profit over country by saving his depiction of Trump for the book, instead of providing it under oath during Trump’s impeachment proceedings last winter. A new wave of such criticism hit Bolton on Friday, when his publisher revealed more about what’s in the book.

In short: Trump is as bad as we thought, perhaps worse. According to the publisher, Bolton will describe Trump as “a president for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation.” Bolton even “argues that the House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy.”

The only way to make sense of Bolton’s behavior is to recognize that he actually did intend and expect to testify. He wanted to testify, but wanted to appear to be forced to do it. Perhaps he thought that, as a reluctant witness, he’d be less open to being caricatured as a disgruntled, discharged adviser, and his credibility would have been enhanced. So he insisted on a court order to appear before the House.

When that didn’t happen, Bolton began virtually begging to testify: But Bolton made one fateful misjudgment.

National Press Club, Club and its Journalism Institute speak out against wrongful conviction of journalist Maria Ressa, Lindsay Underwood, June 15, 2020. The following is a statement from National Press Club President Michael Freedman and National Press Club Journalism Institute President Angela Greiling Keane on the conviction yesterday in a Manila Court of Maria Ressa, right, Executive Editor of Rappler:

We are deeply concerned and disappointed to learn of the conviction of crusading journalist Maria Ressa on charges of cyber libel. The Government of the Philippines has repeatedly charged Ms. Ressa over the last several years with a variety of bogus counts trying very hard to get something to stick.

Make no mistake they are looking to silence her outspoken and fearless voice, which is often in opposition to many of the restrictive and illegal policies of the government. The people of the Philippines lose an important voice if Ms. Ressa is silenced -- as does the world. It was not long ago in January of 2019 that Maria Ressa was named among the group honored as “Persons of the Year” in Time magazine's issue on Press Freedom. Time was right to place a spotlight on her courage and remarkable achievements as a journalist. We must all stand up for Maria Ressa at this critical time.

We invite her to come to the National Press Club right now if she will be allowed to make the trip. We are anxious to hear from her.

June 13

New York Times, Fox News Removes a Digitally Altered Image of Seattle Protests, Jesse Drucker, June 13, 2020. Fox News acknowledged that one photo was a combination of several images, and a second was taken in a different city. Fox News removed photos accompanying its coverage of Seattle’s demonstrations from its website on Friday after acknowledging that one was a combination of several different images and a second photo was of a fiery scene in a different city.

On Seattle’s Capitol Hill, protesters of the police killing of George Floyd have claimed a series of city blocks, now known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The police there have boarded up their precinct and given protesters free rein in the area. In recent days, the zone has featured speeches, music and a screening of a film on the criminal justice system.

On Friday, Fox posted on its site a photo of a man armed with a rifle standing in front of the shattered glass of a storefront. The Seattle Times noted that it was a combination of several different photos from Getty Images taken over nearly two weeks.

Also on the website, Fox also posted a nighttime photo of a burning storefront and car, accompanied by the headline “Crazy Town” and a list of articles on the unrest in Seattle. But that image was taken in St. Paul, Minn.

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Washington Post, Opinion: Forgive Tucker Carlson for his panicky desperation. His world is collapsing, Erik Wemple, June 13, 2020. Two nights after George Floyd died under theknee of a Minneapolis police officer, Fox News host Tucker Carlson turned his attention to a certain city in Minnesota. “We’ll have the latest on those riots in Minneapolis last night,” Carlson said at the top of his show on Wednesday, May 27. “And yes, they were in fact riots, no matter what they’re telling you on the other channels — that’s a fact and we have the tape.”

Again: This was how Carlson launched the first show in which he addressed Floyd’s death.

So many questions merited answers on that edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: How does the Floyd case align with the Minneapolis police department’s record on the use of force? What justification could there possibly be for the treatment of Floyd?

But, no, Carlson went right to broken windows. “Rioters cut a path of destruction through Minneapolis last night after a video went viral that showed a man dying in police custody,” he said. Then came a live shot from Fox News correspondent Mike Tobin, who was in the midst of a confrontation between protesters and police. There were flash-bangs and pepper spray from the police, and Tobin began coughing. Carlson pulled away, saying, “We’re getting reports that there’s looting in other parts of the city. So, I think we’re going to come back to you a little bit from now.”

June 12

New York Times, Amazon Said to Be Under Scrutiny in 2 States for Abuse of Power, Karen Weise and David McCabe, June 12, 2020. State investigators in California and Washington have been looking into whether Amazon abuses its power over sellers on the tech giant’s site, according to people involved with the inquiry.

In the last several months, California has asked about the company’s private label products and whether it uses data from sellers to inform which products it sells, according to two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution by the company.

The Washington attorney general’s office has also been interested in whether Amazon makes it harder for sellers to list their products on other websites, according to correspondence viewed by The New York Times.

The people said that the inquiries did not appear to be in advanced stages.

PBS via WGBH Radio (Boston), Frontline, Maria Ressa, Duterte & the Fight for the Free Press, Max Green and James Edwards, June 12, 2020. Ahead of the expected verdict in her trial, Philippine journalist Maria Ressa speaks out about reporting on President Rodrigo Duterte's brutal drug war — and -- then becoming a high-profile target of his government's crackdown on the press.

As she faces potential prison time on cyber libel charges, the co-founder and CEO of the independent Philippine news site Rappler tells Frontline how she’s preparing, discusses her reporting on Duterte, and says that her conviction about what she does is undaunted: “All it has done is to make us stronger in our intent to continue to hold government to account…”

For more on Duterte’s drug war, watch Frontline's "On the President’s Orders." And for more from Ressa, read Frontline's interview with her for The Facebook Dilemma, in which she discusses her reporting on how Duterte weaponized the platform to target his critics and spread disinformation. Plus: Stay tuned for the forthcoming documentary A Thousand Cuts, featuring Ressa’s story, which will see a summer theatrical release and a fall Frontline broadcast.

New York Times, Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Loses More Advertisers, Tiffany Hsu, June 12, 2020. Disney, Papa John’s, Poshmark and T-Mobile backed away from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” after the host’s comments about Black Lives Matter protests.

On Monday’s segment of his prime-time show, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson cast doubt on the reasons behind the worldwide unrest prompted by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last month.

“This may be a lot of things, this moment we are living through,” Mr. Carlson said. “But it is definitely not about black lives, and remember that when they come for you. And at this rate, they will.”

Since he made those statements and others, prominent companies including the Walt Disney Company, Papa John’s, Poshmark and T-Mobile have distanced themselves from “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” joining other businesses that have backed away from the show in recent years.

The flight of advertisers accelerated on Tuesday, when the watchdog group Sleeping Giants tagged T-Mobile in a Twitter post, saying that Fox News had aired what amounted to an “extremely racist segment scaremongering about the Black community.”

June 11

Washington Post, Trump campaign seeks apology, retraction of CNN poll showing Biden leading, John Wagner and Felicia Sonmez, June 11, 2020 (print ed.). President Trump’s reelection campaign is asking CNN for an apology and demanding a retraction of a poll this week that shows presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a sizable lead, claiming it was designed “to manufacture an anti-Trump narrative.”

CNN said Wednesday that it stands by the poll, which showed Trump trailing the former vice president, 41 percent to 55 percent, or by 14 points, among registered voters in a November matchup.

In a letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker, representatives of the Trump campaign questioned the methodology and timing of the poll, noting that it was largely conducted before better-than-expected unemployment numbers were released Friday.

“Media polls such as these are designed to manufacture an anti-Trump narrative and misinform and mislead actual voters,” the letter, dated Tuesday, said. “It’s a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the President, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the President.”

While Trump has complained about polling dating back to the 2016 election, this is the first known time that he or his campaign have threatened legal action to suppress results.

The Trump campaign asked CNN to retract the poll “by publishing a full, fair, and conspicuous retraction, apology, and clarification to correct its misleading conclusions.” The letter also puts CNN “on notice” that it should preserve documents related to the production of the poll, which was conducted for the network by SSRS and released Monday.

CNN executive vice president and general counsel David Vigilante responded Wednesday afternoon with a letter to the Trump campaign. Vigilante said the Trump campaign’s letter marked what he believed to be the first time that the network has been threatened over polling results in its 40-year history.

Washington Post, Bolton plans to move forward with book despite new White House warning that it contains classified material, Staff report, June 11, 2020 (print ed.).

June 10

Palmer Report, Opinion: Tucker Carlson just suffered a major blow, Bill Palmer, June 10, 2020. As Donald Trump’s popularity continues to collapse, and even many conservative Americans are beginning to support movements like Black Lives Matter, the hosts on Fox News have two choices. They can begin to incrementally evolve themselves, in order to match their incrementally evolving audience. Or they can histrionically double down on racist hysteria, like Tucker Carlson has been doing this week, and begin paying the price accordingly.

No matter what your ratings are, you can’t survive as a cable news host if your advertisers start abandoning you, because your show stops being profitable. We saw that when Bill O’Reilly started bleeding advertisers after his sexual misconduct came to light. To that end, Tucker Carlson – who has spent the past week telling his audience that black people are coming to get them – has lost five major advertisers today.

Media Matters says that Carlson has now lost T-Mobile, SmileDirectClub, Disney, Papa John’s, and Vari. Fox News will attempt to replace these advertisers with new ones. But with so many companies now boycotting Carlson’s show, Fox will have to significantly reduce the ad rates in order to attract new clients. His show will end up being full of no-name advertisers who are paying very little for the slot.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Opinion: Shoddy editors serve as another dagger in the heart of journalism, Wayne Madsen, left, June 10, 2020. During a time of unprecedented attacks on reporters, including physical police attacks on journalists covering civil rights protests – with one suffering the loss of an eye – editorial offices are ill-serving their staffs and the public.

The dodgy reporting of the on-line publication, The Intercept, edited by the over-rated Glenn Greenwald, a one-time attorney for Illinois neo-Nazi leader Matthew Hale, should be particularly suspect during the current situation involving white supremacist provocateurs involved in stoking violence amid otherwise peaceful protests against police violence.

June 1

New York Times, Commentary: Record Ratings and Record Chaos on Cable News, Ben Smith, June 1, 2020 (print ed.). Cable networks are facing threats, and opportunities, in a national crisis. Now, Fox is fighting back and CNBC is looking to the right. CNN is defined by Jeff Zucker, and he may run for mayor.

If Twitter is the twisted heart of America’s public conversation, cable news is its aorta, carrying fear and anger, as the rapper and activist Killer Mike put it last week, into the body politic. The coronavirus pandemic and the new urban crisis have made it impossible to look away, and journalists have at times become targets for the police. In this extraordinary news moment, the primacy of this supposedly dying medium has never been clearer, its ratings higher than ever.

But behind the scenes, chaos and uncertainty are also reaching record highs. I spent last week speaking to homebound executives, producers and on-air talent at the three cable news networks and found them wrestling in wildly different ways with an exceptional news moment that does not fit into cable’s familiar boxes: the coronavirus story, the economic crisis, and the protests and fires in the streets of American cities.

New York Times, Fall Is Now Jam-Packed for Book Publishers. That Could Be a Problem, Alexandra Alter, June 1, 2020. Books scheduled for release this spring and summer are now on track for fall, when authors will be fighting for attention in the midst of a presidential election and an ongoing crisis.

Delaying a book’s publication is a calculation that authors and publishers throughout the industry have made and wrestled with in recent months, as the pandemic has devastated the retail landscape and led to canceled tours, book fairs, literary festivals and media appearances. As publishers scramble to limit the economic fallout and sales declines driven by the epidemic, hundreds of books that were scheduled to come out this spring and early summer have been postponed, in some cases until next year.

Washington Post, Ryan Grim helped push the Tara Reade story into the mainstream. What does he think of it now? Paul Farhi, June 1, 2020. The Washington editor of the Intercept has been both hero and scourge for various factions of liberals.

The past few weeks haven’t been kind to Tara Reade, the woman who has accused former vice president Joe Biden of sexual assault. Several of Reade’s former landlords and acquaintances say she manipulated and deceived them. Lawyers say she inflated her résumé as a prosecution witness in several criminal cases, and a district attorney in California is investigating whether she perjured herself. Her attorney quit on her after just two weeks.

Ryan Grim is unmoved.

Grim — a journalist whose work has given prominence and credence to Reade’s allegations, which Biden has firmly denied — thinks the latest revelations don’t really change the story’s basic contours.

“It’s messy and getting messier,” he said last week. Those “who don’t believe her, or don’t want to believe her, have plenty to cling to. People who do believe her, or who want to believe her, do as well, though many people in the middle have shifted to the doubtful camp as more questions have arisen.”

As Washington bureau chief of the Intercept, he was among the first journalists to showcase Reade’s latest allegations of abusive treatment when she worked in Biden’s office. And when, shortly thereafter, she alleged on a podcast that Biden had sexually assaulted her in 1993, Grim was noisy in his efforts to call attention to the story — both on Twitter, where he has more than 150,000 followers, and in interviews discussing each twist and turn.

New reporting puts focus on Tara Reade’s inconsistencies

He also broke an important piece of the story last month when he uncovered a recording of Reade’s late mother calling in to CNN in 1993 and telling host Larry King about unspecified “problems” her daughter had working for “a prominent senator.” The call “isn’t conclusive, but it buttresses [Reade’s] credibility,” Grim said in a webcast interview. “It adds to the pile of evidence” supporting Reade, who had previously said she told her mother about the alleged assault when it happened.

Biden partisans have accused Grim and the Intercept of promoting the story to boost Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Biden’s last rival for the Democratic nomination, who remained in the race until mid-April and would be the likeliest benched candidate to see his hopes resurrected if Biden dropped out. (Biden’s campaign representatives declined to comment.)

Critics note that the Intercept — co-founded in 2014 by Pulitzer-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar — is known for taking whacks at the Democratic establishment and championing the party’s insurgent wing.

Grim has been attacked by Neera Tanden, a former Obama administration official who is the president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank. “We’ve had story after story that demonstrates massive inconsistencies at best and lies at worst by Reade. And silence by @ryangrim, who pushed this story online for weeks,” she tweeted May 21. Tanden went on to accuse him of being among a group of journalists “who spend years pushing a certain candidate, he loses the primary, and then those journalists push stories to torpedo the candidate who won.”

Grim fired back by calling Tanden “delusional” and defending his coverage of the primaries — maintaining that, far from seeing him as an ally, Sanders supporters have attacked him for his tough reporting on their candidate.

Washington Post, Misinformation about extent of D.C. unrest surges across Twitter, Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Fenit Nirappil, June 1, 2020. Misinformation about the extent of the unrest in Washington, D.C. and false claims about widespread communications outages burgeoned on Twitter Monday, making the #DCblackout hashtag into a nationwide trend on the platform.

Started by an account with just three followers, the hashtag exploded in popularity, generating about half a million tweets in its first nine hours after being created. The thread swelled with untrue claims that authorities had somehow blocked protesters from communicating from their smartphones in order to crack down on the unrest, which included looting and some fires.

Several Twitter accounts shared images of a major fire burning out of control near the Washington Monument, but others noted that the image appeared to have been copied from the television show “Designated Survivor.”

Washington Post, Facebook employees blast Zuckerberg’s response to Trump posts, Rachel Siegel, June 1, 2020. Facebook’s stance on the president’s post stands in stark contrast to Twitter, which for the first time limited the public’s ability to view or share his tweet.

As protests swept the nation over the weekend, several Facebook employees publicly chastised CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his hands-off approach to a divisive post on the demonstrators by President Trump — one that Twitter took the unprecedented step of flagging as inflammatory on its site.

“I am not proud of how we’re showing up,” tweeted Jason Toff, director of product management. “The majority of co-workers I’ve spoken to feel the same way. We are making our voice heard.”

Washington Post, Police injure, arrest reporters covering unrest, Paul Farhi and Elahe Izadi, June 1, 2020 (print ed.). Even when displaying a press badge, some were hit with pepper spray or rubber bullets. “I have never been fired at by police,” said one startled war correspondent, “until tonight.”

May

May 28

U.S. 2020 Elections / Politics

New York Times, Executive Order Is Expected to Curtail Protections for Social Media Companies
Palmer Report, Analysis: Donald Trump isn’t the one with the leverage here, Bill Palmer

DOJ Probes U.S. Reporter After Barr Exposé

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Commentary: Barr's DOJ demanded and received access to WMR editor's email / iPhone account, Wayne Madsen

U.S. Crime, Courts, Scandals

New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s ‘Horrifying Lies’ About Lori Klausutis May Cross a Legal Line, Peter H. Schuck
Washington Post, Barr appoints Texas prosecutor to review Obama officials’ ‘unmasking’ requests

U.S. 2020 Elections / Politics

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New York Times, Executive Order Is Expected to Curtail Protections for Social Media Companies, Maggie Haberman and Kate Conger, May 28, 2020. The move is almost certain to face a court challenge and signals the latest salvo by President Trump to crack down on online platforms.

The Trump administration is preparing an executive order intended to curtail the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for what gets posted on their platforms, two senior administration officials said early Thursday.

Such an order, which officials said was still being drafted and was subject to change, would make it easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter are suppressing free speech when they move to suspend users or delete posts, among other examples.

The move is almost certain to face a court challenge and is the latest salvo by President Trump in his repeated threats to crack down on online platforms. Twitter this week attached fact-checking notices to two of the president’s tweets after he made false claims about voter fraud, and Mr. Trump and his supporters have long accused social media companies of silencing conservative voices.

youtube logo Custom White House officials said the president would sign the order later Thursday, but they declined to comment on its content. A spokesman for Twitter declined to comment.

Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, online companies have broad immunity from liability for content created by their users.

But the draft of the executive order, which refers to what it calls “selective censoring,” would allow the Commerce Department to try to refocus how broadly Section 230 is applied, and to let the Federal Trade Commission bulk up a tool for reporting online bias.

Palmer Report, Analysis: Donald Trump isn’t the one with the leverage here, Bill Palmer, right, May 28, 2020. As is increasingly the case these days, Donald Trump is attempting to write checks he can’t cash when it comes to the threats he’s making.

He spent all of Wednesday threatening to punish Twitter, or even shut it down entirely, because the site dared to place a fact check warning on two of his false tweets.

Here’s the thing, though. On Wednesday night we saw Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey fire back at Trump, and that’s a good thing. But while watching the exchange play out between Trump and Jack, something occurred to me: they’re both using Jack’s platform to do it.

Yes, Trump has other ways of getting his message across, including television. But it’s long been clear that Trump considers Twitter to be his most effective communication tool. The fact that Trump had to use Twitter to threaten to shut down Twitter means that Trump isn’t the one with the leverage here.

Yes, Twitter will take a hit in the popularity department if Donald Trump stops using it as his main platform.

But Trump has more to lose.He’s on track to lose a presidential election, and he’ll end up indicted and put on criminal trial in New York if he loses. If Trump sees tweeting as one of his key campaign strategies, he’s not at all in a position to walk away from Twitter. Twitter might lose some traffic if this feud escalates, but Trump could lose everything.

DOJ Probes Reporter After Barr Exposé

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Commentary: Barr's DOJ demanded and received access to WMR editor's email / iPhone account, Wayne Madsen, May 28, 2020. On February 14, 2019, William Barr was sworn in as Attorney General, a position in which he has proceeded to act as Donald Trump's personal lawyer and hatchet man.

A little over a month from Barr assuming his position, his Department of Justice issued a legal demand to Microsoft and Apple, approved by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, "for data related to your Email account."

On March 29, 2019, the same day Barr's Justice Department demanded from Microsoft and Apple access to this editor's Hotmail and iPhone data, WMR published a scathing article concerning Barr. Something in the article obviously triggered Barr into demanding access to Hotmail and Apple data, possibly to discover potential leakers in DOJ or the FBI.

U.S. Crime, Courts, Scandals

New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s ‘Horrifying Lies’ About Lori Klausutis May Cross a Legal Line, Peter H. Schuck (emeritus professor of law at Yale and Darling Foundation visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, this semester), May 28, 2020. The president’s innuendo about the death of a congressional staffer in 2001 could lead to a costly court judgment against him.

President Trump and his minions relentlessly grind out despicable acts — gratuitous insults to war heroes, over 18,000 (and counting) false or misleading statements, many decisions courts have ruled illegal. But Mr. Trump’s wantonly cruel tweets about the tragic death in 2001 of Lori Klausutis are distinctive: They may constitute intentional torts for which a civil jury could award punitive damages against him.

Last week, Timothy Klausutis, Lori’s widower husband, wrote a remarkably restrained, poignant letter to Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, citing the pain that Mr. Trump’s “horrifying lies” about his wife’s death have caused him and the family, and asking Mr. Dorsey to remove Mr. Trump’s tweet.

Mr. Dorsey has refused, most likely because the 1996 Communications Decency Act probably protects him from defamation claims for publishing the words of another. However Twitter added a warning label to the president’s false tweets on Tuesday about mail-in ballots, the first time the service has taken such a step.

Mr. Trump’s first tort is called intentional infliction of emotional distress, which the courts developed precisely to condemn wanton cruelty to another person who suffers emotionally as a result. This tort, which is sometimes called “outrage,” readily applies to Mr. Trump’s tweets about Ms. Klausutis. They were intentional and reckless, and were “extreme and outrageous” without a scintilla of evidence to support them. And they caused severe emotional distress — the protracted, daily-felt grief described in Mr. Klausutis’s letter to Mr. Dorsey.

Although the tweets targeted Mr. Scarborough, his own infliction of emotional distress claim may be weaker than Mr. Klausutis’s.

Even so, Mr. Scarborough might succeed in a defamation suit against Mr. Trump for reputational harm. After all, the president’s innuendo that Mr. Scarborough may have murdered Lori Klausutis — presumably credible to the many Trump Twitter followers who subscribe to conspiracy theories — may seriously harm Mr. Scarborough’s reputation with them and others.

Mr. Trump, moreover, often aims his tweets to lead multiple news cycles affecting well beyond his Twitter followers. The president will surely argue that he has not actually accused anyone of murder and was merely “raising questions.” But courts have held that such calculated innuendo can constitute defamation, depending on the facts. This would be for a jury to decide.

Mr. Scarborough, as a public figure in his own right, must satisfy the Supreme Court’s demanding test for defamation liability in its landmark New York Times v. Sullivan decision.

Under this test — designed to free public debate from being unduly constrained by fear of legal liability — Mr. Scarborough must prove that Mr. Trump made his defamatory comment either with actual knowledge that it was false or with “reckless disregard” for whether it was true or false. But the president’s tweets about the Klausutis case probably satisfy this test. After all, he has not cited any evidence to support his calumny either before the tweets or in response to the backlash since then. If the jury found for Mr. Scarborough, it could require Mr. Trump to pay substantial punitive damages in addition to compensation for his reputational harm.

Under the court’s unanimous 1998 ruling in Paula Jones’s sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton, both of these lawsuits — by Mr. Klausutis and by Mr. Scarborough — could proceed against the president while he is still in office. Because his tweets reach followers nationwide, the lawsuits could probably be brought in any state. And since the subject of his tweets had nothing to do with his presidential responsibilities, he probably could not hide behind an assertion of executive privilege.

Washington Post, Barr appoints Texas prosecutor to review Obama officials’ ‘unmasking’ requests, Devlin Barrett, May 28, 2020. This is an offshoot of an investigation underway by the U.S. Attorney of Connecticut, who was tapped by Barr to investigate the origins of the 2016 election interference probe that has overshadowed Trump’s presidency.

Attorney General William P. Barr has appointed a U.S. attorney in Texas to scrutinize Obama-era officials who sought to identify anonymized names in government documents that turned out to be people connected to then-President-elect Trump, a Justice Department official said Wednesday.

In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said the attorney general had tasked John Bash, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Texas, to examine the practice of “unmasking,” which many Republicans charge was abused by the previous administration to unfairly target people close to Trump.

May 27

Washington Post, Twitter labels Trump’s tweets with a fact check for the first time
Washington Post, Trump doubles down on conspiracy theory about woman’s death, ignoring grieving widower’s plea for peace
Washington Post, Facebook hasn’t warned investors about illegal activity, including drug sales, whistleblowers allege
PEN America, Opinion: Trump Lashes Out Against Twitter; PEN America CEO says it’s a “red alert for all Americans,” Suzanne Noessel

Washington Post, Twitter labels Trump’s tweets with a fact check for the first time, Elizabeth Dwoskin, May 27, 2020 (print ed.). The move was made in response to two recent tweets in which President Trump falsely claimed that mail-in ballots are fraudulent.

Twitter on Tuesday slapped a fact-check label on President Trump’s tweets for the first time, a response to long-standing criticism that the company is too hands-off when it comes to policing misinformation and falsehoods from world leaders.

The move, which escalates tensions between Washington and Silicon Valley in an election year, was made in response to two Trump tweets over the past 24 hours. The tweets falsely claimed that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. Twitter’s label says, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” and redirects users to news articles about Trump’s unsubstantiated claim.

The tweets, said Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough, “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”

The label directs users to articles by CNN, The Washington Post and the Hill, along with selections from the articles and a page summarizing the findings of fact-checkers.

Washington Post, Trump doubles down on conspiracy theory about woman’s death, ignoring grieving widower’s plea for peace, Toluse Olorunnipa, Elizabeth Dwoskin and John Wagner, May 27, 2020 (print ed.). President Trump’s online stream of baseless allegations, misinformation and pseudoscience has intensified in recent weeks, sparking renewed calls for social media platforms to take action.

Washington Post, Facebook hasn’t warned investors about illegal activity, including drug sales, whistleblowers allege, Nitasha Tiku, May 27, 2020. The new complaint to the SEC claims the social media company is aware of illegal activity on its platform and has failed to properly police it.

A consortium of Facebook insiders and critics filed a confidential whistleblower’s complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission late Tuesday, claiming the social media giant is aware of illegal activity on its platform, such as the sale of opioids, and has failed to properly police it.

The complaint, which was obtained by The Washington Post, includes dozens of pages of screenshots of opioids and other drugs for sale on Facebook and its photo-sharing site Instagram, with some having seemingly obvious tags such as “#buydrugsonline.” It also notes that Facebook has a pattern of taking down content when it is pointed out by media or activists, only to have it reappear later.

The filing is part of a campaign by the National Whistleblowers Center to hold Facebook accountable for unchecked criminal activity on its properties. By petitioning the SEC, the consortium is attempting to get around a bedrock law — Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act — that exempts Internet companies from liability for the user-generated content on their platform.

Instead, the complaint focuses on federal securities law, arguing that Facebook’s failure to tell shareholders about the extent of illegal activity on its platform is a violation of its fiduciary duty. If Facebook alienates advertisers and has to shoulder the true cost of scrubbing criminals from its social networks, it could affect investors in the company, the complaint argues.

PEN America, Opinion: Trump Lashes Out Against Twitter; PEN America CEO says it’s a “red alert for all Americans,” Suzanne Noessel, May 27, 2020. In response to President Trump’s threats to shut down Twitter over its fact-check of his false tweets, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said the following:

“President Trump’s threat to regulate or shut down social media platforms sounds a red alert for all Americans who care about free speech. His call to punish Twitter for its fact-checking of his blatantly false statements is akin to threatening to shut down a newspaper or a TV network for a report considered unfriendly. Not only does he not have the authority to silence these platforms and users, the constitution expressly forbids using the power of government to exact reprisals against speech. He isn’t protecting free speech; he is chilling it.

“Free speech has never involved a right to say things that are false and not be held to account. In this instance, Twitter has neither silenced the president nor closed his account. And that’s a good thing. It is valuable for Americans to know what their president thinks, no matter how odious. It’s often revelatory.

“But when those tweets are deceptive or misleading, the company is well within its rights to apply its rules: namely that information will be fact-checked, and if found to be false, marked as such. Twitter is not obligated to offer a vehicle for President Trump’s falsehoods, and he perverts the power of the presidency in threatening the company for doing so.”

May 25 martin luther king injustice quote

New York Times, Opinion: In Memphis, Journalism Can Still Bring Justice, Margaret Renkl, May 25, 2020. The nonprofit newsroom MLK50, founded by Wendi C. Thomas, aims to carry on the work that Martin Luther King Jr. started.

Wendi C. Thomas launched MLK50 in 2017 as a one-year project to make the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a time to consider the current state of economic justice in the city where he was murdered while advocating for a living wage.

“Underpaid black workers and their plight drew Dr. King to Memphis more than 50 years ago,” Ms. Thomas said in a phone interview last week. “That’s why he was here. And while I wouldn’t say that Memphis has made no progress, it’s hard to fathom that Dr. King would be proud of where we’re at.” It is a city where almost 28 percent of the population lives in poverty, and that number is growing.

Ms. Thomas was under no illusion that simply telling the stories of underpaid workers, immigrants and other vulnerable Memphians would sort out the economic issues that make it so difficult for them to emerge from poverty. “The city has made a commitment, a commitment, to low-wage industries, which means low-wage labor, which means systems that exploit, for the most part, black and brown workers,” she said. But telling their stories was a start. Three years later, her one-year project is still going strong.

Educated in Memphis schools, Ms. Thomas is a veteran journalist with more than 25 years of reporting and editing experience at daily newspapers in Indianapolis, Nashville and Charlotte, N.C. For 11 years, she served as a columnist and assistant managing editor at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. By the time she’d completed a year as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, she had both the knowledge and the experience to build a newsroom from scratch.

What she didn’t have was funding. In the beginning, for weeks on end, she worked 16- and 18-hour days, living off her credit cards while creating a news source unlike any other in Memphis. “We unapologetically exist to dismantle the status quo where it doesn’t serve low-income residents in Memphis, the overwhelming majority of whom are black,” Ms. Thomas said. “We’re not a black publication, but we frame the news from the perspective of the most vulnerable.”

Ms. Thomas’s investigative series on predatory debt collection by a nonprofit hospital system affiliated with the United Methodist Church, the largest hospital chain in the Memphis area, revealed that these hospitals sued their own low-income employees for failing to pay their medical debts. In other words, a faith-based hospital system both failed to pay its employees a living wage and sued them for being unable to pay their bills. To add insult to injury, workers’ health-insurance policies did not cover care at rival hospitals with more generous financial-assistance policies.

In the three years since MLK50 launched, the publication has grown to include a managing editor, a visuals director and a senior editor, and it hires a range of freelancers, all of whom are paid. Thanks to large grants from the American Journalism Project and the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy, Ms. Thomas is now poised to expand her nonprofit newsroom to include a development director and an operations manager. A full-time Report for America corps member will join the team, as well.

Washington Post, Florida family grieves as Trump spreads debunked conspiracy theory to attack MSNBC host, Craig Pittman, May 25, 2020 (print ed.). A little after 8 a.m. on July 20, 2001, a couple arriving for an appointment opened an unlocked front door at an office in the Florida panhandle town of Fort Walton Beach and discovered a woman lying on the floor, dead. Her name was Lori Kaye Klausutis and she was just 28.

The police said they found no signs of foul play. The medical examiner concluded her lonely death was an accident. She had fainted, the result of a heart condition, and hit her head on a desk, he said.

joe scarborough headshot Now, nearly 20 years later, Klausutis’s death has captured the attention of the country’s most prominent purveyor of conspiracy theories — the president of the United States — who has without evidence speculated that she might have been murdered and that the case should be reopened.

The reason for President Trump’s fixation:

At the time of her death, Klausutis was working for a Republican congressman from Pensacola named Joe Scarborough, left, — the same Scarborough who today, as host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, is a fierce critic of Trump and has in recent weeks decried the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as a failure.

New York Times, The New Model Media Star Is Famous Only to You, Ben Smith, May 25, 2020 (print ed.). With short videos and paid newsletters, everyone from superstars to half-forgotten former athletes and even journalists can, as one tech figure put it, “monetize individuality.”

Back in March, I was trying to persuade my dad to stop taking the subway to work in Manhattan and join me upstate. So I paid $75 to Leonard Marshall, a retired New York Giants defensive lineman we both loved in the 1980s, to send the message.

“I put a few guys in the hospital, Bob,” he told my father solemnly. “I need you to play defense in these crazy times.”

It worked, and my father hasn’t been to Times Square since.

I had reached Mr. Marshall through Cameo, a service that allows you to buy short videos from minor celebrities. I also used Cameo to purchase a pep talk from an Olympic triathlete for my daughter ($15), an ingratiating monologue for my new boss from a former Boston Red Sox manager ($100) and a failed Twitter joke delivered by the action star Chuck Norris ($229.99).

Cameo is blowing up in this strange season because “every celebrity is really a gig economy worker,” says Steven Galanis, the company’s chief executive. They’re stuck at home, bored and sometimes hard up for cash as performances, productions and sporting events dry up. The company’s weekly bookings have grown to 70,000 from about 9,000 in early January, it says, and Mr. Galanis said he anticipated bringing in more than $100 million in bookings this year, of which the company keeps 25 percent. The company expects to sell its millionth video this week.

May 22

U.S. Courts, Crime

Norma McCorvey, center left, raises arm in triumph with her attorney Gloria Allred following 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, as portrayed in new FX documentary

Norma McCorvey, center left, raises arm in triumph with her attorney Gloria Allred and Supreme Court building in background following 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, as portrayed in new FX documentary "AKA Jane Roe," illustrated by Associated Press photo by J. Scott Applewhite.

New York Times, Opinion: Jane Roe’s Pro-Life Conversion Was a Con, Michelle Goldberg, right, May 22, 2020. Norma McCorvey makes a shocking deathbed confession.

In 2006, I went to Jackson, Miss., to report on the weeklong siege of the state’s last abortion clinic by the anti-abortion group Operation Save America. Flip Benham, then the group’s leader, had T-shirts made up, black with white lettering, saying, “Homosexuality Is Sin! Islam Is a Lie! Abortion Is Murder! Some Issues Are Just Black and White!”

By his side was Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade. In 1995 Benham opened the headquarters of Operation Rescue, an earlier iteration of Operation Save America, next to the Texas abortion clinic where McCorvey worked, and converted her during her smoke breaks. In Mississippi, she tore up the decision bearing her alias, telling the abortion protesters: “You’re so beautiful. I’m so sorry for what I did.” That night, the group burned all the scraps in a church parking lot. McCorvey lit the match.

It was a cultural coup for the right when McCorvey publicly turned against legal abortion. Jane Roe rejecting Roe v. Wade was something abortion opponents could throw in the faces of pro-choice activists. So it is a bombshell that McCorvey has revealed, in the posthumous new documentary AKA Jane Roe, that it was, at least in some sense, an act. “I am a good actress,” she said.

The movie, which debuts on Friday on FX, also makes clear that anti-abortion leaders understood this. They’ve been perpetrating a scam on us all for 25 years.

In the documentary’s final 20 minutes, McCorvey, who died of heart failure in 2017, gives what she calls her “deathbed confession.” She and the pro-life movement, she said, were using each other: “I took their money, and they put me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say, and that’s what I’d say.”

In her career as a pro-life icon, she collected nearly half a million dollars. But at the end of her life, she once again affirmed a belief in the right to abortion, and evinced pride in Roe v. Wade. “Roe isn’t going anywhere,” she said early on election night in 2016, when she thought Hillary Clinton was going to win. “They can try, but it’s not happening, baby.”

Given the political damage done by her cynical about-face, it’s surprising how sympathetic McCorvey — campy, foul-mouthed and irreverent — comes off. She was a lost soul from a traumatic background. Her father was absent and her mother beat her, and she ended up in reform school after running away from home at 10. She entered an abusive marriage at 16, became addicted to drugs and alcohol, and lost custody of her first child.

Norma McCorvery fx documentary

Christianity Today, Opinion: Deathbed Apology: Norma McCorvey’s Pro-Life Friends Tell Another Story, Jonathon Van Maren, May 22, 2020. What the ‘AKA Jane Roe’ documentary gets wrong.

"In February 1970, I was Norma McCorvey, a pregnant street person, a twenty-one-year-old woman in big trouble,” writes McCorvey in her 1994 memoir I Am Roe. “I became Jane Roe at a corner table at Columbo’s, an Italian restaurant at Mockingbird Lane and Greenville Avenue in Dallas.”

That short meeting with Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, two lawyers looking for the right case to strike a blow on behalf of abortion rights, transformed McCorvey’s life. The following month, Weddington and Coffee filed a lawsuit against Dallas district attorney Henry Wade for enforcing Texas’s abortion law and used McCorvey as their lead plaintiff. The case ended up at the United States Supreme Court, and on January 22, 1973, the justices overturned the law seven-to-two and legalized abortion in all fifty states.

norma mccorvey jane roe 1989 On that day, Norma McCorvey (shown at left in a 1989 photo) became Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade — part symbol, part person, trapped in the maelstrom of history and the sound and fury of America’s abortion wars. When she left the abortion industry for the pro-life movement in 1994, she made headlines across the nation.

Now again, McCorvey is making headlines as the bombshell subject of a new FX documentary, AKA Jane Roe, which claims that she changed her mind a second time and reverted back to a pro-abortion position. Producer Nick Sweeney tells a story in which McCorvey’s relationship with the pro-life movement was strictly a financial one.

In a series of interviews that she dubbed her “deathbed confession,” McCorvey calls it all an “act.”

“I was the big fish,” McCorvey says in the documentary. “I think it was a mutual thing … I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say.”

Numerous headlines have suggested that McCorvey was “paid to change her mind” on abortion, despite the fact that those are not actually her words. In trying to unearth the real narrative, I spoke with many of her close friends, three of whom went on the record. Those three, in addition to others, reject the idea that she was bribed into switching sides. Their story of McCorvey and their relationship with her is much more complex, intimate, and humane.

“For this new documentary to quote Norma saying she was not genuinely pro-life is very suspicious,” said Father Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life. “I knew Norma. Her pro-life convictions were not an act.”

Pavone was part of McCorvey’s faith story. As she described in her second memoir, Won By Love, her relationship with various pro-lifers led her to Christianity and also to the pro-life movement. On August 8, 1995, she was baptized in a backyard swimming pool in Dallas, Texas. In 1998, she became a Roman Catholic and adopted Pavone as her spiritual director. (His organization recently released a statement on the Sweeney documentary.)

Starting the year of her baptism, McCorvey spoke at numerous pro-life events and publicly expressed remorse for her role in the legalization of abortion. In 2004, she even sought to have the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade based on new evidence that abortion hurts women. (The case was dismissed the following year.)

Was McCorvey bribed for her ongoing contributions to the movement? Sweeney’s evidence for this claim — that over the decades, McCorvey had been paid at least $456,911 in gifts — supports an opposite conclusion, in my opinion. The figure is not a high one, considering that some pro-life speakers often earn upwards of $10,000 for a single speaking engagement. And being paid to advocate for a position is not the same thing as being paid to change your mind.

More importantly, my sources suggest that these monetary contributions were primarily given not for coercive purposes but for supportive ones. McCorvey’s pro-life friends cared deeply for her and often helped her financially when she was in need.

May 21

Axios, The Atlantic lays off almost 20% of staff, Sara Fischer, May 21, 2020. The Atlantic is laying off nearly 20% of staff, according to an internal note from David Bradley, the publication's chairman, that was obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: It's the latest media company that's been been forced to take drastic measures to survive the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

The state of play: The 68 staff cuts are mostly attributable to the collapse of the company's events business, which was one of its strongest pillars for many years.

In the memo, Bradley says that sales, editorial and events staff are all impacted."There is no fault on the part of people leaving the firm. What makes this so particularly difficult is that these are exceptional and beloved Atlantic colleagues. They are exactly the same good people who were selected to join us at the outset Measure for measure, they have contributed to The Atlantic as have those who are remaining. It is only that the ground has shifted," Bradley wrote in his note to staff.

"I had thought that I would spend some substantial part of this memo explaining the reasoning behind our decision. But, I think it may speak for itself. The particular timing is clear — a global pandemic that has shuttered the economy generally, advertising acutely, and in-person events altogether," he added.

Between the lines: The Atlantic's new majority ownership stake from Emerson Collective, the impact investment vehicle owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, has allowed the company to accelerate its growth in recent years, including a major staff increase and expansion that began in 2018.

The big picture: The pandemic is forcing dozens of major media companies, including newer, digitally-native media companies and older magazine companies, to carry out layoffs and pay cuts.

The Atlantic joins The Hollywood Reporter, Fortune, Billboard, The Economist Group, Group Nine Media, BuzzFeed News, Vox Media, Bustle Digital Group, Cheddar, Maven Media, G/O Media, Protocol and others who have resorted to layoffs and furloughs.

May 18

New York Times, Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True? Ben Smith, May 18, 2020 (print ed.). He has delivered revelatory reporting on some of the defining stories of our time. But a close examination reveals the weaknesses in what may be called an era of resistance journalism.

Ronan Farrow, in Los Angeles in February, may now be the most famous investigative reporter in America.Credit...Danny Moloshok/Reuters

It was a breathtaking story, written by The New Yorker’s marquee reporter and published with an attention-grabbing headline: “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records.”

In it, the reporter, Ronan Farrow, right, suggests something suspicious unfolding inside the Treasury Department: A civil servant had noticed that records about Mr. Cohen, the personal lawyer for President Trump, mysteriously vanished from a government database in the spring of 2018. Mr. Farrow quotes the anonymous public servant as saying he was so concerned about the records’ disappearance that he leaked other financial reports to the media to sound a public alarm about Mr. Cohen’s financial activities.

The story set off a frenzied reaction, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calling it “an amazing shocking story about a whistle-blower” and his colleague Rachel Maddow describing it as “a meteor strike.” Congressional Democrats demanded answers, and the Treasury Department promised to investigate.

Two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents. The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went “missing.” That was merely the story put forward by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry, who later pleaded guilty to illegally leaking confidential information.

The records were simply put on restricted access, a longstanding practice to prevent leaks, a possibility Mr. Farrow briefly allows for in his story, but minimizes. And Mr. Fry’s leaks had been encouraged and circulated by a man who was barely mentioned in Mr. Farrow’s article, the now-disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti, a passionate antagonist of Mr. Cohen.

Mr. Farrow may now be the most famous investigative reporter in America, a rare celebrity-journalist who followed the opposite path of most in the profession: He began as a boy-wonder talk show host and worked his way downward to the coal face of hard investigative reporting. The child of the actress Mia Farrow and the director Woody Allen, he has delivered stories of stunning and lasting impact, especially his revelations about powerful men who preyed on young women in the worlds of Hollywood, television and politics, which won him a Pulitzer Prize.

I’ve been watching Mr. Farrow’s astonishing rise over the past few years, marveling at his ability to shine a light on some of the defining stories of our time, especially the sexual misconduct of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, which culminated with Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in February just before the pandemic took hold. But some aspects of his work made me wonder if Mr. Farrow didn’t, at times, fly a little too close to the sun.

Because if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.

Mr. Farrow, 32, is not a fabulist. His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up. His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.

That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault.

The New Yorker has made Mr. Farrow a highly visible, generational star for its brand. And Mr. Farrow’s supporters there point out the undeniable impact of his reporting — which ousted abusers like New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, and helped rewrite the rules of sex and power in the workplace, sometimes with his colleague Jane Mayer. Ken Auletta, The New Yorker writer who helped Mr. Farrow take his work from NBC to the magazine, said that the important thing is that Mr. Farrow helped reveal Mr. Weinstein’s predatory behavior to the world and bring him down.

“Are all the Ts crossed and the Is dotted? No,” Mr. Auletta said of some of Mr. Farrow’s most sweeping claims of a conspiracy between Mr. Weinstein and NBC to suppress his work.

“You’re still left with the bottom line — he delivered the goods,” Mr. Auletta said.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, defended Mr. Farrow’s reporting, calling it “scrupulous, tireless, and, above all, fair.”

“Working alongside fact checkers, lawyers and other editorial staff members at The New Yorker, he achieved something remarkable, not least because he earned the trust of his sources, many of whom had to relive traumatic events when they talked to him,’’ Mr. Remnick said in a statement. “We stand by Ronan Farrow’s reporting. We’re proud to publish him.”

Mr. Farrow, in his own statement to The New York Times, said he brings “caution, rigor, and nuance” to each of his stories. “I’m proud of a body of reporting that has helped to expose wrongdoing and to bring important stories into public view.”

It’s impossible, however, to go back and answer the question of whether Mr. Farrow’s explosive early reporting would have carried such power if he’d been more rigorous and taken care to show what he knew and what he didn’t. Is the cost of a more dramatic story worth paying? Because this much is certain: There is a cost.

That becomes clear in an examination of Mr. Farrow’s debut article on Mr. Weinstein, back in October 2017, which provided the first clear, on-the-record claim that Mr. Weinstein had gone beyond the systematic sexual harassment and abuse revealed days earlier by The Times into something that New York prosecutors could charge as rape. The accuser was Lucia Evans, a college student whom Mr. Weinstein had approached at a private club, and then later lured to his office with a promise of acting opportunities. There, she told Mr. Farrow, he forced her to perform oral sex on him.

But a fundamental principle of the contemporary craft of reporting on sexual assault is corroboration: the painstaking task of tracking down friends and neighbors a traumatized victim may have confided in soon after the assault, to see if their accounts align with the victim’s story and to give it more — or less — weight. In much of the strongest #metoo reporting, from the stories about Mr. Weinstein in The New York Times to The Washington Post’s exposé of Charlie Rose and even some of Mr. Farrow’s other articles, clunky paragraphs interrupt the narrative to explain what an accuser told friends, and often, to explore any conflicting accounts. Americans are now watching this complicated form of reporting play out in the stories about Tara Reade, who has accused Joe Biden of assaulting her.

Mr. Farrow’s first big story on Mr. Weinstein offered readers little visibility into the question of whether Ms. Evans’s story could be corroborated. He could have indicated that he had, or hadn’t, been able to corroborate what Ms. Evans said, or reported what her friends from the time had told the magazine. He wrote instead: “Evans told friends some of what had happened, but felt largely unable to talk about it.”

It appears Mr. Farrow was making a narrative virtue of a reporting liability, and the results were ultimately damaging.

A crucial witness, the friend who was with Ms. Evans when both women met Mr. Weinstein at the club, later told prosecutors that when a fact checker for The New Yorker called her about Mr. Farrow’s story, she hadn’t confirmed Ms. Evans’s account of rape. Instead, according to a letter from prosecutors to defense lawyers, the witness told the magazine that “something inappropriate happened,” and refused to go into detail.

But the witness later told a New York Police Department detective something more problematic: That Ms. Evans had told her the sexual encounter with Mr. Weinstein was consensual. The detective told the witness that her response to the magazine’s fact checker “was more consistent” with Ms. Evans’s allegation against Mr. Weinstein and suggested she stick to The New Yorker version, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorneys office later acknowledged. The detective denied the exchange, but when Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers unearthed the witness’s contradictory accounts, the judge dismissed the charge. Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers gloated, though, of course, their client was ultimately convicted on other counts.

May 17

The Atlantic, Opinion: The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning, Jeffrey Goldberg, June, 2020. America is losing its grip on Enlightenment values and reality itself. The Middle East is a cauldron of conspiracy, a place where the most bizarre theories often have real policy consequences. Saul Lieberman once said, “Nonsense is nonsense but the history of nonsense is scholarship.” I would add: The influence of nonsense, when unchecked by science, by direct observation, by a shared epistemological reality, can be profoundly damaging.

Eight years later, in a windowless Austin, Texas, warehouse, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was explaining to me why he, like Mustafa Mahmoud, disbelieved the investigated and proven truth of what happened on 9/11. Jones is a top-tier conspiracist, a professional one, too, and I visited him at his headquarters to find out for myself if he actually believed the idiocy he peddled—that the government controls the weather; that Bill Gates is secretly a genocidal eugenicist. The list of absurdities has no end. It always seemed outlandish to me that otherwise smart people (Mustafa Mahmoud was one of Egypt’s leading physicians) could sincerely believe in theories that stand in opposition to logic, Occam’s razor, and accreted fact. My assumption about people like Jones was that they were nihilistic grifters, exploiting innocent people seeking to satiate the deep human need for coherence.

Jones told me he was busy; I could have 30 minutes. Four hours later he was still talking—we were having dinner at a Mexican restaurant by then—and I was looking for an exit. He was nuts, and therefore exhausting. It was an afternoon filled with statements like this: “We’re living under tyranny. The bankers, the New World Order, they’re using the War Powers Act to grab our guns. This isn’t a republic. Come on, if you say the bankers are forcing fluoride on us, if you call 9/11 an inside job, they’ll destroy your life, that’s how evil they are.”

Trump does not defend our democracy from the ruinous consequences of conspiracy thinking. Instead, he embraces such thinking. A conspiracy theory—birtherism—was his pathway to power, and, in office, he warns of the threat of the “deep state” with the ferocity of a QAnon disciple. He has even begun to question the official coronavirus death toll, which he sees as evidence of a dark plot against him. How is he different from Alex Jones, from the conspiracy manufacturers of Russia and the Middle East?

He lives in the White House. That is one main difference.

The Atlantic, State and Federal Data on COVID-19 Testing Don’t Match Up, Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal, June, 2020. The CDC has quietly started releasing nationwide numbers. But they contradict what states themselves are reporting.

For the past 11 weeks, the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic has been the country’s only reliable source for national testing data. (The tracker compiles the number of tests reported by each U.S. state and territory daily.) While the CDC has provided only occasional and rudimentary tallies of total tests, data from the COVID Tracking Project have been used by Johns Hopkins University, governors and members of Congress, and the White House.

With the new CDC site, the federal government is providing regular testing data again, and for the first time ever, it is doing so on a state-by-state level. But an initial analysis of the CDC’s state-level data finds major discrepancies between what many states are reporting and what the federal government is reporting about them. In Florida, for example, the disparity is enormous. The state government reported on Friday that about 700,000 coronavirus tests have been conducted statewide since the beginning of the outbreak.

This count should be authoritative: Governor Ron DeSantis has ordered hospitals and doctors to report their test results to the Florida Department of Health. Yet the CDC reported more than 919,000 tests in the state in that same period. That’s 31 percent more tests than Florida itself seems to think it has conducted. (Because the CDC says it does not update its data on the weekends, we have, throughout this article, compared its figures against the numbers reported by each state on Friday.) When we asked the CDC to explain the discrepancy in Florida, the agency declined to comment on the record.

“If this is what they’re getting, the CDC should pick up the phone and call the state of Florida and say, ‘What’s happening?’” Ashish Jha, the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard, told us.

Given the complexity and the multisource nature of the data, some variations should certainly be anticipated. But the inconsistencies we found suggest that Florida is not an outlier. Using the state numbers that match the CDC’s output most closely, in 22 states, the CDC’s reported number of tests diverges from the number reported by the state government by more than 10 percent. In 13 states, it diverges by more than 25 percent. In some cases, the CDC’s tallies are much higher than what states are reporting; in others, much lower.

The Atlantic, Birtherism of a Nation, Adam Serwer, June, 2020. The conspiracy theories surrounding Obama’s birthplace and religion were much more than mere lies. They were ideology.

May 15

PBS, What 74 former Biden staffers think about Tara Reade’s allegations, Daniel Bush and Lisa Desjardins, May 15, 2020. Over his decades-long career in the Senate, former Vice President Joe Biden was known as a demanding but fair and family-oriented boss, devoted to his home life in Delaware and committed to gender equality in his office.

He was not on a list of “creepy” male senators that female staffers told each other to avoid in the elevators on Capitol Hill.

Yet Biden, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was also a toucher, seemingly oblivious to whether physical contact made some women uncomfortable. That behavior has persisted in recent years. Biden is now facing fresh scrutiny after a former aide in March charged that he sexually assaulted her when she worked in his Senate office in the early 1990s, an allegation Biden has categorically denied.

The PBS NewsHour spoke with 74 former Biden staffers, of whom 62 were women, in order to get a broader picture of his behavior toward women over the course of his career, how they see the new allegation, and whether there was evidence of a larger pattern.

None of the people interviewed said that they had experienced sexual harassment, assault or misconduct by Biden. All said they never heard any rumors or allegations of Biden engaging in sexual misconduct, until the recent assault allegation made by Tara Reade. Former staffers said they believed Reade should be heard, and acknowledged that their experiences do not disprove her accusation.

In all, the NewsHour tried to contact nearly 200 former staffers of Biden’s, based primarily on public records of his time in the Senate and White House and also from interviews with current campaign advisers. They include former interns and senior aides, from his 1972 Senate campaign through his time at the White House.

Some are still in politics, others left long ago to pursue other careers. They were asked about Reade’s allegation but also whether they, or anyone they know, were ever uncomfortable around Biden. Many said that her sexual assault allegation was at odds with their knowledge of Biden’s behavior toward women.

The interviews revealed previously unreported details about the Biden office when Reade worked there, such as an account that she lost her job because of her poor performance, not as retaliation for lodging complaints about sexual harassment, as Reade has said.

Other recollections from former staffers corroborated things she has described publicly, such as Biden’s use of the Senate gym and a supervisor admonishing her for dressing inappropriately.

Overall, the people who spoke to the NewsHour described largely positive and gratifying experiences working for Biden, painting a portrait of someone who was ahead of his time in empowering women in the workplace.

“The one thing about Joe Biden is, he is a man of the highest character and that’s why these accusations are so surreal and just can’t comport with the man I worked with,” said Marcia Lee Taylor, a senior policy advisor on the Judiciary Committee, where women held leading roles when Biden served as chairman.

But he had blindspots, which Biden himself has publicly acknowledged, when it came to how his interactions with women in public could make them uncomfortable.

Reade declined the NewsHour’s interview request but her attorney, Doug Wigdor, sent detailed answers to a number of questions by email. He wrote that Biden’s public touching is evidence that he could have mistreated his client in the way she claims.

“I don’t think anyone would describe these situations as normal,” Wigdor wrote. “They are troublesome, to say the least.”

Many former Biden staffers said they believe Reade’s allegation is false.

Addressing Tara Reade’s allegations

Since Reade went public with her assault accusation in March, former staffers of Biden’s world have been scanning their memories, considering the details of her story and their own experiences.

Reade, in interviews with multiple news outlets, has alleged that Biden attacked her in the Senate complex when she met him on an errand. But her accusations are also more sweeping. She has charged that the Biden office was a toxic place to work, that the senator touched her shoulders and neck multiple times, and that she was asked to serve drinks because he thought she was pretty. Reade has also claimed she was demoted and ultimately pushed to leave because she complained about workplace harassment.

The NewsHour spoke with more than 20 people who worked for Biden when Reade was also a staffer. Some remembered her, many did not.

Ben Savage, who said his desk was next to Reade’s in the Biden mailroom, disputed her charge that she was forced out of her job in retaliation for a sexual harassment complaint she claims to have filed.

Savage, who worked as the office’s systems administrator, overseeing computers and information processing, told the NewsHour that Reade was fired for her poor performance on the job, which he witnessed — not as retaliation for her complaints about sexual harassment.

But according to Savage, Reade had been mishandling a key part of her job and an essential office task — processing constituent mail, something they worked on together. Savage said he recalls reporting these issues to his boss, deputy chief of staff Dennis Toner. After that, Savage said he began diminishing Reade’s duties, taking over some of her tasks and rerouting parts of the process to exclude her.

“Of all the people who held that position, she’s the only one during my time there who couldn’t necessarily keep up or who found it frustrating,” said Savage, who worked in the office for three years, from 1993 to 1996.

Toner, who was Savage’s direct supervisor, told the NewsHour that he did not remember Reade. He said he did remember Savage as a good worker who stood out in the office.

“I can’t take issue with Ben saying that her job performance was not up to par. We would have had a discussion with Tara or whomever the employee would have been to see how we could make it work,” Toner said. “I do not recall Tara being in the office. I can’t comment on why she would have left or anything like that,” he added.

Wigdor, Reade’s attorney, said that she does not remember Savage specifically, but said his story is wrong and her performance had nothing to do with her termination.

“Ms. Reade recalls that there was a lot of nitpicking regarding her performance in the office,” he wrote. “She was also very nervous at that point and distracted so it is possible that from time to time there was a mistake made … but her performance had nothing to do with her termination.”

Washington Post, Biden says he does not remember Tara Reade, Annie Linskey, May 15, 2020. Joe Biden says on MSNBC that he does not recall the former senate aide, who worked for him in the early 1990s.

Former vice president Joe Biden said Thursday that he does not remember Tara Reade, who has accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was working in his Senate office in the early 1990s.

Asked by MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell if he remembers Reade, Biden said: “To be honest with you, I don’t.”

Biden made the remarks in an interview that aired Thursday evening on “The Last Word.” The presumptive Democratic nominee for president appeared alone in one segment of the program, and was then joined by Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial nominee.

Abrams is a potential vice-presidential pick for Biden, and he asked that she join him on the program. He complimented her work on voting rights, saying she “knows what she’s doing and she’s incredibly capable person.”

tara reade joe biden Custom Before Abrams, Biden was asked about Reade and made his most extensive comments since he first addressed the accusation on “Morning Joe” earlier this month.

“Her story has changed considerable times,” Biden said at one point. “This claim has changed as it’s gone on.”

Last year, Reade was among several women who said that Biden had made her feel uncomfortable. She told The Washington Post that he touched her neck and shoulders but did not mention the alleged assault.

This year Reade added to the story, saying that he pushed her against a wall in a Senate hallway and put his hand up her skirt.

“Nothing like this ever happened,” Biden said Thursday. “She should be heard and the story should be vetted but ultimately the truth matters.”

Biden also addressed the distress that the accusation has caused on the left, in which some activists take her claims seriously but also want to defeat President Trump, who has been accused of sexual assault by at least 16 women.

Sex Claim, Investor Scam Promoter Pursued

Jacob Wohl, whose supposed investment acumen as a 17-year-old, was featured by Fox Business News (screenshot)

Jacob Wohl, whose supposed investment acumen as a 17-year-old, was featured by Fox Business News (screenshots). Separate from his investment activities, Wohl has become known as a promoter of scandal allegations against perceived opponents of Donald Trump and other Republicans. On May 7, 2020, Reason Magazine published a column quoting Diana Andrade, shown below right in a photo with Wohl when she said they were dating, in a story headlined as follows: Reason, She Said Anthony Fauci Sexually Assaulted Her. Now She Says Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman Paid Her to Lie.

Salon, Arizona attorney general “actively pursuing” right-wing troll Jacob Wohl, Roger Sollenberger, May 15, 2020. Right-wing provocateur Jacob Wohl owes $43,000 in Arizona, and the state AG is prepared to come for him. The Arizona attorney general's office is actively pursuing collection efforts against right-wing social media provocateur Jacob Wohl, who has not made any payments toward nearly $38,000 in fines from a 2016 investment fraud ruling against him, Salon has learned.

A spokesperson for the Arizona Corporation Commission notified Salon about Wohl's delinquency in response to a Salon article last week.

"The Commission, through the Arizona Attorney General's Office, is actively pursuing collection efforts against Mr. Wohl," the spokesperson told Salon in an email.

"Mr. Wohl has not paid anything since the matter was sent to the Attorney General's Office for collections," the spokesperson wrote in an email. "Given his indictment last year, I would venture that any available funds are going to pay his criminal defense counsel."

The Commission said it retains the right to take further action against Wohl "if he violates any part of the order or if he commits additional actions that violate the Arizona Securities Act or the Investment Management Act."

According to the court order, the commission said, Wohl accrues interest on any unpaid amount.

"Between penalty and restitution, Mr. Wohl owes approximately $43,000," the commission spokesperson said. "The Attorney General's office has engaged California counsel to assist in collections efforts. Those lawyers are utilizing all statutorily allowed collection methods to obtain the funds owed to the state."

The 22-year-old Wohl, who has achieved a modest measure of media infamy with a series of hapless attempts to fabricate smears of sexual impropriety against Democratic elected officials and other public figures — including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former special counsel Robert Mueller, and, most recently, Dr. Anthony Fauci — apparently cut his teeth on investment fraud beginning in his late teens.

In 2017 the Arizona Corporation Commission filed a cease-and-desist order against Wohl, at the time 20 years old, alleging that he and his business partner broke the law in 2015 and 2016 when they misled clients about how much of their money would be at risk and exaggerated the size of their company.

The commission ordered Wohl to pay his victims $32,919 in restitution, plus $5,000 in penalties. Wohl asked for a continuance. "I'm wondering why we're going through this exercise, and why you think your client is going to make payment on a later date if he's not able to make payment today," Commissioner Boyd Dunn said to Wohl's counsel at a hearing.

"This is a relatively small amount," the attorney replied. "I know you guys have seen hundreds of thousands of dollars for these types of cases."

"It's not a small amount to the investor. So don't belittle it," Dunn said. The commission accommodated Wohl with a four-week continuance, after which he was required to pay his fine in monthly installments of $1,371.61. Arizona Central reported in 2018 that Wohl had not paid any of it, and that balance remains unchanged today.

The scams earned Wohl a lifetime ban by the National Futures Association, and led directly to felony charges currently facing him in California. (Wohl has denied wrongdoing.)

In 2016 an Arizona man tipped off the Riverside County district attorney's fffice that Wohl and his business partner, Matt Johnson, 30, had swindled him out of $75,000 he invested through Wohl Capital Investment Group. The man killed himself shortly afterward, according to Wohl's arrest warrant.

The tip led the Riverside County DA to open an investigation into a separate matter, which led the office to indict Wohl, who lives in Corona, California, as well as Johnson, on two counts of selling unregistered securities. The Daily Beast first reported those charges last September.

In February, Wohl and Johnson pleaded not guilty, but their hearing, set for April 24, was postponed due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic and has not been rescheduled.

May 14

The Atlantic, Investigation Into The Prophecies of Q, Adrienne LaFrance, June 2020. American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase. This article is part of “Shadowland,” a project about conspiracy thinking in America.

Conspiracy theories are a constant in American history, and it is tempting to dismiss them as inconsequential. But as the 21st century has progressed, such a dismissal has begun to require willful blindness. I was a city-hall reporter for a local investigative-news site called Honolulu Civil Beat in 2011 when Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for a presidential run by publicly questioning whether Barack Obama had been born in Hawaii, as all facts and documents showed. Trump maintained that Obama had really been born in Africa, and therefore wasn’t a natural-born American—making him ineligible for the highest office. I remember the debate in our Honolulu newsroom: Should we even cover this “birther” madness? As it turned out, the allegations, based entirely on lies, captivated enough people to give Trump a launching pad.

[With] Trump now president, a series of ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the “deep state,” the star chamber of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump’s reelection chances; and that media elites were cheering the death toll. Some of these ideas would make their way onto Fox News and into the president’s public utterances. As of late last year, according to The New York Times, Trump had retweeted accounts often focused on conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at least 145 occasions.

The power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power — its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process — was not. The internet also enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.

QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.

What might have languished as a lonely screed on a single image board instead incited fervor. Its profile was enhanced, according to Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins of NBC News, by several conspiracy theorists whose promotion of Q in turn helped build up their own online profiles. By now, nearly three years since Q’s original messages appeared, there have been thousands of what his followers call “Q drops” — messages posted to image boards by Q. He uses a password-protected “tripcode,” a series of letters and numbers visible to other image-board users to signal the continuity of his identity over time. (Q’s tripcode has changed on occasion, prompting flurries of speculation.) As Q has moved from one image board to the next — from 4chan to 8chan to 8kun, seeking a safe harbor — QAnon adherents have only become more devoted. If the internet is one big rabbit hole containing infinitely recursive rabbit holes, QAnon has somehow found its way down all of them, gulping up lesser conspiracy theories as it goes.

It’s impossible to know the number of QAnon adherents with any precision, but the ranks are growing. At least 35 current or former congressional candidates have embraced Q, according to an online tally by the progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America. Those candidates have either directly praised QAnon in public or approvingly referenced QAnon slogans. (One Republican candidate for Congress, Matthew Lusk of Florida, includes QAnon under the “issues” section of his campaign website, posing the question: “Who is Q?”)

QAnon has by now made its way onto every major social and commercial platform and any number of fringe sites. Tracy Diaz, a QAnon evangelist, known online by the name TracyBeanz, has 185,000 followers on Twitter and more than 100,000 YouTube subscribers. She helped lift QAnon from obscurity, facilitating its transition to mainstream social media. (A publicist described Diaz as “really private” and declined requests for an interview.) On TikTok, videos with the hashtag #QAnon have garnered millions of views. There are too many QAnon Facebook groups, plenty of them ghost towns, to do a proper count, but the most active ones publish thousands of items each day. (In 2018, Reddit banned QAnon groups from its platform for inciting violence.)

Adherents are ever looking out for signs from on high, plumbing for portents when guidance from Q himself is absent. The coronavirus, for instance — what does it signify? In several of the big Facebook groups, people erupted in a frenzy of speculation, circulating a theory that Trump’s decision to wear a yellow tie to a White House briefing about the virus was a sign that the outbreak wasn’t real. On March 9, Q himself issued a triptych of ominous posts that seemed definitive: The coronavirus is real, but welcome, and followers should not be afraid. The first post shared Trump’s tweet from the night before and repeated, “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming.” The second said: “The Great Awakening is Worldwide.” The third was simple: “GOD WINS.”

A month later, on April 8, Q went on a posting spree, dropping nine posts over the span of six hours and touching on several of his favorite topics — God, Pizzagate, and the wickedness of the elites. “They will stop at nothing to regain power,” he wrote in one scathing post that alleged a coordinated propaganda effort by Democrats, Hollywood, and the media. Another accused Democrats of promoting “mass hysteria” about the coronavirus for political gain: “What is the primary benefit to keep public in mass-hysteria re: COVID‑19? Think voting. Are you awake yet? Q.” And he shared these verses from Ephesians: “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the full armor of God so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.”

Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has become an object of scorn among QAnon supporters who don’t like the bad news he delivers or the way he has contradicted Trump publicly. In one March press conference, Trump referred to the State Department as the “Deep State Department,” and Fauci could be seen over the president’s shoulder, suppressing a laugh and covering his djt anthony fauci face. By then, QAnon had already declared Fauci irredeemably compromised, because WikiLeaks had unearthed a pair of emails he sent praising Hillary Clinton in 2012 and 2013.

Sentiment about Fauci, right, among QAnon supporters on social-media platforms ranges from “Fauci is a Deep State puppet” to “FAUCI is a BLACKHAT!!!”—the term QAnon uses for people who support the evil cabal that Q warns about. One person, using the hashtags #DeepStateCabal and #Qanon, tweeted this: “Watch Fauci’s hand signals and body language at the press conferences. What is he communicating?” Another shared an image of Fauci standing in a lab with Barack Obama, with the caption “Obama and ‘Dr.’ Fauci in the lab creating coronovirus [sic]. #DeepstateDoctor.” The Justice Department recently approved heightened security measures for Fauci because of the mounting volume of threats against him.

In the final days before Congress passed a $2 trillion economic-relief package in late March, Democrats insisted on provisions that would make it easier for people to vote by mail, prompting Q himself to weigh in with dismay: “These people are sick! Nothing can stop what is coming. Nothing.”

The most prominent QAnon figures have a presence beyond the biggest social-media platforms and image boards. The Q universe encompasses numerous blogs, proprietary websites, and types of chat software, as well as alternative social-media platforms such as Gab, the site known for anti-Semitism and white nationalism, where many people banned from Twitter have congregated. Vloggers and bloggers promote their Patreon accounts, where people can pay them in monthly sums.

There’s also money to be made from ads on YouTube. Q evangelists have taken a “publish everywhere” approach that is half outreach, half redundancy. If one platform cracks down on QAnon, as Reddit did, they won’t have to start from scratch somewhere else. Already embroiled in the battle between good and evil, QAnon has involved itself in another battle — between the notion of an open web for the people and a gated internet controlled by a powerful few.

Media Matters, Opinion: A conspiracy theorist who scammed people with a fake Ebola virus cure is now selling silver as a coronavirus solution, Eric Hananoki, May 14, 2020. Rima E. Laibow is a quack doctor who scammed people in 2014 by peddling her brand of nano-silver as a cure for the Ebola virus. She’s now fraudulently selling that product as a solution to the coronavirus pandemic, claiming that it’s “your last line of defense” and for “anyone interested in not being a statistic in this pandemic.”

She also advised people who think they have been exposed to the coronavirus or are starting to have corresponding symptoms that they should increase the daily usage of her product so they can supposedly protect themselves.

Laibow is an Arizona-based doctor, commentator, and conspiracy theorist. She is the medical director of the Natural Solutions Foundation, which describes itself as “a private international NGO (Non Governmental Organization) focused on health and food freedom.” She also posts coronavirus conspiracy theories on a website called Open Source Truth.

Laibow sells “Dr. Rima Recommends™ Nano Silver” through an online store that is apparently run by the limited liability company Natural Solutions Health.

She has a history of fraudulently marketing her silver. In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission sent her a warning letter after she repeatedly claimed that her nano-silver could cure, treat, and prevent the Ebola virus. (Laibow has heavily disputed the cdc logo Custom federal government’s action.) A June 2015 business plan posted on her website stated that “during two recent periods, mid 2009 and late 2014, (the ‘Swine Flu’ panic of 2009 and the viral threat in 2014) we sold over a $100,000 volume of silver per month for several months each time, with continuing residual sales.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that “there is currently no vaccine to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The best way to prevent illness is to avoid being exposed to this virus.” The FDA and FTC have been sending warning letters to companies that promote their products as being able to treat, cure, or prevent COVID-19.

May 13

Media Matters, Opinion: Month to month, Fox News’ coronavirus coverage has dropped more than 20%, Rob Savillo and Lis Power, May 13, 2020. By the time you read this, the official American death toll from COVID-19 may have surpassed 90,000. The actual number is almost certainly much higher.

However, our review of Fox News' coverage showed that as the pandemic devastated America, the network steadily declined its coverage of the crisis. From March 12 through April 10, 95% of weekday segments on Fox were related to the coronavirus. Then, from April 13 through May 11, the proportion of coronavirus-related weekday segments on Fox dropped to just 74%. In the last week, coronavirus-related weekday segments accounted for only 56% of all output from the network. By contrast, in the same period both CNN and MSNBC maintained a high-level of coronavirus-related coverage.

Further, many of Fox's recent segments on the coronavirus pandemic have focused on efforts to reopen the economy, rather than coverage of further coronavirus prevention efforts.

While Fox’s original coverage of the crisis proved to be harmful, their neglect of the story amidst mass death in America is equally problematic. Here are recent advertisers on the network who have sponsored Fox's disregard for public health.

Also: In one day alone, Fox & Friends devoted twice as much time to the "Obamagate" charade (more on that below) than it did on the coronavirus pandemic.

Media Matters, Fox News hosts are trying to get Fauci fired. In Senate testimony this week Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that states that ignore federal guidelines and prematurely reopen businesses and roll back social distancing measures risk causing new outbreaks of the coronavirus, and could trigger “avoidable suffering and death” from COVID-19. Fauci’s warning received considerable blowback from Fox News and right-wing media, who appear to be trying to remove him from his high-ranking position.

In response to Fauci’s testimony, which contradicted many of President Trump’s statements, the president’s supporters at Fox lashed out at him one way or another this week. In particular, Tucker Carlson said Fauci “may be even more off-base than your average epidemiologist” and called him “the chief buffoon.”

Notably, the prime-time hosts did not criticize Trump for listening to Fauci; instead they suggested that Fauci himself has abused his power.

Fox’s notable escalation of criticism towards Fauci is bad news for those of us who believe it’s beneficial for the president to consult with an expert with decades of experience dealing with pandemics.

As Media Matters Matt Gertz explained, “Trump not only watches Fox prime-time shows religiously, but he also personally consults with their hosts. Carlson played a role in former national security adviser John Bolton’s departure from the White House, and his personal meeting with Trump and a monologue he gave in March have been credited with the president taking the virus more seriously. Hannity reportedly speaks to the president nightly and has so much influence he’s been described by White House officials as the 'shadow' chief of staff. And Ingraham dropped by the White House twice last month to advise the president and other top officials on the coronavirus response. If the Fox Cabinet turns Fauci into a regular target, it puts his job in jeopardy."

May 12

Media News

“When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so. Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”

— President Trump, in a tweet, May 12

Washington Post, Trump’s vicious claim that Joe Scarborough might have murdered an aide, Salvador Rizzo, May 12, 2020. The sun had not been up for an hour when the president of the United States, in his ninth tweet of the day, said MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough might be a murderer.

It’s an old claim, debunked by The Washington Post in 2017. Trump often smears those who challenge him. He has a long-running feud with the joe scarborough headshot “Morning Joe” husband-and-wife team of Scarborough, left, and Mika Brzezinski.

But it remains astounding to see the president make a thinly veiled murder accusation devoid of evidence. Many of the 18,000 false and misleading claims in our Trump database feature overheated rhetoric. Few of them rise to these vicious heights.

The Facts “Morning Joe” airs on MSNBC from 6 to 9 a.m. on weekdays. The hosts have been hammering the administration’s dysfunction in the face of the covid-19 pandemic, with Scarborough often taking Trump to task for “a blizzard of lies.”

This morning, the hosts also zeroed in on Trump’s contentious exchange with a CBS News reporter at a news conference Monday. Brzezinski and Scarborough both called Trump’s remarks “racist.” They ran a segment criticizing the Justice Department’s unusual move to drop the criminal case against Michael Flynn, a former Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. They interviewed Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), who said of Trump: “He can’t handle women, particularly strong women, and we know that Trump is xenophobic, and it comes out time and again.”

Meanwhile, somewhere inside the White House, Trump was firing off tweets accusing Scarborough of possibly having murdered an aide in 2001.

Trump first lobbed this conspiratorial charge at Scarborough in November 2017. The president is referring to the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old aide who worked for Scarborough when he was a Republican member of Congress representing Florida’s 1st Congressional District.

The circumstances of Klausutis’s death have spawned conspiracy theories, but authorities never suspected foul play. Her death is not an unsolved mystery or a cold case waiting for answers. Klausutis’s death on July 20, 2001, was ruled accidental and the police concluded there was no reason to further investigate. A police investigator told The Post in 2017 that authorities had left “no stone unturned.” PolitiFact has given Trump’s claim its worst rating, “Pants on Fire.”

The medical examiner, Michael Berkland, determined that an abnormal heart rhythm caused Klausutis to lose consciousness and fall, fatally striking her head. She was discovered in Scarborough’s office in Fort Walton Beach, lying on her back with her head near a desk, according to a police report.

The Fort Walton Beach police report from Aug. 6, 2001, noted that the medical examiner had determined that Klausutis died as a result of an acute subdural hematoma, or blood clot. The police report cited a letter from Berkland, stating that the injury was the result of trauma from a fall as she lost consciousness from “a probable cardiac arrhythmia secondary to valvular heart disease.” The day before she was found dead, Klausutis told a colleague she was not feeling well, according to the police report. She also told a mail carrier she was not feeling well.

Trump in his tweet asked why Scarborough had left Congress so “quickly and quietly,” implying a connection between Klausutis’s death and Scarborough’s resignation. In fact, the death occurred almost two months after Scarborough announced his resignation. Klausutis was looking for a new job when she died, and Scarborough was in Washington.

Washington Post, Trump’s ‘ask China’ response to CBS’s Weijia Jiang shocked the room — and was part of a pattern, Sarah Ellison and Elahe Izadi, May 12, 2020. President Trump has a long history of using the bully pulpit to take jabs at reporters. Yet the pandemic-era briefings have become especially fraught — and an unusually barbed exchange with one journalist on Monday raised questions about whether he reserves special contempt for some.

At a Rose Garden press briefing, CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang, right, asked the president why he so frequently claims that the United States is doing “far better than any other country” at testing for coronavirus. “Why does that matter?” she asked. “Why is this a global competition to you if every day Americans are still losing their lives?”

Trump started by deflecting — “they’re losing their lives everywhere in the world” — before pivoting suddenly: “They’re losing their lives everywhere in the world, and maybe that’s a question you should ask China. Don’t ask me, ask China that question, okay?”

Jiang, an American journalist of Chinese descent, seemed taken aback and asked, “Why are you saying that to me, specifically?” He replied that he would give the same answer to “anybody that asks a nasty question.” Seconds later, he abruptly ended the news conference and walked off.

In a moment when Asian Americans have reported being subjected to verbal and physical abuse amid coronavirus fears, and when the president himself has leaned into his anti-China rhetoric, Trump’s slap at Jiang drew widespread attention.

May 10

Media News

judy mikovits pandemic

New York Times, Virus Conspiracists Elevate a New Champion, Davey Alba, May 11, 2020 (print ed.). A video promoting baseless and dubious claims by the discredited scientist Judy Mikovits, above, has been viewed more than 8 million times in the past week.

In a video posted to YouTube on Monday, a woman animatedly described an unsubstantiated secret plot by global elites like Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci to use the coronavirus pandemic to profit and grab political power.

In the 26-minute video, the woman asserted how Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading voice on the coronavirus, had buried her research about how vaccines can damage people’s immune systems. It is those weakened immune systems, she declared, that have made people susceptible to illnesses like Covid-19.

The video, a scene from a longer dubious documentary called “Plandemic,” was quickly seized upon by anti-vaccinators, the conspiracy group QAnon and activists from the Reopen America movement, generating more than eight million views. And it has turned the woman — Dr. Judy Mikovits, 62, a discredited scientist — into a new star of virus disinformation.

Her ascent was powered not only by the YouTube video but also by a book that she published in April, “Plague of Corruption,” which frames Dr. Mikovits as a truth-teller fighting deception in science. In recent weeks, she has become a darling of far-right publications like The Epoch Times and The Gateway Pundit. Mentions of her on social media and television have spiked to as high as 14,000 a day, according to the media insights company Zignal Labs.

The rise of Dr. Mikovits is the latest twist in the virus disinformation wars, which have swelled throughout the pandemic. Conspiracy theorists have used the uncertainty and fear around the disease to mint many villains. Those include Dr. Fauci after he appeared to slight President Trump and Mr. Gates, a co-founder of Microsoft, as someone who started the disease. They have also pushed the baseless idea that 5G wireless waves can help cause the disease.

On the flip side, they have created their own heroes, like Dr. Mikovits.

The conspiracy theorists “recast a pusher of discredited pseudoscience as a whistle-blowing counterpoint to real expertise,” said Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Dr. Mikovits did not respond to requests for comment.

Judy Mikovits has a degree in biology from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in molecular biology from George Washington University. From 1992 to 2001, she worked at the National Cancer Institute as a postdoctoral fellow, a staff scientist and a lab director, then served as research director of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease from 2006 to 2011. In 2011, after her research into chronic fatigue syndrome was discredited, she was fired from Whittemore.

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump wants America to ‘normalize’ coronavirus deaths. It’s the media’s job not to play along, Margaret Sullivan, right, May 11, 2020 (print ed.). Here’s how journalists can puncture this administration’s loaded buzzwords, bogus comparisons and callousness about human life.

Media critic and New York University professor Jay Rosen sees a strategy of normalizing coronavirus as key to Trump’s attempt to save his political skin before November’s presidential election, as he described in a widely-read essay last week:

“The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible,” he wrote.

The media’s role in Trump’s plan-without-a-plan? Well, he’s counting on us to regurgitate and magnify his message — and in doing so, make people begin to shrug off the daily horrors as inevitable. When journalists repeat the rhetoric about the necessity of widespread “reopening” or when they become inured to the continuing death count, they do his work for him.

May 10

New York Times, How Many Have Died? For Some on the Right, It’s Politics, Not Science, Matthew Rosenberg and Jim Rutenberg, May 10, 2020 (print ed.). Elements of the right have sought to bolster President Trump’s political standing by turning scientific questions into political issues.

The claim was tailor-made for President Trump’s most steadfast backers: Federal guidelines are coaching doctors to mark Covid-19 as the cause of death even when it is not, inflating the pandemic’s death toll.

That the claim came from a doctor, Scott Jensen, who also happens to be a Republican state senator in Minnesota, made it all the more alluring to the president’s allies. Never mind the experts who said that, if anything, the death toll was being vastly undercounted.

“SHOCKING,” tweeted Chris Berg, a conservative television show host on KX4, a Fox affiliate in Fargo, N.D., after interviewing Dr. Jensen last month. Soon after, Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host, invited Dr. Jensen onto her show. His assertions were picked up by Infowars, the conspiracy-oriented website founded by Alex Jones. They were shared by followers of Qanon, who subscribe to a web of vague, baseless theories that a secret cabal in the government is trying to take down the president.

Washington Post, NYC schools lift ban on Zoom — even as hackers hit other educational online events, Valerie Strauss, May 10, 2020. One Ohio school district is suspending its use of Zoom after a Board of Education meeting was hacked and child pornography was displayed.

A virtual graduation ceremony at Oklahoma State University held Saturday on the Zoom platform was hacked by saboteurs who displayed racist and anti-Semitic messages, the school said. Another instance of what is known as “Zoombombing” was reported in Ohio, where a Brecksville-Broadview Heights School District Board of Education meeting was interrupted by a hacker who displayed child pornography on the screen for several seconds, the district said.

Online security concerns have been growing since schools across the country closed to try to stem the spread of the coronavirus and students were told to work remotely. Schools and districts rushed to create remote lessons and partnered with different online platforms, sometimes without strict security filters. There have been numerous reports of intruders disrupting classes and school meetings, from elementary school to higher education.

May 9

New York Times, Will Coronavirus Kill Astrology? The pandemic has affected all of us. Who saw it coming? Hayley Phelan, May 9, 2020. If ever there was one, Susan Miller would be a blue-chip astrologer. So, in January, when she appeared on CBS New York and predicted that 2020 would “be a great year, and it will be a prosperous year,” people listened.

People listened when she said Capricorn would be the year’s “celestial favorite,” and that Cancer was the most likely to wed; Libra was set to score in real-estate and Taurus could expect a calendar full of international travel.

And then, people got mad because — it probably doesn’t need pointing out — things didn’t exactly go according to the stars’ plan.

“I remember a month ago, thinking: has everybody fired their astrologer?” said Divya Babbar, who subscribed to Ms. Miller’s free app last year. As a Sagittarius, Ms. Babbar had been looking forward to the year of profit Ms. Miller had predicted for her.

YouTube and Instagram users took to Ms. Miller’s feeds to complain. “Susan, you’re a very good writer but you forgot about the Covid-19 virus and the loss of jobs,” one user sniped.

Another railed: “Why didn’t you predict this, Susan? Covid-19 was major enough to see it coming!”

Many astrologers and their followers believe that daily events are impacted by the movements and positions of celestial objects, the planets and the sun. Science says: No. Most psychologists agree that astrology’s appeal relies largely on “confirmation bias” — the human tendency to seek out, recall and favor information that confirms what we already believe.

Astrologers, the haters say, write their horoscopes in such a broad, general way that anyone could find something that applied to them, especially if they’re really looking for it. But then March 2020 arrived, and with it the dawning of a global pandemic, the magnitude and universality of which seemed to contradict not just astrology, but the very notion that each sign could have its own fate (after all, we all are facing a common threat at the moment and it doesn’t take a seer to know that most of us will be spending a lot more time at home).

May 8

Pandemic Politics / Media

Washington Post, White House tightens its grip on virus information, Toluse Olorunnipa, May 8, 2020 (print ed.). The president has sought to block or downplay information about the severity of the pandemic as he urges a return to normalcy. Several Republican governors are following his lead.

President Trump in recent weeks has sought to block or downplay information about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic as he urges a return to normalcy and the rekindling of an economy that has been devastated by public health restrictions aimed at mitigating the outbreak.

His administration has sidelined or replaced officials not seen as loyal, rebuffed congressional requests for testimony, dismissed jarring statistics and models, praised states for reopening without meeting White House guidelines and, briefly, pushed to disband a task force created to combat the virus and communicate about the public health crisis.

Several Republican governors are following Trump’s lead as an effort takes shape to control the narrative about a pandemic that has continued to rage throughout a quickly reopening country. With polls showing most consumers still afraid to venture out of their homes, the Trump administration has intensified its efforts to soothe some of those fears through a messaging campaign that relies on tightly controlling information about a virus that has proven stubbornly difficult to contain.

Washington Post, Analysis: Trump labels Americans as ‘warriors’ in risky push to reopen, David Nakamura, May 8, 2020 (print ed.). President Trump praised American farmers as the “warriors” in his trade war with China that was harming their exports. He used the same term to describe the Republican lawmakers who spent political capital to defend him in the impeachment fight.

Now, as he pushes to reopen the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has identified a new group of “warriors” to enlist in battle: the American public.

Trump unveiled the moniker this week — during a trip to a face-mask manufacturing facility in Phoenix on Tuesday and again in an Oval Office photo op with nurses Wednesday — suggesting it is no longer just medical workers on the front lines who must respond against the lethal illness.

“I’m actually calling now . . . the nation warriors,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We have to be warriors. We can’t keep our country closed down for years.”

The president’s use of the term has capped a weeks-long rhetorical effort to frame the crisis through battlefield language. Trump has called himself a “wartime president” and cast the virus as an “invisible enemy” that is “smart” and “tough.” In recent days, he has taken to comparing the national emergency to other moments in American history when the nation’s collective spirit and bravery helped overcome threats from a challenging foe, including World War II.

Yet in his efforts to rally public support, Trump — as he did with the farmers and GOP lawmakers — is again shifting the burden and potential repercussions of his decisions onto those whom he is enjoining in the fight, in this case most other Americans.

Press Run, Opinion: Access journalism is killing us, Eric Boehlert, May 8, 2020. News consumers deserves real answers. Finally emerging from his pandemic-era Fox News bunker, Trump sat for an interview with ABC News this week. For weeks as the U.S. death toll skyrocketed and tens of millions of people lost their jobs, Trump had agreed only to answer pleasing, one-on-one questions from Fox News. He did his best to create an alternate universe, where the deadly cornonavirus would soon "wash away."

Agreeing to be interviewed by ABC, Trump appeared to be taking a risk by exposing himself to tougher questions about his historically incompetent response to the public health crisis, and a mountain of evidence that he personally chose to do nothing to protect the country from a virus invasion. In the end, the soft-as-a-pillow interview on ABC proved to be no risk. And Trump probably knew that going in, because TV journalists, perhaps more concerned about access than answers, simply refuse to hold him accountable in-person.

Accustomed to blustering his way through TV Q&A's and facing minimal pushback, Trump once again delivered an often-incoherent session with ABC, while lying relentlessly. Yet Trump was never closely questioned by "ABC World News Tonight" anchor David Muir, even when the issues of the day include more than 70,000 dead Americans and 30 million lost jobs. Incredibly, Muir failed to call Trump out on the pandemic-related lies he had been telling for weeks during his White House briefings. Meaning, Muir likely knew in advance what Trump's falsehoods would be, yet the anchor did nothing.

Content with the TV "get" (i.e. landing a interview with Trump), Muir did his minimal best to hold the president accountable for what some experts see as the greatest single failure of leadership in the history of the United States presidents. Muir did what so many journalists before him have done over the last five years — he let Trump get away with it. And Muir did it at a time when America is so desperate for answers and accountability.

Trump Donor Now Controls Postal Service

Washington Post, Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service, Josh Dawsey, Lisa Rein and Jacob Bogage, May 7, 2020 (print ed.). Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service.

A top donor to President Trump and the Republican National Committee will be named the new head of the Postal Service, putting a top ally of the president in charge of an agency where Trump has long pressed for major changes in how it handles its business.

The Postal Service’s board of governors confirmed late Wednesday that Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman who is currently in charge of fundraising for the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, will serve as the new postmaster general.

The action will install a stalwart Trump ally to lead the Postal Service, which he has railed against for years, and probably move him closer than ever before to forcing the service to renegotiate its terms with companies and its own union workforce. Trump’s Treasury Department and the Postal Service are in the midst of a negotiation over a $10 billion line of credit approved as part of coronavirus legislation in March.

The confirmation came after The Washington Post asked for comment on the decision.

Trump has indicated he wants the Postal Service to dramatically raise fees for delivering packages for customers such as Amazon in exchange for tapping the line of credit. Trump has long argued that Amazon doesn’t pay the Postal Service enough, a charge the agency has fiercely contested. (Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Post.)

Palmer Report, Opinion: For the last time, Donald Trump can’t magically rig the election by killing off the Post Office, Bill Palmer, May 8, 2020. When Donald Trump and the Republican Senate recently signaled their hesitation to include the Post Office in its overall bailout legislation, some folks out there came up with a conspiracy theory that Trump and the GOP were trying to kill off the Post Office so there would be no mail-in voting in November.

If you put any thought into this conspiracy theory at all, it immediately falls apart. Unlike most government entities, the Post Office generates substantial revenue, so it’s not something the government can get rid of simply by “defunding” it. Nor would the Post Office magically be gone from the face of the earth before the election. Even if that did happen, no one would stand for it. Democrats and Republicans both use the Post Office for various things, and would not tolerate its disappearance. For that matter, Republican and Democratic voters both like to mail in their votes.

The trouble is, we’ve seen this “Trump is killing the Post Office so he can magically rig the election” nonsense repeated so many times, it ends up warping our view of everything that we see happening. What we’re really seeing play out right now is twofold.

First, UPS and FedEx have been paying the GOP to sabotage the Post Office for a decade, because they don’t like having to compete with Post Office Priority Mail on pricing. By squeezing the Post Office, with the pension scam and other tactics, the GOP has been forcing the Post Office to raise its Priority Mail prices in order to make up the revenue. This has been going on forever; it’s just that the media has barely covered it, so most people don’t know it’s going on.

Second, Donald Trump has a personal vendetta against Amazon because its CEO Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which has exposed a number of Trump’s scandals. Sabotaging the Post Office doesn’t directly harm Bezos, as the Post Office only handles a fraction of Amazon’s shipping. But it’s fairly clear that the GOP and its donors have goaded Trump into going after the Post Office as a way of supposedly harming Bezos, because they want the Post Office to be squeezed for Priority Mail pricing reasons.

But if you weren’t aware of any of the lengthy backstory for why Trump and the GOP keep squeezing the Post Office, and your first taste of the story was when they tried to squeeze the Post Office at the start of the pandemic, then you might be inclined to mistakenly believe the this had something to do with mail-in voting.

The trouble is, this kind of conspiracy theory doesn’t help us. Yes, we need to fight for the Post Office. But we’ve needed to be fighting for the Post Office for the past decade, as the GOP has been trying to sabotage it on behalf of UPS and FedEx. If we’re only focusing on fighting an imaginary battle to stop Trump from killing the Post Office and magically rigging the election, we’ll never rectify the actual scandal – which has always centered entirely around Priority Mail pricing.

May 5

Mediaite, NY AG Reportedly Initiated Harassment Investigation Into NBC News Including Claims Against Andy Lack, Chris Matthews, Rudy Takala, May Letitia James 150x150 5, 2020. New York’s attorney general Letitia James, right, launched an investigation into NBC News in late 2019, according to a new report, over allegations of sexual harassment, retaliation and gender discrimination.

The investigation involves allegations against former “Hardball” host Chris Matthews and NBC News chief Andrew Lack, according to the Tuesday report in Variety. It comes after the network’s Monday announcement that Lack was retiring earlier than anticipated.

Sources told the publication the attorney general’s office had interviewed a number of women in connection with the investigation, including former “Today” host Megyn Kelly. Attorney Douglas Wigdor is reportedly representing several of the women.

Former NBC News producer Rich McHugh said in a Monday interview he wasn’t aware of the details, but that the attorney general’s civil division was spearheading the investigation. “We’re not sure if it could lead to anything criminal, but I do know they have been looking into this and interviewing employees over a number of months,” McHugh said.

Former “NBC News at Sunrise” anchor Linda Vester, who accused the network’s Tom Brokaw of misconduct in 2018, said the attorney general’s office asked her to share details of her allegations. “They asked me to recount my original experience, and wanted to know a lot about the retaliation after I told the Brokaw story and what I thought might be Andy Lack’s involvement in it.”

A woman who spoke anonymously said she was harassed by Matthews and that the network retaliated against her for reporting it. “Everyone in that company knew about it and they knew about it for years and it was horrible,” she said.

Another woman, Addie Zinone, who alleged that she had a 2000 affair with NBC anchor Matt Lauer while she worked as a 24-year-old production assistant, said the AG’s office also contacted her. “It’s time to ask what top management at NBC and other outlets are doing to change the culture that allowed Lauer, along with numerous news anchors with questionable attitudes toward women, to stay in their positions for so long,” Zinone said.

Lauer, who was fired from the “Today” show in 2017 over a rape allegation, infamously had a button installed under his desk that allowed him to lock his door while visitors were in his office. NBC at the time denied the report in a vaguely-worded statement, saying, “The button releases a magnet that holds the door open. It does not lock the door from the inside.”

NBCUniversal said on Monday that Telemundo chief Cesar Conde would replace Lack at the network. Lack, who served as NBC’s president and chief operating officer, became a controversial figure after he quashed reporting by Ronan Farrow on allegations of sexual abuse by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

May 4

Washington Post, Andy Lack, longtime NBC News and MSNBC executive, steps down from chairmanship after internal, external criticism, Sarah Ellison and Elahe Izadi, May 4, 2020. Andy Lack, right, who has served as chairman of NBC News and MSNBC for five years after a longtime affiliation with the company, is stepping down from his job amid a corporate restructuring.

Lack “has decided to step down and will transition out of the company at the end of the month,” according to a statement from NBC. The move came months ahead of schedule, according to people familiar with the deliberations, who said Lack had planned to step down after the 2020 presidential election.

The announcement ended Lack’s lengthy tenure at NBC, one split into two tours and marked by significant upheaval within his ranks, particularly in his most recent time at the network.

The news came the same day NBCUniversal announced it was reorganizing its news and entertainment divisions. Cesar Conde, who has overseen Spanish-language Telemundo and NBC’s international organization, will now serve in the newly created role of chairman of NBCUniversal News Group, which includes NBC News, CNBC and MSNBC.

It’s the first big executive shuffle by CEO Jeff Shell since he took over for Steve Burke earlier this year. Lack’s direct reports, who included NBC News President Noah Oppenheim and MSNBC President Phil Griffin, will now report to Conde, along with CNBC Chairman Mark Hoffman.

The move comes now in part because Shell wanted to make his imprint on the company and is facing intense budget pressure during economic fallout from the novel coronavirus, according to NBCUniversal insiders who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

That fallout had already forced NBC to place on hold an ambitious plan to launch a news service with Sky News, which NBC parent Comcast gained control of in 2018.

matt lauer today Lack, 72, a veteran TV news producer, first joined NBC as news division president in 1993 after a long career at CBS and oversaw a surge in the ratings for “NBC Nightly News” and the “Today” show. He left the network for a series of other corporate media jobs a decade later.

Since returning to the network as chairman of its news division in 2015, Lack oversaw a resurgence of some of NBC’s marquee shows, such as “Today,” and urged NBC News to fully embrace its cable partner MSNBC, pushing anchors from both divisions to work together.

He also oversaw high-profile controversies and missteps: anchor Brian Williams’s suspension and demotion for exaggerating his reporting exploits; the network’s apparent delay during the 2016 presidential campaign of the “Access Hollywood” recording from 2005 in which Donald Trump bragged about groping women; “Today” host Matt Lauer’s firing for sexual misconduct in 2017 (Lauer is shown at left in a file photo); and the ronan farrow signing of Fox News host Megyn Kelly to a huge contract that resulted in a low-rated talk show and her eventual departure from NBC.

Lack was also in charge when NBC parted ways three years ago with investigative journalist Ronan Farrow, right, who subsequently won a Pulitzer for the New Yorker magazine with his groundbreaking story revealing Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as a repeat sexual offender and harasser.

chris hayes Custom

Palmer Report, Analysis, MSNBC Chairman Andy Lack resigns after network faces backlash for phony Biden scandal, Bill Palmer, May 4, 2020. MSNBC just had its ugliest five day stretch in the network’s quarter-century history. Host Chris Hayes falsely characterized a non-credible allegation against Joe Biden, which led to Biden going on Morning Joe and refuting the whole thing.

Even after the Associated Press confirmed that the accuser was fundamentally changing her story, MSBNC still spent the weekend obsessively hammering away at the story as if it were a real scandal. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s audience began loudly rebelling against MSNBC across social media for its journalistic malpractice.

Now MSNBC chairman Andy Lack, right, is suddenly resigning. NBC is officially saying that this is due to a larger restructuring. But these kinds of “restructuring” moves in the corporate world are often orchestrated as cover for getting rid of a specific executive without making it look like a controversial ouster.

Given the timing, it’s difficult to imagine that Lack’s abrupt departure is mere coincidence. We’re coming off a week in which large chunks of Chris Hayes’ own audience are calling for his resignation, the names of other MSNBC hosts like Ali Velshi have been trending amid backlash, and MSNBC figures like Andrea Mitchell have been getting severely “ratioed” with negative replies on Twitter.

It was fairly clear that certain MSNBC hosts felt confident in breathlessly hyping the phony Biden scandal – even as it was completely falling apart – because they felt that it was what the MSNBC bosses wanted them to do. Now that the entire thing has blown up in MSNBC’s face, and its audience is outraged, that “boss” is suddenly resigning. Again, NBC will continue to paint this as being mere coincidence. But let’s see if there’s a shift in on-air tone today at MSNBC, now that the debacle appears to have cost the network’s chairman his job.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump’s Fox News town hall disaster just opened up a whole new can of worms for him, Bill Palmer, right, May 4, 2020. What a lot of people don’t understand is that Fox News is a for-profit corporation like any other major news outlet. The only difference is that Fox has a business centered around feeding convenient lies to conservatives in order to rile them up and keep them tuned in. But even Fox has to maintain relative credibility with its gullible audience, or it risks losing them.

When Donald Trump agreed to do a coronavirus town hall on Fox News last night, he and his handlers must have been expecting a series of softball questions. After all, Fox News viewers are the people who like him. Perhaps he thought he’d get asked questions about how successful he is, or what an amazing job he’s done with the coronavirus crisis. Instead, the audience questions were are all fairly reasonable and topical.

Fox could have cherry picked questions that were about how great Trump is – surely a few were submitted – but that’s clearly not where Fox’s audience is. Even these gullible conservatives are worried about treatments and vaccines, food and income, and the importance of what’s going on right now. Donald Trump must not have expected these questions, because he had no idea how to answer almost any of them.

At one point Donald Trump was telling a bizarre and inaccurate story about World War I. He’d been asked about nursing homes. At another point Trump began rambling about airline bailouts. He’d been asked about how to save an individually-run business with no employees. His answers didn’t even match the questions.

It’s not just that Donald Trump made himself look really inept in the eyes of an unusually sober Fox News audience. The real problem for Trump is that even a lot of Fox viewers seem to be looking for serious solutions and governmental competence right now – and Trump has absolutely no idea how to deliver that or even address it. Serious moments require serious leaders, and Trump is more of a failing carnival barker than ever.

May 3

Palmer Report, Opinion: ABC News retracts phony Joe Biden story, apologizes, Bill Palmer, May 3, 2020. Even as MSNBC continues to take a bizarre victory lap for having promoted a phony Joe Biden scandal that’s falling apart in real time, ABC News has made a mess of its own, with an entirely different phony Biden scandal. This has landed the ABC reporter in hot water and made an even bigger mess of things.

It all started when a woman claimed that Joe Biden had made inappropriate remarks to her during a 2008 event, while she was underage. This allegation was dead on arrival, because there’s widespread documentation that Biden wasn’t even at the event in question.

But when ABC News reporter Sasha Pezenik posted a Twitter thread about the non-story, she listed the allegation in the first tweet – where everyone would see it – and then she only acknowledged the falseness of the allegation deeper in the thread, where no one would see it.

This morning Pezenik tweeted this: “Last night I posted a tweet about Vice President Biden. The allegations in my tweet had not been vetted or put through the ABC News standards process. I have since removed the tweet and I apologize for posting it.”

This is a huge and inexcusable error in judgment – but at least she was willing to retract it and apologize.

When TV news outlets breathlessly overhype a “scandal” they know is phony, and then they’re called out on it, too often they sanctimoniously double down on the false story instead of backing down. There’s a hashtag pushing for Pezenik to be fired, but we’re not sure we agree with that. She handled this very differently than MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who openly mocked his audience for daring to point out that he mischaracterized a phony Biden scandal.

SouthFront, Appeal Of SouthFront Steering Committee Regarding Censorship On YouTube And Facebook, Viktor Stoilov (SouthFront steering committee member), May 3, 2020. On April 30th, our Facebook page with about 100,000 subscribers was deleted without any warnings or an opportunity to file an appeal.

Now, the situation appears to be even worse.

youtube logo Custom On May 1st, YouTube terminated all of South Front’s channels, with approximately 170,000 subscribers. Our YouTube channels were also terminated without any warnings or notifications. The main YouTube channel in English had over 152,000 subscribers, 1,900 uploaded videos and approximately 60 million views.

The termination of our channels occurred regardless of the fact that our YouTube channels had zero active strikes. Covering conflicts in the Middle East, we expressly understand the inherent sensitivity of the issue. Therefore, we have strictly followed YouTube’s Community Guidelines and have always complied with the Terms of Service.

SouthFront’s YouTube channels were terminated without any warning. All that we got was a single automated email regarding the termination of our inactive channel in Farsi “SouthFront Farsi” that included several translations of our war reports. However, even this email provides no details regarding the decision and just claims that “SouthFront Farsi” violated YouTube’s Terms of Service without any elaboration.

Throughout the past five years of our endeavors, South Front has been constantly subjected to pressure from different Euro-Atlantic structures and US tech companies that hold a monopoly on the dissemination of information. We have repeatedly faced attempts to censor our coverage of world events, in the form of written analysis, videos and livestream interviews.

The only reasonable explanation, we may imagine, is that US authorities ordered YouTube and Facebook to cleanse the media sphere of sources of objective coverage and analysis on the Middle East region as a part of the ongoing preparations for a war with Iran.

May 2

Associated Press, AP Exclusive: Harassment, assault absent in Biden complaint, Alexandra Jaffe, Don Thompson and Stephen Braun, May 2, 2020. Tara Reade, the former Senate staffer who alleges Joe Biden sexually assaulted her 27 years ago, says she filed a limited report with a congressional personnel office that did not explicitly accuse him of sexual assault or harassment.

“I remember talking about him wanting me to serve drinks because he liked my legs and thought I was pretty and it made me uncomfortable,” Reade said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press. “I know that I was too scared to write about the sexual assault.”

Reade said she described her issues with Biden but “the main word I used — and I know I didn’t use sexual harassment — I used ‘uncomfortable.’ And I remember ‘retaliation.’”

Reade described the report after the AP discovered additional transcripts and notes from its interviews with Reade last year in which she says she “chickened out” after going to the Senate personnel office. The AP interviewed Reade in 2019 after she accused Biden of uncomfortable and inappropriate touching. She did not raise allegations of sexual assault against Biden until this year, around the time he became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

tara reade younger The existence of the Senate report has become a key element of the accusations against Biden, which he has flatly denied. Reade says she doesn’t have a copy of the report, and Biden said Friday that he is not aware that any complaint against him exists. He asked the Senate and the National Archives to search their records to try to locate a complaint from Reade.

But Reade [shown at left in a photo from her younger years] is suggesting that even if the report surfaces, it would not corroborate her assault allegations because she chose not to detail them at the time.

According to a transcript of her 2019 interview with the AP, Reade said: “They have this counseling office or something, and I think I walked in there once, but then I chickened out.” She made a similar statement in a second interview with AP that same day, according to written notes from the interview.

On Friday, Reade said she was referring to having “chickened out” by not filing full harassment or assault allegations against Biden. In multiple interviews with the AP on Friday, Reade insisted she filed an “intake form” at the Senate personnel office, which included her contact information, the office she worked for and some broad details of her issues with Biden.

Reade was one of eight women who came forward last year with allegations that Biden made them feel uncomfortable with inappropriate displays of affection. Biden acknowledged the complaints and promised to be “more mindful about respecting personal space in the future.”

During one of the April 2019 interviews with the AP, she said Biden rubbed her shoulders and neck and played with her hair. She said she was asked by an aide in Biden’s Senate office to dress more conservatively and told “don’t be so sexy.”

She said of Biden: “I wasn’t scared of him, that he was going to take me in a room or anything. It wasn’t that kind of vibe.”

The AP reviewed notes of its 2019 interviews with Reade after she came forward in March with allegations of sexual assault against Biden. But reporters discovered an additional transcript and notes from those interviews on Friday.

A recording of one of the interviews was deleted before Reade emerged in 2020 with new allegations against Biden, in keeping with the reporter’s standard practice for disposing of old interviews. A portion of that interview was also recorded on video, but not the part in which she spoke of having “chickened out.”

The AP declined to publish details of the 2019 interviews at the time because reporters were unable to corroborate her allegations, and aspects of her story contradicted other reporting.

In recent weeks, Reade told the AP and other news organizations that Biden sexually assaulted her, pushing her against a wall in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building in 1993, groping her and penetrating her with his fingers. She says she was fired from Biden’s office after filing a complaint with the Senate alleging harassment.

The accusation has roiled Biden’s presidential campaign, sparking anxiety among Democrats. Republicans have accused Biden backers of hypocrisy, arguing that they have been quick to believe women who have accused President Donald Trump and other conservatives of assault. Trump has faced multiple accusations of assault and harassment, all of which he denies.

Reade says she was reluctant to share details of the assault during her initial conversations with reporters over a year ago because she was scared of backlash, and was still coming to terms with what happened to her.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Joe Biden accuser changes her story again, admits she didn’t originally even accuse him of assault, Bill Palmer, right, May 2, 2020. Even as certain MSNBC hosts continue to breathlessly hype a sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden that was already uniquely non-credible on its face, the accuser has now fundamentally changed her story yet again – and it appears she’s now trying to backtrack in rapid fashion.

Yesterday, Biden called on the National Archives and Senate archives to release their copy of the report that Tara Reade claims she filed in 1993. The National Archives says it has no such report. If the Senate confirms the same, it’ll strongly point to Reade having never filed a report to begin with. Now Reade is telling the AP that when she filed the report, she didn’t accuse Biden of sexual harassmentor assault. Instead she simply said that she felt “uncomfortable.”

This changes things in a rather massive way. By her own admission, the key supposed piece of her contemporaneous corroboration – the report she filed – absolutely does not corroborate her story. She can still argue that the assault happened and that she only filed a vague report about feeling “uncomfortable” instead. But that won’t hold any credibility, because she originally claimed that she filed a report about sexual assault.

Biden’s accuser had already changed fundamentally changed her story in self-contradictory manner multiple times, and several of her supposed corroborators had already shot her down, before MSNBC host Chris Hayes opened this can of worms by falsely characterizing the allegation as “credible” and “corroborated.” How Hayes still has a job is anyone’s guess. At this point, this isn’t even a Joe Biden scandal; it’s a Tara Reade scandal. MSNBC had absolutely no business hyping this mess as if it were some legitimate story.

kayleigh mcenany djt

Washington Post, Analysis 15 minutes after pledging not to lie, Trump’s new press secretary made an obviously false claim, Philip Bump, May 2, 2020 (print ed.). It dealt with a former Trump official who admitted lying.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany held the first daily news briefing in more than a year Friday, her first since assuming her current role last month. McEnany, a veteran of rising to Donald Trump’s defense on cable news, when he was a candidate and now as president, was prepared for the moment, armed with voluminous talking points and an ability to seamlessly introduce them.

The reporters in the room were clearly at least somewhat skeptical of the extent to which they could take McEnany at her word. At one point, a reporter asked her to pledge that she would never lie to the reporters and, by extension, the public.

“I will never lie to you,” McEnany replied. “You have my word on that.”

Fifteen minutes later, she raised a subject no one had asked about and quickly offered an obviously false claim about it.

“I am glad that you brought up justice, and — because, look, there is, again, a case of injustice that has yet to be brought up today, but I certainly would like to bring it up,” she said. “And that’s the case of General Michael Flynn.”

She offered a rough presentation of the case being made by Flynn’s defenders that the former national security adviser was railroaded into accepting a guilty plea after misrepresenting his 2016 interactions with Russia’s ambassador during a conversation with FBI investigators. This week, the Justice Department released documents centered on the investigation, which included notes written before Flynn was interviewed by the FBI at the White House. They’ve been touted as a smoking gun showing bias against Flynn, though that interpretation is dubious.

What the notes did not say is what McEnany said they did.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump’s head is spinning, Bill Palmer, May 2, 2020. Over the past twenty-four hours Donald Trump has seemed to insinuate that the phony allegation against Joe Biden is both credible and fake. Last night Trump’s lapdog Lindsey Graham went on Fox News and dct underage wmr tweet strongly defended Biden against the allegation, suggesting that Team Trump wants nothing to do with it – even amid reports that the Trump campaign was testing out a TV ad aimed at legitimizing the phony allegation. So what’s going on?

It’s pretty clear that Donald Trump and his team don’t know what to do with this phony Biden scandal. That’s not surprising. It wasn’t invented for Trump’s benefit. It was invented by “Bernie or Bust” fanatics masquerading as journalists, in a desperate last-ditch attempt at taking Biden down, under the delusional belief that this would somehow result in Bernie Sanders being the nominee instead. Nevermind that Sanders has dropped out and strongly endorsed Biden; now that Bernie has formally divorced himself from the “Bust” crowd, they’ve become even more deranged in their behavior.

Joe Biden aced his interview about the fake scandal yesterday, meaning it’s not going to have the impact that the “Bust” crowd was hoping for.

Biden has a 100% chance of being the nominee. Sanders isn’t going to withdraw his endorsement and magically reenter the race, no matter how much time his more deranged supporters spend fantasizing over this.

Bernie’s reasonable supporters are already lined up behind Biden. Yet now this Biden vs Trump race has a fake Biden scandal that could end up djt pedo graphic IMG 3170 Custom being more of a problem for Trump than for Biden.

The mere existence of the phony Biden scandal has prompted the media and the public to recall that Donald Trump has dozens of credible accusers.

If Trump and his team start trying to promote the Biden scandal, it could backfire on them, as everyone is reminded of who the actual sexual criminal is in this race. On the other hand, as the focus shifts more toward Trump’s status as a sexual predator, he and his team could feel compelled to try to play up the fake Biden allegation in the hope of shifting the focus back.

There’s a reason Donald Trump’s head is spinning as he tries to figure out how to handle this. When a fake scandal is invented about a Democratic candidate, it’s usually invented by the Republicans, meaning they get to come up with a fake scandal that specifically works in their favor.

This is a fake scandal about a Democratic candidate that was invented by the fringe left to keep the Democrat from getting to the general election to begin with, so it’s not at all a good fit for what Trump needs right now. No wonder he’s not sure what to do with it.

May 1

Washington Post, Pence staff threatens action against reporter who tweeted about visit to clinic without surgical mask, Paul Farhi, May 1, 2020. Pence , right, visits Mayo Clinic hospital, does not wear mask.

Vice President Pence’s office has threatened to retaliate against a reporter who revealed that Pence’s office had told journalists they would need masks for Pence’s visit to the Mayo Clinic — a requirement Pence himself did not follow.

Pence’s trip to the clinic Tuesday generated criticism after he was photographed without a surgical mask — the only person in the room not wearing one. The Minnesota clinic requires visitors to wear masks as a precaution against spreading the coronavirus.

Pence’s wife, Karen Pence, said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday that he was unaware of the mask policy until his visit was over.

But Steve Herman, who covers the White House for Voice of America, suggested that there was more to the story after Karen Pence’s interview.

“All of us who traveled with [Pence] were notified by the office of @VP the day before the trip that wearing of masks was required by the @MayoClinic and to prepare accordingly,” tweeted Herman, who covered the trip as part of his rotation as one of the pool reporters, who share information with other reporters in limited-space situations.

The tweet apparently enraged Pence’s staff, which told Herman that he had violated the off-the-record terms of a planning memo that had been sent to him and other reporters in advance of Pence’s trip.

Herman said he was notified by the White House Correspondents’ Association that Pence’s office had banned him from further travel on Air Force Two, although a spokesperson in Pence’s office later told VOA managers than any punishment was still under discussion, pending an apology from Herman or VOA.

VOA is continuing to talk with Pence’s staff, said Yolanda Lopez, the director of VOA’s news center. She said it wasn’t clear how the vice president intended to proceed. Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, declined to comment.

The issue, according to people involved, is whether Herman’s tweet violated the off-the-record terms of a planning document sent via email Monday evening by the vice president’s office to reporters who planned to travel with Pence to the clinic.

A copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post explicitly stated that masks are required for the visit and instructed reporters to wear them. “Please note, the Mayo Clinic is requiring all individuals traveling with the VP wear masks,” the document said. “Please bring one to wear while on the trip.”

The directive confirms that Pence’s staff was well aware of the need for masks, raising the possibility that none of his aides alerted him to the requirement or that Pence had intentionally flouted it, perhaps to avoid being photographed in a mask. (Pence himself told reporters after the visit that because he doesn’t have the coronavirus — he is tested frequently — he decided he could “speak to these researchers, these incredible health-care personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you.”)

However, the planning document is marked, “OFF THE RECORD AND FOR PLANNING PURPOSES ONLY.” The off-the-record designation is standard for such logistical memos, indicating reporters are obligated not to publish or report the information. The White House typically keeps planning information confidential to maintain security for official trips.

But there’s some question about how long the obligation lasts — whether it is permanent or only applies to the period before and during the trip.

Herman’s tweet came nearly 48 hours after the vice president’s trip had ended, suggesting the vice president’s staff was more embarrassed by the disclosure than concerned about security.

“My tweet speaks for itself,” Herman said in a statement. “We always have and will strictly adhere to keeping off the record any White House communications to reporters for planning purposes involving logistics that have security implications prior to events. . . . All White House pool reporters, including myself and my VOA colleagues, take this very seriously.”

As is, the vice president’s office took no action against another reporter, Gordon Lubold of the Wall Street Journal, who traveled with Pence and tweeted something similar to Herman’s tweet Thursday. “Everyone in the entire Mayo Clinic had a mask on, everyone, and we were all told the day before we had to wear a mask if we entered the clinic,” Lubold tweeted.

In a now-deleted tweet, the clinic said it had alerted Pence to its mask policy before his visit. A later statement from the clinic said only that it had informed Pence’s office of the policy, not Pence personally.

Voice of America is a government-funded but independent news agency that has lately been the object of White House criticism. The Trump administration accused VOA this month of promoting Chinese government propaganda in its reporting about the coronavirus. The VOA’s director, Amanda Bennett, has defended its independence.

On Thursday, Pence wore a mask as he toured a General Motors auto plant in Indiana that has been converted into a factory making ventilators for hospitals around the country.

Washington Post, House investigators demand Amazon’s Bezos testify in antitrust probe, Tony Romm and Jay Greene, May 1, 2020. House lawmakers investigating Amazon for antitrust violations demanded on Friday that Jeff Bezos, left, the company’s chief executive, agree to testify at an upcoming hearing or face a potential subpoena that would force him to appear.

jeffrey bezos washington post The dramatic escalation between members of Congress and the e-commerce giant follows reports that Amazon employees tapped data from third-party sellers in its marketplace to make decisions about launching its own competing products, despite initially telling Democrats and Republicans it did not engage in such practices.

Lawmakers on the House’s top competition-focused panel specifically pointed to statements that Amazon made starting last July, when officials explicitly told Congress that “we do not use any seller data to compete with them." Lawmakers raised the potential that Amazon might have committed perjury during its earlier testimony on Capitol Hill.

Palmer Report, Opinion: What did Bill Barr just do to Michael Cohen? Bill Palmer, May 1, 2020. Two weeks ago, it was announced that Michael Cohen was william barr new o being released from prison early due to the coronavirus outbreak in the prison system, and that he would serve the rest of his sentence from home. Then word surfaced that Cohen is writing a tell-all book about Donald Trump that will be released before the election. Now, suddenly, Cohen isn’t going to be released from prison.

It’s not difficult to figure out what’s going on here. Donald Trump’s lawyer recently sent a letter to Michael Cohen, threatening him over the book. This gives away that Trump is scared to death of what Cohen might do to him. And now, according to the Daily Beast, Cohen is suddenly not being let out.

It’s fairly clear to us that Attorney General Bill Barr, right, has intervened and is blocking Michael Cohen from being released. Of course this won’t actually stop Cohen’s book from being published; he’s been writing it while in prison, and it’ll come out before the election whether he’s still locked up or not. The book won’t contain any national security matters, like John Bolton’s book did, so there will be no method for Trump to use for trying to forcibly delay Cohen’s book.

djt smiling file Of course Bill Barr is no dummy, so he knows that keeping Michael Cohen locked up won’t keep his book from coming out. But Barr knows that Donald Trump is the kind of dummy who thinks keeping Cohen locked up will somehow keep his book from coming out. As usual, Barr is making a move that will please Trump, but not help Trump. If anything, this controversy over Cohen’s release hurts Trump, because now it’ll be a bigger story, and more people will be looking forward to seeing what’s in Cohen’s book.

Biden Accuser Commentary

jennifer rubin new headshot Washington Post, Opinion: What Joe Biden did right in rebutting Tara Reade’s claims, Jennifer Rubin, right, May 1, 2020. Political pundits will “grade” former vice president Joe Biden’s response to Tara Reade’s allegation that he digitally penetrated her more than 25 years ago. The campaign’s written statement was empathetic and respectful but definitive. Biden sat for a tough interview Friday without losing his cool. He was not angry or accusatory; he did not claim a conspiracy nor insult the accuser. He volunteered to open Senate papers (which he said are at the National Archives, not at the University of Delaware). In short, he did what an innocent person would do and say.

The lines “If you believe Christine Blasey Ford, you have to believe Reade” or “You didn’t believe President Trump, so you cannot believe Biden” (or other variations) are the worst examples of mindless “balance” and faux objectivity. It takes a minute to identify fundamental differences between situations that bear little resemblance to one another.

Trump never sat for a grueling interview to go through the facts of more than a dozen claims against him. Biden sat for an interrogation of a single claim of sexual assault. (And no, his penchant to ignore personal space and excessive hugginess were not sexual, although they were inappropriate.)

Unlike Republicans and now-Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who refused to allow a full investigation of charges, Biden has put no restrictions on media inquiries and has offered up relevant documents. (Republicans also refused to open up all documents relevant to Kavanaugh’s past White House work having nothing to do with Ford’s allegation.)

And let’s get real: Reade and Ford are not similar accusers. Ford’s story was consistent for years. Reade’s has not been. Ford did not claim to have complained contemporaneously; Reade did and was rebutted by Biden staff to whom she would have complained. In Kavanaugh’s case, there was another witness to an alleged, separate incident of sexual misconduct at Yale University involving Kavanaugh. In Reade’s case, no one else has accused Biden of anything like Reade’s claim.

Washington Post, Opinion: Why we’ll never have resolution on Tara Reade’s accusation against Joe Biden, Paul Waldman, May 1, 2020. We will be spending a good bit of time debating whether Biden’s comments were properly sensitive or politically deft, and people will continue to argue about whether Reade’s charge or Biden’s denial is more convincing.

But we should understand that there will be no resolution to this controversy, no satisfying conclusion, no point at which anyone feels that we’ve fully understood what happened and what we should think about it. It may fade as a campaign issue, but it will remain an open wound.

And yes, we can point out that President Trump has been credibly accused of various forms of sexual misconduct, all the way up to rape, by no fewer than two dozen women, not to mention the fact that he is on tape bragging about his ability to sexually assault women with impunity. And we can observe that unlike Biden, who reiterates that women have a right to be heard and refrains from attacking Reade, Trump has met his accusers with the accusation that they’re all despicable liars; in one case, he said, “Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.”

You can point all that out to Trump’s supporters, but it won’t do you any good. Unlike liberals for whom sexual assault and gender equality are important issues, many conservatives are unencumbered by questions of principle, and they’re practiced at pretending to care about something for only as long as it gives them political advantage. Remind them that the president they worship is an accused sexual predator, and they’ll just laugh.

And right now, they couldn’t be happier. If you search “Tara Reade” at FoxNews.com, you come up with more than 2,500 results. It’s a game they’re practiced at playing. They don’t need to persuade the public that Trump is good, only that everyone else is just as bad as he is — just as corrupt, just as venal, just as dishonest, just as morally contemptible. The fact that the charge against Biden is the same kind that has been leveled so many times (and far more persuasively) against Trump isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

Washington Post, Analysis: Biden begs off questions about University of Delaware documents, Aaron Blake, May 1, 2020. Joe Biden gave his first public interview Friday about allegations of sexual assault against him. And he set up the interview by issuing a lengthy statement in which he called for the National Archives to release any record of the complaint that his accuser, Tara Reade, says she filed in the early 1990s — but that Biden says didn’t exist.

But during the subsequent interview on MSNBC, he struggled to answer questions about other documents that could also potentially shed some light: ones housed at the University of Delaware.

Biden resisted repeated inquires from “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski about also releasing documents from his personal files there. Those documents are being held back now since they are generally released once an official like Biden leaves public life.

Biden repeatedly sought to beg off questions about the files by saying that they would not contain any documents pertinent to the Reade allegations.

“First of all, let’s get this straight: There are no personnel documents. You can’t do that,” Biden said, adding: “You have my income tax returns. They’re private documents. They do not get put out in the public. They’re not part of the public record.”

He repeatedly drove home the point that there were “no personnel records” in the documents. Pressed further, he said he was also sure there was nothing about Reade in those documents.

“So personnel records aside, are you certain there was nothing about Tara Reade in those records --” Brzezinski asked.

“I am absolutely certain,” he said, adding: “There is nothing. They’re not there. I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. There are no personnel records, by definition.”

Biden also said he worried that disclosing documents, including his confidential conversations with foreign leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, “could really be taken out of context.” He emphasized that those documents are generally released when someone leaves public office.

“All of that to be fodder in a campaign at this time — I don’t know of anybody who’s done anything like that,” Biden said.

Brzezinski then offered a compromise: Why not have someone search just for documents that pertain to Reade?

Biden, though, wouldn’t commit to it. “Who does that search?” he said.

Brzezinski said the university or some kind of commission could do so, but Biden reverted to talking about how any actual complaint should be in the National Archives.

But while the complaint — which Reade has said was not for the alleged assault but for making her feel uncomfortable — might not be in Biden’s University of Delaware files, those files could contain other documentation that could shed light. As The Post’s editorial board wrote recently in urging Biden to release any such relevant records:

The editorial board repeatedly acknowledged there may indeed be nothing pertinent or about Reade in those files, as Biden now insists, but it said they should be examined:

There are 1,875 boxes and 415 gigabytes of electronic content, largely uncataloged. Searching won’t be as easy as some might assume. But an inventory conducted with an eye toward releasing only relevant material could at least ascertain whether personnel records are part of this archive at all.

Disinformation Via Cults, Web

Washington Post, Internet Culture Analysis: Why dangerous conspiracy theories about the virus spread so fast — and how they can be stopped, Travis M. Andrews, May 1, 2020. Fighting online misinformation, such as the 5G conspiracy theory, can feel like fighting a waterfall. But it can be done.

Since the novel coronavirus pandemic began, misinformation has proliferated on the Internet — par for the course during a crisis. People took to social media in droves to share false claims that covering your body in chlorine or eating garlic were effective methods of fighting the virus, both of which were disproved by the World Health Organization.

The pandemic has also sparked a wave of more insidious conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that 5G mobile networks spread and worsen the coronavirus, which has led to dozens of instances of arsonists setting fire to cell towers across Europe.

Misinformation spreads online much like a virus itself. Although various types spread slightly differently, the transmission of the 5G conspiracy theory offers some insight into how false claims grow online.

In this case, it involved 5G, the newest, fastest type of cellular network, which began deploying globally in 2019. As is usually the case with new technologies, it has attracted its fair share of conspiracy theories. A general practitioner in Belgium named Kris Van Kerckhoven baselessly told the newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws in a Jan. 22 story that 5G was life-threatening and linked to the coronavirus, as Wired reported.

The newspaper quickly issued a correction and deleted the offending article from its website, but it was too late. Anti-5G groups began spreading the rumor, and some members of a frightened public, desperate for some sense of order, believed this deeply implausible lie.

It’s certainly more difficult to fight misinformation if someone is purposely and relentlessly spreading it, which is partially the case with various 5G conspiracy theories. The Russian network RT America has been peddling disinformation about the mobile network since long before covid-19, in part, according to the New York Times, to slow the rollout in the United States and give Russia time to catch up.

RT helped plant the seeds of mistrust surrounding 5G. Van Kerckhoven watered them.

Alex Jones Screen shot May 1, 2020 at 12.02.06 pm

If society collapses, Alex Jones says he would kill and cook his neighbours to feed his children (screenshot from Infowars )

Independent, Alex Jones says he'd kill and cook his neighbors to feed his kids, Oliver O'Connell, May 1, 2020. He has a few years’ worth of food stored away to get through first.

In an unhinged rant on his InfoWars radio show, notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones described in detail how he would kill and eat his neighbours to feed his children.

In a segment from his 28 April show: ‘Mission Accomplish! Coronavirus Panic Triggers Global Collapse,’ the controversial radio host said: “You know what, I’m ready. My daughters aren’t starving to death. I’ll eat my neighbors.”

He then explains in graphic detail how he would go about doing so.

A one-minute-long edited segment of the show was posted to Twitter by Jones’ ex-wife Kelly Jones, with whom he has battled in court for custody of their three children.

Ms Jones tweeted: “This is my ex-husband, Alex Jones, graphically describing how he'll kill his neighbor to f e e d my kids: Homicidal. Terrifying.”
Watch more

“I lost my kids for tweeting about injustice. This is UNJUST to my kids. This is a mom's worst nightmare. Court must act,” she added, before asking for retweets to further her cause.

The Joneses divorced in March 2015, and in 2017 Ms Jones sought sole or joint custody of the children due to her husband’s behaviour — he has a history of wild conspiracy theories and on-air rants. Ms Jones says that he is “not a stable person.”

April

April 28

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump has played the media like a puppet. We’re getting better — but history will not judge us kindly, Margaret Sullivan, right, April 28, 2020. The media has failed America by never figuring out how to cover a president who busts all our norms.

SaraCarter.com, Howard Stern: Trump Supporters Should All ‘Take Disinfectant and Drop Dead,’ Staff Writer, April 28, 2020. “I would love it if Donald would get on TV and take an injection of Clorox and let’s see if his theory works,” Howard Stern said on his show on Monday according to the NY Daily News.

“Hold a big rally, say f—k this coronavirus, with all of his followers, and let them hug each other and kiss each other and have a big rally.”

When Robin Quivers suggested, “A big cocktail of disinfectant,” Stern replied “Yeah…and all take disinfectant and all drop dead.”

Washington Post, Trump allies highlight new claims regarding allegations against Biden, Matt Viser, April 28, 2020 (print ed.). A former neighbor and a former work colleague are reported to have corroborated claims of harassment and assault by a former Senate aide to Joe Biden.

April 27

diamond and silk cropped

Daily Beast, Fox News Cuts Ties With Diamond & Silk, Unofficial Trump ‘Advisers’ Who Spread Bonkers Coronavirus Claims, Lachlan Cartwright and Justin Baragona, April 27, 2020. The MAGA superstars lost their Fox gig after pushing absolutely wild conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fox News has cut ties with MAGA vlogging superstars Diamond & Silk, who had contributed original content to the network’s streaming service Fox Nation since shortly after its late 2018 launch.

The sudden split comes after the Trump-boosting siblings have come under fire for promoting conspiracy theories and disinformation about the coronavirus. “After what they’ve said and tweeted you won’t be seeing them on Fox Nation or Fox News anytime soon,” a source with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast.

After rising to prominence during the 2016 election, Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson leveraged their newfound celebrity into regular sycophantic appearances on Fox News, resulting in President Donald Trump raving about their performances, featuring them at rallies, and treating them as “senior advisers.”

The social-media personalities were eventually tapped to provide weekly videos for Fox Nation after it launched as a subscription-based online video network. Their episodes, essentially 5-7 minute distillations of their freeform live-streams, appeared like clockwork on the streaming service until earlier this month.

No new episodes of their online program have been uploaded since April 7, as CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy first noted over the weekend. Prior to this month, the duo never missed a week posting episodes since December 2018.

A spokesperson for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment. Diamond & Silk also did not reply when emailed by The Daily Beast.

The sisters’ Fox guest spots have also dried up recently. According to a search of TVEyes, a cable-news monitoring system, Diamond & Silk haven’t appeared on the network since a March 6 interview on Fox & Friends and a March 7 hit on the now-defunct Fox Business Network show trish regan fox Custom hosted by Trish Regan, who was also ditched by Fox after her own comments calling the pandemic an “impeachment scam.”

Diamond & Silk have used their heavy social-media presence to be at the forefront of right-wing misinformation about the COVID-19 outbreak. For instance, during their March 30 livestream, the duo claimed that the number of American coronavirus deaths has been inflated to make Trump look bad.

“What I need to know is how many people have passed away in New York, and what I need to know is: Who has the bodies?” Diamond asked. “I need for somebody that does investigative work to call the morgues. To call the funeral homes. We need to know, because I don't trust anything else that comes out of his mouth now... Something's not right here. Something is off here.”

She added: “Is this being deliberately spread? Look, I’m not being a conspiracy theorist, this is real, but I’m asking my own questions. What the hell is going on?"

Silk, meanwhile, baselessly asserted that the disease was “man-made” and “engineered,” wondering aloud if there was a “little deep-state action going on behind the scenes.” She also questioned whether the World Health Organization had a “switch” to “turn this virus on and off?”

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), A cult within a cult: Falun Gong and the Trump administration, Wayne Madsen, left, April 27, 2020. Falun Gong, the Central wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped Small Intelligence Agency-linked Chinese cult, which is banned in China, has achieved overarching influence in the Donald Trump White House, State Department, and among Republican Party stalwarts harboring ambitions for national office. The cult's newspaper, The Epoch Times, enjoys access to White House press conferences and is currently engaged in a campaign to cast blame on China for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), as well as former Trump ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, have swallowed Falun Gong's bait by accusing China of manufacturing the Covid-19 virus as a bio-weapon at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Falun Gong has also enticed Trump personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani into making the false claim epoch times that President Barack Obama funded virus research at the Wuhan laboratory in 2017, even though Trump was president during the time frame. Giuliani tweeted: "Why did the US (NIH) in 2017 give $3.7m to the Wuhan Lab in China?"

In fact, the National Institutes of Health grants to an NGO that was conducting virus research at the Wuhan laboratory were approved by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2016, with $700,000 of the funds being granted by the Trump administration in 2017. Falun Gong is not the only cult in which Giuliani is heavily involved, the other being the Iranian exile group Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which is a terrorist group based in Albania that is trying to overthrow the Iranian government.

The Epoch Media Group, the Falun Gong media operation, has spent millions of dollars on social media campaigns, including setting up fake accounts, that have promoted Trump and proffered conspiracy theories against presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

April 24

Media Matters, Advocacy: Right-wing media struggle to respond to Trump's remarks about a "disinfectant" and an "injection," Bobby Lewis, April 24, 2020. Introduction by John Whitehouse: This week: This is (still) as serious as it gets. Lives are on the line with how this coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic is covered. It's clear that right-wing media are not just failing this test, but failing it badly.

During a coronavirus press conference, President Donald Trump suggested that injecting disinfectant into people could be a potential treatment for COVID-19. This is false; disinfectants are not meant to be consumed by humans in any way, and Trump arguably clarified later that he wasn’t talking about a physical injection. The initial comment prompted outcry from medical experts and media figures, and the disinfectant brand Lysol issued a statement warning against internal use of its products. While some in right-wing media admitted that Trump said what he said, others tried to downplay or justify the president’s displayed ignorance.

A few conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller (which called it a “hypothetical”) admitted that Trump did in fact suggest injecting disinfectant to fight coronavirus. Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy admitted on-air that Trump suggested using something poisonous inside the body and that people should not do it.

Many others defended Trump. An article on Fox News' website suggested that Trump was taken out of context. Rush Limbaugh, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart took a similar deny-everything approach.

On his radio show, MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt attacked the media for “abusing ... Trump’s comments on ultraviolet light” because “he didn’t say what they say he said.” Hewitt also promised to never buy Lysol products again, due to the company’s statement against internal use of its products.

Others just outright defended Trump. The following was written by David Brody, a right-wing journalist who has been a frequent guest on Meet the Press in recent years.

A Fox News host said that it was "hilarious" that people were talking about an "offhand comment" from Trump.

After many of these right-wing outlets said that Trump never said anything like this, Trump himself came out and and admitted he did say that, but he was being sarcastic. That's just another obvious lie for these outlets to defend. The whole sordid affair raises questions about why these briefings were aired live by all networks anyway. It may be a moot question since Trump is reportedly planning to scale them back.
Fox's promotion of protests against social distancing mirrors its tea party support

Despite the warnings of medical experts, Fox News has aggressively promoted right-wing demonstrations calling for the removal of social distancing mandates. Fox’s promotion of these protests mimic their efforts promoting the tea party in the build up to the 2010 midterm elections. Some coverage of the protests even resemble shot by shot remakes of its tea party promotion.

In 2009, the network’s parent company handed over more than $2 million to GOP-linked political groups. Fox’s support of the tea party movement was a key moment in the network’s transition from a right-wing news outlet to a GOP political organization. That year Fox personalities heavily promoted tea party demonstrations, encouraged viewers to attend protests, thanked tea party activists for their work, and even participated in more than a dozen events themselves.

Now, more than a decade later, Fox is running the same playbook. As it did with the tea party, the network isn’t simply covering the protests as newsworthy events, it is actively encouraging its audience to support and attend the events. From April 13 to April 20, Fox ran 91 segments on the protests and spent 6 hours covering the story.

April 22

New York Times, Bezos Takes Back the Wheel at Amazon, Karen Weise, April 22, 2020. The chief executive, who had distanced himself from day-to-day management, is closely involved in the company’s response to the pandemic.

At the end of February, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, were in France discussing climate change with President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace and celebrating atop the Eiffel Tower with the designer Diane von Furstenberg. Days jeffrey bezos washington post later, paparazzi spotted the couple grabbing dinner at Carbone in New York.

By late March, he had decamped to his ranch in West Texas, focusing on Amazon as the coronavirus pandemic spread across the United States.

After years of working almost exclusively on long-term projects and pushing day-to-day management to his deputies, Mr. Bezos, 56, has turned back to the here-and-now problems facing Amazon, the company said, as the giant retailer grapples with a surge of demand, labor unrest and supply chain challenges brought on by the coronavirus.

rachel maddow headshot He is holding daily calls to help make decisions about inventory and testing, as well as how and when — down to the minute — Amazon responds to public criticism. He has talked to government officials. And in April, for the first time in years, he made a publicized visit to one of Amazon’s warehouses.

“For now, my own time and thinking continues to be focused on Covid-19 and how Amazon can help while we’re in the middle of it,” Mr. Bezos wrote to shareholders last week.

Mr. Bezos’ daily oversight hasn’t led to perfectly smooth sailing. Amazon has struggled to respond quickly to the growing number of coronavirus cases in its work force, and it has been slammed with orders from consumers.

But Amazon is one of the few companies that have benefited financially from the crisis. Because of all the customer demand, shares of the company have hit record highs. That has made Mr. Bezos, the wealthiest man in the world, $25 billion richer since early March.

New York Times, Fox News Stars Touted a Malaria Drug, Until They Didn’t, Michael M. Grynbaum, April 22, 2020. Laura Ingraham called hydroxychloroquine “a game changer.” But after a month of coverage, she stopped discussing the drug on the air.

For a month’s stretch, the Fox News star Laura Ingraham relentlessly promoted the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to her nearly four million nightly viewers.

The drug was “a game changer” in the fight against the coronavirus, the conservative anchor declared. She booked recovered patients to describe their “miracle turnaround” — “like Lazarus, up from the grave,” as Ms. Ingraham put it. Anyone who questioned the drug’s efficacy was, she said, “in total denial.”

“I love everybody, love the medical profession,” the host said on April 3, after listing off public health experts who questioned the cure. “But they sean hannity white house want a double-blind controlled study on whether the sky is blue.”

But as of Wednesday last week, Ms. Ingraham was no longer talking about hydroxychloroquine, and she hasn’t brought it up on her show since.

Her fellow Fox News prime-time stars, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, have also cut back on referring to the drug. In fact, since April 13, hydroxychloroquine has been mentioned about a dozen times on Fox News, compared with more than 100 times in the four previous weeks, according to a review of network transcripts.

New York Times, Rupert Murdoch, his son Lachlan Murdoch and other Fox executives will take pay cuts, Edmund Lee, April 22, 2020. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, the owner of Fox News and the Fox television network, announced pay cuts to its executive ranks that will affect 700 employees as it worked to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus outbreak.

rupert murdoch 2011 shankbone The Fox Corporation chief executive Lachlan Murdoch, the elder son of Rupert, made the announcement in a memo sent to the company’s 7,700 workers on Wednesday.

“While we don’t know exactly when we will return to normal and full operations across the company, we have decided to take several new actions to ensure that we remain strong and are well-positioned when this crisis recedes,” Lachlan Murdoch said.

He and the family patriarch will forgo their entire salaries through September, though most of their compensation comes from stock awards and bonuses. Rupert Murdoch, shown at left in a photo by David Shankbone, makes $5 million in salary but his compensation tops $29 million with incentives and stock. Lachlan Murdoch makes $3 million in salary, with an additional $20 million coming from stocks and bonuses.

Consequences of Sound (CoS), Seth MacFarlane Calls Out Oprah for Popularizing “Dubious Characters” Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, Ben Kaye, April 22, 2020. The celebrity doctors have been spouting off misinformation about the coronavirus and its possible treatments.

Over the last few weeks, celebrity doctors Phil McGraw (a psychologist), right, and Mehmet Oz (a cardiothoracic surgeon), below left, have been spouting off misinformation about the coronavirus and its possible treatments.

Besides the fact that neither are actually trained in epidemiology, a common factor between the two TV docs is how they got their start: as guests on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. That’s a connection Seth MacFarlane has recently taken issue with, mehmet oz calling on Oprah to “correct” the record on the pair of medical hosts.

The Family Guy creator’s first remarks came from a tweet in which he shared a Los Angeles Times article detailing Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil’s controversial COVID-19 remarks. “Oprah has done some wonderfully altruistic things with her career, but the use of her platform to amplify the voices of dubious characters rather than legitimate scientists has been a disservice,” MacFarlane wrote. “I hope she will lend her own powerful voice to correct it.”

April 21

kayleigh mcenany djt

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump’s idiot press secretary Kayleigh McEnany would like to have this tweet back, Bill Palmer, April 21, 2020. On Monday evening, Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany attacked a reporter on Twitter for daring to refer to Donald Trump as “Trump.”

McEnany tweeted, “To you, he’s not Trump, he’s PRESIDENT Trump!” This prompted all kinds of backlash against McEnany for her clueless arrogance. It also prompted some digging.

Various people managed to dig up this tweet that Kayleigh McEnany posted back in 2012:

Obama filling out his "presidential bracket" now on ESPN. Don't you have better things to do son? Like.. oh, I don't know.. govern.

— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) March 15, 2012

That’s right, she wasn’t using the “President” honorific back when Barack Obama was President. For that matter she referred to Obama as “son” – which feels an awful lot like a thinly veiled racist remark.

Media Matters, Commentary: Despite rules about misinformation, a YouTube video calling coronavirus a “false flag” related to 5G racked up millions of views, Alex Kaplan, April 20, 2020. An April 16 YouTube video suggesting the novel coronavirus is a “false flag” to force “mandatory vaccines” and microchips on people has quickly racked up millions of views despite the platform’s pledge to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation. The video also claims that both Bill Gates and 5G cell phone towers are somehow involved.

youtube logo Custom Last month, as the pandemic began to spread throughout the United States, YouTube wrote that it had “worked to prevent misinformation associated with the spread of the virus” and would “quickly remove videos that violate our policies when they are flagged, including those that discourage people from seeking medical treatment or claim harmful substances have health benefits.” YouTube has also pledged to crack down on some specific false conspiracy theories, such as that 5G is connected to the virus, which YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki mentioned in a CNN interview aired on April 19.

But on the evening of April 16, The Next News Network, a conspiracy theory YouTube channel with a history of pushing false and dubious claims, uploaded a video titled “EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Rashid Buttar BLASTS Gates, Fauci, EXPOSES Fake Pandemic Numbers As Economy Collapses.”

The video features Dr. Rashid Buttar, who HuffPost noted is “a widely discredited osteopath” and has been using social media to spread falsehoods about the virus. In just four days, the video has already racked up more than 4.3 million views and more than 930,000 Facebook engagements, and the numbers continue to climb.

Toward the start of the video, host Gary Franchi described other videos Buttar has made, saying he has showed that there’s “fraud ... being perpetuated across the world by the World Health Organization, the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], Bill Gates, the deep state, the mainstream media,” and there’s “hysteria being perpetuated to scare the world population based on false data.”

Buttar proceeded to push multiple falsehoods and conspiracy theories throughout the video.

cdc logo Custom He pushed the absurdly false claim that “nobody has yet demonstrated a single death from the actual virus” and also falsely said that “the number of deaths are still less than the seasonal flu.” Additionally, Buttar claimed the death count was being inflated, although experts agree the death total is likely being undercounted, and he claimed that there was fake activity at hospitals. Buttar also said “studies clearly show that if you've had a flu shot you're going to test positive for COVID-19,” which is another falsehood that has spread over social media.

Later in the video, Buttar accused White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci of being a “criminal” who’s committed “traitorous” activity and dubiously suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine had “at least 99% efficacy” in treating COVID-19, claiming that “they've shown hundreds and hundreds of patients have treated, nobody's died.”

Buttar suggested the pandemic was a “false flag event to then mandate mandatory vaccines” and that people who refuse will be “considered as dissidents” and “shot in the head” or “quarantined in some kind of a concentration camp.” He also suggested that “5G towers” and “chemtrails” were related to the virus, and that increasing vaccines and 5G would cause people to become even more sick.

Buttar also referenced a false social media conspiracy theory involving Bill Gates to claim that future vaccinations will be monitored by putting “more RF chips in us to see who has had the vaccine” as part of “a cycle that they’re going to keep on going over and over again until they’ve got everybody digitized and they have RF chips in everybody.” He also called the CDC’s 6-foot social distancing recommendation “absolute garbage” and a ruse to “decide who … should be available to talk and work and who should be used as a dissident or classified as a dissident and made quiet.”

Buttar later expanded on his Gates conspiracy theory, accusing him of having a “depopulation agenda,” and claimed that hundreds of millions of people will be harmed by vaccines, but “they're going to blame it on the COVID-19.” He added that “anybody who says that vaccines are necessary, they either are completely 100% ignorant or they have a suspect agenda.” (Buttar also compared his Gates-microchip conspiracy theory to what happened in the Holocaust and then promoted a video about vaccines and eugenics from conspiracy theory outlet Infowars.)

April 20

deborah birx djt white house photo cropped

New York Times, Opinion: Stop Airing Trump’s Briefings! Charles M. Blow, right, April 20, 2020 (print ed.). The media is allowing disinformation to appear as news.

Around this time four years ago, the media world was all abuzz over an analysis by mediaQuant, a company that tracks what is known as “earned media” coverage of political candidates. Earned media is free media. The firm computed that Donald Trump had “earned” a whopping $2 billion of coverage, dwarfing the value earned by all other candidates, Republican and Democrat, even as he had only purchased about $10 million of paid advertising.

Simply put, the media was complicit in Trump’s rise. Trump was macabre theater, a man self-immolating in real time, one who was destined to lose, but who could provide entertainment, content and yes, profits while he lasted. The Hollywood Reporter in February of 2016 quoted CBS’s C.E.O. as saying, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” because as The Reporter put it, “He likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.”

I fear that history is repeating itself.

For over a month now, the White House has been holding its daily coronavirus briefings, and most networks, cable news channels and major news websites have been carrying all or parts of them live, as millions of people, trapped inside and anxious, have tuned in.

The briefings are marked by Trump’s own misinformation, deceptions, rage, blaming and boasting. He takes no responsibility at all for his abysmal handling of the crisis, while each day he seems to find another person to blame, like a child frantically flinging spaghetti at a wall to see which one sticks.

He delivers his disinformation flanked by scientists and officials, whose presence only serves to convey credibility to propagandistic performances that have simply become a replacement for his political rallies.

We are in the middle of a pandemic, but we are also in the middle of a presidential campaign, and I shudder to think how much “earned media” the media is simply shoveling Trump’s way by airing these briefings, which can last up to two hours a day.

Washington Post, Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz aren’t coronavirus experts. So why are they talking about it on TV news? Paul Farhi and Elahe Izad, April 20, 2020 (print ed.). Some cable networks’ willingness to let pundits opine on topics beyond their expertise draws pushback as the celebrity doctors tackle covid-19, lockdowns and other life-and-death matters.

phil mcgraw 2013 Dr. Phil had much to say about the coronavirus lockdown the other night on Fox News.

“Look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying — 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes,” the talk-show host, shown right in 2013, said Thursday, “but we don’t shut the country down for that. But yet we’re doing it for this?”

Social media quickly erupted with fury and derision as viewers pointed out the hopeless apples-to-orangeness of his argument: Cars and tobacco aren’t exactly communicable diseases; and both, in fact, have inspired extensive government regulations to limit injuries and death. (The TV shrink was also widely mocked for making a comparison to swimming-pool deaths using a bogus statistic inflated by a factor of nearly 100.)

But the interview raised deeper concerns: Why was Dr. Phil — not a medical doctor but a clinical psychologist with no special knowledge about the politics, science or economics of the shutdown — on a TV news channel talking about the topic in the first place?

In recent TV appearances to discuss the pandemic, fellow celebrity doctors Drew Pinsky and Mehmet Oz,left, have offered commentary based on a loose or seemingly wobbly understanding of the crisis — arguably doing more to undermine public understanding than enhance it.

All three have since walked back their statements. Pinsky apologized for last month dismissing the coronavirus as no more serious than influenza; Oz said Thursday he “misspoke” this week when he casually urged reopening schools at a “cost [of] 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality.” And on Friday, McGraw acknowledged that he had used an inflated number of drowning deaths and that his comparisons to smoking and driving weren’t quite on point, either. “Yes, I know that those are not contagious. So, probably bad examples.”

Washington Post, Pro-gun activists use Facebook to promote protests of orders to remain at home, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Tony Romm, April 20, 2020 (print ed.). Three far-right provocateurs are behind some of the largest Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine demonstrations, offering the latest evidence that some seemingly organic protests are engineered by a network of conservative activists.

Washington Post, Analysis: With no good answer for lost month of virus preparation, Trump snaps at another female reporter, Amber Phillips, April 20, 2020 (print ed.). When President Trump was asked at Sunday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing why he didn’t warn Americans in February that the virus was spreading and implement social distancing earlier, Trump’s response was to go back to late January, when he issued the travel restrictions on Chinese people coming to the United States.

In other words: More than two months into this crisis, Trump doesn’t have an answer for why he didn’t do more in this crucial window to prepare the country for the coronavirus.

On Sunday, Trump got defensive when a reporter asked him why his administration had not done more to prepare. He told CBS’s Weijia Jiang to “lower her voice” and to take it “nice and easy.”

April 19

Newsday, Opinion: An early casualty of the coronavirus pandemic has been the loss of easy access to public information, Miranda S. Spivack, Updated April 19, 2020. In Hawaii, Gov. David Ige suspended the open meetings and open records laws. In California, numerous governments and public agencies, including San Francisco, announced suspension or substantial delays in providing public records.

In Ohio, the state labor department stopped issuing daily unemployment figures. In the District of Columbia, the city council approved a measure that allows agencies to suspend fulfilling public information requests during “days of a Covid-19 closure.”

“Many state agencies are releasing data on Twitter,” said John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, an open-government advocacy group. “That’s better than nothing, but it means there is a ton of data being released in a very disjointed way.”

The picture is even bleaker at the federal level. The FBI quickly shut down its record division and refused to accept any electronic request for records, insisting instead on paper inquiries.The White House ordered that high-level meetings about the coronavirus be classified. The Army stopped providing data on soldiers who are infected with the virus, saying the information could fall into the hands of the nation’s enemies.

Federal officials have declined to identify nursing homes where residents are ill from the virus. The $2.2 trillion stimulus bill that President Donald Trump signed into law on March 27 includes a provision that exempts the Federal Reserve from holding public meetings, a remarkable development because the agency will play a key role in shepherding the federal monetary response to the pandemic — and will be able to do so away from the public.

It is obvious that some delays and detours are necessary as governments adjust to the new normal and step up their public health response. But the virus in the United States also should be an opportunity for governments to rethink how they maintain — and yes — enhance the ability of the public to track government actions and data whenever possible in real time. Daily briefings are good, but there is so much more that governments can do to keep the public informed, especially during a public health crisis of this magnitude.

Washington Post, Americans at World Health Organization transmitted real-time information about coronavirus to Trump administration, Karen world health organization logo Custom DeYoung, Lena H. Sun and Emily Rauhala, April 19, 2020. The presence of U.S. scientists in Geneva undercuts president’s argument that the WHO failed to communicate with Washington.

More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.

cdc logo Custom A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.

The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts President Trump’s charge that the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely responsible for the rapid spread of the virus in the United States.

New York Times, U.S. live updates: Governors in U.S. Hot Spots Plead for More Testing, Staff reports, April 19, 2020. New York and New Jersey, epicenters of the outbreak in the United States, say they can’t reopen their economies without wider tests for the virus.

virus fox rallies to reopen economy april 18 may 2 Custom 2

Media Matters, Commentary: Fox News promotes protests against social distancing, Matt Gertz, April 19, 2020 (first published April 16). Introduction by John Whitehead: This is (still) as serious as it gets. Lives are on the line with how this coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic is covered. It's clear that right-wing media are not just failing this test, but failing it badly.

Over the last few days, Fox News has enthusiastically promoted protests against social distancing orders. Hosts and other network figures have promoted and encouraged viewers to join in.

On Saturday, Fox aired the above map of planned protests. The entire affair is very similar to how the network promoted Tea Party protests in 2009. In fact, the map (shown below) was even similar.

tea party rallies 2009 fox Custom 2

There's substantial evidence that some of these protests are astro-turfed. But even taking into account that some people really do feel this way, the fact is that polls show that the vast majority of Americans are more worried about governments opening things too quickly.

As Media Matters president Angelo Carusone told Vox, Fox News and right-wing media didn't create these protests, but they are legitimizing them, whitewashing extremist ties, and bringing them to a larger audience, both in terms of pushing people to participate and pushing other media outlets to cover them. The goal is to change public opinion about the pandemic.

The difference this time is that this is about science, not politics. And these protests -- and those like Fox that promote them -- only help spread the virus.

Fox News triggered Trump's all-caps endorsement of protests against his own guidelines for re-opening the economy

President Donald Trump endorsed conservative protests against social distancing measures in three states immediately after Fox News aired a segment on the efforts. Trump, who was apparently watching the segment, responded to it in real-time by expressing support for the protests, sending multiple tweets saying, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!,” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.”

Earlier this week, Fox hosts cheered on protests by conservative activists against Michigan’s stay-at-home order. As Matt Gertz noted at the time: “If Trump sees Fox’s protest coverage and endorses the effort, social distancing will become even more politically polarized. The hard-won progress in the fight against the virus could evaporate in an instant, leaving behind a shattered economy and an influx of COVID-19 deaths.”

This is not hyperbole. We've already seen data indicate that there may be a surge in COVID-19 cases in Wisconsin after Republicans and the Supreme Court forced that state's voters to go to the polls.

Washington Post, Trump campaign decides to focus on Biden rather than try to promote his pandemic response, Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Annie Linskey and Toluse Olorunnipa, April 19, 2020. Both Democrats and Republicans shifted their strategies after polling showed declining approval ratings for President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

President Trump’s campaign is preparing to launch a broad effort aimed at linking Joe Biden to China, after concluding that it would be more politically effective than defending or promoting Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision by top campaign advisers, which has met pushback from some White House officials and donors, reflects polling showing a declining approval rating for Trump among key groups and growing openness to supporting Biden in recent weeks, according to officials familiar with the data who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The shift represents a remarkable acknowledgment by aides to a self-described “wartime president,” leading during what might have been a rally-around-the-flag moment, to effectively decide it is better to go on the attack than focus on his own achievements. Campaign polling found more than three-quarters of voters blamed China for the coronavirus outbreak, underscoring the potential benefits of tying the presumptive Democratic nominee to Beijing.

The planned China push, which has already been embraced by pro-Trump outside groups, comes as both the Trump and Biden campaigns have been anxiously recalibrating their plans in response to the most catastrophic economic and health crisis in the United States in generations. The two title contenders for the 2020 elections are finally set, but neither campaign, with their mismatched strengths and weaknesses, knows what the election arena will look like.

Washington Post, #FloridaMorons trends after people flock to reopened Florida beaches, Meryl Kornfield and Samantha Pell, April 19, 2020 (print ed.). Aerial snapshots of people flocking to a reopened beach in Jacksonville, Fla., made waves on the Internet on Saturday.

Local news aired photos and videos of Florida’s shoreline dotted with people, closer than six feet apart, spurring #FloridaMorons to trend on Twitter after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) gave the go-ahead for local beachfront governments to decide whether to reopen their beaches during a news briefing Friday. Duval and St. Johns counties have reopened their beaches, while Miami-Dade County officials said they are considering following suit.

On the same day that Florida reported 58 deaths from the coronavirus — its highest daily toll since the pandemic began — DeSantis told reporters that it’s essential that Floridians get exercise outdoors.

Media / Politics

New York Times, Opinion: The Coronavirus Story Isn’t About the President, Ben Smith, April 19, 2020. Trump has begun his corona campaign. We don’t have to play along, our columnist writes.

Did you hear? The president said some things today. Mean things! About someone I know … I can’t quite remember the details, or whether it was today or yesterday, or what day of the week it is, anyway.

President Trump has figured out the answer to one of the less important questions of 2020: How do you run a presidential campaign amid a pandemic? He can’t hold rallies, he can’t kiss babies, he can’t shake hands, not that he likes doing that anyway. And he can’t talk about anything else.

What Mr. Trump can do, it turns out, is host rolling, raucous, two-plus-hour daily television variety shows to keep his connection with the faithful and, incidentally, to variously entertain and appall the rest of the homebound American public. He can rally gun owners in Virginia as well as angry suburbanites in Michigan. He can attack the news media to make sure it’s paying attention.

This is it — the corona campaign. The most effective form of direct presidential communication since Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Mr. Trump wanted to start a radio show, my colleague Elaina Plott reported, but really, television was the medium that made him and the one he knows and loves. Get used to it, because given its power, he’s not going to stop in November, win or lose. He’ll most likely broadcast on his favorite medium until the day he dies.

So how do we, citizens and — to stick to my particular beat here at The Times — journalists, handle this?

April 18

Washington Post, Opinion: The Trump administration is muzzling government scientists. It’s essential to let them speak candidly to the press again, Margaret Sullivan, April 17, 2020. Kathryn Foxhall remembers a time when reporters could call up any doctor or researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and ask them questions on the record. A journalist might even get them to open up for a “background” interview, offering candid information on the condition the expert’s name would not be used.

“There was the official story and then there was everything else,” the former editor of the Nation’s Health, an industry publication, told me. “We took this for granted.”

Foxhall watched with dismay as that openness disintegrated radically over the past two decades. Federal agencies, including the CDC, began to require media inquiries to go through a public information officer. Direct contact was minimized and tightly monitored. Interviews might take place with a public-relations “minder” present.

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the situation got much worse.

Suddenly, the filter between journalists and experts became even more opaque — and much more politicized. Who got to speak publicly, including to the news media, was controlled by Vice President Pence’s office after he was put in charge of the administration’s pandemic response.

The new restrictions are dangerous, said Anna Diakun, staff attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which this month sued the CDC for the release of records about White House and CDC policies that may keep the agency’s employees from speaking to the press and public.

“The White House is promoting inaccurate and misleading claims about the pandemic, even as it is restricting CDC employees from speaking to the press and the public,” she said.

She told me what’s happening amounts to a “gag order” on the very experts that the public needs to hear from directly. And it may be a violation of constitutionally protected free speech.

While conflicting information about the pandemic has made expert opinion especially crucial right now, the underlying free-speech issue has been building for a long time.

“This problem predates President Trump and the epidemic by 20 years,” Foxhall said. And she’s been battling it for years, working with the Society of Professional Journalists to survey journalists about the restrictive practices they have grown accustomed to — and, in her view, have failed to fight back against strongly enough.

Journalists work around these constraints instead of challenging them, she believes, and it’s the public that loses out because the press can no longer get the full picture of what’s happening inside federal agencies.

April 18

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Architects and Engineers for 911 Turth (AE911Truth) "Free Fall" radio show: Request for Correction: What It Means and How NIST Might Respond, An Interview with Mick Harrison and Ted Walter, April 18, 2020. On this week’s episode of "9/11 Free Fall," attorney Mick Harrison and AE911Truth Director of Strategy Ted Walter join host Andy Steele for an in-depth discussion of the request for correction submitted to NIST earlier this week regarding the agency's 2008 report on the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7.

The 100-page request for correction, which is signed by ten 9/11 family members, 88 architects and structural engineers, and AE911Truth, represents the most serious challenge to date against NIST's World Trade Center investigation.

9/11 Free Fall recently moved from an hour-long to a half-hour format. We hope you’ll be able to tune in for this episode or read the full interview.

April 17

Architects and Engineers for 911 Turth (AE911Truth), Commentary: A Teaser for the Much-Anticipated Building 7 Documentary, Staff report, April 17, 2020. We at Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth are thrilled to release a short teaser for our upcoming documentary on Building 7 and the University of Alaska Fairbanks study led by Dr. Leroy Hulsey, shown above.

We’ve got to bring this film to millions, so please share the teaser widely and stay tuned for updates on our forthcoming release of the film!

April 17

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Washington Post, Opinion: Tara Reade, Joe Biden and the limitations of journalism, Monica Hesse, April 17, 2020 (print ed.). Reporters can’t always clear away the fog. Being a journalist reporting on sexual assault allegations is a delicate, humbling, horrifying task, which feels worse than any other task except for the alternative: not reporting on the allegations — allowing an accuser’s pursuit of justice or an accused’s pursuit of exoneration to wither in your voicemail.

This week, The Washington Post and the New York Times both published lengthy investigations into a sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden — an account that had previously been reported via the Intercept and on a podcast, and which the Biden campaign denies.

Tara Reade (shown above), who worked in Biden’s Senate office in 1992 and 1993, last year came forward to say that Biden had touched her neck and shoulders when she was in his employ. She has now expanded that account with a more serious charge:

Reporters didn’t have access to the full police report; it’s not public. And, unlike the legal system, reporters don’t have the power to subpoena witnesses and compel truthful testimony; key players can decline to comment at any moment. And news outlets can’t sentence individuals to prison, and they cannot know, with 100 percent certainty, exactly what happened on congressional grounds or at parties or in basements or with powerful celebrities 20 or 30 years ago.

The profession has limitations, memory has limitations, people have limitations.

I know all of this, and yet, even as I read the account I found myself thinking the same things I thought during Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s hearings or while reading accounts of a molestation accusation against Woody Allen or with any number of other accusations regarding long-ago events: Solve this. Show us the smoking gun, or the indisputable security-camera footage, or the telltale lie. Produce an old roommate, an old diary. Eliminate all doubt, so we don’t have to live with it.

Washington Post, How governments in U.S. and worldwide are using people’s phones in attempt to fight virus, Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Drew Harwell and Tony Romm, April 17, 2020. Data long considered personal and sensitive is now being used to track the coronavirus's spread. But it's unclear that such data will help in the absence of traditional contact tracing methods.

New York Times, Bill Gates, at Odds With Trump on Virus, Becomes a Right-Wing Target, Daisuke Wakabayashi, Davey Alba and Marc Tracy, April 17, 2020. The Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist has been attacked with falsehoods that he created the coronavirus and wants to profit from it.

In a 2015 speech, Bill Gates warned that the greatest risk to humanity was not nuclear war but an infectious virus that could threaten the lives of millions of people.

That speech has resurfaced in recent weeks with 25 million new views on YouTube — but not in the way that Mr. Gates probably intended. Anti-vaccinators, members of the conspiracy group QAnon and right-wing pundits have instead seized on the video as evidence that one of the world’s richest men planned to use a pandemic to wrest control of the global health system.

Mr. Gates, 64, the Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist, has now become the star of an explosion of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak. In posts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, he is being falsely portrayed as the creator of Covid-19, as a profiteer from a virus vaccine, and as part of a dastardly plot to use the illness to cull or surveil the global population.

The wild claims have gained traction with conservative pundits like Laura Ingraham and anti-vaccinators such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Mr. Gates has emerged as a vocal counterweight to President Trump on the coronavirus. For weeks, Mr. Gates has appeared on TV, on op-ed pages and in Reddit forums calling for stay-at-home policies, expanded testing and vaccine development. And without naming Mr. Trump, he has criticized the president’s policies, including this week’s move to cut funding to the World Health Organization.

Misinformation about Mr. Gates is now the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods tracked by Zignal Labs, a media analysis company. The misinformation includes more than 16,000 posts on Facebook this year about Mr. Gates and the virus that were liked and commented on nearly 900,000 times, according to a New York Times analysis. On YouTube, the 10 most popular videos spreading lies about Mr. Gates posted in March and April were viewed almost five million times.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Opinion: The hoax industry and its main hucksters, Wayne Madsen, April 17, 2020. Currently, Trump's team of misfits, freaks, and racists are targeting the governors and legislatures of several states over the imposition of coronavirus stay-at-home and closure orders.

The medium that created Trump as a virtual political cartoon character, television, is now providing him and his supporters with phony advice and encouragement from a group of phony doctors.

Washington Post, Analysis: Fauci dismisses dodgy premises in Laura Ingraham interview, Aaron Blake, April 17, 2020. The Fox News host’s interview with Dr. Phil is getting a lot of attention, but it might have been her interview with an actual medical doctor, Anthony S. Fauci, that best spotlighted conservative media’s suspect coverage of the coronavirus.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s interview with Dr. Phil is getting all the attention this morning. But it might have been her interview Thursday with an actual medical doctor, Anthony S. Fauci, that best spotlighted conservative media’s odd, speculative and suspect coverage of the coronavirus.

Ingraham has been one of the leading conservative skeptics of health officials’ response to the virus. She has repeatedly attacked the models used to project death tolls and argued that those officials have oversold the threat and ruined the economy by hijacking public policy.

So welcoming Fauci to her show would have seemed a good opportunity to press perhaps the most preeminent figure on these issues. For Ingraham, though, it didn’t turn out so well.

Perhaps the most glaring problem with her interview with Fauci is that she didn’t even bring up the models that she has repeatedly attacked and offered as evidence of an overzealous response. Nor did she reiterate her past suggestions that Fauci has inappropriately taken over the decision-making process in the federal government.

At one point, she questioned the idea of not fully returning to business as usual until we have a vaccine.

“Dr. Fauci, on the question of a vaccine: We don’t have a vaccine for SARS,” she said, adding: “We don’t have a vaccine for HIV. And life did go on, right?”

Fauci rejected the comparison.

“Well, no, but Laura, this is different,” he said. “HIV/AIDS is entirely different. We don’t have a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, but we have spectacularly effective treatment. People who invariably would have died years ago right now are leading essentially normal lives. SARS is a different story. SARS disappeared.”

April 16

Washington Post, New study says Trump has ‘dangerously undermined truth’ with attacks on news media, Paul Farhi, April 16, 2020. The report from the Committee to Protect Journalists catalogues President Trump’s anti-press actions.

djt quizzical uncredited palmer Custom A new research report from a leading journalism organization says President Trump’s attacks on the news media have endangered American democracy and imperiled press freedom in other countries.

The report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) catalogues a lengthy list of Trump’s anti-press behaviors, from repeatedly tarring credible reporting with charges of “fake news,” to trying to bar reporters from the White House, to scrubbing or withholding information from government websites.

Trump’s attacks on the news media have “dangerously undermined truth and consensus in a deeply divided country” at a time when the nation faces the unprecedented challenge of the coronavirus, concludes CPJ, a New York-based organization that monitors press issues around the world.

Its report, titled “The Trump Administration and the Media,” documents such Trump administration practices as using U.S. Customs and Border Protection to question journalists and search their electronic devices at border crossings; Trump’s calls for boycotts of news organizations and for changes in libel laws to punish reporting he doesn’t like; the ending of formal White House press briefings for more than a year; and Trump’s repeated lies to discredit accurate reporting.

New York Times, Why Michael Savage Is Blasting Hannity and the Right-Wing Media on the Virus, Jeremy W. Peters, April 16, 2020. The conservative radio host is still loyal to President Trump but says right-wing media got it all wrong by doubting the severity of the coronavirus early on.

michael savage white house 2018 Custom There are a lot of people who are ruining the country right now, according to Michael Savage (shown in 2018 at the White House). Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Liberal mayors in big cities like San Francisco. Undocumented immigrants. Homeless people.

But for the past two months, listeners to Mr. Savage’s conservative radio show have heard him howl with unabated contempt about another menace: “The pimps” in the right-wing media “who tell you what you want to hear.” They are “intellectual dwarfs” and “science illiterates,” he says, who spent weeks downplaying the threat from the coronavirus epidemic and accusing President Trump’s opponents of exaggerating it to hurt him politically.

On Mr. Savage’s broadcast, which has one of the largest audiences in talk radio with 7.5 million listeners each week, the virus has never been a hoax or a bad case of the sniffles. He has lectured his fans on the research in detail: How it is transmitted; which treatments are proving effective; and the difference between morbidity and mortality rates.

With no small amount of self-satisfaction, Mr. Savage reminds people of his credentials — a Ph.D. and training in epidemiology — and of the fact that he was one of the few voices in conservative media who had warned them all along.

Much of the time, Mr. Savage still sounds like any other right-wing shock jock — making fun of Nancy Pelosi and doubting the validity of the #MeToo movement. But on the subject of the coronavirus, Mr. Savage has become one of the loudest voices of dissent on the right.

His views are a striking departure from the accepted version of events among Mr. Trump’s loyalists in the media, who have made a concerted effort to deny that they downplayed the epidemic. Mr. Savage has attacked the credibility of the conservative media, accused its biggest stars of being too rote and unthinking in their defense of the president, and demanded that they be held accountable for misleading millions of Americans.

MSNBC host Chris Cuomo, recuperating at home from COVID-19, and his wife, Cristina Greeven Cuomo

MSNBC host Chris Cuomo, recuperating at home from COVID-19, and his wife, Cristina Greeven Cuomo

Washington Post, ‘It just breaks my heart’: Chris Cuomo says his wife, Cristina, has coronavirus, too, Timothy Bella, April 16, 2020. When Chris Cuomo announced he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the high fever, chills, shortness of breath and hallucinations of his late father weren’t what immediately worried the CNN anchor. What did concern him, he said, was passing the virus to his family.

“I just hope I didn’t give it to the kids and Cristina,” Cuomo, 49, wrote in his March 31 tweet announcing his diagnosis. “That would make me feel worse than this illness!”

On Wednesday night, Cuomo, broadcasting again from his home’s basement, where he remains quarantined, said that his worst fear had become a reality: His wife, Cristina, had tested positive for the coronavirus.

April 14

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Washington Post, Analysis of The Me President: Trump uses briefing to focus on himself, Ashley Parker, April 14, 2020 (print ed.). Monday’s news conference offered a stark portrait of a president who seemed unable to grasp the magnitude of the crisis.

Washington Post, Analysis: Trump’s propaganda-laden, off-the-rails coronavirus briefing, Aaron Blake, April 14, 2020 (print ed.). Near the start of his daily coronavirus briefing on Monday, President Trump made a statement that betrayed, better than just about anything, how he views the purpose of such briefings.

Before playing a campaign-style video intended to show his decisive action on the virus and to accuse his critics of being the actual culprits on downplaying the threat, Trump cued it up by talking about what he wanted to do after it played.

“Most importantly,” he said, “we’re going to get back on to the reason we’re here, which is the success we’re having.”

Trump’s self-promotion, falsehoods and use of dodgy medical advice in these coronavirus briefings have led to a dialogue about whether networks should carry them live. And on Monday, he seemed to be daring all of them to stop, turning the whole thing into a spectacle of government-produced propaganda and even more personal score-settling and grievances.

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Palmer Report, Editorial note: It’s about time! Bill Palmer, right, April 14, 2020. At one point during Donald Trump’s press briefing yesterday, after his behavior had taken a turn for the indescribable, CNN put a chyron (above) across the bottom of the screen that said “TRUMP MELTS DOWN.” It was a perfectly accurate and factual description of what was going on. It’s about time.

When I first started referring to Donald Trump’s behavior as “meltdowns,” I took a ton of heat for it. Various mainstream media outlets and pundits told me I was being hyperbolic, sensationalistic, and unprofessional. Meanwhile they were doing their best to understate and normalize his behavior by framing his rubber room-level antics as somehow merely being “untraditional” or “out of the box.”

Now, three years too late, the media is finally reporting on Donald Trump using accurate words that properly reflect his behavior. I’m not bitter that some of the same mainstream pundits who gave me grief for using words like “meltdown” are now using it themselves. I do resent that if the media had been doing its job properly these past few years, Trump would probably have been ousted by now. But better late than never.

My goal from the start has been to nudge the mainstream media toward being more honest and accurate. The media has a bad habit of using painfully understated headlines and descriptors that have falsely painted Donald Trump as merely behaving in unusual fashion, when by any objective measure he’s behaving as an unhinged and deranged lunatic. We’re getting closer. I’ll keep pushing until the mainstream media is willing to fully tell the public just how objectionable Trump’s behavior is without sugarcoating it.

April 13

Washington Post, Opinion: What it really means when Trump calls a story ‘fake news,’ Margaret Sullivan, right, April 13, 2020. President Trump margaret sullivan 2015 photo at the White House news briefing Friday. After the president spent Easter trashing media investigations that found his coronavirus response slow and lacking, a few things became clear.

President Trump has rhapsodized in recent weeks about how special Easter is for him. He never quite specified why that is, but for a while it was the date he had in mind for ending the national shutdown — the day on which he envisioned Americans crowding the church pews once again.

And yet he spent much of the holiest weekend on the Christian calendar in an uproar over crushing news reports that make it clear his early response to coronavirus warnings was a failure — that cost thousands of human lives.

On April 4, The Washington Post reported that it took 70 days from the time Trump was first notified of the seriousness of the coronavirus threat for him to treat it “not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens.” The Post detailed how that 10-week period “now stands as critical time that was squandered.”

This landmark piece of reporting was followed a week later by a New York Times investigation based in part on a stunning chain of emails from dozens of experts in government agencies, health organizations and universities. The “Red Dawn” emails make it undeniable that the alarm was raised months ago, while Trump was assuring the nation that the virus was nothing more serious than the flu and would soon disappear.

April 10

Real Clear Politics, Ex-GOP Group "The Lincoln Project" Endorses Biden, Launches Brutal Ad Hitting Trump For Golfing During Pandemic, Tim Hains, April 10, 2020 (5:54 min.). This week, the anti-Trump conservative group "The Lincoln Project" endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president.

Co-founded by George Conway, the outspoken husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, and Rick Wilson, the [GOP campaign consultant] author of "Everything Trump Touches Dies," the group also launched this ad blaming President Trump directly for the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the U.S.

"Coronavirus has now killed three times more Americans than 9/11," the ad says. "So what’s Donald Trump been up to? Blaming the impeachment hearings for distracting him from preparing for the pandemic."

"Where was Trump? He wasn’t distracted. He had plenty to do. Like campaign rallies and golfing. In February, the virus spread to Europe. While Italy was shutting down and quarantines were being announced all over the world, Trump played more golf and packed thousands of people together. Sounds safe."

"Trump just didn’t care. He still doesn’t. He was never distracted. And Americans have been paying attention."

"We are proud to endorse @JoeBiden for President."

"As America contends with unprecedented loss, we need a leader who can steady the ship, heal our common wounds, and lead us into our next national chapter. Joe Biden has the humanity, empathy and steadiness we need in a leader."

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) April 8, 2020.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Shame on you CNN for caving like this, Bill Palmer, April 10, 2020. Yesterday morning, CNN announced that Mike Pence was trying to blackmail the network into airing Trump’s press briefings in full, by refusing to allow anyone from the coronavirus response team to appear on CNN. When yesterday’s Trump press conference began, CNN stuck to its recent approach of refusing to air Trump’s opening speech, and only tuning in later for the experts and the reporter questions.

CNN received praise for this from all sides, including me. But when Trump’s briefing began today, CNN promptly put it on the air, right from the start. It’s now clear that CNN did cave to Mike Pence, but decided to wait a day before caving, in the hope that no one would notice it was caving.

This is disturbing, but not unexpected. Cable news networks are multimillion dollar for-profit businesses that literally exist to turn a profit, not to inform you. They’ll always do whatever they think is going to deliver them the highest ratings.

CNN must have concluded that it was going to get more overall viewers by airing the briefings and having access to the response team members, than by not having any of it on the air. This is a reminder that the only person who can change a cable news network’s behavior is you – by refusing to watch the segments that shouldn’t be on the air, and by contacting the networks to let them know which kinds of content you’re refusing to watch.

Washington Post, White House attacks Voice of America, claiming it promoted Chinese propaganda, Paul Farhi, April 10, 2020. The stinging public criticism, which may be unprecedented by an administration since the federally funded but independent news service was founded in 1942, took VOA officials by surprise.

The White House launched an extraordinary attack on Voice of America on Friday, saying the federally funded but independent news service had promoted Chinese government propaganda in its reporting about the coronavirus outbreak.

The critique was found on the official White House website, flagging its brief statement with a provocative headline: “Amid a Pandemic, Voice of America Spends Your Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda.”

The unsigned statement said, in part: “Journalists should report the facts, but VOA has instead amplified Beijing’s propaganda. This week, VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful ‘model’ copied by much of the world—and then tweeted out video of the Communist government’s celebratory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end.”

It added, “Even worse, while much of the U.S. media takes its lead from China, VOA went one step further: It created graphics with Communist government statistics to compare China’s Coronavirus death toll to America’s. As intelligence experts point out, there is simply no way to verify the accuracy of China’s numbers.”

The statement was preceded by a barbed tweet on Thursday from Dan Scavino, President Trump’s social media director. In sharing VOA’s tweet showing a Chinese celebration marking the end of a lockdown, Scavino wrote, “American taxpayers—paying for China’s very own propaganda, via the U.S. Government funded Voice of America! DISGRACE!!”

Scavino is one of President Trump’s longest-serving aides; he often produces videos that accompany Trump’s tweets.

The stinging public criticism, which may be unprecedented by an administration since VOA was founded in 1942, took VOA officials by surprise. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you what prompted it,” said Amanda Bennett, VOA’s director. “I don’t actually know. It just came out of the blue.”

New York Times, How a Virus Conspiracy Theory Fueled Arson and Harassment in Britain, Adam Satariano and Davey Alba, April 10, 2020. A false idea linking the spread of the coronavirus to 5G wireless technology has spurred more than 100 incidents this month, officials said.

On April 2, a wireless tower was set ablaze in Birmingham. The next day, a fire was reported at 10 p.m. at a telecommunications box in Liverpool. An hour later, an emergency call came in about another cell tower in Liverpool that was going up in flames.

Across Britain, more than 30 acts of arson and vandalism have taken place against wireless towers and other telecom gear this month, according to police reports and a telecom trade group. In roughly 80 other incidents in the country, telecom technicians have been harassed on the job.

The attacks were fueled by the same cause, government officials said: an internet conspiracy theory that links the spread of the coronavirus to an ultrafast wireless technology known as 5G. Under the false idea, which has gained momentum in Facebook groups, WhatsApp messages and YouTube videos, radio waves sent by 5G technology are causing small changes to people’s bodies that make them succumb to the virus.

The incidents starkly demonstrate how coronavirus conspiracy theories have taken a dark turn by spilling out into the real world. In just a few weeks, the pandemic has given pre-existing fringe ideas online new urgency by playing on people’s fears.

Before the coronavirus, rarely did such theories cause as much tangible harm so quickly, disinformation researchers said.

In the United States, one person died after self-medicating with chloroquine, which was touted online as a miracle cure for the coronavirus even though its efficacy is unproven. And Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was assigned more security this month after unfounded theories spread that he was part of a secret cabal working to undermine President Trump.

“Most conspiracies stay online, but this is having real-world impact,” said Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the E.U. DisinfoLab, a Brussels-based group tracking virus conspiracy theories. He called managing pandemic misinformation “a new problem” because the disease is global and people everywhere are hunting for information.

The false theory linking 5G to the coronavirus has been especially prominent, amplified by celebrities like John Cusack and Woody Harrelson on social media. It has also been stoked by a vocal anti-5G contingent, who have urged people to take action against telecom gear to protect themselves.

The idea has deep internet roots. An analysis by The New York Times found 487 Facebook communities, 84 Instagram accounts, 52 Twitter accounts, and dozens of other posts and videos pushing the conspiracy. The Facebook communities added nearly half a million new followers over the past two weeks. On Instagram, a network of 40 accounts nearly doubled its audience this month to 58,800 followers.

On YouTube, the 10 most popular 5G coronavirus conspiracy videos posted in March were viewed over 5.8 million times. Today, the conspiracy can be found on Facebook in over 30 countries, including Switzerland, Uruguay and Japan.

British politicians said the conspiracy theory and the violent acts it was causing were unacceptable. “This is nonsense of the absolute highest order,” said Julian Knight, a member of Parliament who leads a committee investigating coronavirus-related online misinformation. He said Facebook and YouTube needed to “get a grip” on the situation or risk undermining the crisis response.

Mr. Knight added that the spread of 5G conspiracies raised alarms about how information about a future coronavirus vaccine would be disseminated.

“If we were to get a vaccine for Covid-19, can we trust the social media companies to ensure that the right public health messages are put out about that vaccine?” he asked. “That could be a question of life and death for many people.”

Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, said it was “starting to remove false claims that 5G technology causes the symptoms of or contraction of Covid-19.” YouTube said it would reduce recommendations of videos linking the coronavirus to 5G, while Twitter said it had taken action against misleading and harmful content about the illness.

April 9 kayleigh mcenany djt

Washington Post, Opinion: New press secretary Kayleigh McEnany could do the impossible: Make us miss Sean Spicer, Margaret Sullivan (below right), April margaret sullivan 2015 photo 9, 2020 (print ed.). We couldn’t imagine it could get worse than Spicer lying about inaugural crowd sizes. Sarah Sanders and Stephanie Grisham showed us it could.

By now, we’ve come to accept that spin is part of the job description for White House press secretaries. It’s a tactic and talent that has been on display in every modern presidential administration.

But race-baiting? Dangerous bluster on topics of public health? Blatant sycophancy?

We should still be shocked to see these qualities in the president’s top spokesperson. Evidence of these things in someone’s background should be disqualifying for the position — which, after all, is responsible for informing the public through the news media.

Nevertheless, Kayleigh McEnany (shown above) got the job Tuesday. She got it despite her appalling Twitter joke in 2012 about President Barack Obama’s brother having never left his Kenyan hut and smears centered on “birtherism” conspiracy theories — unfounded questions about whether Trump’s predecessor was born in the United States — to stoke racism.

Deadline Hollywood, Mike Pence’s Office Reverses Decision, Allows Public Health Officials To Appear On CNN, Ted Johnson, April 9, 2020. Vice President Mike Pence’s office has reversed itself and will now allow two top public health officials to appear on CNN, after earlier blocking the medical professionals from appearing on the network because it has not carried the nightly White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings in their entirety.

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will appear on a CNN coronavirus town hall on Thursday evening and Dr. Anthony Fauci will guest on New Day on Friday, the network said.

Earlier in the day, CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported that Pence’s office had withheld the health experts from the network out of upset that the network had not carried the portion of the press briefings that include the Vice President and other members of the task force. According to CNN, a spokesperson for the Vice President said, “When you guys cover the briefings with the health officials then you can expect them back on your air.”

CNN and other networks have been under pressure to stop airing the press briefings live, out of concerns that they have given President Donald Trump a platform to make unverified claims or relay other forms of misinformation. Even some on-air personalities have urged the networks to at least do more aggressive forms of fact checking. Some, like The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, suggested that Pence’s portion of the briefing, typically a more sobering view of the crisis, was just as if not more essential to cover.

“There’s a big debate going on among folks about whether cable should be airing Trump briefings,” she tweeted on Tuesday. “Okay. But if you’re running the beginning of the briefing, why cut away from Pence and the actual health officials?”

On Wednesday, CNN did cover the portion of the briefing where Trump took questions from the media, and also aired portions where Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx spoke to reporters. But to many viewers, it has meant that networks hop back and forth from the briefing to their news anchors, who have tried to do quick fact checks of some of the statements made.

The White House did not return a request for comment. A spokesperson for CNN also declined to comment.

One press advocacy organization, PEN America, condemned the attempt to restrict CNN’s access to public health officials.

April 7

Cleveland Scene, Plain Dealer Put Out to Pasture. In Final Death Blow, Remaining Reporters Given Impossible Choice, Sam Allard, April 7, 2020. On the first workday after a brutal and debilitating round of layoffs at The Plain Dealer, Editor Tim Warsinskey delivered what will be the paper's final and cruelest blow.

He told the 14 remaining newsroom staffers that they would henceforth be forbidden from covering stories in Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, and Summit County and could no longer report on anything that might be deemed a "statewide" issue. Those vast content areas will now fall under the editorial jurisdiction of cleveland.com, the PD's non-union sister newsroom.

If the PD staffers choose to remain employed, Warsinskey said, they will have to do so as members of a "bureau" responsible for reporting on Northeast Ohio's outlying counties: Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina and Portage.

This announcement came as a shock to those who had survived Friday's purge and were only now coming up for air. Some level of reorganization within the newsroom was expected — hence the Monday meeting — but the total theft of their beats was "incomprehensible," according to a statement from the Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild Local 1, posted moments ago to its Facebook page.

And so the paper's remaining staffers are now faced with a devastating decision: they can either leave and let the state's largest paper, (and the country's first News Guild), die, ceding victory at last to the Newhouses of Advance Publications, who've been ruthlessly and methodically busting the PD's [Plain Dealer's] union for years; or they can stay on, suffering the indignities of filing low-stakes stories on distant locales that haven't been part of the paper's regular coverage area for years.

Exceptions have been made for four remaining employees, according to the Guild's statement. Terry Pluto and Philip Morris will be permitted to remain as columnists; Steve Litt can stay on as the region's art and architecture critic; and Susan Glaser can still cover regional travel.

But the rest will have to sacrifice their beats — in many cases, beats which they've been covering for decades and for which they are by far the most equipped and knowledgeable reporters in the region — to cleveland.com.

It should be obvious, though, that there will be nowhere close to 77 journalists covering the region after the 14 on the PD side make up their minds this week. Equally obvious is the fact that Tim Warsinskey and Advance Publications could not care less about "the stories that matter to you," least of all "the pandemic impact that is gripping us all."

Actions do, in fact, speak louder than words. As of last Thursday, (and long before the spread of COVID-19), The Plain Dealer had a three-person team covering health in the region. Brie Zeltner, who covered the intersection of medicine and public health, and Julie Washington, who wrote stories about individual patients and medical technology, were both laid off Friday. Ginger Christ covers the hospitals. During the biggest and most destructive public health story in a century, Advance Publications has chosen to rob the region of its most skilled and deeply sourced health reporters. That's how much they care.

The Guild is correct, then, in its assessment that this "strategy" has absolutely nothing to do with Advance's interest in meaningful coverage of Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina and Portage counties. That's a bad joke and should be interpreted as such. The purported coverage area, ("outlying counties"), is so geographically broad and remote as to be meaningless as a beat. And yet it's simultaneously so restrictive ("no stories about Cuyahoga or Summit counties or any statewide issues") that reporting on it would paralyze any news reporter who takes the job seriously.

That's deliberate.

Politico, Coronavirus clampdown: The virus casts a shroud over American civic life, Jeremy B. White, April 7, 2020. States and cities across the country are cutting off access to open records and canceling in-person meetings, starving the public — not to mention lobbyists and other influence-brokers — of information as the coronavirus outbreak reaches into all corners of civic life.

The public access shutdown comes just as local officials make unprecedented decisions about health care and how to disburse billions of dollars in federal aid. And it could undermine years of hard-won victories on access to information, some transparency advocates say, with now-temporary restrictions enduring even after this crisis has receded.

Meetings that typically allow constituents to physically interact with their representatives have been suspended. Activists and lobbyists no longer have physical access to state lawmakers in some places. And many cities and states, their staff preoccupied with the virus, have halted or curbed their responses to public records requests.

That is meeting pushback from some public transparency and good government advocates who warn that a public health emergency shouldn’t undermine the public’s access to the workings of government — particularly when that government is making critical, life-and-death decisions. One advocate drew a parallel to how some records vanished from public view after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Here’s another huge national event, this health crisis, that is probably also going to set new precedents for what’s going to be available or not and how people are going to respond or not respond based on the new normal,” said Daniel Bevarly, executive director National Freedom of Information Coalition.

In-the-open policymaking has receded as elected officials hunker down. The California legislature adjourned early and then delayed its return date. Illinois state legislators are holding private discussions about future bills, while the Massachusetts legislature has also nixed in-person public hearings. The Los Angeles City Council has suspended in-person meetings for the foreseeable future. Courts have curtailed their business, which means public attendance relies on varyingly available telephonic access. California’s campaign finance watchdog has delayed disclosure deadlines, as has Los Angeles.

Some legislative bodies have loosened their rules to allow for more remote access. Others have not, in some cases citing difficult-to-amend rules that require physical participation. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker have signed executive orders springing agencies from in-person meeting requirements.

stephanie grisham unsourced Custom

Washington Post, Grisham out as White House press secretary after eight months during which she held no regular briefings, Anne Gearan, April 7, 2020. Stephanie Grisham has worked closely with first lady Melania Trump and will now become her chief of staff and spokesperson, the White House announced Tuesday.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, shown at center above, is leaving the job after eight months during which she held no regular press briefings of the sort that once defined the job.

First lady Melania Trump announced Tuesday that Grisham would rejoin her staff as a full-time chief of staff and spokesperson, calling her “a mainstay and true leader in the Administration.”

Grisham was not a fixture in the inner circle of advisers to President Trump, as her predecessor Sarah Sanders had been, although White House officials have praised her loyalty.

The White House did not immediately name a successor for Grisham, who has also held the job of communications director.

kayleigh mcenany djt

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany is even more of a disaster than the last three, Bill Palmer, April 7, 2020. Donald Trump’s revolving door of idiots, stooges, con artists, and buffoons continues. Today he got rid of White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, who was on the job for ten months and never did hold a press briefing, and replaced her with Kayleigh McEnany – who is somehow even worse.

She had been working for Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, where braindead idiocy is par for the course. Now Trump’s new Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has apparently decided that the White House needs a Press Secretary who actually does the job, so he’s replaced Grisham with McEnany.

April 6

Washington Post, Opinion: The Sunday shows have become horror shows, Jennifer Rubin, right, April 6, 2020 (print ed.). There is no factual debate: The jennifer rubin new headshot Trump administration did not follow the advice from George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations to prepare for pandemics. Instead, Trump and his staff wasted 70 days, 10 weeks, after learning of the covid-19 disaster.

We could have straightened out and deployed testing on a massive scale, as South Korea did. We could have stockpiled supplies, prepared the country and mandated a national stay-at-home order (which has still not been done, a failure the surgeon general could not explain).

While Trump made outrageous promises, even Republicans knew he was spouting nonsense. The Post explained: “In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.”

The utter lack of preparation, arguably the worst failure in presidential leadership in the modern era, continues to this day as the administration fails to come to grips with the virus and plot a way forward. The Sunday shows put on display the desperate attempts by informed experts, the media and governors to find any evidence that the administration has gained a handle on the crisis.

New York Times, Americans Don’t Trust the Media Anymore. So Why Do They Trust the Cuomos? Ben Smith, April 6, 2020 (print ed.). CNN once prevented Chris Cuomo from interviewing his brother, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on the air. But that all changed with the arrival of the coronavirus.

In a series of four riveting interviews, Andrew Cuomo, 62, right, delivered the scary reality of the pandemic to his brother’s audience. He also bragged that he is their mother’s favorite and that Chris — Christopher, he calls him — was the family “meatball.” When the governor’s audio finally dropped, Chris delivered an aside: “This is a great chance for me to say some things to him.”

The Cuomo brothers’ show became a deeper drama last week when Chris Cuomo, 49, revealed his coronavirus diagnosis. He had lost 13 pounds in three days. He chipped a tooth one night when he was in terrible pain. On Thursday, he called into his brother’s daily news conference.

“You came to me in a dream, you had on a very interesting ballet outfit, and you were dancing in the dream, and you were waving a wand and saying, ‘I wish I could wave my wand and make this go away,’” Chris Cuomo told the governor.

The sick guy in his basement roasting his brother is not exactly high-minded journalism. Imagine the reaction, if, say, a Trump family member interviewed the president on Fox News. But it is moving television. And more than anything, it reflects the instincts and inclinations of Jeff Zucker, the morning show producer-turned-corporate executive who now runs CNN.

jamal khashoggi entering consulate

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump calls MBS his ‘friend’ — 18 months to the day after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Fred Hiatt (Editorial page editor), April 6, 2020 (print ed.). No doubt President Trump was unaware of the significance of the date he chose to salute “my friend MBS.”

No doubt Trump had no idea that it was the year-and-a-half-anniversary of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Mohammed Bin Salman Al-Saud But, yes, Trump’s tweet came 18 months to the day after his “friend MBS” — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right — had a hit squad murder Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. A hit squad that included forensic doctor Salah Mohammed Tubaigy, who brought his bone saw with him from Riyadh.

You probably remember the outlines of the story. A respected Saudi journalist living in Virginia and writing columns for The Post, Khashoggi (shown below in the Washington Post's newsroom) had visited the consulate the previous week seeking paperwork so he could marry his Turkish fiancee, Hatice Cengiz. He had been told, no problem, come back the following Tuesday — Oct. 2, 2018.

U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the murder could not have taken place without the crown prince’s authorization. An investigation by U.N. special rapporteur Agnes Callamard called the murder and dismemberment “an extrajudicial killing for which the State of the jamal khashoggi washpost newsroom Small Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is responsible.”

For a time, the Trump administration pretended to seek information about the killing. The truth would come out, Trump said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pressed the crown prince at least to move aside his chief henchman, Saud al-Qahtani.

But any pretense is long gone. Qahtani remains influential. The administration has illegally ignored congressional mandates to furnish information on the killing and impose sanctions.

And now, as though to mark a year and a half of Saudi nose-thumbing, Trump is prostrating himself again. The reason: As a pandemic imperils the American economy, the Saudis have threatened to devastate the U.S. oil industry further by flooding the market with cheap oil.

April 4

#MeToo Claims

Medium via OpEd News, Deep Reporting / Commentary: Evidence Casts Doubt on Tara Reade's Sexual Assault Allegations of Joe Biden, Brian Krassenstein and Eddie Krassenstein, April 4, 2020. Alexandra Tara Reade’s accusations of sexual assault against Joe Biden appear very questionable once the story is fully investigated. We reached out to Ms. Reade for comment but she refused.

(For more Justice Integrity Project coverage, see March 31 and March 30 excerpts in #MeToo coverage here.)

April 3

Daily Beast, Dr. Fauci Shuts Down ‘Fox & Friends’ on Coronavirus Cure: ‘We Don’t Operate on How You Feel,’ Justin Baragona, April 3, 2020. “I think we’ve got to be careful that we don’t make that majestic leap to assume that this is a knockout drug,” the top doctor said of hydroxychloroquine

Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci left the hosts of Fox & Friends disappointed and frustrated Friday when he threw cold water on their insistence that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine is a game-changing cure for the coronavirus.

Citing a recent poll showing that 37 percent of doctors around the world feel the drug is currently the most effective treatment of COVID-19, co-host Steve Doocy added that frequent Fox News guest Dr. Mehmet Oz recently touted a small Chinese study that found the drug had some efficacy in treating the virus.

Doocy went on to play a clip of Dr. Oz wondering whether Fauci was impressed with the results of that study. The Fox host asked the top physician to respond to the TV doctor.

“That was not a very robust study,” replied Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force. He also pointed out that while there’s still a possibility of a “beneficial effect,” the scale and strength of the evidence is not “overwhelmingly strong.”

“But getting back to what you said just a moment ago that ‘X percent’—I think you said 37 percent—of doctors feel that it’s beneficial. We don’t operate on how you feel. We operate on what evidence is, and data is,” he continued. “So although there is some suggestion with the study that was just mentioned by Dr. Oz—granted that there is a suggestion that there is a benefit there—I think we’ve got to be careful that we don’t make that majestic leap to assume that this is a knockout drug.”

Co-host Brian Kilmeade, meanwhile, pushed back against the disease expert, claiming a large percentage of doctors in other countries are now prescribing the drug to treat coronavirus. He then speculated as to whether those taking the drug for other conditions were prevented from infection of COVID-19.

“I would be very curious, doctor, to see if anyone who was taking this for lupus or arthritis has gotten the coronavirus, that would be one way to go the other way to see about this study,” Kilmeade wondered aloud.

“I mean, obviously this is a good drug in many respects for some of the diseases you mentioned, and the one thing we don’t want to happen is that individuals who really need a drug with a proven indication don’t have it available,” Fauci responded, adding that it doesn’t matter if a large percentage of doctors “think that it works.”

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt then jumped in, suggesting that “Democratic leaders” are preventing patients from receiving hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease and asking Fauci what could be done to make sure we’re giving it to everyone in need.

“Well first of all, this is an approved drug for another indication, and doctors can, and the FDA has made it very clear that doctors can prescribe it on what we call off label,” he explained. “There’s no inhibition for that. So a considerable amount of drug was made available, as you remember, just a few days ago. But the FDA was very clear that they’re not going to be inhibiting anyone from doing an off label prescription of the drug. So they’re free to do that if they want to.”

Washington Post, Thousands of Zoom video calls left exposed on open Web, Drew Harwell, April 3, 2020. Many of the videos include personally identifiable information and deeply intimate conversations, recorded in people’s homes.

Thousands of personal Zoom videos have been left viewable on the open Web, highlighting the privacy risks to millions of Americans as they shift many of their personal interactions to video calls in an age of social distancing.

Videos viewed by The Washington Post included one-on-one therapy sessions; a training orientation for workers doing telehealth calls that included people’s names and phone numbers; small-business meetings that included private company financial statements; and elementary school classes, in which children’s faces, voices and personal details were exposed.

Many of the videos include personally identifiable information and deeply intimate conversations, recorded in people’s homes. Other videos include nudity, such as one in which an aesthetician teaches students how to give a Brazilian wax.

April 2

Washington Post, Pakistan court overturns convictions in killing of journalist Daniel Pearl, Shaiq Hussain, April 2, 2020. Omar Saeed Sheikh’s sentence was reduced to life in prison, and three co-conspirators were freed. The decision by the Sindh High Court can still be appealed to Pakistan’s Supreme Court.

A regional Pakistani court on Thursday overturned the convictions of the men involved in the killing of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

The ruling by two judges on the High Court of Sindh province can still be appealed to Pakistan’s Supreme Court.

“As per the court’s judgment, Omar Saeed Sheikh has been found guilty of kidnapping and not of murder. The accused was in jail for 20 years,” the defendants’ lawyer Khawaja Naveed told The Washington Post.

Saeed had been sentenced to death for Pearl’s murder, but now with just a seven-year sentence for kidnapping, he could be released, given the 18 years he has already served.

The three other men convicted with Saeed — Fahad Naseem, a computer expert; Salman Saqib, a religious activist; and Sheikh Adil, a police officer — were ordered released by the court.

Washington Post, Shivering, hallucinating, beaten ‘like a piñata’: Chris Cuomo’s ‘haunted’ night with coronavirus, Allyson Chiu, April 2, 2020.

Washington Post, OANN gets booted from White House press room after making unauthorized appearance, Paul Farhi, April 2, 2020. Despite social distancing in the crowded briefing room, the White House made an exception for conservative One America News Network (OANN). White House correspondents pushed back.

This time, it was a fairly routine question that Chanel Rion, a correspondent for One America News Network, posed to President Trump during Tuesday’s White House news briefing: How many clinical trials would it take before a potential coronavirus drug he has touted could be approved? Trump wasn’t sure and turned the question over to Anthony S. Fauci, his infectious-diseases expert.

But the brief Q&A raised its own question: What was Rion doing there in the first place?

Under strict new guidelines jointly imposed last month by White House officials and the White House Correspondents' Association, which represents journalists, access to the cramped briefing room is now restricted to about 15 reporters each day, to enforce social-distancing measures amid the coronavirus crisis, and several smaller news organizations can rotate in only once every several days.

And it wasn’t OANN’s turn on Tuesday. Nor on Wednesday, when Rion showed up in the room again — prompting the correspondents’ association to vote to remove OANN from the rotation.

“We did this because a reporter for this outlet twice attended press briefings in contravention of this policy,” the board of the WHCA said in a statement late Wednesday. “We do not take this action lightly. This is a matter of public safety.”

Rion and her employer, a tiny conservative cable outlet known as OANN, appear to have gotten special permission from the White House, in violation of the guidelines. The reasons, and the source of the approval, are unclear, but OANN and Rion have a history of reporting favorably about Trump. Rion herself has pushed conspiracy theories that advance his political interests, such as the unfounded allegation that officials in Ukraine secretly manipulated the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton. Trump, in turn, has tweeted praise of OANN’s reporting dozens of times.

The White House, in effect, on Tuesday bent the rules — which were designed to ensure the health of journalists, the president and the nation’s top public-health officials — in granting access and a national spotlight to a correspondent from an obscure but Trump-friendly news outlet.

OANN was founded 2013 by Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire Republican donor from San Diego who made his fortune in the circuit-board business before starting over in media. His son, Charles Herring, president of One America’s parent company Herring Broadcasting, told The Post last week that the channel “is designed to report just the news” and that “we would not describe our news reporting as right-leaning.”

March

March 31

Palmer Report, Opinion: CNN refused to start airing Donald Trump’s press conference today until he was done speaking, Bill Palmer, March 31, 2020. It looks like Donald Trump has finally pushed CNN to the point where it’s no longer willing to air him while he’s dishonestly rambling during his press conferences.

When Trump began speaking this evening, MSNBC started airing it immediately. But CNN didn’t start airing it until Trump was done babbling and Dr. Birx began speaking.

No TV network should be airing these press conferences at all. But we’ve reached a fascinating point here, where CNN is refusing to put the President of the United States on the air because of the dangerous misinformation that he likes to spew. This can’t simply be a ratings decision, or CNN wouldn’t be airing the press briefing at all. Instead, this is specifically about keeping Trump from harming people.

This comes after Donald Trump used his last few press conferences to spread deadly false information about coronavirus drugs, to make random false accusations about hospital workers stealing medical equipment, and to give the My Pillow guy a

#MeToo Claim Against Biden

Democracy Now! Opinion: “It Shattered My Life”: Former Joe Biden Staffer Tara Reade Says He Sexually Assaulted Her in 1993, Amy Goodman, March 31, 2020. In an exclusive Democracy Now! TV/radio broadcast, we speak with Tara Reade, the former staffer in Joe Biden’s Senate office who has come forward with allegations that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993.

Last week, The Intercept reported that the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, set up to help survivors of rape and sexual assault, refused to fund a #MeToo investigation into allegations against Biden. Reade told journalist Katie Halper in an interview published Tuesday that Biden repeatedly touched her without her consent and sexually assaulted her.

Reade approached the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund in January looking for assistance, but was reportedly told the fund could not help her because Biden is a candidate for federal office, and pursuing a case could jeopardize the fund’s nonprofit status. Reade says she learned from The Intercept report that the public relations firm representing Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund is SKDKnickerbocker, whose managing director, Anita Dunn, is top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you give us the circumstances, how you ended up — what was the day, how you ended up alone with Joe Biden? Explain what happened that day.

TARA READE: I was approached by my supervisor. She handed me a gym bag and said, “Hurry, Joe wants this, so get it to him. He’ll meet you down towards the Capitol.” And I went down the stairs, and I don’t remember exactly where I was, because there’s connections between the Russell Building and all of that and the corridors, but we were in a semi-private location. It wasn’t a room. It wasn’t, you know, the Russell Office Building — I mean, in his office. It was down in the corridors. And I handed him the gym bag.

And then he — it was one, as I described, fluid moment. He was talking to me, and he said some things that I don’t recall. And I was up against the wall. And he — I remember the coldness of the wall. And I remember his hands underneath my blouse and underneath my skirt, and his fingers penetrating me as he was trying to kiss me and I was pulling away. And he pulled back, and he said, “Come on, man. I heard you liked me.” But he was angry. It was like a tight voice. And he tended to smile when he was angry. And he isn’t like the Uncle Joe like everybody talks about now. He was younger. He was my dad’s age at that time and very strong. And he looked insulted and angry. And I remember feeling like I had done something wrong when he said that statement. And then I was standing there when he said — he was still near me. He said — pointed his finger and said, “You’re nothing to me. You’re nothing.” And he walked away.

The next thing I remember was that night and talking to my mom, and she was like, “You need to file a police report. It’s a sexual assault.” And I didn’t think of it as sexual assault, and I didn’t really understand. And I was trying to just get over the shock of it, because I looked up to him. He was supposed to be a champion of women. And I was so thrilled to be at that office and so honored, and it shattered my life and changed the trajectory of my whole career and life. And I lost my job after I complained, and I was fired.

AMY GOODMAN: And how exactly did you complain, Tara? You filed a complaint of sexual harassment against Senator Biden at the time? Now, let’s be clear, this is 1993, two years after he led the Senate Judiciary Committee around the Anita Hill charges against Clarence Thomas. So this is soon after that. You filed a complaint. Did you talk about this happening?

TARA READE: No, I didn’t talk about the sexual assault. What I did was I went through office protocol, which would be to go to your supervisor. And if you’re not happy, you go to the next supervisor, and then the next one would be the chief of staff. And I did go up the chain verbally. And there were a couple of meetings — more than a couple, actually. And there were people taking notes. I mean, I know they took notes. And some were more informal in the hallway, with Marianne. And I was basically — after I had not served the drinks, that whole, you know, episode, I was immediately told, like within a few days, by Marianne’s assistant that I dressed too provocatively, that I was too — that I needed to be less noticeable. And then Marianne got me in the hallway, because I was annoyed by that, and she said, you know, “You want to just keep your head down and do as you’re told, if you want to last here.”

And I went to them and told them I was uncomfortable. So I couched it in those terms. We didn’t use the term “sexual harassment” a lot back then. And I remember saying I was uncomfortable and why. But nothing happened. And in fact, I was put in a windowless office, and I had my duties taken away from me. I was given a desk audit. I was told to call one of my upper-level supervisors even if I went to the restroom. I was not to call or talk to other staffers or go to legislative hearings. I was told that I was given a month to find another job. And I sent out my résumés. And before I did that, because of this retaliation, I told my mother, who gave me the term “retaliation” and explained to me what was happening, and said to march in there and file a sexual harassment claim. And I said — and she used the word. And I said, “Well, you don’t just march into their office. Like, that’s not how this is done.”

March 30

U.S. Media / Propaganda

New York Times, Facebook, Google and Twitter Struggle to Prepare for Election
Washington Post, Gannett will furlough workers at more than 100 newspapers over next three months
Washington Post, Opinion: Trump’s quarantine con should be the breaking point, E.J. Dionne Jr.
New York Times, Opinion: Trump Is Hurting His Own Re-Election Chances, David Leonhardt
Washington Post, Trump berates PBS NewsHour reporter for ‘threatening’ question, hits ‘nice’ question out of park
Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigative Commentary, No evidence of bio-warfare involved with COVID-19

#MeToo Claim Against Biden

tara reade joe biden Custom

Medium, Investigative Commentary: Evidence Casts Doubt on Tara Reade’s Sexual Assault Allegations of Joe Biden, Brian Krassenstein and Eddie Krassenstein

U.S. Media / Propaganda

New York Times, Facebook, Google and Twitter Struggle to Prepare for Election, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel and Nicole Perlroth, Updated March 30, 2020. After spending billions to avoid a repeat of 2016, the tech giants are careening from crisis to crisis as their foes change tactics.

The day after the New Hampshire primary last month, Facebook’s security team removed a network of fake accounts that originated in Iran, which had posted divisive partisan messages about the U.S. election inside private Facebook groups.

Hours later, the social network learned the campaign of Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor, had sidestepped its political ad process by directly paying Instagram meme accounts to post in support of his presidential bid.

That same day, a pro-Trump group called the Committee to Defend the President, which had previously run misleading Facebook ads, was found to be promoting a photo that falsely claimed to show Bernie Sanders supporters holding signs with divisive slogans such as “Illegal Aliens Deserve the Same as Our Veterans.”

Facebook, Twitter, Google and other big tech companies have spent the past three years working to avoid a repeat of 2016, when their platforms were overrun by Russian trolls and used to amplify America’s partisan divide. The internet giants have since collectively spent billions of dollars hiring staff, fortifying their systems and developing new policies to prevent election meddling.

But as the events of just one day — Feb. 12 — at Facebook showed, although the companies are better equipped to deal with the types of interference they faced in 2016, they are struggling to handle the new challenges of 2020.

Washington Post, Gannett will furlough workers at more than 100 newspapers over next three months, Jacob Bogage, March 30, 2020. gannett logo Custom Some employees paid more than $38,000 a year by one of the company’s newspapers, including USA Today, will be required to take one week of unpaid leave in April, May and June.

Washington Post, Trump berates PBS NewsHour reporter for ‘threatening’ question, hits ‘nice’ question out of park, Katie Shepherd, March 30, 2020.

ej dionne w open neck Washington Post, Opinion: Trump’s quarantine con should be the breaking point, E.J. Dionne Jr., March 30, 2020. If you doubted that President Trump’s approach to the coronavirus crisis is all about him — about getting a few hours or a few days of blaring headlines and then manically moving on to some other empty gesture that he can claim is “strong” — his threat on Saturday to quarantine the New York region tells you all you need to know.

The man who fleeced innocent souls through what the conservative National Review called the “massive scam” of Trump University is applying the same hucksterism to a situation where thousands of lives are at stake.

The quarantine caper ought to be the straw that breaks the hustler’s back.

There was Trump telling reporters in the early afternoon: “There is a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine, short term, two weeks, on New York, probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut,” he said, expressing worry that “a lot of New Yorkers are going down” to Florida.

Media-wise, all hell broke loose.

Of course he had never spoken to the governors of the affected states beforehand. Of course this was a way of shifting blame for his own incompetence to the stricken people of three Democratic states that would never vote for him. Of course he never considered whether he even had the power to do what he claimed he might do.

And of course it was all fake.

Having milked the “possibility” for a long news cycle, he informed the world on Twitter at 8:19 p.m. Saturday: “A quarantine will not be necessary.”

There are two lessons here. The first is that the media must treat Trump the way they treat anyone else who regularly offers lies along with idle but explosive conjecture. His daily journey before the White House cameras is no different from any of his other swindles, and his “briefings” should be treated with the contempt they deserve.

The second lesson is more important for the long run. We are learning, in both good ways and bad, about the importance of competent, energetic and empathetic government. For the past week, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been offering a running seminar on this subject for all who will listen, both in a floor speech and in a phone interview from his home in Brooklyn.

In voting — unanimously in the Senate — for a $2.2 trillion economic rescue bill, Schumer told me, Republicans acknowledged what they regularly deny: that government is indispensable, especially “when there’s an emergency, when lives are at stake, and when you need quick action.” Also: when “the private sector cannot do the job.”

Washington Post, Trump berates PBS NewsHour reporter for ‘threatening’ question, hits ‘nice’ question out of park, Katie Shepherd, March 30, 2020.

New York Times, Opinion: Trump Is Hurting His Own Re-Election Chances, David Leonhardt, right, March 30, 2020 (print ed.). Don’t be fooled by snapshot polls. The president backed off of his hope that the country will be “opened up and raring to go” by Easter. A top medical adviser and governors had said they could not envision easing the measures anytime soon.

The strangest part of President Trump’s coronavirus response is that it’s almost certainly damaging his chances of re-election.

I realize that may sound surprising, given that his approval rating has been rising. But when you look beyond day-to-day events — which Trump often struggles to do — you see that he is creating the conditions for a miserable summer and fall, with extended virus outbreaks and a deeper recession. The summer and fall, of course, are the crux of the presidential campaign.

Trump’s virus strategy revolves around trying to make the present seem as good as possible, without much concern for the future. He spent almost two months denying that the virus was a serious problem and falsely claiming that the number of cases was falling. He has spent the last two weeks alternately taking aggressive measures and refusing to do so, often against the advice of public-health experts. Some Republican governors, following Trump’s lead, are also rejecting those experts’ pleas: There are beaches open in Florida, restaurants open in Georgia and Missouri and many people out and about in Oklahoma and Texas.

Altogether, the United States seems to have engaged in the least aggressive response of any affected country. Sure enough, it also now has the world’s largest number of confirmed cases. The American caseload was initially following a similar path as the Chinese and Italian caseloads. But the number of American infections is now rising uniquely fast, with 96,000 new cases in the last week — more than twice as many as in any seven-day period in any other country.

This surge doesn’t cause only more short-term deaths and overwhelmed hospitals. It also leads to more cases in later months, by creating a larger group of infected people who can spread the virus to others. As Tom Frieden, a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me, “The higher the peak, the longer it lasts.”

And the longer that the country is gripped by the virus, the deeper that the economic downturn will be. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor, refers to this as the first rule of “virus economics”: The only way to resuscitate the economy is to stop the virus. Premature attempts to restart business activity will lead to further outbreaks, which will cause more fear and new shutdowns.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigative Commentary, No evidence of bio-warfare involved with COVID-19, Wayne Madsen (author of 18 wayne madsen may 29 2015 cropped Small books, investigative reporter and former Navy Intelligence officer and NSA analyst), March 30, 2020. Contrary to ruminations from far right-wing Republicans -- including Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as fundamentalist crackpot Jerry Falwell, Jr. -- that COVID-19 involves either a willful or accidental biological warfare operation set in motion by China or North Korea, the facts are that the deadly virus involves no military or intelligence service.

The fact that every military and intelligence service on the planet has been negatively impacted and severely hobbled by the virus is evidence that there are no strategic military winners and only losers with respect to the pandemic. It is Donald Trump's senior Republican officials and evangelical supporters who are pushing such nonsense that COVID-19 is a biological warfare attack. It is proof of the paucity of any level of military or intelligence expertise in the Republican Party and the Trump administration.

#MeToo Claim Against Biden

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Tara Reade (screenshot via The Hill newspaper).

Reason.com, Opinion: Why Are the Mainstream Media Ignoring Tara Reade's Sexual Assault Accusation Against Joe Biden? Robby Soave, March 30, 2020. So far, it's been silence from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and others.

On September 14, 2018, The New York Times reported the existence of an unverified sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The story cited three people who had read a letter sent by the accuser—Christine Blasey Ford—to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D–Calif.). Ford was not interviewed for the story; indeed, she wasn't named.

Unconfirmed reports of a teenaged Kavanaugh assaulting a teenaged Ford evidently merited coverage from The Times. This prompts an obvious question: Why is the paper of record now declining to publicize a very troubling allegation against former Vice President Joe Biden?

The Times is hardly alone in this regard. The mainstream media have remained bafflingly silent about Tara Reade, a former member of then-Senator Biden's staff who claims that he sexually assaulted her in 1993. Reade's name has only appeared twice in The Washington Post, and both were quick asides: A news roundup from April of last year briefly acknowledged an earlier, milder version of Reade's accusation, and a recent rapid-fire Q&A asked a Post political reporter to weigh-in on the political ramifications "of the Tara Reade bombshell." (The nature of the bombshell is not described.)

And while the coronavirus pandemic is obviously dominating news coverage, CNN has made plenty of time for Biden. Chris Cillizza is still ranking Biden's potential veep choices, and the network conducted a virtual townhall event with the candidate last Friday. Reade's name didn't come up, and it has never appeared at CNN.com. At NBC, it's the same story: Chuck Todd interviewed Biden but didn't ask about the allegation.

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Medium, Investigative Commentary: Evidence Casts Doubt on Tara Reade’s Sexual Assault Allegations of Joe Biden, Brian Krassenstein and Eddie Krassenstein, March 30, 2020. Alexandra Tara Reade’s accusations of sexual assault against Joe Biden (both shown above) appear very questionable once the story is fully investigated.

We were able to contact a longtime friend of Reade’s who wished to remain anonymous, but they said they “do not believe her allegations,” claiming she has always been one to seek attention. Note: We reached out to Ms. Reade for comment but she refused.

Every allegation of sexual assault must be taken seriously, and the #metoo movement has certainly given the victims of sexual harassment and assault a greater shield of confidence in coming forward with less fear of being attacked themselves. With this said, however, it is the media’s responsibility to thoroughly investigate accusations before jumping into a story and allowing those allegations to potentially destroy another human being, or, in this case, a political campaign. Every woman deserves to be heard, but every media outlet still has the responsibility of investigating and then relaying to the public all of the facts at face value.

joe biden 2020 button Custom Alexandra Tara Reade came forward last week with quite disturbing allegations against former Vice President and current 2020 Presidential candidate Joe Biden. In April of 2019, Reade originally said that Joe Biden’s handsiness made her feel uncomfortable when she worked as a Senate aide in 1993. At the time, however, she said that she did not consider Biden’s actions to be sexualization, instead comparing her experience to that of being a beautiful lamp.

This story suddenly changed last week when Reade took part in an interview with podcast host Katie Halper. In the interview, Reade claimed that then-Senator Joe Biden “penetrated” her, against her will, with his finger, in an encounter that took place in ‘93.

While the allegations made by Reade are impossible to prove or disprove, examining Reade’s actions over the years and other evidence Vladimir Putin Il Corriere that has been archived on the internet, brings her honesty and integrity into question.

Below we will cover many of the inconsistencies in her story, the endless contradictions she has made over the years, and the evidence that paints a picture of someone who went from seemingly adoring Joe Biden and disliking Vladimir Putin, right, in 2017, to someone who showed compassion and love for Vladimir Putin in 2018, to someone who accused Biden of doing horrific things to her in 2019 and 2020.

Who is Alexandra Tara Reade?

Alexandra Tara Reade has gone by many names and aliases over the years. According to our research, she was born as Tara Reade Moulton, before changing her name in her early 20s to Tara Reade, then changing it back to Tara Moulton again, and then changing it once again later in life (through marriage) to Alexandra Tara McCabe.

It appears as though sometime between 2017 and early 2018 she began calling herself Alexandra Tara Reade.

According to a website that she recently deleted, Reade is the founder of Gracie’s Pet Food Pantry, graduated from Seattle University School of Law, and was the co-host, creator and producer of a soul music radio show called “Soul Vibes” on KNRY — an AM radio station that serves the Santa Cruz and Monterey areas in California.

At one point in her life Reade worked on the domestic violence unit for the King County Prosecutor, in Seattle, WA, as a ‘Victim’s Advocate,” and on at least one occasion testified as an expert witness on domestic violence.

Reade also worked for former Congressman Leon Panetta, former Senator Joe Biden, and former California State Senator Jack O’Connell.

In 2017 Alexandra Tara Reade Praised Joe Biden for Helping End Sexual Assault.

In 2017 Alexandra Tara Reade praised Joe Biden for his action in helping stop sexual assault, not just once, but on multiple occasions.

Alexandra Tara Reade’s other Twitter account under her legal name Alexandra (Tara) McCabe.

Between September of 2016 and May of 2017, Alexander Tara Reade used a Twitter account, under the name Tara McCabe, to spread praise of Joe Biden via tweeting, retweeting and liking various Tweets.

There are multiple examples of this, as seen below:

In the below instance, Reade retweeted a tweet by Margaret Cho that appears to commend Joe Biden for working with Lady Gaga to end sexual assault.
In 2017 Joe Biden worked with Lady Gaga to help end sexual assault. In February of 2017, Tara Reade retweeted this tweet apparently commending Biden for his work in doing so.
Then again in April of 2017, Reade liked a tweet by the Huffington post that praised the former Vice President for helping men realize how important they are in the fight against sexual assault. The article commends Biden for the steps he has taken to encourage men to take responsibility in stopping assaults against women.

...

Conclusion

No, no one will be able to say with certainty whether Tara Reade’s latest allegations are legitimate or not, but the very least we can do is ensure that the public has as much information as possible to make an informed decision. That’s the purpose of this article.

With that, we leave you with two things to think about

#1) A tweet response made by Reade just weeks before coming forward with new allegations seemingly contradicting her original story, and just days before The Daily Beast reported on the Russian media becoming concerned with Joe Biden’s resurgence. As you can see, it seems as though Reade is admitting that she’s waiting for the perfect time to release her new allegations in order to hurt Joe Biden’s campaign:

And #2) A tweet response that Reade made to the parents of accused rapist Julian Assange. She called the man “a hero.”

Note: UPDATE 4/2/20: We were able to contact a longtime friend of Reade’s who wished to remain anonymous, but they said they “do not believe her allegations,” claiming she has always been one to seek attention.

We went out of our way to get Reade on the record to defend herself and also spoke to individuals close to her for years in an effort to get someone to tell us that Reade was telling the truth. Those we spoke to could not do so and in fact left us even more convinced that things don’t add up.

Background on Krassentein Brothers

Heavy.com, Krassenstein Brothers: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, Erin Laviola, Updated May 24, 2019. Ed (above at left) and Brian Krassenstein (above right in the Facebook photo), the Florida brothers who became famous on Twitter for their outspoken opposition of President Trump, have been permanently banned from the social platform.

The Krassensteins were accused of creating fake Twitter accounts and purchasing automated “bots” that could share and “like” their tweets in order to boost their own profiles. They shared the official statement that Twitter sent out on their website, the Hill Reporter:

“The Twitter Rules to apply to everyone. Operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions are strictly prohibited. Engaging in these behaviors will result in permanent suspension from the service.”

Ed and Brian Krassenstein have denied the accusations. They wrote in an op-ed on May 24, 2019 “We NEVER, and we want to make this as clear as day, ever bought or sold ANY Twitter accounts or interactions. We swear on our graves that this is 100% true.”

The Krassenstein brothers had more than 1.6 million followers between them before Twitter banned them from the site. Ed and Brian Krassenstein have been tweeting about Donald Trump and his administration since late 2016. Many of their tweets have called for his impeachment and accused him of being corrupt. They often were seen responding to the president’s tweets. They are also credited with helping to promote the hashtag “Resistance” on social media.

Here’s what you need to know.

1. Ed & Brian Krassenstein Began Tweeting About Donald Trump in Late 2016; The Brothers Say They Started Posting About the President Out of Sincere Concerns About the Administration

2. The Krassenstein Brothers Deny Paying For Bots & Have Asked Twitter to Review The Suspension

3. Federal Investigators Searched Ed & Brian Krassenstein’s Homes in 2016 After They Were Accused of Helping to Promote Scams Run By a Russian Crime Organization; The Brothers Were Never Charged With a Crime

4. Ed & Brian Krassenstein Have Operated Dozens of Websites Since the Early 2000s

5. Brian & Ed Krassenstein Are Both Married Fathers & Live in the Same Neighborhood in Fort Myers, Florida

Daily Beast, Twitter Bans #Resistance-Famous Krassenstein Brothers for Allegedly Operating Fake Accounts: GONE, Will Sommer, May 23, 2019. Ed and Brian Krassenstein are banned for life after ‘operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions,’ a Twitter spokesman said.

Twitter has permanently banned prominent anti-Trump brothers Brian and Ed Krassenstein, alleging that two of the biggest stars of #Resistance Twitter had broken the site’s rules about operating fake accounts and purchasing fake interactions with their accounts.

“The Twitter Rules apply to everyone,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. “Operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions are strictly prohibited. Engaging in these behaviors will result in permanent suspension from the service.”

The suspensions are a major loss for the Krassensteins, who had used their massive Twitter followers and ability to quickly respond to tweets from Donald Trump to make themselves internet celebrities. Ed Krassenstein had roughly 925,000 followers before he was banned, while Brian Krassenstein had more than 697,000.

The brothers appeared to be unusually good at getting attention on Twitter. While the Twitter statement doesn’t explain what the Krassensteins allegedly did to illicitly promote their accounts, “fake interactions” could engage buying bots to retweet their posts, or buying fake followers to inflate their profiles on the site.

In a statement to The Daily Beast, the Krassensteins denied breaking Twitter rules.

“Twitter claims that we manipulated our interactions through the purchase of fake accounts and fake interactions,” the Krassenstein brothers said. “We have never once acquired anything for the purpose of increasing our Twitter presence.”

The Krassensteins say they only operated secondary accounts on Twitter to monitor death threats, as well as accounts for their businesses.

“None of those accounts were ever used for manipulative purposes as Twitter claims,” the Krassensteins said in the statement.

March 27

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Daily Beast, Fox Business Ditches Trish Regan After Coronavirus ‘Impeachment Scam’ Rant, Matt Wilstein, March 27, 2020. The Fox Business host was officially let go on Friday more than two weeks after she ranted against the “coronavirus impeachment scam.”

Fox Business Network announced on Friday that it has officially “parted ways” with anchor Trish Regan following her controversial rant against what she called the “coronavirus impeachment scam” earlier this month.

“We thank her for her contributions to the network over the years and wish her continued success in her future endeavors,” the network said in a statement. “We will continue our reduced live primetime schedule for the foreseeable future in an effort to allocate staff resources to continuous breaking news coverage on the Coronavirus crisis.”

“I have enjoyed my time at FOX and now intend to focus on my family during these troubled times,” Regan said in her own statement.

Regan was previously placed on an indefinite hiatus after she delivered a surreal monologue on Monday, March 9th in which she accused Democrats and the media of perpetuating a coronavirus hoax.

With the words “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam” on the screen next to her, Regan told viewers, “We've reached a tipping point. The chorus of hate being leveled at the president is nearing a crescendo as Democrats blame him and only him for a virus that originated halfway around the world. This is yet another attempt to impeach the president.”

“Many in the liberal media using, and I mean using, coronavirus in an attempt to demonize and destroy the president,” she added.

Following what amounted to a suspension, Regan tried to pass off her situation as part of larger safety measures at Fox, tweeting, “FBN has taken prudent steps to limit staffing levels and is prioritizing its coverage during market hours. I fully support this decision — we all must to do our part to keep our colleagues safe.”

Since then she has mostly used her Twitter account to encourage private companies to help fight the pandemic and cheer on the stock market during its rare rallies.

Major 9/11 Report Analyzed

AE911Truth "Free Fall" radio show: In the Name of Engineering, Science, and Truth: Leroy Hulsey and Roland Angle on the Final WTC 7 Report, Host Andy Steele, March 27, 2020 (30 mins.). On this week's episode of 9/11 Free Fall, Dr. Leroy Hulsey of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Roland Angle of AE911Truth join host Andy Steele to discuss the release of the final report on World Trade Center Building 7 and the importance of everyone helping in their own way to share it.

Andrew Steele:

So we are all collectively at the end of a very long journey, maybe not long in the span of all of humankind, but for all of us who have been eagerly awaiting the publishing of the final report on World Trade Center 7, we are here now this week. We're going to be talking about that. For people who may be new — we always want to take them into account — Roland, can you briefly describe for our audience what this report is about.

Roland Angle:

Professor Hulsey and his team at the University of Alaska Fairbanks conducted this study of the collapse of World Trade Center 7, the 47-story building that collapsed in New York City on 9/11, because there had been significant questions raised about the government-issued report on that collapse, which was authored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

And there was just a lot of research that indicated that the conclusions that NIST came to — that the building was brought down by normal office fires — was highly suspect. And so Professor Hulsey and the University of Alaska agreed at our request, to conduct a full, thorough engineering study of the collapse and determine just how valid the NIST report was. And if not, what other mechanism might have caused the collapse of the building.

So that's the purpose of the study. And I would like to say that I've worked with Professor Hulsey and other engineers as this report has been developed, and I can say that it is a very thorough and exact study of what happened that day.

Dr. Hulsey, I know you have taped presentations out there that go into a lot of detail about this. But just briefly for our audience, as we maneuver into talking about the report overall, can you tell us about some of the many years' processes that were involved in putting this report together?

Leroy Hulsey:

So if it's going to come down through some form of natural phenomenon, it's likely not to come straight down. That was looked at very carefully at the beginning. We established the methodology to look at every little detail that might impact what might have occurred to this building as it might be coming down.

And so we looked at, in detail, floors 12 and 13, as NIST did, and we examined numbers of things about that. We also, at the same time, were looking at, without consideration from NIST, what might have happened under a heated-up floor system, walls, columns, etc., etc. And we determined that the modeling was essential in determining how this building is going to respond.

What we did is put together a virtual model of the building to virtually simulate a failure and then [analyze] what kind of failures needed to happen to get what you see in the videos that actually occurred. That's kind of a snapshot overview.

Andrew Steele:

Now again, because our time is brief, can you just talk about some of the conclusions that you had reached that you talked about last September.

Leroy Hulsey:

Yeah, well the first one was that it became very clear early on that fire did not bring this building down. So that's the first thing. And when I took this on, I said, "I might not be able to come up with the reason it came down, but I could certainly tell you what didn't happen." And, well, that didn't happen.

The second thing we began to look at is how the building actually deformed if it was subjected to all this heat. And it became pretty clear pretty quickly that the exterior part of this building was not that stiff. So when you heat up something, imagine that it's going to elongate with respect to some point. And that point is where it's the stiffest. That's not on the outside of the building; it's closer to the inner core, where the elevator shafts were.

That being said, the response going around, the big controversy, which was column 79, and the bearing plates, and the A2001 girder coming into it led to a whole different set of findings than they used as an argument that brought this building down. And furthermore, when you go up and take a look at the system, the other conclusion we came to was that the system up near the top, near the penthouse, that series of columns didn't fail down below, they failed up around Floor 45 — in that neighborhood, which there was no fires up there.

So that was a further finding that led us to be sure that what we were saying is true. Anyway, that's kind of a snapshot....

Andrew Steele:

Absolutely. And I love the fact that you point that out — the fact that we have NIST telling us one thing, Dr. Hulsey and the University of Alaska Fairbanks telling us another. You have two very different outcomes of this analysis. I will step back further and say for myself that from one side, you have the input data hidden away under this guise of public safety: We have to preserve public safety by not making the input data available to the general public, even though engineers like yourselves need that input data — if you believe the official story — to make the general public more safe. Because if buildings can just collapse from random office fires, good God, we're all in danger — anybody who works in a major city.

But this is only phase one of our getting the word out. Again, the corporate media have never been the best friend of 9/11 Truth. Any progress we've made has been because of ourselves. So the next step is to be doing the work to get this out in front of as many people — especially engineering professionals —as possible.

Our volunteers are getting ready for the long fight. They're going to be doing their work. They're fighting those professors on one team. They're going to be calling those professors on another team. And we're going to be having Project Due Diligence doing the proper outreach to those people as well, to carry on those discussions, to get presentations.

This is going to be a full-on assault against the official story of Building 7. And this report is going to be the big Sherman Tank driving through the resistance. Because, again, it's very hard to challenge. I mean, common sense, when you first look at the building coming down, is a very big weapon. But when you actually have the science and everything laid out in this volume, it's very hard to get around it.

Roland, I want to hear from you though. I know what our supporters can do. I've got my own views. But as a board member, what in your view, can our supporters do to help us out in promoting the results of the study?

Roland Angle:

I think if people will look at the results of the study. It's a 115-page document, and I think it's very well laid out. It's very clearly stated. I think that most people can actually follow it. Now, I know it's asking a lot for people to look through 115-page technical report, but this is an issue that is part of a story that has defined the whole era that we're living in.

People have asked in the past, "What good does it do to go back and study this?" And I think we need to understand that the study points out the fact that the evidence that was examined and the conclusion that we came to as a result of that study, was seriously flawed. Therefore, we have been off on a deviant trip. And we need to go back to that information and restudy it and come to different conclusions about what was the cause of that event.

And that event is so important from a professional standpoint alone, for us as engineers. We cannot allow information that is not correct to circulate throughout our profession. It will undermine the foundation of our profession, and we will lose all credibility—and we should lose all credibility if we can't explain why a failure like this actually occurred.

So, what people can do is spread this information as best they can. Point to it, talk about it, research it, look at the different aspects of it, and encourage, especially their engineering friends and colleagues, to do the same.

We will reach a tipping point. And I'm convinced that, from my experience—and our experience as engineers who have been taking this information out into the engineering community—that engineers, like it or not, are playing a very central role in this whole event, because we are the experts.

The public is relying upon us to tell them what we know to be true about what happened. What I'm finding is that, wherever we go, when we present our information to the engineering community, they stand behind us 100% and agree that the NIST report is flawed and we need a new investigation.

Andrew Steele:

As a layman sitting on the outside—I mean, I work here at AE, but I'm not a scientist or engineer like you guys are—it just seems to me that so much work has been done in this report and in all of the work previous on World Trade Center Seven. Now that this report is out, what else can be done to make the case? I think I asked Richard Gage one time this on the show, but I want to hear it from you guys as the engineers here, starting with Roland, is there anything further that could be done on World Trade Center 7 to point to the fact that we're not getting the full story of what happened that day?

Roland Angle:

That's a very good question. I think the information is clear now. I'm satisfied that the information that we have produced, including this report, over the last 15 years, proves without a doubt that the buildings were brought down by controlled demolition. That information is presented to the public most often as some kind of a conspiracy theory [Emphasis added].

However, we're progressing from an engineering standpoint of, in this case, constructing a virtual model, subjecting it to the fires, looking at the observed collapse, and coming to a reasoned, scientific conclusion about what caused that collapse. So we've got to take that information now out to the universities. We're going to encourage the universities to study both reports. They have students who are routinely assigned to solve forensic problems that are presented to them in this field. And we're going to ask that the universities take up such studies.

They can come down only in three ways. They can say that the NIST report is valid and they stand behind it. They can say that the University of Alaska study is valid and they stand behind it. Or they might come up with some third hypothesis or some theory as to why the building came down.

But I think it's very important that this discussion take place in the engineering community, that the public be aware that this discussion is going on, that the public encourage the engineering community in every way possible to take up this study, and that people continue to assist us by funding us to go out to the engineering community.

So far we've made 22 presentations to chapters of professional organizations like the American Society of Civil Engineers and the National Society of Professional Engineers, and to various universities. We've gone to conferences. We're getting a great response and a lot of interest.

And that all takes money. Money is a very important aspect of this, and we have only been able to accomplish this with the support of our many supporters who have contributed the money that has been necessary for us to pay for this study and to pay for our efforts with due diligence, and our other efforts to publicize this issue.

We are a grassroots organization. We're a nonprofit. We don't get any money from any special interest. We are not endorsing any products. We are simply in it for the benefit of the reputation of the engineering community and the responsibility that we have to the general public.

So, everybody has a role to play. Wherever they fit into that model, they should play their part. We encourage everyone to take this up as a matter of great, overwhelming importance to our society.

March 26

Washington Post, Fact checker: Trump’s faux facts on Fox News, Glenn Kessler and Salvador Rizzo, March 26, 2020. The president was all over the network, but he often got his facts about the pandemic wrong. Here's a guide to his spin.

Washington Post, Trump spent 25 percent of his time at Wednesday’s briefing on self-congratulation and placing blame, Aaron Blake, March 26, 2020. He often devotes considerable time to playing up his alleged successes and the obstacles that stand in his way. That was particularly the case Wednesday.

Washington Post, Opinion: Local journalism needs a coronavirus stimulus plan, too, Margaret Sullivan, right,March 26, 2020. In an margaret sullivan 2015 photo apocalyptic advertising downturn, ideas that would have been unthinkable weeks ago deserve immediate consideration.

Media readership and viewership is soaring as citizens seek life-or-death information about the coronavirus: Where to get tested? Does my hospital have enough ventilators? Is it safe to go outside?

But the accompanying economic decline is killing off advertising — for restaurants, cars, travel, entertainment — and other support that has kept many news organizations going.

For some, the events of the past few weeks have already proved too much for their fragile existence. Alternative weeklies have stopped printing. Local dailies are laying off staff at already decimated newsrooms. Many others, including digital-only newsrooms, are hanging on by a thread.

It’s happening around the world: Newspapers in Australia and Britain announced in the past few days that they were going out of business or suspending print publication.

HuffPost, Alex Jones Loses Sandy Hook Court Appeal, Must Now Pay Nearly $150,000 In Legal Fees, Sebastian Murdock, March 26, 2020. The Infowars host is being sued by nine people whose family members were killed in the shooting at the Connecticut elementary school.

Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist and repeated loser of court battles, was ordered Wednesday to pay more than $20,000 in attorney fees after losing another appeal in a defamation case related to the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He now owes nearly $150,000 in legal fees before he even faces a jury.

The Texas Court of Appeals sided with Sandy Hook father Neil Heslin, who for years has been attacked by conspiracy theorists who falsely claim the school shooting in which 20 children and six adults were killed never happened.

Heslin’s lawsuit accuses Jones and his website, Infowars, of defamation after Jones claimed the parents of the dead children were “crisis actors” who helped stage the shooting. Jones is now being sued by nine family members of people who died in the shooting.

Jones’ most recent appeal to dismiss Heslin’s lawsuit was found to be “frivolous,” the court ruled Wednesday. Jones was ordered to pay $22,250 in attorney fees.

Jones was also ordered to pay approximately $25,000 in October after a court sanctioned him. And in December, he was ordered to pay $100,000 in legal fees after a Texas judge ruled his defense team “intentionally disregarded” an earlier order to produce witnesses.

Attorney Mark Bankston, who is representing Heslin and other families suing Jones, told HuffPost in a statement that the latest victory for his client spells the end for Jones.

“It is rare to see a legal defense so incompetent and disrespectful to the rule of law that it causes a defendant to rack up $150,000 in fines during preliminary motions before even reaching trial,” Bankston said. “These fines are only the beginning. A far greater reckoning awaits Mr. Jones.”

Former allies have turned against Jones during his legal battle. Rob Jacobson, a former Infowars editor, testified in a deposition that staff laughed at him when he warned them against spreading lies about Sandy Hook.

“I told [Jones] straight to his face: ‘They’re going to come after you for Sandy Hook. This is really bad,’” Jacobson said. “He just stared at me like a deer in the headlights, he had nothing to say. And we just went on our way.”

Paul Watson, Jones’ longtime friend and a contributor to Infowars, testified in December that he also warned Jones to leave the parents alone, but was largely ignored.

Jones was most recently in the news after he was caught peddling a toothpaste he falsely claimed could kill the deadly coronavirus.

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Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, WTC 7 Not Destroyed by Fire, Concludes Final University of Alaska Fairbanks Report, AE911 Truth, March 25, 2020. The destruction of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 in New York City late in the afternoon of September 11, 2001, was not a result of fires, according to the much-anticipated final report issued today by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF).

The UAF team’s findings, which were the result of a four-year computer modeling study of the tower’s collapse, contradict those of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which concluded in a 2008 report that WTC 7 was the first tall building ever to collapse primarily due to fire.

“Our study found that the fires in WTC 7 could not have caused the observed collapse,” said Professor Leroy Hulsey, right, the study’s principal investigator. “The only way it could have fallen in the observed manner is by the near-simultaneous failure of every column.”
leroy hulseyIMG 2188 Small “The only way it could have fallen in the observed manner is by the near-simultaneous failure of every column.” — Professor Leroy Hulsey

The four-year study was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth), a nonprofit organization representing more than 3,000 architects and engineers who have signed the organization’s petition calling for a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11.

“We are proud to have supported the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Professor Leroy Hulsey in conducting a genuinely scientific study into the reasons for this building’s collapse,” said Richard Gage, president and founder of AE911Truth. “It is now incumbent upon the building community, the media, and government officials to reckon with the implications of these findings and launch a new full-scale investigation.”

AE911Truth and its allies among the 9/11 victims’ families will now use the findings in the report as part of a formal “request for correction” that the group plans to submit to NIST in the coming days. “The indisputable errors documented in our request for correction will give NIST no way out of correcting its deeply flawed report and reversing its conclusion that fires were the cause of the collapse,” said Gage.

“It is now incumbent upon the building community, the media, and government officials to reckon with the implications of these findings and launch a new full-scale investigation.” — Richard Gage, AIA

The final report, entitled A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7 – Final Report, includes clarifications and supplemental text based on public comments submitted in response to a draft report released by UAF and AE911Truth on September 3, 2019.

The UAF team’s final report is the result of an extensive four-year computer modeling effort that was followed by a robust peer review process. The peer review included dozens of public comments as well as external review by two independent experts, Dr. Gregory Szuladzinski of Analytical Service Company, a leading expert in structural mechanics and finite element modeling, and Dr. Robert Korol, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University and a fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering.

richard gage cspan interview “I am grateful to everyone who supported or participated in this study in any way,” said Professor Hulsey. “We hope that our findings will be carefully looked at by the building community and spur further investigation into how this building came down on that tragic day.”

The Hulsey report and supporting materials can be found on UAF’s Institute of Northern Engineering website and on the AE911Truth website .

Richard Gage (shown at left on one of the most downloaded C-SPAN program in its history) and civil engineer Roland Angle held a live virtual presentation on March 26, 2020 to outline the findings contained in the final report. Please tune in or watch the archived presentation here .

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March 24

New York Times, Local News Outlets Dealt a Crippling Blow by Biggest of Stories, Tiffany Hsu and Marc Tracy, March 24, 2020 (print ed.). Weekly papers and small dailies across America are facing peril as the coronavirus cuts off ads and live events.

Alternative weeklies and daily papers in small and midsize cities across the United States were already suffering because of the recession last decade, the migration of readers from print to online and the decline of the advertising business. Since 2004, roughly one-fourth of American newspapers — more than 2,000 — have been lost to mergers or shutdowns, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina. Most were weeklies.

The arrival of the coronavirus shook the industry’s already weakened economic foundation. As ad revenue and the money generated by events sponsored by small publications started to evaporate, many papers have canceled print editions, laid off workers or asked readers for donations.

Among those affected: Metro Weekly, a magazine about gay issues in Washington, D.C.; First Touch, a soccer publication in New York; and Gaming Today, a gambling newspaper in Las Vegas.

Charleston City Paper, in South Carolina, described the outbreak as a “storm of a disease.” Pittsburgh City Paper, using a local insult, referred to the crisis as a “jagoff.” Submerge Magazine in Sacramento wrote that the coronavirus “is poised to decimate” the publication. Indy Week in Durham, N.C., likened it to an earthquake that has forced the paper to face “the prospect of weeks or months deep in the red.”

Washington Post, U.S. news publishers band together to urge China not to expel their journalists, Paul Farhi, March 24, 2020. An unusual full-page ad in The Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal called for the need of “probing, accurate, on-the-ground reporting” during the coronavirus crisis.

Washington Post, U.S. combats martial law conspiracy theories as the National Guard assists in coronavirus response, Dan Lamothe, March 24, 2020. With the expected deployment of tens of thousands of National Guardsmen to help with the coronavirus outbreak, the Defense Department finds itself trying to stamp out conspiracy theories that the United States will adopt martial law.

Washington Post, Prime members first: Amazon is ranking customers and ramping up hiring to address coronavirus demand, Jay Greene, March 24, 2020. The retailer's inability to deliver household staples such as toilet paper and bleach to many customers has led the company to reduce sales of nonessential items and prioritize shipping to members of its $119 a year Prime service.

Amazon has added a new measure to try to triage its flood of orders and shortage of goods during the coronavirus pandemic: prioritizing its $119-a-year Prime members.

Now, the company is offering delayed delivery times for non-members of Prime on many nonessential items that are available — such as hair dryers, Tic Tac candies and pill pockets to help dogs take medicine.

The move follows weeks of inability to stock and ship household staples — ranging from toilet paper to hand sanitizer to bleach — at a time when shoppers are more and more reliant on Amazon while they are staying at home to prevent the spread of the virus.

Amazon has said it will hire 100,000 workers, limit shipments to its warehouses from its third-party sellers, and restrict orders of “lower-priority shipments” to customers in France and Italy, where the outbreak is particularly acute.

March 21

Palmer Report, Opinion: Have we finally reached the breaking point? Bill Palmer, March 21, 2020. CNN host John King used his show yesterday to curse at Donald Trump for his dishonest and embarrassing performance during his latest coronavirus press briefing. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow used her show last night to call on her own network to stop airing Trump’s press briefings live, due to the harm they’re doing. Former FBI Assistant Director and frequent MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi also called for an end to live airings of Trump’s briefings.

For the major media outlets, there are few things more sacred than White House press briefings. They get to send people to ask the President of the United States, or the President’s representatives, direct questions on live national television. These briefings are a farce in the Trump era. But back when we had real Presidents, the briefings were an institution. Certain questions could make or break presidential administrations.

For some of the biggest faces on cable news to now be calling for their own networks to pull the plug on White House briefings, it’s a big deal. More specifically, pulling the plug on live Presidential press briefings, during a time of crisis, is nothing short of surreal.

Yet there’s a decent chance that when Donald Trump holds his next coronavirus press briefing, whether it be today or on Monday, MSNBC and CNN won’t carry it. These networks face a lot of pressure to air Presidential press briefings. Now they’re publicly facing pressure from within their own upper ranks to pull the plug. Have we finally reached the breaking point where cable news is fully saying no to broadcasting Trump live?

New York Times, Opinion: Call Trump’s News Conferences What They Are: Propaganda, Jennifer Senior, March 21, 2020. Then contrast them with the leadership shown by Andrew Cuomo, Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel.

In a time of global emergency, we need calm, directness and, above all, hard facts. Only the opposite is on offer from the Trump White House. It is therefore time to call the president’s news conferences for what they are: propaganda.

We may as well be watching newsreels approved by the Soviet Politburo. We’re witnessing the falsification of history in real time. When Donald Trump, under the guise of social distancing, told the White House press corps on Thursday that he ought to get rid of 75 to 80 percent of them — reserving the privilege only for those he liked — it may have been chilling, but it wasn’t surprising. He wants to thin out their ranks until there’s only Pravda in the room.

March 20

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Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump somehow managed to have his worst press conference yet today, Bill Palmer, March 20, 2020. Remember all those terrible, embarrassing, disinformational, utterly pathetic press conferences that Donald Trump has put on over the past week?

We can now look back on those as the good old days. Today, Trump decided to show us how he really feels about being stuck as President of the United States during a crisis of his own making, and let’s just say that… well, we’re not even sure what to say.

At one point Trump was handed an opportunity to score the easiest of points, when NBC News reporter Peter Alexander asked him what he would say to Americans who are afraid about the coronavirus crisis. All Trump had to do was say something like “You’ll be fine if you follow the precautions” or even just “Don’t be scared.” No one was expecting him to bust out an FDR-level “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

But even with the bar set so low for Donald Trump, he still couldn’t clear it. In fact he didn’t want to.

When asked what he would say to Americans who are afraid, Trump’s response was “I’d say you’re a terrible reporter.” No really, the President of the United States said that. To a reporter. During a televised press conference. In the midst of a pandemic that’s already killed hundreds of Americans.

This isn’t a guy who’s trying to win reelection. This isn’t a guy who’s even focused on trying to survive this crisis. This is a guy who doesn’t think he has any chance of a good outcome for himself, so he’s taking out his frustrations on anyone he can.

With his answer today, he didn’t just tell a respected reporter to go screw himself. He told all Americans to go screw themselves. It’s as if he now expects to lose in November, and he’s taking out his frustrations on the American people because they’re going to vote him out.

March 19

Media News

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Donald Trump speech with change from "Corona" to "Chinese (Jabin Botsford photo for Washington Post, March 19, 2020).

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump caught changing his press conference notes to make them more racist, Bill Palmer, March 19, 2020. Donald Trump didn’t start referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese Virus” until everyone figured out that he was wrong about it being a hoax, and he needed a racist stunt in order to keep his base in line. It turns out Trump is going to even greater lengths to push this racist trope than we thought.

Washington Post photographer Jabin Botsford captured this remarkable photo of Donald Trump’s press conference notes today, which reveals that Trump’s handlers told him to say “Corona Virus” but he crossed out “Corona” and replaced it with “Chinese.”

Moon of Alabama, False Claims About The Novel Coronavirus And How To Debunk Them, b, March 19, 2020. Today China reported zero new domestic cases of novel coronavirus infections. It has beaten the epidemic just as we predicted early on. Other countries with still expanding epidemics will have to adopt all the measures China has taken to also win the fight.

Our extensive reporting about the novel cornonavirus has attracted many new commentators to this site. Unfortunately some of these, as well as some of the regulars, continue to spread disinformation and myths about the current pandemic and its causes.

To keep some level of quality at this site requires an aggressive countering of such comments. But our capacity to do so is limited. We do delete comments that are nonsensical or have been debunked and we do block people who insist to post or repost nonsense. But there are now many more comments per day than we can read. We therefore have to ask other commentators to counter the bad false ones.

March 18

Washington Examiner, Trump pleads with Syria to free American journalist Austin Tice amid coronavirus pandemic, Caitlin Yilek, March 19, 2020. President Trump urged Syria to release American journalist and veteran U.S. Marine Corps officer, Austin Tice, right, who is believed to be held hostage in the country.

austin tice Custom “Syria, please work with us. We would appreciate you letting him out,” the president said at the White House coronavirus task force’s daily briefing on Thursday.

Trump later clarified that he was not confirming that Tice is still alive.

"We’re trying to find that out," he said. “If he is alive, we would like very much to get him back.”

Tice, 38, disappeared in Syria in 2012 while he was working as a freelance journalist. He illegally entered Syria to report on the civil war, which was then in its second year.

He intended to leave in August 2012 but was detained at a checkpoint. Five weeks later, a short video titled “Austin Tice still alive” was posted on a Syrian pro-government website. The video showed him blindfolded in a rocky mountainside being forced to recite a prayer Muslims say before dying. He then said in English, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.”

The State Department said after his capture that it believed Tice was in the custody of the Syrian government, which has not admitted to imprisoning him.

Trump also announced Lebanese-American Amer Fakhoury, who has been detained in Lebanon since September, had been released.

Fakhoury, who has stage 4 cancer, was arrested after a Hezbollah-linked publication alleged that he tortured people imprisoned by the South Lebanon Army, a majority-Christian militia group backed by Israel in its fight against Hezbollah and Palestinian militias during the 1980s and 1990s. He was charged with murder, kidnapping, and the torture of prisoners at Khiam detention center.

Fakhoury’s lawyer said the charges were bogus.

“Amer’s only crime is that he is a United States citizen, which is making the Lebanese government hold him hostage to gain leverage over the United States," Celine Atallah, Fakhoury’s lawyer said. "This is an egregious act of criminality by them.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Fakhoury will receive urgent medical treatment.

“His return comes as a relief to those who have followed the case with grave concern,” Pompeo said in a statement. “We are relieved to be able to welcome him back home.”

New York Magazine, Playboy Magazine Is Closing Down, Probably for Good, Christopher Bonanos, March 18, 2020. No more print edition. Playboy has announced that it’s closing down its flagship magazine for the rest of 2020.

It seems unlikely, given the wording of the announcement and the state of print magazine-making, that it will ever return. It’s not a surprise, exactly — its circulation and advertising drooped long ago, accelerating as the nudie pictures for which it was celebrated became available everywhere for free.

Hugh Marston Hefner, its founder/editor/latter-day reality-show star/loungewear enthusiast, died in 2017, as his faded empire contracted around him, and one got the sense that the magazine was kept going partly because nobody wanted Hef to outlive it.

Hard to imagine it now, but Playboy once felt forward-thinking and modern. Founded in 1953, it was a significant force in the loosening of anti-obscenity laws regarding the press.

By the early 1960s, it was a huge success, soon expanding to open its namesake clubs all over the world. It also moved into TV with Playboy’s Penthouse (later Playboy After Dark), a late-night talk show of sorts starring Hefner and an array of celebrity guests. The magazine peaked in the early 1970s at a circulation, breathtaking to see now, of 5.6 million copies a month. The magazine’s licensing operation since then has put the signature rabbit logo on cocktail glasses, clothes, car accessories, and far more. Plus, of course, online porn.

March 17

New York Times, The World of Books Braces for a Newly Ominous Future, Alexandra Alter, March 16, 2020. Publishers, bookstores and authors are struggling to confront and limit the financial fallout from the unfolding coronavirus crisis.

In these isolated times, many people are inside reading, but the book business, like others, is bracing for catastrophe. Major literary festivals and fairs around the world have been canceled. Public libraries have closed. Author tours, signings and bookstore appearances have been scrapped.

As the severity of the coronavirus outbreak continues to intensify, authors, publishers and booksellers are struggling to confront and limit the financial fallout. Many fear the worst is yet to come, including more store closures and potential disruptions to warehouse and distribution centers, as well as possible paper shortages and a decline in printing capacity.

“There’s no question we’re going to see a drop in sales,” said Dennis Johnson, co-publisher of the Brooklyn-based independent press Melville House, who has directed staff to work from home. “It’s unprecedented. Nobody knows what to do except hoard Purell.”

The Sydney Writers’ Festival, which typically draws an audience of 80,000 and was scheduled to begin on April 27, was called off this week, following cancellations of major book fairs in England, France, Germany and Italy. In the United States, The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Tucson Festival of Books, the Virginia Festival of the Book and The Believer Festival in Las Vegas were among the many shuttered events, which draw tens of thousands of readers and can be a critical sales venue for authors and publishers.

On Monday, PEN America announced that it was calling off its World Voices Festival, which was set to take place in early May in New York, with planned appearances by Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Jenny Slate, Elif Shafak and others.

BookExpo, a pivotal annual trade show for publishers, booksellers and librarians, is currently still scheduled to take place at the end of May at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York, according to the event’s organizer, Reed Exhibitions. “We remain optimistic that we can take the appropriate measures to see ourselves on the other side of this by the end of May and carry on as planned,” BookExpo’s director said in a statement on its website. “That being said, we will continue to follow guidelines and precautions suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

The potential long-term effects for book retailers are sobering. Many in the industry are worried that independent bookstores will be devastated as local and state officials mandate social distancing and order some businesses to temporarily close.

March 16

New York Times, Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now, Ben Smith, March 16, 2020. Mr. Cuomo has emerged as the executive best suited for the coronavirus crisis, our columnist writes.

andrew cuomo “A crisis shows you a person’s soul,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, right, mused during a conference call with reporters on Sunday. “It shows you what they’re made of. The weaknesses explode and the strengths are, uh, emboldened.”

He paused. He’d forgotten, perhaps, whom he was talking about and seemed to have strayed to talking about himself. Then, he returned to the subject at hand, introducing the Westchester County executive: “And, uh, George Latimer has really stepped up.”

Mr. Cuomo has governed New York for more than nine years without inspiring much love. He wins elections by grinding opponents into dust before they can make it to the ballot box. He governs by transaction, not inspiration, as a dispenser of favors and destroyer of insurgents’ dreams, the purest master of the machine since Lyndon Johnson in his prime.

He has passed marriage equality, cut deals with Republicans, meddled incessantly in the running of the subway system. The people most passionate about politics these days — the New Left and the Trump-led right — dislike him because he governs as both a social liberal and a friend of business. Many moderate and liberal politicians, who ought in theory to like Mr. Cuomo, simply fear him.

And yet Mr. Cuomo has emerged as the executive best suited for the coronavirus crisis, as President Trump flails and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wrestles haltingly with a crucial decision and then heads to the gym.

The governor has been the clearest and most decisive of the three, relentless behind the scenes and open about the risks. He has publicly worried over his daughters and his 88-year-old mother, and put state prisoners to work making hand sanitizer. He’s alternated between sweetness and confrontation with Mr. Trump, as he would with a wayward upstate legislator.

Even many of his critics say the very qualities that make him abrasive in ordinary interactions are serving him well now.

The hallmarks of crisis management are clear communication and utter decisiveness. And Mr. Cuomo seems to be one of handful of governors, including Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Democrat, who have stepped into a vacuum to demonstrate those qualities.

Washington Post, Coronavirus exposes Internet inequality among U.S. students as schools close their doors, Tony Romm, March 16, 2020. Millions of Americans lack Web access, a digital divide that complicates educators’ efforts to continue instruction during a health crisis.

Every year, Anthony Angelini surveys his seventh-grade students at New Oxford Middle School in rural Pennsylvania, asking whether they have access to a computer and a reliable way to get online.

And every year, some portion of them say they don't. “That number is significant when you're talking about kids,” Angelini said.

But his annual query has taken on new urgency in recent days, as schools around the country shut their doors in response to the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak. While some are migrating their daily lessons and homework assignments onto the Web, many administrators and teachers lack that digital luxury — illustrating how a public health crisis has brought to light a technological one.

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump’s rage at the media takes a dangerous new turn, Greg Sargent, March 16, 2020. It’s bad enough that President Trump has relentlessly minimized the coronavirus threat for nakedly political reasons, disastrously hampering the federal government response to the President Donald Trump official crisis, with untold consequences to come.

Determined not to be outdone by his own malice and depravity, Trump is taking new steps that threaten to make all of it worse. He’s telling millions of Americans to entirely shut out any and all correctives to his falsehoods. He’s insisting they must plug their ears to any criticism designed to hold his government accountable for the failures we’re seeing, even though such criticism could nudge the response in a more constructive direction.

Trump is now raging at the media for reporting on his botched claims about Google’s plans for a new website to steer people to testing options. Trump dramatically overpromised in this regard, forcing Google to scale down the expectations he had created.

Washington Post, On Fox News, suddenly a very different tune about the coronavirus, Paul Farhi and Sarah Ellison, March 16, 2020. 'This is impeachment all over again': How Fox is reacting to the coronavirus outbreak.

For weeks, some of Fox News’s most popular hosts downplayed the threat of the coronavirus, characterizing it as a conspiracy by media organizations and Democrats to undermine President Trump.

Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham accused the news media of whipping up “mass hysteria” and being “panic pushers.” Fox Business host Trish Regan called the alleged media-Democratic alliance “yet another attempt to impeach the president.”

But that was then.

With Trump’s declaration on Friday that the virus constitutes a national emergency, the tone on Fox News has quickly shifted.

On his program on Friday, Hannity — the most watched figure on cable news — lauded the president’s handling of what the host is now, belatedly, referring to as a “crisis.”

“Tonight, we are witnessing what will be a massive paradigm shift in the future of disease control and prevention,” he said. “A bold, new precedent is being set, the world will once again benefit greatly from America’s leadership. . . . The federal government, state governments, private businesses, top hospitals all coming together, under the president’s leadership, to stem the tide of the coronavirus.”

In all, it has been a complicated dance for a network whose hosts are among Trump’s most ardent boosters and defenders — an increasingly challenging position to take as the crisis grew in magnitude. Trump, meanwhile, has long looked to Fox News and its personalities for guidance and approval, a dynamic that may have been pivotal this week after host Tucker Carlson reportedly visited with the president in person to urge him to take the coronavirus seriously.

Until then, Trump’s allies on Fox News were inclined to take the same stance that the president himself promoted for several weeks — that this coronavirus that had sickened and killed thousands of people in China was no worse a threat than the seasonal flu.

Just a week ago, Hannity shrugged at the pandemic. “So far in the United States, there’s been around 30 deaths, most of which came from one nursing home in the state of Washington,” he said last Tuesday. “Healthy people, generally, 99 percent recover very fast, even if they contract it.”

By way of comparison, he added: “Twenty-six people were shot in Chicago alone over the weekend. I doubt you heard about it. You notice there’s no widespread hysteria about violence in Chicago. And this has gone on for years and years. By the way, Democratic-run cities, we see a lot of that.”

From February: Conservative pundits blame a grab bag of supposed villains amid the coronavirus outbreak

Ingraham, whose program follows Hannity’s, also seems to have had a fast-dawning recognition that the social and economic dislocation of the virus was more than just a Democratic talking point wielded against the president.

In late February, Ingraham called Democrats the “pandemic party” and displayed photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) alongside enlarged images of coronavirus molecules. “How sick that these people seem almost happiest when Americans are hurting,” she said.

March 13

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Media Matters, Opinion: Fox puts Trish Regan’s Fox Business show on hiatus after deranged coronavirus monologue, John Whitehouse, March 13, 2020. Days after Regan called coronavirus a scam, Fox said that her show is going on hiatus to make room for more coverage of the pandemic.

On Monday, March 9, Trish Regan opened her Fox Business show by complaining of the “Coronavirus impeachment scam.” Her deranged monologue received widespread ridicule after a tweet by Media Matters’ Andrew Lawrence that has been viewed millions of times.

On Friday, March 13, Bloomberg News reported that Regan’s 8 p.m. show, Trish Regan Primetime, was being put on hiatus.

“Fox Business’s prime-time programs Trish Regan Primetime and Kennedy will both be on hiatus until further notice,” Fox said a statement. “Due to the demands of the evolving pandemic crisis coverage, we are deploying all resources from both shows for staffing needs during critical market hours. Fox Business will run long form programming in prime time for the foreseeable future.”

I want to let everyone know that Trish Regan Primetime is now on hiatus. FBN has taken prudent steps to limit staffing levels and is prioritizing its coverage during market hours. I fully support this decision — we all must to do our part to keep our colleagues safe. #TrishRegan

Fox Business’s Kennedy, hosted by Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery, was also put on hiatus.

Before this monologue calling a deadly global pandemic a “scam,” Regan was known for over-the-top pro-Trump rhetoric and for being the first interview that top Trump adviser Stephen Miller gave after his emails revealed an affinity for racist rhetoric and white nationalist conspiracy theories.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea here, there is plenty of awful coronavirus coverage on Fox that has not led to any consequences.

March 12

Media / Civil Rights News

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Washington Post, Chelsea Manning is released from jail, Rachel Weiner, March 12, 2020. A federal judge ruled that the testimony of the former Army private was no longer needed in the investigation of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Chelsea Manning, shown in a 2018 file photo, was released from jail Thursday after a federal judge announced that the grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been disbanded. “Ms. Manning’s appearance before the grand jury is no longer needed,” federal judge Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia wrote. “Her detention no longer serves any coercive purpose.”

Manning had been detained in the Alexandria Detention Center for 11 months in civil contempt for her refusal to testify. The judge’s order comes a day after the former Army private attempted suicide in jail. Authorities said they stepped in before serious harm occurred.

In 2010, while serving as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning shared with WikiLeaks thousands of classified State and Defense Department cables. She was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison but was released by President Barack Obama after seven years.

Manning is still liable for $256,000 in fines levied by the judge for her refusal to testify.

Assange is now facing charges in Alexandria under the Espionage Act. Prosecutors contend that by soliciting the information from julian assange facts wikileaks Custom Manning and helping her crack a password, he went beyond the role of a journalist or publisher in disseminating the classified information.

Assange is fighting extradition from the United Kingdom to Alexandria, arguing the case against him is politically motivated.

Hacker Jeremy Hammond, who was also being held in civil contempt for refusing to testify before the WikiLeaks grand jury, was also ordered released by Trenga after five months of civil contempt. But he is still serving a 10-year prison sentence for cyberattacks on various government agencies and businesses.

Trenga’s order rendered moot the arguments by Hammond and Manning that they could never be coerced into testifying. In Alexandria, grand jurors generally serve six to 18 months. The judge did not explain his reasons for ending this grand jury now beyond saying its “business” has “concluded.”

Washington Post, Facebook, Twitter suspend Russian-linked operation targeting African Americans on social media, Tony Romm and Craig Timberg, March 12, 2020. Facebook and Twitter have disabled a sophisticated Russian-linked operation designed to stoke racial tensions among African Americans in the United States, the companies announced Thursday, raising fresh alarms about Kremlin interference ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The malicious campaign relied on a mix of fake accounts and real people, who lived in Ghana and Nigeria, some of whom appear to have been duped into thinking they were aiding a nongovernmental organization. Instead, they helped amplify a network of inauthentic accounts, pages and groups on Facebook and Twitter that shared polarizing content around social issues including race and civil rights, the tech giants said.

None of the so-called coordinated, inauthentic activity focused on the 2020 election or sought to “promote or denigrate political candidates,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of security policy at Facebook. But Facebook and Twitter linked the operation to some of the same Russian actors that employed similar tactics four years ago to spread falsehoods during the 2016 presidential race.

March 10

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Palmer Report, Opinion: What are Donald Trump and Jill Stein plotting now? Bill Palmer, March 10, 2020. You remember Jill Stein. She ran for president in 2016 as a supposed far left candidate, but all she did was help hand the election to Donald Trump. She was also photographed having dinner with

Vladimir Putin in Moscow just before she entered the 2016 race, so go figure.

Anyway, Jill Stein posted a lie-filled tweet about Joe Biden yesterday, and guess who retweeted it this morning?

That’s right, Donald Trump is now retweeting Jill Stein’s lies (below) about Joe Biden. Everything she’s said here can be easily disproven. Joe Biden did an interview on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show just last night, and Biden has done rallies in multiple states over the past few days.

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Washington Post, Fact Checker Analysis, Unraveling three manipulated videos about Joe Biden, Glenn Kessler, March 10, 2020. For the first time, Twitter applied its new “manipulated media” label — and the Trump campaign is not happy about it.

White House social media director Dan Scavino posted the video, and it was later retweeted by President Trump. (He also quote tweeted the video and retweeted Scavino’s complaint that the video was not manipulated.) The video suggested that Biden had said in a rally, “Excuse me. We can only reelect President Trump.”

But despite the protests of the Trump campaign, this clearly is manipulated video. Last year, the Fact Checker unveiled our guide to manipulated video, which includes three broad categories: Some video is taken out of context; other content is deceptively edited; or, in the worst instances, deliberately altered.

The Trump tweet is an example of “Missing Context”: The video is unaltered, but the way it is presented to the viewer lacks or misstates the context in which events occurred. In this specific case, this is an example of what we labeled as “isolation” — a brief clip from a longer video to create a false narrative that does not reflect the event as it occurred.

The Trump campaign ended the clip before Biden completed his full sentence: “Excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s gotta be a positive campaign.”

In other words, Biden was calling for Democratic Party unity, not the reelection of Trump. But the video — eagerly shared by supporters of both Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — does not let viewers know that. Instead, it appears to be part of an ongoing effort to suggest that Biden, who stutters, is too old or feebleminded to assume the presidency.

New York Times, Russia Trying to Stoke U.S. Racial Tensions Before Election, Officials Say, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, March 10, 2020 (print ed.). Russian intelligence services are trying to incite violence by white supremacist groups to sow chaos in the United States, American intelligence officials said.

The Russian government has stepped up efforts to inflame racial tensions in the United States as part of its bid to influence November’s presidential election, including trying to incite violence by white supremacist groups and to stoke anger among African-Americans, according to seven American officials briefed on recent intelligence.

Russia’s lead intelligence agency, the S.V.R., has apparently gone beyond 2016 methods of interference, when operatives tried to stoke racial animosity by creating fake Black Lives Matter groups and spreading disinformation to depress black voter turnout. Now, Russia is also trying to influence white supremacist groups, the officials said; they gave few details, but one official said federal investigators are examining how at least one neo-Nazi organization with ties to Russia is funded.

Other Russian efforts, which American intelligence agencies have tracked, involve simply prodding white nationalists to more aggressively spread hate messages and amplifying their invective. Russian operatives are also trying to push black extremist groups toward violence, according to multiple officials, though they did not detail how.

Russia’s more public influence operations, like state-backed news organizations, have continued to push divisive racial narratives, including stories emphasizing allegations of police abuse in the United States and highlighting racism against African-Americans within the military.

Austin American-Statesman, Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones charged with DWI near Austin, authorities say, Kelsey Bradshaw, March 10, 2020. Austin- alex jones headshot based conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was booked into the Travis County Jail on a charge of driving while intoxicated just after midnight Tuesday, the Travis County sheriff’s office said.

Jones, 46, was booked at 12:37 a.m., said Kristen Dark, spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office. The driving while intoxicated charge is a class B misdemeanor, she said.

An arrest affidavit for Jones says a sheriff’s deputy responded at 10:10 p.m. Monday to a western Travis County residence for a disturbance reported by Jones’ wife.

His wife had told the dispatcher they were in a verbal fight that had been physical earlier in the day, the affidavit says. She said Jones left the residence in a black Dodge Charger and that he was possibly drinking, the affidavit says.

While en route to the residence, a deputy saw a dark Dodge leaving the neighborhood. The vehicle was traveling 45 mph in a 40 mph zone.

Miami Herald, Journalists from around the world alerted after conference attendee has coronavirus, Carli Teproff, March 10, 2020. More than a thousand journalists from around the world have been put on notice after an attendee of a major computer-assisted reporting conference held over the weekend in New Orleans has tested presumptive positive for the novel coronavirus.

Several reporters from across McClatchy — including two from the Miami Herald — were among those who attended the 2020 NICAR conference, which was held March 5-8 at the New Orleans Marriott on Canal Street.

March 8

New York Times, Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups, Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman, March 8, 2020 (print ed.). Mr. Prince, a contractor close to the Trump administration, contacted veteran spies for operations by Project Veritas, the conservative group known for conducting stings on news organizations and other groups.

Erik Prince, left, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation — detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union — has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.

Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family. Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump’s agenda.

betsy devos o Mr. Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, left, has at times served as an informal adviser to Trump administration officials. He worked with the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn during the presidential transition. In 2017, he met with White House and Pentagon officials to pitch a plan to privatize the Afghan war using contractors in lieu of American troops. Jim Mattis, then the defense secretary, rejected the idea.

Mr. Prince appears to have become interested in using former spies to train Project Veritas operatives in espionage tactics sometime during the 2016 presidential campaign. Reaching out to several intelligence veterans — and occasionally using Mr. Seddon to make the pitch — Mr. Prince said he wanted the Project Veritas employees to learn skills like how to recruit sources and how to conduct clandestine recordings, among other surveillance techniques.

James O’Keefe, the head of Project Veritas, declined to answer detailed questions about Mr. Prince, Mr. Seddon and other topics, but he called his group a “proud independent news organization” that is involved in dozens of investigations. He said that numerous sources were coming to the group “providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.”

March 7

Washington Post, Inside the Sanders campaign’s quest to win the Internet, Isaac Stanley-Becker, March 7, 2020. Bernie Sanders’s critique of the “corporate media” is inseparable from his effort to reach people in new ways — and on a whole different scale than his rivals.

As Sanders seeks to reinvigorate his presidential campaign against a largely unified Democratic establishment, he will tap a political resource unlike any other in Democratic politics — a far-reaching universe of podcasts, YouTube channels, subreddits, Facebook groups and digital newsletters.

This unfiltered online megaphone, which channels distrust of the political mainstream, gives Sanders an edge as he seeks another rebound moment for his campaign. It offers a chance to encourage new voters to turn out in upcoming primaries and to amplify his attacks on former vice president Joe Biden.

Bernie Sanders’s political movement faces a reckoning after Super Tuesday setbacks

No other Democrat exercises the same kind of power online. The candidates who competed in the nominating contest’s four early states collectively garnered about 57 million views on Facebook live streams over the past year. Sanders is responsible for 54 million of them, according to an analysis conducted by his campaign using CrowdTangle, a social media tracking tool.

The online machinery, designed by a staff filled with veterans of liberal news sites and experts in online messaging, has helped Sanders cultivate a mass following — including in California, which accounts for an outsize share of the online views tracked by his campaign and delivered him an important primary win this week.

Washington Post, Amazon ‘likely to succeed’ on key point in Pentagon cloud lawsuit, judge says, Aaron Gregg, March 7, 2020 (print ed.). A Court of Federal Claims judge sided with Amazon on several points in its protest of the military’s award of a massive cloud computing contract to Microsoft. halts the work for now while Amazon’s case proceeds.

A federal judge has concluded that a bid protest lawsuit brought by Amazon over President Trump’s intervention in an important Pentagon cloud computing contract “is likely to succeed on the merits” of one of its central arguments, according to a court document made public Friday.

The document provides the first indication of how Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims might rule in a high-stakes bid protest over the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud computing contract, which was awarded to Microsoft in October following intervention from the White House and members of Congress.

In a blow to Microsoft and the Defense Department, Campbell-Smith recently ordered the Pentagon to halt work on JEDI. In a lengthy opinion explaining her reasoning, she sided with Amazon’s contention that the Pentagon had made a mistake in how it evaluated prices for competing proposals from Amazon and Microsoft. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

She also concluded that the mistake is likely to materially harm Amazon, an important qualifier for government contract bid protests. And she rejected arguments raised earlier by Microsoft and the Defense Department that Amazon should have raised its concerns sooner.

March 6

bbc news logo2 BBC, Woody Allen book pulped after walkout at publisher, Staff report, March 6, 2020. Hachette Book Group (HBG) has cancelled plans to woody allen tribeca festival 2009 david shankbone publish a memoir by Woody Allen, the award-winning film director who has been accused of sexual abuse. Allen is , shown at right in a 2009 photo by David Shankbone.

The decision on Friday came one day after Hachette employees staged an office walkout in protest at the plan to publish the book.

It also came after Allen's son, Ronan Farrow, spoke out against the decision.

ronan farrow Mr Farrow, left, a journalist, wrote a book for HBG last year about how powerful men avoid punishment for misconduct. Mr Farrow is Allen's son with actress Mia Farrow.

His adopted sister, Dylan Farrow, has accused Allen of sexually abusing her in 1992 when she was seven years old. He has denies the claim.

A statement by HBG spokeswoman Sophie Cottrell called the decision to pulp Allen's autobiography -- Apropos of Nothing -- "a difficult one".

"At HBG we take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly. We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books," she added.

She said that listening sessions had been held with staff members, which led the publisher to come "to the conclusion that moving forward with publication would not be feasible".

The publishing house also plans to return the rights to Allen, the statement added. The book seems to have been acquired by HBG last year, but the announcement that it would be released in April only came this week.

Dylan Farrow had released a scathing statement on Monday, accusing Hachette of betraying one of their authors, her brother Ronan Farrow, whose book, Catch and Kill, was published by HBG in October 2019.

"Hachette's publishing of Woody Allen's memoir is deeply upsetting to me personally and an utter betrayal of my brother whose brave reporting, capitalised on by Hachette, gave voice to numerous survivors of sexual assault by powerful men," she wrote.

"This provides yet another example of the profound privilege that power, money and notoriety affords. Hachette's complicity in this should be called out for what it is and they should have to answer for it."

Mr Farrow also released a statement, saying that HBG had "concealed the decision from me and its own employees while we were working on Catch and Kill -- a book about how powerful men, including Woody Allen, avoid accountability for sexual abuse".

Catch and Kill tells the story of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, who was jailed for rape last month.

March 5

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump campaign lawsuits against NYT, WaPo present a juicy opportunity, Erik Wemple, March 5, 2020. Former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III sought for more than a year to interview President Trump for his investigation into possible collaboration between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. The two sides negotiated “accommodations” allowing Trump to answer questions in writing. The eventual answers, noted the Mueller report, “demonstrate the inadequacy of the written format,” prompting Mueller to push for a personal interview. “The President declined,” reads the report.

Thus was lost the opportunity to press Trump, under oath, about all the Russia stuff.

But wait! A fresh chance may be lurking in recent libel suits filed by the Trump campaign against the New York Times and The Washington Post for opinion pieces relating to Trump-Russia, as well as to North Korea. As noted here and here, the complaints are shoddy frivolities that seek to curtail fair and crucial discussion of matters of public consequence. Accordingly, they’re sure to disappear after a couple of righteous motions to dismiss. (Disclosure: I work for The Post’s Opinions section.)

A more investigative option beckons, however. Instead of seeking a quick dismissal of the lawsuits, the newspapers — or either one of them individually — could choose to dig in and proceed straight to the discovery stage of the litigation. Such a move would require the newspapers to turn over emails and submit to depositions about how they commissioned and edited the columns in question. Since discovery is a two-way street, it would also require the Trump campaign to do likewise: to open its aides, past and present, to scrutiny regarding the topics at hand.

Call the campaign’s bluff, in other words.

We’re talking about a fantasy scenario here. The legal arms of newspapers exist to secure the dismissal, not the prolongation, of libel claims. Though they assist their newsrooms with Freedom of Information Act litigation and other efforts to secure documents, they are not captives of the news operations. And what sane news organization invites plaintiffs’ lawyers to muck around in their deliberations? When Times editorial page editor James Bennet, for example, answered questions in a preliminary stage of Sarah Palin’s libel suit, he exposed a rickety editing process.

tavis smiley Custom

Washington Post, Jurors find Tavis Smiley violated contract with PBS after testimony about dating and sexually harassing employees, Keith L. Alexander, March 5, 2020 (print ed.). A jury in the District on Wednesday found former PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley, above, violated his contract with the TV network after hearing accounts of six women who said he had sexually harassed them when they worked for him.

After about 1½ days of deliberations, the jury of seven men and two women determined Smiley, 55, had acted counter to the network’s morals clause, which prohibited on-air talent from participating in any public behavior that would negatively affect the employee or the network.

The women testified through video deposition that during their tenure with Smiley’s company, TS Media, Smiley had pressured them for sex or told lewd jokes. The trial, which lasted about three weeks, was held at D.C. Superior Court because TS Media, while based in Los Angeles, is incorporated in the District.

Smiley admitted to having intimate relationships with two of the women, but testified he never used his position as their boss to pressure or threaten them. And he said any jokes were innocent and not intended to offend.

For 14 years, PBS distributed Smiley’s late-night talk show to 238 PBS stations nationwide, about 72 percent of its network.

The court case began when Smiley claimed the network terminated his contract without proof of the allegations and sued PBS for nearly $1 million. The network countersued for about $1.7 million that it said Smiley owes in money it provided to him for a season that never aired.

PBS attorneys said Smiley could be ordered to pay the network as much as $1.9 million, including penalties and fees. Judge Yvonne Williams, who oversaw the trial, scheduled another hearing to finalize Smiley’s financial penalties.

Washington Post, Facebook takes down Trump campaign ads it deemed deceptive after first allowing them, Craig Timberg and Tara Bahrampour, March 5, 2020. After complaints from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the company removed the ads for violating its policy against misleading references to the U.S. census.

Facebook removed Trump campaign ads on Thursday for violating its policy against misleading references to the U.S. census amid criticism that it has given politicians too much leeway to misinform users on its platform.

The Trump ads urged Facebook users to “take the official 2020 Congressional District Census today,” but despite the look and language of the ad, they were not related to the once-a-decade national count of U.S. citizens happening this year. Instead, the ads linked to a survey on the “Certified Website of President Donald J. Trump,” which collected information and requested a donation.

Facebook initially said it would permit the ads, ruling that they were clearly not a part of the U.S. census, according to Popular Information, a politically themed online newsletter that first reported on the ads and the company’s refusal to remove them. Facebook announced its policy against misleading references to the census in December.

Epstein Case

PhilosophyInsights via YouTube, Eric Weinstein: Why is Still No One Asking These Questions about Jeff Epstein, March 5, 2020 (15 min. video). In this new interview from March 2020, New York financier Dr. Eric Weinstein goes to the bottom of what happned to Jeffrey Epstein, and asks precisely why journalists and government official do not ask some very basic questions.

Is journalism broken? What was his impression when Eric met Epstein in 2002?

Weinstein, with a Harvard Ph.D. in mathematics, is managing director of Theil Capital. His Wikipedia profile is here.

March 2

chris matthews screenshot

NBC News, Chris Matthews announces retirement, mutually parts ways with MSNBC, Jason Abbruzzese, March 2, 2020. Matthews was due to retire in the near future with the events of the past week playing a factor in the timing of the move, an MSNBC spokesperson said.

Chris Matthews, one of the longest-tenured voices at MSNBC, announced his retirement during Monday’s night’s airing of his talk show, “Hardball.”

chris matthews 2011 david shankbone Custom Matthews, 74 (shown in a 2011 photo by David Shankbone), said he and MSNBC had mutually agreed to part ways. The decision followed a series of events that resulted in criticism of the host’s statements about Bernie Sanders, African-American lawmakers, and comments he had made to female journalists and coworkers.

“I’m retiring,” Matthews said. “This is the last ‘Hardball’ on MSNBC.”

Matthews was due to retire in the near future with the events of the past week playing a factor in the timing of the move, an MSNBC spokesperson said.

msnbc logo Custom After MSNBC aired a commercial following the announcement, Matthews did not return to the program. Steve Kornacki, a political reporter for the network, took over the rest of the hour, and seemed shocked by the news. “That was a lot to take in,” he said, saying it had been an honor to work with Matthews, and then beginning a discussion about the coronavirus response.

Matthews, a former speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, has hosted “Hardball” on MSNBC since 1999 and remained a centrist voice on the cable news channel’s prime-time programming, which often features commentary that is further to the left.

NBCUniversal is the parent company of MSNBC and NBC News. Matthews said he was not retiring due to a lack of interest in politics, but nodded to changes taking place.

March 1

Assange Prosecution: Implications

julian assange clean cut library screenshot 2007 Custom 2 Consortium News via Zero Hedge, Opinion: Assange Extradition: Can A French Touch Pierce A Neo-Orwellian Farce? Pepe Escobar, March 1, 2020.
It’s quite fitting that the – imperially pre-determined – judicial fate of Julian Assange (shown above in a 2007 screenshot) is being played out in Britain, the home of George Orwell.

As chronicled by the painful, searing reports of Ambassador Craig Murray, what’s taking place in Woolwich Crown Court is a sub-Orwellian farce with Conradian overtones: the horror…the horror…, remixed for the Raging Twenties. The heart of our moral darkness is not in the Congo: it’s in a dingy courtroom attached to a prison, presided by a lowly imperial lackey.

In one of Michel Onfray’s books published last year, Theorie de la Dictature (Robert Laffont) – the top dissident, politically incorrect French philosopher starts exactly from Orwell to examine the key features of a new-look dictatorship. He tracks seven paths of destruction: to destroy freedom, impoverish language, abolish truth, suppress history, deny nature, propagate hate, and aspire to empire.

To destroy freedom, Onfray stresses, power needs to assure perpetual surveillance; ruin personal life; suppress solitude; make opinion uniform and denounce thought crimes. That sounds like the road map for the United States government’s persecution of Assange.

Other paths, as in impoverishing language, include practicing newspeak; using double language; destroying words; oralizing language; speaking a single language; and suppressing the classics. That sounds like the modus operandi of the ruling classes in the Hegemon.

To abolish truth, power must teach ideology; instrumentalize the press; propagate fake news; and produce reality. To propagate hate, power, among other instruments, must create an enemy; foment wars; and psychiatrize critical thinking.

There’s no question we are already mired deep inside this neo-Orwellian dystopia.

John Paradise Lost Milton, in 1642, could not have been more prophetic, when he wrote “Those that hurt the eyes of the people blame them for being blind.” How not to identify a direct parallel with Le Petit Roi Emmanuel Macron’s army, month after month, willfully blinding protesting Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests in the streets of France.

Orwell was more straightforward than Milton, saying that to talk about freedom is meaningless unless it refers to the freedom to tell people what they don’t want to hear. And he put it in context by quoting a line from Milton: “By the known rules of ancient liberty.”

No “known rules of ancient liberty” are allowed to penetrate the heart of darkness of Woolwich Crown Court.
A Spy at the Service of the People

Juan Branco is arguably the most brilliant young French intellectual – heir to a fine Sartre/Foucault/Deleuze tradition. The French establishment detests him, especially because of his best-seller Crepuscule, where he dissected Macronism – branded as a thuggish regime – from the inside, and the French president as a creature and instrument of a tiny oligarchy.

Julian Assange. (YouTube still)

He has just published Assange: L’Antisouverain (Les Editions du Cerf), an absorbing, erudite study that he defines as “a philosophy book about the figure of the Anti-Sovereign.” The Sovereign is of course the state apparatus.

Here (in French) is an excellent interview with Branco about the book. There’s nothing even remotely comparable to it in the Anglosphere, which has treated Assange essentially as an unpleasant freak, oozing pedestrian slander and piling up sub-ideology tirades disguised as facts.

The book is essentially structured as a seminary for the hyper-selective Ecole Normale Superieure, the august school in the Latin Quarter here that shapes French elites, a privileged nest of power institutions and reproduction of privileges. Branco takes the reader to the heart of this universe just to make him or her discover Assange from the point of view of one of those students.

Branco was privileged to profit from the interaction between the Ecole Normale Superieure and Yale. He met Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in January 2014, “in a state of radical confinement,” and then followed him as a juridical consultant, then lawyer, “day after day,” until meeting him again in September 2016, “getting ready to no less than change the course of the American presidential election and engineer the fall of the one who had sworn to crush him, one Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

Branco is fascinated by Assange’s “scientific journalism,” and his capacity to “intervene in the political space without occupying a determined place.” Assange is painted as a contemporary oracle, a maniac for free access to information, someone who “never looked for a reward, or insertion, or juridical protection,” which is a totally different modus operandi from any media.

February

Feb. 27

Washington Post, Opinion: The moderators let the Democratic debate spiral into chaos and crosstalk. There must be a better way, Margaret Sullivan, right, margaret sullivan 2015 photo Feb. 27, 2020 (print ed.). I can think of two possible reforms, neither of which I like very much. The first is simple enough: Moderators should have the ability to shut off the microphones of candidates whenever they refuse to respect the time limits.

There was one particularly cringe-inducing moment at the end of the Democratic debate Tuesday night that summed up all the embarrassments of the previous two hours.

“CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell, with a palpable sense of relief, announced that the debate was over. But her co-moderator, Gayle King, immediately jumped in to correct her: “Time for one more break, Norah. Time flies when you’re having fun!”

O’Donnell looked surprised and none too happy. Then the commercial break took place and the moderators reappeared — only to say that, yes, the show really was over.

And while the two-hour debate in Charleston, S.C., had its enlightening moments, a viewer couldn’t help but feel that the whole thing had careened, more than slightly, out of control.

Media News

Consortium News, Live Updates and Commentary: Assange extradition hearing adjourned until May 18, Staff report, Feb. 27, 2020. The judge has adjourned the hearings a day earlier than planned. It will resume in Woolwich Crown Court on May 18.

The defense this week seriously undermined the prosecutors’ case that Assange had endangered lives of informants, had “solicited” classified material from Chelsea Manning, and had helped Manning crack a password to enter a government computer. The defense showed Manning had legal access to the database and did not need a user name or password. Assange was helping her download video games and movies forbidden to U.S. soldiers.

The defense also laid out its evidence that Assange actually worked to protect informants; and that Manning had not responded to WikiLeaks‘ solicitations, a charge that ignores that asking sources for classified information is a routine journalistic practice.

julian assange cropped with un header The last two days of the hearings were consumed by the question of whether Assange (shown in a file photo while being given political prisoner protection in Ecuador's London embassy) was being accused of political offenses, and whether the British-U.S. extradition treaty or British domestic law on extraditions would apply. The question of whether Assange was being given a fair trial also arose, given that he is cut off from communication with his attorneys during the proceedings, while being locked in a glass cage behind them.

Assange is back in his glass cage at the back of the courtroom. The court gave him headphones to help him hear what is going on, but he soon after took them off. The spectacle on Wednesday, in which Assange said he was no more a participant in his own hearing that “a spectator at Wimbledon,” underscored the pettiness and even sadism of the governor of Belmarsh prison.

What other reason to separate Assange from his attorneys in the courtroom, when murder suspects routinely sit with their lawyers, what other reason to strip search him, handcuff him 11 times, put him five different cells and take away his legal papers on Monday than to simply humiliate him and show that his life is in their abusive hands?

Before the hearing began Tuesday a court officer instructed Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, that he had been instructed to bar the “head of WikiLeaks” from entering the public gallery, a glassed-in room with two rows of seats high above the small courtroom.

John Shipton, Assange’s father, and Assange’s brother Gabriel and Hrafnsson protested and left the cramped area where 18 people lined up to get into the gallery. A few minutes later they returned. Hrafnsson said sending out a few tweets got the court authorities to change their mind. He said no explanation for why the court wanted him barred was given.

The family sat down to hear Assange’s lawyers complaining that on Monday Assange had been intimidated by prison authorities, being strip searched, handcuffed 11 times, made to stay in five different cells and had legal documents he was studying taken away from him. Judge Vanessa Baraister told the court she had no jurisdiction over how Assange is being mistreated.

During the hearing Assange is separated from his lawyers in room at the back of the court behind bullet-proof glass. He wore a gray jumper and blazer and looked to have aged well beyond his 48 years. He appeared mostly able to focus on the proceedings, at times intensely. He sent word to the judge through one of his lawyers that he wished to sit among his attorneys in the courtroom.

Feb. 26

Washington Post, Five arrested, accused of targeting journalists as part of neo-Nazi Atomwaffen group, Rachel Weiner and Matt Zapotosky, Feb. 26, 2020. Federal officials on Wednesday arrested several alleged members of a white-supremacist group called Atomwaffen Division, including its two leaders, accusing them of plotting to intimidate journalists by calling police to their homes and offices and dropping off threatening fliers.

John Cameron Denton, of Montgomery, Tex., is charged in U.S. District Court in Alexandria with conspiring to call in fake threats targeting a ProPublica reporter and his office. Police arrived in force at both locations, at one point briefly detaining the reporter.

In federal court in Seattle, prosecutors say Kaleb Cole and three others hatched a different intimidation plan: finding out where journalists live and leaving posters at their homes with messages featuring swastikas, weapons and the vague threat that they were being watched. After Atomwaffen founder Brandon Russell was arrested in Florida in 2017, according to prosecutors, Denton and Cole, of Arlington, Wash., took leadership of the group. As news organizations began to expose their members, authorities said they discussed how to strike back.

“We must simply approach them with nothing but pure aggression,” Cole said in a recorded message in 2018, according to court records. “We cannot let them think they are safe.”

Denton, according to prosecutors, directed a group of neo-Nazis who harassed ProPublica and a reporter there by calling in fake threats to law enforcement in hopes of provoking an overwhelming response — a practice known as “swatting.” While the reporter is not named in court papers, the description is of A.C. Thompson, who has written extensively about Denton and Atomwaffen.

The group called New York police to ProPublica’s office in December 2018, according to the criminal complaint, claiming that there was a pipe bomb, a hostage and a dead body inside.

A dozen officers responded and cleared the floor in question; one employee was there and “visibly shaken,” according to the complaint.

Two months later, prosecutors say the group called police to Thompson’s home in California, claiming that he was armed and had just killed his wife. He and his wife were briefly detained by police.

According to the complaint, Denton acknowledged his role in an interview with an undercover agent last month.

In Seattle, prosecutors say Cole and a high-ranking recruiter named Cameron Brandon Shea came up with “Operation Erste Saule,” a German term they used to refer to the news media. One person involved recommended using the Society of Professional Journalists website to pick targets, according to court papers.

Employees of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization that tracks anti-Semitism and has investigated Atomwaffen, reported receiving threatening messages. Prosecutors say an Atomwaffen member named Johnny Roman Garza participated in the intimidation by leaving fliers at the homes of black and Jewish journalists in Arizona, while Taylor Ashley Park-Dipeppe is accused of attempting to threaten a reporter in Florida. However, prosecutors say he left the poster at the wrong address.

Feb. 24

U.S. Justice System

Washington Post, Weinstein guilty on two charges in sexual assault case, acquitted on others, Shayna Jacobs, Feb. 24, 2020. The jury in the New York trial determined that Harvey Weinstein, right, forced a sex act on a former production assistant in 2006 and raped a former aspiring actress in 2013. He was found not guilty of the most severe charge, predatory sexual assault.

• Washington Post, Advocates for victims of sexual assault hail Weinstein’s conviction as a breakthrough.
• Washington Post, Perspective: Weinstein’s conviction allowed victims to have messy stories. That’s revolutionary.

New York Times, Editorial: The Lessons of #MeToo’s Monster, Editorial Board, Feb. 24, 2020. After decades of abuse allegations, Harvey Weinstein is found guilty. What does the hard-won, long-overdue conviction of Harvey Weinstein demonstrate?

It shows how difficult it can be to bring abusers to justice, particularly when they are wealthy and powerful. It shows how much the #MeToo movement has changed American life. And it shows how far society still has to go.

Mr. Weinstein was convicted on Monday of a felony sex crime and rape in the third degree but was acquitted of the most serious counts against him, predatory sexual assault. He is headed for at least five years in prison. That’s a victory for Mr. Weinstein’s victims.

But the Weinstein case shows the obstacles presented by the American legal system to successfully prosecuting abusers. The case, tried in a Manhattan courtroom, rested on testimony from just six women out of the more than 90 who have accused Mr. Weinstein of sexual misconduct. (He also faces charges in Los Angeles of raping one woman and groping and masturbating in front of another.)

It took decades of persistence by survivors, advocates, journalists and law enforcement to call Mr. Weinstein to account before the law. In 2015, Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, declined to prosecute credible allegations against Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Vance acted years later only after dozens of women went public with their allegations.

UK Assange Hearing Starts

julian assange screenshot arrest (Ruptly)

London police arresting the bearded WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on April 11, 2019. (Ruptly/YouTube)

The Guardian, Julian Assange hearing: sources 'disappeared' after WikiLeaks release, Ben Quinn, Feb. 24, 2020. Lawyers for US government deliver opening arguments as extradition case begins.

Secret sources who had supplied information to the US government “disappeared” after they were put at risk from death or torture by the release of classified documents by WikiLeaks, the first day of Julian Assange’s extradition hearing has been told.

The US case for the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder was opened at Woolwich crown court by James Lewis QC, who referred to a range of sources in states including Iraq, Afghanistan and China.

“The US is aware of sources, whose redacted names and other identifying information was contained in classified documents published by WikiLeaks, who subsequently disappeared, although the US can’t prove at this point that their disappearance was the result of being outed by WikiLeaks,” he told the court in south-east London.

By disseminating material in an unredacted form, Lewis said Assange knowingly put human rights activists, dissidents, journalists and their families at risk of serious harm in states operated by oppressive regimes.

julian assange cropped with un header Assange, 48, shown in a file photo, is wanted in the US to face 18 charges of attempted hacking and breaches of the Espionage Act. They relate to the publication a decade ago of hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and files covering areas including US activities in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Australian, who could face a 175-year prison sentence if found guilty, is accused of working with the former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak classified documents.

Sitting at the back of the court and dressed in a grey blazer, grey sweater and white shirt with reading glasses perched on his head, Assange listened impassively as the US case was laid out while the sound of chants from hundreds of his supporters outside could be clearly heard throughout the first morning of evidence.

Earlier, Lewis said that reporting for journalism was not an excuse for breaking laws, lawyers acting for the US government have said on the first day of a legal battle over whether the WikiLeaks founder can be extradited from the UK.

“The defence seek to suggest that the risk to these individuals who, by having the individuals revealed as informants, is somehow overstated. I would remind the court that these were individuals who were passing on information on regimes such as Iran and organisations such as al-Qaida.”

He took the court through a number of details about documents relating to sources which the US alleges were put at risk. They included one who had supplied information about an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attack in Iraq and who had been mentioned in a report classified as “secret.”

Earlier, Lewis said he wanted to emphasise that Assange essentially faced two areas relating to his conduct in the indictment – theft and computer hacking of the information published and identifying informants in Iraq and Afghanistan knowing that they would be at risk of harm.

“He is not charged with disclosure of embarrassing or awkward information that the government would rather not have have disclosed,” he added. “The disclosures charges are solely where there was a risk of risk.”

Earlier, Lewis referred to a report in the Guardian from September 2011, which reported that WikiLeaks had published its full archive of 251,000 secret US diplomatic cables, without redactions, potentially exposing thousands of individuals named in the documents to detention, harm or putting their lives in danger.

He went on to describe how the move had been strongly condemned by WikiLeaks’ five previous media partners – the Guardian, New York Times, El País, Der Spiegel and Le Monde – who have worked with the site publishing carefully selected and redacted documents.

“We deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk,” the organisations said in a joint statement, which Lewis read out.

Assange’s case has drawn widespread support, including from the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, who said last week that he should not be extradited because of the potential impact on press freedom and concerns about “the real risk of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment.”

Feb. 22

Washington Post, Wall Street Journal reporters protest ‘sick man’ headline in Wall Street Journal, Paul Farhi, Feb. 22, 2020. The Wall Street Journal’s China staff is urging the newspaper to apologize for a headline that prompted the Chinese government to expel three of its journalists this week.

Feb. 21

Washington Post, How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook, Craig Timberg, Feb. 21, 2020 (print ed.). Facebook created “Project P” — for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent.

In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company’s most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company.

“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships.

When another Facebook staff member pushed for the entire list to be taken down on the grounds that the accounts fueled the “fake news” that had roiled the election, Kaplan warned of the backlash from conservatives.

“They don’t believe it to be fake news,” he said, arguing for time to develop guidelines that could be defended to the company’s critics, including on the right.

The debate over “Project P,” which resulted in a few of the worst pages quickly being removed while most others remained on the platform, exemplified the political dynamics that have reigned within Facebook since Trump emerged as the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee to the White House in 2016. A company led mainly by Democrats in the liberal bastion of Northern California repeatedly has tilted rightward to deliver policies, hiring decisions and public gestures sought by Republicans, according to current and former employees and others who have worked closely with the company.

Trump and other party leaders have pressured Facebook by making unproven claims of bias against conservatives amid rising signs of government action on the issue, including investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. Republicans also have leveraged Facebook’s fears of alienating conservative Americans to win concessions from a company whose most widely shared news content typically includes stories from Fox News and other right-leaning sources.

These sensitivities — in conjunction with the company’s long-standing resistance to acting as “an arbiter of truth” — have affected Facebook’s responses to a range of major issues, from how to address fake news and Russian manipulation of American voters on the platform to, more recently, the advertising policies that have set the political ground rules for the 2020 election, say people privy to internal debates.

Such factors have helped shape a platform that gives politicians license to lie and that remains awash in misinformation, vulnerable to a repeat of many of the problems that marred the 2016 presidential election.

Facebook, unlike Google and Twitter, also has refused calls to restrict politicians’ access to powerful ad-targeting tools — which Trump used with particular relish four years ago — that allow messages to be tailored to individual voters, based on characteristics Facebook has gleaned over years of tracking user behavior.

New York Times, A $1 Billion Literary Scandal and the ‘Madoff of France,’ David Segal, Feb. 21, 2020. Accused of orchestrating a literary Ponzi scheme, Gérard Lhéritier prepares his defense as his breathtaking collection is auctioned off.

A letter from Frida Kahlo, signed and twice kissed with red lipstick, fetched just over $8,800. A page of scribbled calculations by Isaac Newton sold for about $21,000. A 1953 handwritten speech by John F. Kennedy took in $10,000.

All of the items came from a now-defunct company, Aristophil, which starting in 2002 built one of the largest collections of rare books, autographs and manuscripts in history — some 136,000 pieces in all.

The buying spree turned the company’s founder and president, a stout 71-year-old named Gérard Lhéritier, into a celebrity. He opened the stately Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in a pricey neighborhood in Paris, and surrounded himself with French luminaries. They included former presidents, authors and journalists, who crowned him the “king of manuscripts.”

Six years ago, the French authorities shut down Aristophil and arrested Mr. Lhéritier, charging him with fraud and accusing him of orchestrating what amounts to a highbrow Ponzi scheme. As he bought all those rare manuscripts and letters, he had them appraised, divided their putative value into shares and sold them as if they were stock in a corporation. Those shares were bought by 18,000 people, many of them elderly and of modest means, who collectively invested about $1 billion.

The problem has nothing to do with quality. Everything in the collection is authentic, and a large part of it is highly coveted. But the authorities say that with the help of pliant experts, Mr. Lhéritier grossly inflated the value of pieces before he sold shares in them.

New York Times, What Happened Between E. Jean Carroll and Elle Magazine? Katherine Rosman and Jessica Bennett, Feb. 21, 2020. Her contract was terminated early, but the fashion magazine maintains it wasn’t because of her allegations against President Trump.

Media / Propaganda

jimmy wales facing tomorrow conference israel 2009 AP photo 09102109924 1 Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales speaks at the ‘Facing Tomorrow’ conference in Israel in 2009 (Tara Todras-Whitehill | Associated Press)

Wired, Opinion: Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet, Richard Cooke, Feb. 17, 2020. People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it's a beacon of so much that's right.

In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. The Office's Michael Scott called it “the best thing ever,” because “anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject — so you know you are getting the best possible information.” Praising Wikipedia, by restating its mission, meant self-identifying as an idiot.

That was in 2007. Today, Wikipedia is the eighth-most-visited site in the world. The English-language version recently surpassed 6 million articles and 3.5 billion words; edits materialize at a rate of 1.8 per second. But perhaps more remarkable than Wikipedia's success is how little its reputation has changed. It was criticized as it rose, and now makes its final ascent to … muted criticism. To confess that you've just repeated a fact you learned on Wikipedia is still to admit something mildly shameful. It's as though all those questions that used to pepper think pieces in the mid-2000s — Will it work? Can it be trusted? Is it better than Encyclopedia Britannica? — are still rhetorical, when they have already been answered, time and again, in the affirmative.

Of course, muted criticism is far better than what the other giants at the top of the internet are getting these days. Pick any inflection point you like from the past several years — the Trump election, Brexit, any one of a number of data breaches, alt-right feeding frenzies, or standoffish statements to Congress — and you'll see the malign hand of platform monopolies.

Not too long ago, techno-utopianism was the ambient vibe of the elite ideas industry; now it has become the ethos that dare not speak its name. Hardly anyone can talk abstractly about freedom and connection and collaboration, the blithe watchwords of the mid-2000s, without making a mental list of the internet's more concrete negative externalities.

Yet in an era when Silicon Valley's promises look less gilded than before, Wikipedia shines by comparison. It is the only not-for-profit site in the top 10, and one of only a handful in the top 100. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?

Wikipedia is not perfect. The problems that it does have—and there are plenty of them—are discussed in great detail on Wikipedia itself, often in dedicated forums for self-critique with titles like “Why Wikipedia is not so great.” One contributor observes that “many of the articles are of poor quality.” Another worries that “consensus on Wikipedia may be a problematic form of knowledge production.” A third notes that “someone can just come and edit this very page and put in ‘pens are for cats only.’” Like the rest of the tech world, the site suffers from a gender imbalance; by recent estimates, 90 percent of its volunteer editors are men. Women and nonbinary contributors report frequent harassment from their fellow Wikipedians—trolling, doxing, hacking, death threats. The site's parent organization has repeatedly owned up to the situation and taken halting steps to redress it; several years ago, it allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a “community health initiative.” But in a way, the means to fix Wikipedia's shortcomings, in terms of both culture and coverage, are already in place: Witness the rise of feminist edit-athons.

Feb. 20

Inside DC

John Solomon, Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing

John Solomon, longtime DC-based journalist, shown at left, with his lawyers and souces Joseph DiGenova and the latter's wife Victoria Toensing.

Washington Post, John Solomon columns on Ukraine ripped in newspaper’s internal investigation for conflicts and distortions, Paul Farhi, Feb. 20, 2020 (print ed.). In a lengthy and damning review of former columnist John Solomon, the Hill newspaper ripped Solomon — and itself — for publishing misleading and poorly attributed articles last year that asserted corruption by Joe Biden in his dealings with Ukraine during his time as vice president.

The columns, published in early 2019, set in motion President Trump’s demand that Ukrainian officials announce an investigation of Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Trump’s demand, and his withholding of military aid to Ukraine, led to the House’s impeachment of Trump and his subsequent acquittal in the Senate.

Trump and his allies, including his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and his son Donald Trump Jr., promoted Solomon’s Hill columns via Twitter, and Solomon made several appearances on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program to promote his conclusions, which were that Biden, then considered Trump’s top 2020 challenger, had ousted Ukraine’s top prosecutor to head off an investigation into the company that had hired his son.

That allegation has never been proved; indeed, the former Ukrainian prosecutor has recanted it.

In effect, the Hill said Solomon amplified an inaccurate and one-sided narrative about the Bidens and Ukraine that was fed to him by Giuliani, “facilitated” by businessman Lev Parnas, who was working with Giuliani at the time, and reinforced by Solomon’s own attorneys, who also represented clients embroiled in U.S.-Ukraine politics.

Igor Fruman, top left, and Lev Parnas, two Soviet-born associates of Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney at bottom of a Wall Street Journal graphic above by Laura Kammermann, appear to be deeply involved in the Ukraine scandal.

But the Hill stopped short of retracting or apologizing for Solomon’s articles, nor did it say it shouldn’t have published them. It also didn’t characterize Solomon’s motives in presenting what appears to be a largely debunked conspiracy theory about Ukraine.

The columns were roundly criticized as distorted and inaccurate by U.S. diplomats during their testimony before the House’s impeachment hearings.

The Hill, in its review of 14 Solomon columns and related videos about Ukraine, found multiple flaws in his reporting and in the Hill’s own presentation of his work. It said it has attached editor’s notes to the columns to provide “context and/or disclosure that should have been included at the time of his writings” or to “highlight what has been learned” since Solomon’s columns were published.

“In certain columns, Solomon failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation,” said the internal investigation, which was overseen by the newspaper’s editor, Bob Cusack. “In other cases, the sources were [Solomon’s] own attorneys” — Victoria Toensing and Joseph DiGenova, who have also represented President Trump and Giuliani, who was also a key source for Solomon’s columns.

Solomon didn’t disclose this connection in his columns nor did he disclose to his editors that he shared drafts of his stories with Toensing, DiGenova and Parnas, the review noted. \

Washington Post, How the right learned to wield power inside Facebook, Craig Timberg, Feb. 20, 2020. The social media giant balked at removing misinformation after the 2016 election out of concern it would alienate conservatives.

USA Today, Intelligence employee pleads guilty to leaking classified info to journalists, Savannah Behrmann, Feb. 20, 2020. Henry Kyle Frese pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court to illegally transmitting national defense information to journalists.

Frese, 31, was employed as a counterterrorism analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency from February 2018 to October 2019, and held a top-secret clearance.

“Frese violated the trust placed in him by the American people when he disclosed sensitive national security information for personal gain,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers in a statement. “He alerted our country’s adversaries to sensitive national defense information, putting the nation’s security at risk."

Federal prosecutors say he researched multiple classified intelligence reports – some of which were unrelated to his job duties – and leaked information about a foreign country's weapons systems to two journalists.

Prosecutors said that Frese, who worked as both a contractor and a full-time employee for DIA, was in a relationship with one of the journalists and sought to advance the reporter's career.

The journalist linked romantically to Frese published at least eight articles containing classified information provided by the analyst, authorities say. Prosecutors asserted that Frese compromised the contents of at least five intelligence reports.

The unauthorized disclosures happened in 2018 and 2019. Prior to that, from August 2017 to August 2018, Frese and the reporter lived together, authorities say.

Feb. 19

Moon of Alabama, Opinion: Syria - Turkey's Bluff Is Called - Media Opposition Sources Run By British Intelligence, b, Feb. 19, 2020. Russia has called Turkey's bluff of a wide ranging attack on Syrian government forces. The Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan will now have to find a way out of the Idleb trap he set himself in. His excellent Syria adventure is coming to an end.

Meanwhile we learn that the British military intelligence ran another large dis-information campaign that brought 'Syrian voices' into the 'western' press.

Erdogan continues with his wild rhetoric over Syria.

The 'Western' media is again practicing tear jerking about these refugees in Idleb. But its reports forget to mention that al-Qaeda rules Idleb and that it prevents the people from crossing the line into Syrian government held areas:

In yet another lengthy, expensive, lavishly illustrated story about Idlib, the NYT once again failed to make any mention of the politics of what is happening in that enclave of northwestern Syria – namely, the fact that well-armed jihadist/takfiri fighters from all around the world have controlled it for the past several years, while Syria’s government forces have been battling to regain control.

In that latest article, as in all of the lengthy, one-sided tearjerkers it has published about Idlib over the past year, the NYT has no actual journalists or photographers on the ground reporting the story. It is wholly reliant instead on “stories” and footage it gathers from unverifiable sources inside the enclave – sources who notably never include any mention of the jihadi armed groups that control all aspects of life there.

Today we learn [Middle East Eye (MEE), [The British government’s covert propaganda campaign in Syria] that many of these unverifiable sources have been on the British government payroll since at least 2012.

Middle East Eye (MEE), Investigation: The British government’s covert propaganda campaign in Syria, Ian Cobain and Alice Ross, Feb. 19, 2020. Documents obtained by MEE reveal how British contractors recruited Syrian citizen journalists -- often without their knowledge -- to promote 'moderate opposition.'

The British government covertly established a network of citizen journalists across Syria during the early years of the country’s civil war in an attempt to shape perceptions of the conflict, frequently recruiting people who were unaware that they were being directed from London.

A number of leaked documents seen by Middle East Eye show how the propaganda initiative began in 2012 and gathered pace the following year, shortly after the UK parliament refused to authorise British military action in Syria.

Drawing upon British, American and Canadian funding, UK government contractors set up offices in Istanbul and Amman, where they hired members of the Syrian diaspora, who in turn recruited citizen journalists inside Syria.

These journalists, many of them young, were commissioned to produce TV footage, radio programmes, social media, posters, magazines and even children’s comics.

While many Syrians turned spontaneously to media activism from the start of the war, the documents describe the way in which the British government sought to guide some of their output, seeing citizen journalism as a way of covertly influencing Syrian audiences.

The papers also make clear that those people who were recruited were often unaware that they were part of a British propaganda initiative.
Some of those who were recruited have defended their involvement, however, saying that they were reliant on western support in their efforts to counter pro-government reporting in Syrian state media, and in Iranian and Russian-backed media.

At a time when the last opposition-held enclave in Idlib province is under assault by pro-government forces, they questioned whether western countries could have contributed more material support to moderate rebels.

Some Syrian journalists complained that western support for their work was decreasing even as it was most needed after Russia's entry into the war in 2015 tipped the balance in favour of President Bashar al-Assad.

The documents were drawn up as blueprints for the initiative by an anthropologist working in counter-terrorism at the foreign office in London. They were issued in late 2014 to a small number of communications companies that were invited to bid for three contracts to deliver the work.

One says: “The objective of the project is contribute [sic] towards positive attitudinal and behavioural change.”

This was further defined as: “Reinforcement of popular rejection of the Assad regime and extremist alternatives; promotion of the moderate values of the revolution; promotion of Syrian national identity.”

'Reinforcement of popular rejection of the Assad regime and extremist alternatives; promotion of the moderate values of the revolution; promotion of Syrian national identity'

The documents show that the over-arching aim of the citizen journalism project – and a series of interlinked British propaganda initiatives – was to promote the UK’s strategic interests in Syria and the Middle East.

These are defined in the leaked papers as “a more stable and democratic Syria that better meets the needs and aspirations of its people”, support for a political solution to the conflict, the alleviation of humanitarian suffering, and enhanced UK security.

As well as developing grassroots journalism aligned with British government values, the UK and other western governments were at the same time attempting to build civil society in areas controlled by some of Assad’s opponents, financing and training police forces and civil defence teams.

The anthropologist’s blueprint makes clear that this was being done not just to help maintain law and order and provide humanitarian assistance, but “to build confidence in a future Syria free from extremist rule”.

However, the documents acknowledge the risks to the young journalists who had unwittingly been co-opted by the British government.

“Media coverage of the project will be distinctly unwelcome due to the risks to Syrian employees and to project effectiveness that it would generate,” says one.

“The implementer is not permitted to speak publicly (to the media or at academic conferences) about their work without the explicit permission of HMG [Her Majesty’s Government]. This will be enforced by a Non Disclosure Agreement.”

A number of young Syrian citizen journalists were detained and murdered by the Islamic State (IS) group after it began capturing territory in the country in 2015.

The group frequently denounced its victims as western “spies” and some Syrian citizen journalists were pursued across the border to Turkey and killed.

Whilst many of the victims were not thought to be involved in British-sponsored projects, MEE is aware of two who were.

Feb. 18

Ultra-Right Media Hoax?

Daily Beast, Right-Wing Activists Discussed Wiretapping Seth Rich’s Family, Three People in the Room Say, Will Sommer, Updated Feb. 18, 2020. Involved in the talks about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich: a Fox reporter, a former intelligence contractor, and a pair of provocateurs looking to sow “targeted chaos” online.

A strange set of characters from some of the highest and lowest positions in the American right gathered one morning in September 2017 at an affluent neighborhood outside of Dallas.

One of their topics was responding to online critics of wealthy Texas businessman Ed Butowsky, who had recently been outed as a driving force behind a retracted Fox News story about murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, right.

The group that gathered at Butowsky’s home included a conspiracy theorist, a Fox reporter fighting for her career, a former private intelligence contractor married to star journalist Lara Logan, and a Democratic PR operative who lost his business in the face of sexual assault allegations. The group also included Thomas Schoenberger and Manuel “Defango” Chavez, two notorious internet provocateurs who had recently launched a self-proclaimed “elite” company that promised to use bots and sow “targeted chaos” to defend its clients online.

According to some attendees, the solutions discussed at the September get-together went to extremes. Three people who attended the gathering said the group even discussed the possibility of wiretapping and surveilling Rich’s grieving parents.

In a sworn deposition last year, Schoenberger claims Butowsky wanted to “hear a pin drop” in the Rich’s Omaha, Nebraska, kitchen.

“They wanted it to the point where they can listen to every room and hear discussions,” Schoenberger said in a sworn deposition last year about the gathering. “They literally wanted ears in every room.”

Butowsky strongly disputes Schoenberger’s wiretapping claims and The Daily Beast could find no evidence that anyone in the group actually carried out surveillance on Rich’s family. Butowsky points to Schoenberger’s criminal history—a 2011 felony stalking charge and a 2014 misdemeanor DUI—to argue that his allegations about what occurred at Butowsky’s house can’t be trusted.

“Nobody wiretapped anybody, nobody attempted to wiretap anybody, nobody discussed wiretapping anybody, and quite frankly, I don’t know what wiretapping is,” Butowsky said.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Butowsky confirmed the list of guests at his house, although he disputed the characterization of it as a “meeting.”

“It was just like a sit-down and chat,” said Butowsky. “Nothing happened. There wasn’t like some meeting where we left with plans. It was a bunch of people explaining how reputation management worked on Twitter.”

The varied group, according to Butowsky, included Schoenberger, Chavez, outspoken Rich conspiracy theorist Matt Couch and an associate, Logan’s husband Joe Burkett, as well as Fox News reporter Malia Zimmerman, who was the author of the retracted Fox story.

“Nobody wiretapped anybody, nobody attempted to wiretap anybody, nobody discussed wiretapping anybody, and quite frankly, I don’t know what wiretapping is.”

— Ed Butowsky

They were joined by Trevor FitzGibbon, a former Democratic PR bigwig whose firm once worked with groups like MoveOn and NARAL, but collapsed in 2015 in the face of sexual harassment and assault allegations against him (FitzGibbon denied those allegations and never faced criminal charges). According to Schoenberger and Chavez, FitzGibbon teamed up with them in August 2017 to launch “Shadowbox,” their “elite” online reputation firm. Butowsky was their first client.

Media, Privacy

Washington Post, How Ring and Nest helped normalize American surveillance — and turned us into a nation of voyeurs, Drew Harwell, Feb. 18, 2020. People who own Web-connected cameras say they’ve reshaped their awareness around what’s going on at home. But all that added vigilance has come at a surprising cost.

Margaret Cudia thought her Ring doorbell camera was “the best thing since sliced bread.” She loved watching the world pass by through her suburban New Jersey neighborhood, guarding vigilantly for suspicious strangers and porch pirates from the comfort of her phone.

She hadn’t expected the camera also might capture awkward moments closer to home, like the time it caught her daughter grabbing a beer and talking about how controlling her mother was. “I never told her about that one,” she said with a laugh.

Amazon’s Ring, Google’s Nest and other Internet-connected cameras — some selling for as little as $59 — have given Americans the tools they need to become a personal security force, and millions of people now seeing what’s happening around their home every second — what Ring calls the “new neighborhood watch.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

But the allure of monitoring people silently from afar has also proved more tempting than many expected. Customers who bought the cameras in hopes of not becoming victims joke that instead they’ve become voyeurs.

The Washington Post surveyed more than 50 owners of in-home and outdoor camera systems across the United States about how the recording devices had reshaped their daily lives. Most of those who responded to online solicitations about their camera use said they had bought the cameras to check on package deliveries and their pets, and many talked glowingly about what they got in return: security, entertainment, peace of mind. Some said they worried about hackers, snoops or spies.

Washington Post, U.S. designates 5 major Chinese media outlets as government entities, Anna Fifield, Carol Morello and Emily Rauhala, Feb. 18, 2020. The designation means they will be treated as though they are diplomatic outposts of the Chinese government and subject to the same constraints. The move is the latest in a series of U.S. efforts to tackle China’s influence in the United States.

The State Department on Tuesday designated five Chinese media outlets as official government entities under the Foreign Missions Act, meaning they will treated as though they are diplomatic outposts of the Chinese government and subject to the same constraints.

The move is the latest in a series of U.S. efforts to tackle China’s influence in the United States. It will be sure to anger Beijing, which generally views U.S. government’s actions — from the trade war and the accusations against Huawei to criticism of its human rights record — as an effort to thwart China’s global rise.

The media outlets are the official Xinhua News Agency; China Global Television Network, known as CGTN, the international arm of state broadcaster CCTV; China Radio International; the China Daily newspaper; and Hai Tian Development, a U.S. company linked to the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China.

Feb. 16

Media News

elise stefanik hearing

Glens Falls Post-Star, Opinion: Stefanik letter does nothing to address the threats, Ken Tingley (Editor of The Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y.), Feb. 16, 2020. On Oct. 10, I sent a message to Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY, shown above in a screenshot from December's House impeachment hearings). It wasn’t a formal letter, but it was a direct message to her after she showed support for a local man who shouted threats against the newspaper at a public rally in Glens Falls.

I explained to her in the message that the threats against the newspaper had made many of the men and women who work at our newspaper – from the receptionist and obituary clerks to those in our advertising department – nervous about their safety.

I asked her to denounce the actions of this man, who was a vocal supporter of hers, and I urged her to visit the newspaper to explain to the regular workers with families why she had put them in danger.

She held a town hall meeting in Kingsbury that day, but she did not stop by the newspaper.

She did not respond to my message at all.

Until Friday of this week – Valentine’s Day—when I opened my mailbox to find a letter personally addressed to me from Elise.

“Dear Mr. Tingley” it started, but “Mr. Tingley” was crossed out and “Kenneth” was written in what appeared to be blue sharpie.

We were back on a first-name basis.

I wanted to yell out, “Call me Ken.”

Finally, Elise – I can assume I can her Elise now, right? — had seen the light. I hoped she was responding to my concerns about the safety of our newspaper staff and her ill-advised support of people who threaten us.

Those hopes were quickly dashed.

Elise wanted me to help her fight back against the radical left. She wanted me to help her save the country from Adam Schiff. And she wanted to me to pledge $50, $100, $250, $500, or even $1,000. Didn’t she just finish raising $3 million in the last three months of the year?

She wrote about taking on Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Nadler for citizens in the 21st Congressional District. I don’t recall seeing either of them at the Civic Center or walking around Lake George, but Elise says they are our enemies in upstate New York.

As I continued to read the letter, I wondered if the congresswoman was a little star struck after all the attention she had gotten from President Trump.

She explained that the Democrats fear “dedicated, articulate Republican leaders like me.”

Sounded like, she was a little full of herself.

I was hoping she might mention something about bringing us together, condemning violence and telling the truth.

At the very least, some of her most important accomplishments as our representative.

Instead, Elise sounded like she was going to war.

Then – after hitting me up for a donation to her campaign – she said this:

“Of course, we cannot count on the biased media to expose the Democrats’ horrible abuses of power, their flawed accusations, or their partisan motivations. The smug media elitists have become little more than the PR division of the Democratic Party.”

Feb. 15

Washington Post, Opinion: The future of local newspapers just got bleaker. Here’s why we can’t let them die, Margaret Sullivan, right, Feb. 15, margaret sullivan 2015 photo 2020. With McClatchy filing for bankruptcy, the business is gasping for air. But, against the odds, local newsrooms keep doing vital work.

It’s been a particularly rough couple of months for those who care about local journalism — which should be every American citizen.

Warren Buffett sold his 31 newspapers in January, a powerful vote of no confidence in their financial future. A rapacious hedge fund got its claws deeper into the Chicago Tribune chain in December, which includes the New York Daily News and the Baltimore Sun. Gannett and GateHouse, the two biggest newspaper chains, continued merging — a development almost certain to mean more staff cutbacks in already shrunken newsrooms.

And then on Thursday came more devastating news. Weighed down under enormous debt, the McClatchy newspaper chain — one of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers and owner of the Miami Herald among many others — was filing for bankruptcy protection.

Washington Post, Hedge fund behind McClatchy bankruptcy set to take over, Jonathan O'Connell, Feb. 15, 2020 (print ed.). Chatham Asset Management will take over newspaper chain if court approves reorganization plan. Bankruptcy may have been inevitable for the newspaper chain McClatchy ever since its ill-fated decision to borrow heavily in 2006 to buy another chain, Knight Ridder, for $4.5 billion.

Shortly afterward both the national economy and the print news industry collapsed, and the latter has never recovered.

A decade of cost-cutting and efforts at growing new digital revenue wasn’t enough to change the company’s fortunes. More recent, behind-the-scenes transactions on Wall Street shaped a new path for the 163-year-old owner of the Miami Herald, the Charlotte Observer and 28 other newspapers across the country.

McClatchy’s announcement does not name who its new controlling owner would be, the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, referring instead to Chatham as its largest secured creditor.

But details in hundreds of pages of documents associated with the filing show how Chatham used several financial transactions to exert increasing control over the company, to the point where it partnered with McClatchy on a bankruptcy plan that, if finalized and approved by the court, would hand control of the company to the hedge fund.

In a sign of possible complications to come, the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. raised concerns in a bankruptcy filing Friday about a 2018 financial transaction between Chatham and McClatchy and asked the court to investigate. The filing was first reported by McClatchy’s Washington bureau.

Chatham, which reported $4.4 billion in assets in 2019, isn’t a stranger to the news business but its reputation has not won accolades among McClatchy supporters and employees.

Chatham founder Anthony Melchiorre has been referred to as a “bare-knuckled fighter in business dealings” who “has waded deeper into contrarian bets over the years and stuck by them,” according to industry publication Pensions & Investments.

Chatham is also the controlling owner of American Media Inc., parent of the racy tabloid the National Enquirer. AMI’s chairman, David Pecker, worked with President Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, to bury allegations of Trump’s extramarital affairs, and the publication threatened to publish intimate photos of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Feb. 14

Washington Post, Crimea, Kashmir, Korea: Google redraws borders on maps depending on who’s looking, Greg Bensinger, Feb. 14, 2020. Google alters maps under political pressure and the whims of tech executives. Contract employees say a “disputed region team” addresses more prickly matters.

For more than 70 years, India and Pakistan have waged sporadic and deadly skirmishes over control of the mountainous region of Kashmir. Tens of thousands have died in the conflict, including three just this month.

Both sides claim the Himalayan outpost as their own, but web surfers in India could be forgiven for thinking the dispute is all but settled: The borders on Google’s online maps there display Kashmir as fully under Indian control. Elsewhere, users see the region’s snaking outlines as a dotted line, acknowledging the dispute.

Google’s corporate mission is “to organize the world’s information,” but it also bends it to its will. From Argentina to the U.K. to Iran, the world’s borders look different depending on where you’re viewing them from. That’s because Google — and other online mapmakers — simply change them.

Feb. 13

Washington Post, McClatchy, one of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers, files for bankruptcy, Taylor Telford and Thomas Heath, Feb. 13, 2020. McClatchy Co., one of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers, filed for bankruptcy protection Thursday, another harbinger of America’s deepening local news crisis.

The Chapter 11 filing will allow the Sacramento-based company to keep its 30 newspapers afloat while it reorganizes more than $700 million in debt, 60 percent of which would be eliminated under the plan. If the court approves, it would also hand control of the 163-year-old family publisher to a hedge fund, Chatham Asset Management, its largest creditor.

The filing foreshadows further cost-cutting and retrenchment for one of the biggest players in local journalism at a time when most American newsrooms already are straining to cover their communities. About 20 percent of all U.S. newspapers have closed since 2004, according to a recent report from PEN America, and the sector has shed 47 percent of its jobs.

The publisher of the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star and other regional dailies has been saddled with debt since its $4.5 billion takeover of a much bigger rival, Knight Ridder, in 2006. The combination coincided with a digital boom that disrupted the prevailing business model and changed the way news is consumed.

“In 2010, the total revenue for print ads fell below 1950 levels, and it has continued to decrease,” said Penny Abernathy, Knight chair of journalism and digital media economics at the University of North Carolina. “Everyone assumed if you could just make the transition over to digital that things would be okay. But the problem is that as of 2015, Google and Facebook make up about 75 percent of the digital ad dollar in U.S. markets. That’s not enough to sustain the newsrooms McClatchy inherited from Knight Ridder.”

Feb. 12

National Public Radio, Major Smartphone Trade Show Canceled In Barcelona Amid Coronavirus Concerns, Shannon Bond, Feb. 12, 2020. Organziers of the Mobile World Congress had resisted calls to cancel the event, but reversed course after major companies pulled out over coronavirus fears.

One of the world's biggest trade shows has been cancelled as mounting concerns over the coronavirus outbreak ripple across the business world.

Organizers called off the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, after big-name participants pulled out.

The annual conference, scheduled to kick off on Feb. 24, is a marquee event for the city of Barcelona and for the mobile phone industry. It typically attracts more than 100,000 attendees each year who come to check out the latest in smartphone technology.

But in recent days, companies from Sony and Intel to Amazon and Facebook said they would stay away because of worries about the safety of their employees.

The conference organizer, GSMA, initially resisted calls to cancel. It said it would put in place health precautions including scanning body temperatures, and advised attendees against shaking hands.

Still, companies kept pulling out, and on Wednesday, GSMA reversed course. "The global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event," the group's CEO, John Hoffman, said in a statement.

Other trade shows and business events have also been affected by the outbreak. More than two dozen industry conferences in Asia have been postponed, Reuters reported. Watchmaker Swatch canceled an event in Zurich planned for late February.

WKRN-TV (ABC affiliate in Nashville), TN lawmakers introduce joint resolution to recognize CNN and Washington Post as “fake news,” Staff report, Feb. 11, 2020. An amendment to a house joint resolution was announced Tuesday at the Tennessee State Capitol, announcing that the state of Tennessee recognizes CNN and The Washington Post “as fake news and part of the media wing of the Democratic party.”

According to the resolution, lawmakers say that an editor of The Washington Post wrote on October 3, 2019 that President Trump “cast a spell on the Republican Party and suggested that Trumpism is cult-like.” The resolution also says that a CNN host suggested that Trump supporters “belong to a cult and that our president is using mind control” on November 24, 2019.

“We recognize that fake news outlets suggest ideas without directly making accusations so that they can claim innocence from their ivory towers,” the resolution reads.

The joint resolution introduced in the state House with the Senate reportedly concurring says that CNN and The Washington Post are condemned “for denigrating our citizens and implying that they are weak-minded followers instead of people exercising their rights that our veterans paid for with their blood.”

Read the full resolution here.

gabriel matzneff infographic

New York Times, Gabriel Matzneff, Who Wrote for Years About Pedophilia, Is Charged, Norimitsu Onishi, Feb. 12, 2020. Gabriel Matzneff (shown above), the French writer who talked openly for decades about engaging in pedophilia, was charged on Wednesday in a Paris court with promoting the sexual abuse of children.

Mr. Matzneff, who has been in hiding in the Italian Riviera and did not appear in court, was accused of defending and justifying pedophilia through his many books and public appearances, according to the case filed by l’Ange Bleu, an anti-pedophilia organization.

The court set September 2021 as the start of the trial, which will scrutinize not only the author’s actions but also those of the French elite who published his books, promoted his career and even helped him evade justice.

“Everyone will have to take responsibility,” l’Ange Bleu’s lawyer, Méhana Mouhou, said after the hearing.

L’Ange Bleu is using a special legal procedure to force Mr. Matzneff to stand trial, arguing that its interests as an organization devoted to fighting pedophilia were damaged by Mr. Matzneff’s longstanding promotion of pedophilia. If convicted in that case, Mr. Matzneff, 83, could face up to five years in prison.

Although Mr. Matzneff is not scheduled to appear in court until next year in the case brought by the anti-pedophilia organization, he could face legal challenges sooner if prosecutors decide to charge him in specific cases of abuse.

Prosecutors, who have been criticized in recent weeks for their long inaction despite Mr. Matzneff’s avowed pedophilia, are moving on a separate track that could lead to more criminal charges.

They said on Tuesday that they would actively seek other victims of the author, and on Wednesday they raided for the second time the headquarters of Gallimard, one of Mr. Matzneff’s publishers, to seize more of his books and manuscripts, according to the French news media.

Mr. Matzneff openly talked and wrote about pedophilia, but the dynamic changed after the publication last month of Le Consentement (“Consent”) by Vanessa Springora, the first testimony by one of the writer’s underage victims.

Fueling an abrupt cultural shift in France, the book touched off the sudden downfall of Mr. Matzneff, who was dropped by his three publishers, stripped of a rare benefit from the French government and abandoned by longtime supporters.

Until just a few weeks ago, Mr. Matzneff was recognized as a celebrated writer.

In many books, Mr. Matzneff writes about his relations with teenage girls in France and sex tourism in the Philippines with boys as young as 8. His breakthrough book as an author, from 1974, had the title Les Moins de Seize Ans (“Under 16 Years Old”).

Feb. 11

Hartford Business Journal, Another round of buyouts hits the Hartford Courant’s newsroom, Joe Cooper, Feb. 11, 2020. For the second time in two years, The Hartford Courant’s newsroom has shrunk from buyouts, as daily print newspapers face a challenging and changing media landscape.

Four reporters and two editors recently accepted voluntary separation packages that parent Tribune Publishing recently offered to employees, according to Rebecca Lurye, a Courant reporter and chair of the Hartford Courant Guild.

The buyouts -- terms of which were not disclosed -- came one year after the Courant’s newsroom agreed to form a union and months after New York hedge fund Alden Global Capital LLC became the largest shareholder of Chicago-based Tribune.

Lurye said the 60 or so Courant reporters and editors were concerned about Alden’s reputation of slashing newspaper jobs and sucking up short-term profits at other media organizations it controls through its MediaNews Group subsidiary, including The Denver Post, St. Paul Pioneer Press and Boston Herald.

Their concerns were realized a month ago when Tribune sent an email to staffers announcing its latest round of buyouts citing “industry-wide revenue challenges.”

“They are not receptive to our message, which is buyouts are incredibly damaging to a newsroom,” Lurye said of recent collective bargaining negotiations. “There has been a lot of mixed messaging from the company saying we are a leading media company, or that we are doing really well financially.” (Tribune reported revenue of $236 million in the third-quarter last year, down from $255.8 million in the year prior.)

In recent days, town reporter Michael Walsh, environmental and agricultural reporter Gregory B. Hladky and nature columnist Peter Marteka have all publicly announced their departures from the Courant.

Lurye said the 256-year-old paper’s newsroom has shrunk by 30 staffers since she joined it in early 2017, either through buyouts or positions being left unfilled. That includes the 10 newsroom veterans that left the newspaper during the last round of buyouts in Nov. 2018, she said.

In 2014, Hartford Business Journal reported the Courant’s newsroom peaked in 1994 at 400 employees and fell to 135 employees in 2009. There are well under 100 newsroom employees today.

“That's an incredible loss for a newspaper,” Lurye said.

Cross-state rival Hearst Newspapers in recent years has hired away some big-name Courant talent, including economic and political columnist Dan Haar, sports columnist Jeff Jacobs and columnist and radio personality Colin McEnroe, who is now at Connecticut Public.

The cost-cutting moves have occurred as average weekday print circulation at the Hartford paper has dropped 43% since the fourth quarter of 2015 from 90,057 to 51,416 in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) figures. The average Sunday print circulation in that period fell 40% from 160,563 in 2015, to 96,541 in 2019, AAM said.

In a statement, Andrew Julien, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Hartford Courant Media Group, said “The structural changes in reader habits that have affected print operations at the Courant and newspapers across the nation are well documented and well known. At the same time, we continue to see strong engagement from readers on both the print and digital fronts, with impressive growth particularly on the digital side."

Julien added that during the recent New England Newspaper & Press Association annual awards ceremony the Courant was awarded first place in digital engagement, "a testament to the creative and innovative approaches to storytelling that are keeping the Courant relevant to a new generation of news readers."

He also said the Courant's mission remains the same, to produce "high quality, hard-hitting journalism.”

Feb. 10 julian assange and swedens politically appointed judges indicter graphic

WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange (graphic by The Indicter Magazine and Swedish Doctors for Human Rights).

OpEdNews, Opinion: What Is Happening to Assange Will Happen to the Rest of Us, Chris Hedges, Feb. 10, 2020. David Morales, the indicted owner of the Spanish private security firm Undercover Global, is being investigated by Spain's high court for allegedly providing the CIA with audio and video recordings of the meetings WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had with his attorneys and other visitors when the publisher was in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The security firm also reportedly photographed the passports of all of Assange's visitors. It is accused of taking visitors' phones, which were not permitted in the embassy, and opening them, presumably in an effort to intercept calls. It reportedly stole data from laptops, electronic tablets and USB sticks, all required to be left at the embassy reception area. It allegedly compiled detailed reports on all of Assange's meetings and conversations with visitors. The firm even is said to have planned to steal the diaper of a baby brought to visit Assange to perform a DNA test to establish whether the infant was a secret son of Assange. UC Global, apparently at the behest of the CIA, also allegedly spied on Ecuadorian diplomats who worked in the London embassy.

The probe by the court, the Audiencia Nacional, into the activities of UC Global, along with leaked videos, statements, documents and reports published by the Spanish newspaper El País as well as the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, offers a window into the new global security state. Here the rule of law is irrelevant. Here privacy and attorney-client privilege do not exist. Here people live under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Here all who attempt to expose the crimes of tyrannical power will be hunted down, kidnapped, imprisoned and broken. This global security state is a terrifying melding of the corporate and the public. And what it has done to Assange it will soon do to the rest of us.

The publication of classified documents is not yet a crime in the United States. If Assange is extradited and convicted, it will become one. Assange is not an American citizen. WikiLeaks, which he founded, is not a U.S.-based publication. The extradition of Assange would mean the end of journalistic investigations into the inner workings of power. It would cement into place a terrifying global, corporate tyranny under which borders, nationality and law mean nothing. Once such a legal precedent is set, any publication that publishes classified material, from The New York Times to an alternative website, will be prosecuted and silenced.

The flagrant defiance of law and international protocols in the persecution of Assange is legion. In April 2019, Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno capriciously terminated Assange's right of asylum at the London embassy, where he spent seven years, despite Assange's status as a political refugee. Moreno authorized British police to enter the embassy diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador. (Assange retains his Australian citizenship.) The British police seized Assange, who has never committed a crime, and the British government keeps him imprisoned, ostensibly for a bail violation.

Assange is being held in the notorious high-security HM Prison Belmarsh. He has spent much of his time in isolation, is often heavily sedated and has been denied medical treatment for a variety of physical ailments. His lawyers say they are routinely denied access to their client. Nils Melzer, the United Nations' special rapporteur on torture who examined Assange with two physicians, said Assange has undergone prolonged psychological torture. Melzer has criticized what he calls the "judicial persecution" of Assange by Britain, the United States, Ecuador and Sweden, which prolonged an investigation into a sexual assault case in an effort to extradite Assange to Sweden. Assange said the case was a pretext to extradite him to the United States. Once Assange was arrested by British police the sexual assault case was dropped.

Melzer says Assange would face a politicized show trial in the United States if he were extradited to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act for his role in publishing classified military and diplomatic cables, documents and videos that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each of the counts carries a potential sentence of 10 years, and an additional charge that Assange conspired to hack into a government computer has a maximum sentence of five years. A hearing to determine whether he will be extradited to the United States starts Feb. 24 at London's Woolwich Crown Court. It is scheduled to last about a week and then resume May 18, for three weeks more.

WikiLeaks released U.S. military war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables and 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs along with the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, in which U.S. helicopter pilots banter as they gun down civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. The material was given to WikiLeaks in 2010 by Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, a low-ranking intelligence specialist in the U.S. Army. Assange has been accused by an enraged U.S. intelligence community of causing "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States." Manning was convicted of espionage charges in August 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in a military prison. She was granted clemency in January 2017 by President Barack Obama. Manning was ordered back to prison last year after refusing to testify before a grand jury in the WikiLeaks case, and she remains behind bars. No one was ever charged for the war crimes WikiLeaks documented.

Assange earned the enmity of the Democratic Party establishment by publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic officials. The emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton's repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted "open trade and open borders" and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign's efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton's advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.

Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have remained hidden, but they can't then call themselves journalists.

The Democratic and Republican leaders are united in their crusade to extradite and sentence Assange. The Democratic Party, which has attempted to blame Russia for its election loss to Trump, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers. However, James Comey, the former FBI director, has conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary, and Assange has said the emails were not provided by "state actors."

WikiLeaks has done more than any other news organization to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American empire. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign elections, including French elections. It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save Edward Snowden, who made public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence agencies, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow. (The Snowden leaks also revealed that Assange was on a U.S. "manhunt target list.")

The inquiry by the Spanish court is the result of a criminal complaint filed by Assange, who accuses Morales and UC Global of violating his privacy and client-attorney confidentiality rights. The WikiLeaks founder also says the firm is guilty of misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.

Washington Post, Democrats call for Facebook, Twitter to take down edited Nancy Pelosi video, Cat Zakrzewski, Feb. 10, 2020 (print ed.). It’s likely just the start of an ongoing battle between social media companies and politicians about altered media.\

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents Silicon Valley, Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who helms the House antitrust investigation of Big Tech, and a longtime Pelosi staffer were among the prominent voices who called for Twitter and Facebook to take action against the Pelosi clip.

The video was edited to make it look like the House speaker was ripping up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech right after he paid tribute to various special guests --- including a Tuskegee airman and a military family being reunited. (Pelosi did tear up the speech, but at the conclusion of the president’s remarks, not in response to any individual guest.)

New York Times, He Combs the Web for Russian Bots. That Makes Him a Target, Adam Satariano, Feb. 10, 2020 (print ed.). Ben Nimmo, shown below right, in an Atlantic Council photo, helped pioneer disinformation investigations. His work is now more urgent as misleading internet tactics spread.

ben nimmo atlantic council In August 2017, Ben Nimmo was declared dead by 13,000 Russian bots on Twitter.

“Our beloved friend and colleague Ben Nimmo passed away this morning,” read the epitaph, which was manipulated to look as if it were from a co-worker’s Twitter account. “Ben, we will never forget you.”

The message was immediately shared thousands of times by the network of automated accounts. Notes began pouring in from worried friends and colleagues — even though Mr. Nimmo was very much alive.

It didn’t take long for Mr. Nimmo, who helped pioneer investigations into online disinformation, to figure out what was going on: He had been targeted by a shadowy group after reporting, along with others, that American far-right groups had adopted pro-Kremlin messages on social media about Ukraine. His fake death notice was a sinister attempt at disinformation, which is the spreading of falsehoods with the deliberate intent to mislead.

“That made it personal,” said Mr. Nimmo, 47, whose home address in a town near Edinburgh and other personal data, like bank details, have also been posted online.

For the last five years, Mr. Nimmo, a founder of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, has been a leader of a small but growing community of online sleuths. These researchers serve as an informal internet police force that combats malicious attempts to use false information to sway public opinion, sow political discord and foment distrust in traditional institutions like the news media and the government.

Mr. Nimmo’s work came to the fore after the 2016 American presidential election, when intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had used Facebook and other internet platforms to influence voters. His research has since caused Facebook and other companies to ban thousands of disinformation-related accounts; he has also been tapped as an expert by governments studying foreign interference.

Now his skills are needed more than ever, as the 2020 presidential election approaches and the tactics of internet trickery have been adopted by governments, activist groups and clickbait farms in at least 70 countries. In tandem, a disinformation-for-hire industry has emerged. And domestic disinformation efforts in the United States are also on the rise.

“It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the problem, or how many technological advances you have,” said Jenni Sargent, managing director of First Draft, a London group that tracks disinformation and trains journalists. “Without the human layer of someone like Ben dissecting the way that people use the internet, then we wouldn’t be as far ahead as we are in terms of understanding the problem and the scale.”

Mr. Nimmo works from his home atop a hill and next to a grain farm in the small Scottish town of Haddington. To ferret out disinformation networks, he relies on open-source digital tools: the Wayback Machine to find internet pages that have been deleted; Amnesty International’s Citizen Evidence Lab, which provides information about YouTube videos; and Sysomos for spotting social media trends.

New York Times, Ransomware Attacks Grow, Crippling Cities and Businesses, Nathaniel Popper, Feb. 10, 2020 (print ed.). Hackers are locking people out of their networks and demanding big payments to get back in. New data shows just how common and damaging the attacks have become.

The frequency of ransomware attacks — among the scariest and most costly online assaults — has been hard to pinpoint because many victims quietly pay off their attackers without notifying the authorities.

Now, an array of new data provides perhaps the best available picture of the problem. In 2019, 205,280 organizations submitted files that had been hacked in a ransomware attack — a 41 percent increase from the year before, according to information provided to The New York Times by Emsisoft, a security firm that helps companies hit by ransomware.

New York Times, Amazon Is Quietly Removing Books That Promote Nazis, David Streitfeld, Feb. 10, 2020 (print ed.). The retailer once said it would sell “the good, the bad and the ugly.” Now it is getting pulled into the free speech debates that have roiled social media sites.

Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by George Lincoln Rockwell, left, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon has also prohibited volumes like The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power and A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.

While few may lament the disappearance of these hate-filled books, the increasing number of banished titles has set off concern among some of the third-party booksellers who stock Amazon’s vast virtual shelves. Amazon, they said, seems to operate under vague or nonexistent rules.

“Amazon reserves the right to determine whether content provides an acceptable experience,” said one recent removal notice that the company sent to a bookseller.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been roiled in recent years by controversies that pit freedom of speech against offensive content. Amazon has largely escaped this debate. But with millions of third-party merchants supplying much of what Amazon sells to tens of millions of customers, that ability to maintain a low profile may be reaching its end.

Amazon began as a bookstore and, even as it has moved on to many more lucrative projects, now controls at least two-thirds of the market for new, used and digital volumes in the United States. With its profusion of reader reviews, ability to cut prices without worrying about profitability and its control of the electronic book landscape, to name only three advantages, Amazon has immense power to shape what information people are consuming.

Yet the retailer declines to provide a list of prohibited books, say how they were chosen or even discuss the topic. “Booksellers make decisions every day about what selection of books they choose to offer,” it said in a statement.

Gregory Delzer is a Tennessee bookseller whose Amazon listings account for about a third of his sales. “They don’t tell us the rules and don’t let us have a say,” he said. “But they squeeze us for every penny.”

Nazi-themed items regularly crop up on Amazon, where they are removed under its policy on “offensive and controversial materials.” Those rules pointedly do not apply to books. Amazon merely says that books for sale on its site “should provide a positive customer experience.”

Now Amazon is becoming increasingly proactive in removing Nazi material. It even allowed its own Nazi-themed show, “The Man in the High Castle,” to be cleaned up for a tribute book. The series, which began in 2015 and concluded in November, is set in a parallel United States where the Germans and the Japanese won World War II.

Feb. 9

Media News

New York Times, What Happens When QAnon Seeps From the Web to the Offline World, Mike McIntire and Kevin Roose, Feb. 9, 2020. A city council member in California took the dais and quoted from QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory about “deep state” traitors plotting against the president, concluding her remarks, “God bless Q.”

What began online more than two years ago as an intricate, if baseless, conspiracy theory that quickly attracted thousands of followers has since found footholds in the offline world. QAnon has surfaced in political campaigns, criminal cases, merchandising and at least one college class.

Last month, hundreds of QAnon enthusiasts gathered in a Tampa, Fla., park to listen to speakers and pick up literature, and in England, a supporter of President Trump and the Brexit leader Nigel Farage raised a “Q” flag over a Cornish castle.

The seepage of conspiracy theorizing from the digital fever swamps into life offline is one of the more unsettling developments of the Trump era, in which the president has relentlessly pushed groundless conspiracies to reshape political narratives to his liking.

In promoting fringe ideas about deep state schemes, Mr. Trump has at times elevated and encouraged QAnon followers — recirculating their posts on Twitter, posing with one for a photograph in the Oval Office, inviting some to a White House “social media summit.” Recently, during a daylong Twitter binge, Mr. Trump retweeted more than 20 posts from accounts that had trafficked in QAnon material.

QAnon began in October 2017, when a pseudonymous user of the online message board 4chan started writing cryptic posts under the name Q Clearance Patriot. The person claimed to be a high-ranking official privy to top-secret information from Mr. Trump’s inner circle. Over two years and more than 3,500 posts, Q — whose identity has never been determined — has unspooled a sprawling conspiracy narrative that claims, among other things, that Mr. Trump was recruited by the military to run for office in order to break up a global cabal of pedophiles, and that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation would end with prominent Democrats’ being imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.

The anonymous posts subsequently moved to 8chan, where they remained until August, when that site was taken offline after the El Paso mass shooting. They now live on 8kun, a new website built by 8chan’s owner.

Most recently, the botched Iowa Democratic caucuses and the coronavirus outbreak have provided fodder for conspiracy mongering: QAnon fans shared groundless theories online linking the liberal billionaire George Soros to technological problems that hobbled the caucuses, and passed around bogus and potentially dangerous “treatments” for the virus.

About a dozen candidates for public office in the United States have promoted or dabbled in QAnon, and its adherents have been arrested in at least seven episodes, including a murder in New York and an armed standoff with the police near the Hoover Dam. The F.B.I. cited QAnon in an intelligence bulletin last May about the potential for violence motivated by “fringe political conspiracy theories.”

Washington Post, Joan Cusack and other performance pros weigh in on the Democratic debate, James Warren, Feb. 9, 2020. James Warren, right, a former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, is executive editor of NewsGuard, which rates the credibility of news and information sites.

What did professional observers of performance think of Friday night’s debate in New Hampshire, an impressively sober, 2½-hour exchange?

It’s not an academic question. Just a few days before in his State of the Union address, President Trump demonstrated just how much of politics is theater — and how powerful it can sometimes be.

So it seemed like a good moment to change the lens and assess the Democrats as performers.

We asked a handful of experts who perform, teach performance or judge performers professionally, to give us their reactions. Our group included: Joan Cusack, two-time Academy Award-nominee; Chris Jones, theater critic of the Chicago Tribune; Kelly Leonard, executive vice president of the Second City improvisational comedy troupe; Anne Libera, director of comedy studies at Chicago’s Columbia College; Jon Maas, a Hollywood writer-producer; and Harvey Young, dean of the college of fine arts at Boston University.

Washington Post, U.S. radio’s top player blames AI for layoffs. DJs say that’s spin, Drew Harwell, Feb. 9, 2020 (print ed.).The company that owns iHeartRadio and more than 850 local stations across the country has called AI the muscle it needs to fend off rivals.

Washington Post, Analysis: Harvey Weinstein accuser Jessica Mann’s dramatic testimony is a new kind of test in sex-crime trials, Shayna Jacobs, Feb. 9, 2020. The actress's admitted consensual sexual relationship with Weinstein, both before and after the alleged assaults, makes her a traditionally imperfect witness.

Feb. 7

New York Times, Data Reveals Which Platforms Reported Surge in Child Pornography, Gabriel J.X. Dance and Michael H. Keller, Feb. 7, 2020. In a first, videos outnumbered photos in reports to the authorities last year. Facebook found the most imagery, the bulk of it on its Messenger app.Facebook found the bulk on its Messenger app, but while companies are getting better at finding such content, predators remain adept at exploiting their services.

The number of online photos and videos of child sexual abuse reported to the authorities grew by more than 50 percent last year, an indication that many of the world’s biggest technology platforms remain infested with the illegal material.

Nearly 70 million of the images and videos were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a federally designated clearinghouse for the imagery that works with law enforcement agencies.

The record number was driven by a surge in illegal videos, which have always been popular among sexual predators but are now more readily detected by some companies. Over 41 million videos were reported; the number five years ago was under 350,000. The companies flagged many of the same images and videos multiple times as they were shared among users.

Miami Herald, Police report: Top aide to Miami’s mayor sent sexually graphic photo to teen’s phone, Charles Rabin, Joey Flechas and
David Ovalle, Feb. 5, 2020. On Feb. 7, Rene Pedrosa was arrested and charged with battery and transmitting pornography to a minor after police said he groped a teen in City Hall and later sent the teen a sexually explicit picture.

The report says Rene Pedrosa, 48, solicited some type of picture from the teen, who was familiar with Pedrosa. What exactly he solicited was redacted.

Pedrosa, the mayor’s spokesman and a former television reporter, resigned Tuesday after Mayor Francis Suarez said Pedrosa admitted he was being investigated for “personal misconduct.”

The list of offenses, according to the report, are sexual performance by a child, possession of pornography and soliciting a child via computer and transmission of material harmful to minors.

Pedrosa spent years as a television news reporter at América TeVé-Channel 41, a Spanish-language television station that covers news across Miami-Dade County. Pedrosa often covered stories in local government and the court system.

He joined the mayor’s staff in January 2019 as Suarez’s communications director. Pedrosa became a top adviser and spokesman for the mayor, known for pushing the mayor’s views in local media, especially on Spanish-language radio.

Feb. 6

In this July 10, 2019 file photo, U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald checks his news website at his home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A judge in Brasilia dismissed accusations that Glenn Greenwald was involved in hacking phones of Brazilian officials, following weeks of criticism that his prosecution would infringe on constitutional protections for journalists. (AP Photo / Leo Correa, File)

Associated Press, Brazil judge rejects hacking accusation against Greenwald, Mauricio Savarese and David Biller, Feb. 6, 2020. A judge in Brazil’s capital on Thursday dismissed accusations that journalist Glenn Greenwald was involved in hacking phones of officials, following weeks of criticism that his prosecution would infringe on constitutional protections for the press.

Prosecutors last month leveled accusations that Greenwald helped a group of six people hack into phones of hundreds of local authorities, saying his actions amounted to criminal association and illegal interception of communications.

Since last year, Greenwald’s online media outlet The Intercept Brasil has published a series of excerpts from private conversations on a messaging app involving current Justice Minister Sérgio Moro.

The attempt by prosecutors to criminalize Greenwald’s work had prompted swift backlash from national and foreign journalist associations, freedom of expression advocates and Brazil’s national bar association.

Those groups said prosecutors were abusing their power to persecute Greenwald, an attorney-turned-journalist who lives with his husband and children in Rio de Janeiro. Greenwald’s lawyers called the allegations “bizarre” and said they challenged a previous ruling in the case by the Brazilian Supreme Court protecting freedom of the press.

Thursday’s decision by the Brasilia-based judge, Ricardo Leite, invoked that earlier ruling by Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes, who barred investigations of Greenwald and The Intercept Brasil in relation to the alleged hacking.

“My feeling is that the decision of Justice Gilmar Mendes adopted a wide and extensive sense and it does include the interpretation of blocking any action of investigation by the state, both in the investigation phase and in the judicial one,” Leite wrote in his decision.

While rejecting the claims regarding Greenwald, Leite accepted those against the six alleged hackers, who will now face charges as defendants.

The journalist said in a statement that he welcomes “the fact that this investigation will not move forward,” but adds that he believes “this decision is insufficient to guarantee the rights of a free press.”

“We seek a decisive rejection from the Supreme Court of this abusive prosecution on the grounds that it is a clear and grave assault on core press freedoms. Anything less would leave open the possibility of further erosion of the fundamental freedom of the press against other journalists,” Greenwald said.

He said his news outlet would continue to publish reports based on material obtained from the source.

The Intercept also welcomed the ruling, with reservations.

“As federal police investigators affirmed last year, he did nothing wrong,” said Betsy Reed, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. “However, the ruling is narrow and procedural, based on the injunction issued by a Supreme Court minister last year.”

The leaked excerpts published by The Intercept Brasil purport to show that Moro, then a judge, was improperly coordinating with prosecutors he was overseeing in a vast corruption investigation.

Feb. 5

Transitions

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Authors Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the National Press Club remember their iconic Watergate books (2014 file photo by Noel St. John.)

New York Times, Alice Mayhew, Who Edited a Who’s Who of Writers, Dies at 87, Anita Gates, Feb. 5, 2020 (print ed.). At Simon & Schuster, best sellers were her stock in trade. She popularized the nonfiction political page turner, starting with All the President’s Men.

Alice Mayhew, a widely admired editor who shepherded into print best sellers by a veritable who’s who of writers — along the way popularizing the Washington political narrative, beginning with All the President’s Men in 1974 — died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. alice mayhew 2007 david jacobs.jpg She was 87.

The death was confirmed by Simon & Schuster, where she had been a vice president and editorial director.

All the President’s Men, the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s account of how they uncovered the truth about the Watergate burglary and the subsequent White House effort to cover it up, became an immediate best seller and had a decided impact on American history. Published on June 15, 1974 (no advance copies had been provided, even for reviewers), it accelerated a growing public disapproval of President Richard M. Nixon’s actions and helped fuel a congressional drive toward impeachment that led to Nixon’s resignation 55 days later.

Ms. Mayhew (shown in a 2007 photo at right by David Jacobs) also worked with notable public figures, including President Jimmy Carter (A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, 2015) and the Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (My Own Words, 2017).

The countless best sellers that Ms. Mayhew edited include John Dean’s Blind Ambition: The White House Years (1976); Taylor Branch’s Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years (1998); Walter Isaacson’s books, including Steve Jobs (2011) and Leonardo da Vinci (2017); David Brooks’s On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004), an examination of contemporary American society; Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights history, Carry Me Home (2001); and the first volumes of Sidney Blumenthal’s political biography of Abraham Lincoln, beginning with A Self-Made Man (2016).

In 2014, when Simon & Schuster celebrated its 90th anniversary by having staff members vote for their 90 favorite titles over those years, almost one-third of the books (29) had been edited by Ms. Mayhew.

Mr. Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House (2018) was, as he noted in the acknowledgments, his 19th book with her.

Ms. Mayhew’s books occasionally dealt with the lighter side of political or popular culture. She edited Kitty Kelley’s gossipy biography Nancy Reagan (1991) and two memoirs by the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.

While Ms. Mayhew firmly avoided talking about herself, she was considerably more straightforward when discussing others.

In an interview with Len Colodny, co-author of Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, about Mr. Dean’s claim that his editors had told him to include false information in Blind Ambition (reissued in 2009), Ms. Mayhew said: “That’s a lie. L-I-E. That is spelled L-I-E.”

Feb. 4

Press Freedom

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UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (file photo)

Reporters Without Borders USA (RSF USA), UK: Banning of journalists from Downing Street press briefing latest worrying move by Boris Johnson’s new government, Staff report, Feb. 4, 2020. Today’s attempt by Downing Street to ban select journalists from a press briefing is the latest of a number of worrying steps taken by Boris Johnson’s new government that restrict press freedom.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for an immediate reversal of this alarming trend before the UK follows the US further down the World Press Freedom Index.

On February 3, political journalists walked out of a Downing Street press briefing en masse after an aide attempted to ban selected reporters from attending. The Prime Minister’s Director of Communications, Lee Cain, reportedly tried to prevent journalists from the Independent, the i, the Mirror, HuffPost, PoliticsHome, and others from covering the briefing, on the grounds that they had not been specifically invited. A handful of media had received invitations to a “No10 technical background briefing on the UK’s future relationship with the EU;” however, the journalists who had been invited walked out in protest to the barring of access for their colleagues.

Political journalists had recently complained about the change in location of daily press briefings from Parliament to Downing Street. Many feared this measure could be used to impose restrictions on which media were permitted access, and as highlighted in a letter signed by every national newspaper editor, otherwise “create barriers to covering democracy and impede the work of a free press.”

bbc news logo2 In December, it was confirmed that the government was considering decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee that provides the majority of the BBC’s funding -- a step that could effectively defund the country’s foremost public service broadcaster. Reports also emerged that ministers have been banned from appearing on BBC Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programme, the Today Programme -- a move criticized as an attempt to “delegitimize” the broadcaster.

“Restrictions on journalists’ access and threats against public service media are nothing short of alarming, and are disturbingly reminiscent of early Trump administration moves in the US - practices that should be reversed, not replicated. We call on the Prime Minister to ensure that such steps are immediately ceased, and that this government is acting in line with the country’s obligations to protect and respect press freedom,” said RSF UK Bureau Director Rebecca Vincent.

The UK is ranked 33rd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index.

Washington Post, Opinion: Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse, Margaret margaret sullivan 2015 photo Sullivan, Feb. 4, 2020. Dubious but noisy allegations of caucus-rigging could undermine faith in our democracy.

All credible reporting seemed to confirm the explanation that a technical snag, not a dirty trick, was to blame. But it didn’t matter. Iowa conspiracy theorists were already working overtime long before voters headed to their caucus sites Monday evening, thanks to another technical glitch that prompted the Des Moines Register to cancel the release of its vaunted Iowa Poll on Saturday night.

Supporters of Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang circulated the hashtag “#ReleaseThePoll,” claiming without evidence that it had been killed because their respective candidates did better than expected.

Feb. 3

Washington Post, Rush Limbaugh says he has advanced lung cancer, will continue radio program while he undergoes treatment, Paul Farhi, Feb. 3, 2020. Rush Limbaugh, for decades the leading figure in conservative talk radio, said during his program on Monday that he has advanced lung cancer and will soon begin treatment.

Limbaugh, 69, gave few details about his condition other than a diagnosis from two doctors.

The radio icon said he sought a doctor’s opinion after experiencing shortness of breath on Jan. 12, his birthday.

“I thought about not telling anybody,” he said on the air from his home studio in West Palm Beach, Fla. “It is what it is. You know me, I’m the mayor of Realville. This has happened, and my intention is to come here every day I can and do this program as normally and competently and expertly as I do each and every day because that is the source of my greatest satisfaction professionally, personally.”

He added: “I’ve had so much support from family and friends during this that it’s been tremendous. I told the staff today that I have a deeply personal relationship with God that I do not proselytize about. But I do, and I have been working that relationship tremendously, which I do regularly anyway, but I’ve been focused on it intensely for the past couple of weeks.”

Washington Post, The end comes for another local newspaper, 165 years after it began, Paul Farhi, Feb. 3, 2020 (print ed.). They’re closing up the office now, with its musty odor of moldering newsprint and decrepit bound copies stacked neck-high. On Thursday, the last Montgomery Sentinel rolled off a press, 165 years after its birth.

The newspaper once carried ads for slaves and chronicled the news from both the Civil War and the civil rights movement. It survived the Great Depression and muddled through the Great Recession. But the paper, with editions serving Maryland’s two largest counties, Montgomery and Prince George’s, couldn’t survive Facebook and Google and Instagram. And so now it is gone, the latest to fall in America’s vast newspaper famine.

The story has become humdrum, so routine that newspapers barely stir themselves to report on all the deaths in their family. The civic commemorations are brief, too, if they happen at all. The numbers are dry: More than 1 in 5 newspapers, mostly weeklies like the Sentinel, have dropped dead over the past 15 years.

Like all those papers, the Sentinel covered the local stuff, news of the community, just over the border from the nation’s capital. It wrote about county government (“Bike registration, stipends and zoning dominate meeting,” read last week’s headline), and once staffed all the other meaty beats: schools, politics, cops, courts.

The politicians and bureaucrats knew someone was watching — accountability journalism. Does Facebook do anything like that?

It wrote about people — the teachers, doctors, librarians and artists who lived down the street. When those people died, the obituaries helped everyone remember. Does Instagram do obits?

Feb. 2

U.S. TV / Politics

New York Times, Opinion: For Better or Worse, Trump Will Get His Favorite Things on Super Bowl Sunday, Will Leitch, His pregame interview with Sean Hannity offers unfettered airtime in front of a huge national audience. This Sunday afternoon, before the San Francisco 49ers take on the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV, President Trump will speak with Sean Hannity on Fox, the network airing the Super Bowl. As you might suspect, this interview will be a much more insular enterprise. Mr. Trump speaks regularly with Mr. Hannity, who is seen as an informal but influential adviser, and Mr. Hannity has been in return a staunch, unyielding defender of the president.

It will mark the third time Mr. Trump will do the traditional interview before America’s annual television holiday; he spoke to Mr. O’Reilly in 2017, took 2018 off because the game was aired on NBC, and famously told Margaret Brennan of CBS that he wouldn’t allow his son Barron to play football because it’s “really tough” and “a dangerous sport.”

This year’s Super Bowl comes at an amazing moment, a confluence of political circumstances and events that give this particular bully pulpit a power and a spotlight it hasn’t had in years. With impeachment, the Iowa caucuses and the State of the Union all on deck, Mr. Trump will have a stage, and a famously pliant interviewer, that is unparalleled in American culture. He couldn’t ask for a more ideal year for it to be Fox’s turn to air the game.

New York Times, ‘S.N.L.’ Imagines the Impeachment Trial That Could Have Been, Dave Itzkoff, Feb. 2, 2020. On Super Bowl weekend, Alec Baldwin returned to play President Trump in an episode that also featured several football-themed sketches. If you ended the week hoping that President Trump’s impeachment trial would go on longer, this weekend’s opening “Saturday Night Live” sketch imagined just such a scenario: a parade of self-serving witnesses that wasn’t necessarily an improvement.

This week’s episode, hosted by J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans and featuring the musical guest Luke Combs, began with a voice-over lamenting that the president’s trial “wound up consisting of two weeks of dry debate and posturing, and will conclude without any witness testimony or new evidence.” Instead, the sketch promised “the trial you wish had happened.”

#MeToo Scandals

New York Times, ‘Angels’ in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Katherine Rosman, Sapna Maheshwari and James B. Stewart, Feb. 2, 2020 (print ed.). Victoria’s Secret defined femininity for millions of women. Its catalog and fashion shows were popular touchstones. For models, landing a spot as an “Angel” all but guaranteed international stardom.

But inside the company, two powerful men presided over an entrenched culture of misogyny, bullying and harassment, according to interviews with more than 30 current and former executives, employees, contractors and models, as well as court filings and other documents.

edward razek Ed Razek, right, for decades one of the top executives at L Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret, was the subject of repeated complaints about inappropriate conduct. He tried to kiss models. He asked them to sit on his lap. He touched one’s crotch ahead of the 2018 Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

Executives said they had alerted Leslie Wexner, the billionaire founder and chief executive of L Brands, about his deputy’s pattern of behavior. Some women who complained faced retaliation. One model, Andi Muise, said Victoria’s Secret had stopped hiring her for its fashion shows after she rebuffed Mr. Razek’s advances.

A number of the brand’s models agreed to pose nude, often without being paid, for a prominent Victoria’s Secret photographer who later used some pictures in an expensive coffee-table book — an arrangement that made L Brands executives uncomfortable about women feeling pressured to take their clothes off.

The atmosphere was set at the top. Mr. Razek, the chief marketing officer, was perceived as Mr. Wexner’s proxy, leaving many employees with the impression he was invincible, according to current and former employees. On multiple occasions, Mr. Wexner himself was heard demeaning women.

Feb. 1

Washington Post, Twitter bans Zero Hedge account after it doxxed a Chinese researcher over coronavirus, Derek Hawkins, Feb. 1, 2020. Twitter on Friday permanently suspended the right-leaning finance blog Zero Hedge after it published a conspiracy theory suggesting that a Chinese scientist might be responsible for the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

A Twitter spokesperson did not comment on what specifically prompted the suspension, saying only that Zero Hedge was removed for violating the social media giant’s platform manipulation policy. Twitter defines platform manipulation as “using Twitter to engage in bulk, aggressive, or deceptive activity that misleads others and/or disrupts their experience.”

But Zero Hedge’s founder, who uses the pseudonym Tyler Durden, wrote in a Friday afternoon post that he received a notice from Twitter saying he violated the platform’s rules against abuse and targeted harassment.

“It is news to us that this website has (ever) ‘engaged in the targeted harassment of someone,' ” Durden wrote.

January

Jan. 31

Associated Press, Anne Cox Chambers, wealthy newspaper heiress, dies at 100, Jeff Martin, Jan. 31, 2020. Anne Cox Chambers, a newspaper heiress, diplomat and philanthropist who was one of the country’s richest women, has died at the age of 100.

Her nephew James Cox Kennedy announced her death to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, her company’s flagship newspaper.

Chambers, a director of Cox Enterprises Inc., promoted Jimmy Carter’s political career and served as U.S. ambassador to Belgium during his presidency. Forbes estimated her net worth several years ago at nearly $17 billion. She was well known for her charitable giving, and served on the boards of the Atlanta Arts Alliance and the High Museum of Art among other institutions.

She was the daughter of James Middleton Cox, the 1920 Democratic presidential candidate and founder of Cox Enterprises Inc. The privately held company has included The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers, radio and TV stations, cable TV systems and other businesses.

Chambers and her mother and siblings inherited the company when the senior Cox died in 1957.

While most of her wealthy friends were Republicans, she remained a staunch Democrat. At 89, she even knocked on doors for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, the newspaper reported.

“I just don’t discuss politics with my friends. No use having fights,” she once told Vanity Fair magazine.

“Both of my parents were extremely caring people, so that I think growing up, well, there was the fact of feeling responsible,” she said. “My father’s rich friends would complain about paying taxes, but he used to say it was a privilege to pay taxes. In Russia, you’d never make enough money to pay those taxes.”

Jan. 30

Media News

julian assange npc event jan 30 2020 Custom

@Action_4Assange, an advocacy group for the civil rights of imprisoned WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange, sponosored a panel discussion on Jan. 30, 2020 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The discussion is available via YouTube here. In related news, see a news report below based on a United Nations finding.

Courage Foundation video YouTube, The Prosecution of Julian Assange and Its Impact on the Freedom of the Press, expert panel appearing at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, Jan. 30, 2020, published on Jan. 31 and filmed by Taylor Hudak‏ of @Action_4Assange (70:04 mins).

WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has been indicted on 17 counts of Espionage and 1 count of conspiracy to commit computer crime for WikiLeaks' 2010 publications of the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary, and State Department cables leaked to WikiLeaks by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

On Jan. 30, 2020, these legal and academic experts discussed the impact of Assange's prosecution on the freedom of the press, at the National Press Club's First Amendment Lounge in Washington DC.

Speakers:

Jameel Jaffer, Director, Knight First Amendment Institute
Amy Jeffress, Attorney, former US Department of Justice
Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project

Moderator: Mary-Rose Papandrea, Constitutional Law Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Courage Foundation supports whistleblowers and the public's right to know. Courage hosts Julian Assange's defense site at defend.wikileaks.org

SwissInfo.org, UN rapporteur: Assange being set up to be ‘burnt at the stake,’ Nils Melzer, Jan. 31, 2020. The detention and potential extradition to the US of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is an attack on democratic principles and the freedom of the press, says the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.

In an interview with news outlet Republikexternal link, Melzer delivered a damning indictment of the legal and political systems in the United States, Britain, Sweden and Ecuador.

“It is obvious that what we are dealing with here is political persecution,” he said. “The case is a huge scandal and represents the failure of Western rule of law.”

Assange is currently in a high-security prison in Britain fighting extradition to the US. In 2010 the whistleblowing website Wikileaks published material from former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning of alleged US war crimes in Iraq.

Melzer got involved in the case last year but was dissatisfied with answers to his enquiries to the Swedish and British authorities. He has visited Assange in jail and says that the 48-year-old is being denied legal rights and is being subject to psychological torture that could cost him his life.

Melzer, who has previously criticised the Swiss government’s stance towards Assange, tells Republik that he has documentary evidence that Swedish police made up evidence to accuse Assange with rape, an investigation that was subsequently dropped.

“Four democratic countries joined forces – the US, Ecuador, Sweden and the UK – to leverage their power to portray one man as a monster so that he could later be burnt at the stake without any outcry. If Julian Assange is convicted, it will be a death sentence for freedom of the press,” Melzer said.

Assange is wanted for trial in the US to face several charges, including breaches of the Espionage Act. He continues to divide public opinion, with some accusing him of being a dangerous narcissist who endangers lives and others believing him to be a defender of democratic freedoms.

Jan. 29

mary louise kelly john bolton cnn files

New York Times, Opinion: Pompeo Called Me a ‘Liar.’ That’s Not What Bothers Me, Mary Louise Kelly (co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered”), Jan. 29, 2020. Journalists are supposed to ask tough questions, then share the answers — or lack thereof — with the world.

I write about all this now to refocus attention on the substance of the interviews, which has been overshadowed by Mr. Pompeo’s subsequently swearing at me, calling me a liar and challenging me to find Ukraine on an unmarked map.

For the record, I did. That’s not the point. The point is that recently the risk of miscalculation — of two old adversaries misreading each other and accidentally escalating into armed confrontation — has felt very real. It occurs to me that swapping insults through interviews with journalists such as me might, terrifyingly, be as close as the top diplomats of the United States and Iran came to communicating this month.

Rolling Stone, QAnon YouTubers Are Telling People to Drink Bleach to Ward Off Coronavirus, EJ Dickson, Jan. 29, 2020. Dangerous advice is spreading on YouTube and Twitter, despite efforts to stop it.

As coronavirus spreads across the globe — with Chinese authorities confirming nearly 6,000 cases and 132 people dead as of Wednesday — the reaction on social media in particular has largely been marked by fear and panic. For some conspiracy theorists, however, it has also served as a prime opportunity to spread misinformation and baseless rumors about the disease — some of which are potentially extremely dangerous.

One terrifying example? QAnon supporters are encouraging people to drink MMS — or Miracle Mineral Solution, a bleaching agent that has been touted as a “miracle cure” by anti-vaxxers and other fringe groups — to ward off coronavirus. And despite restrictions on such content on platforms like YouTube, it is nonetheless fairly easy to find.

According to the Daily Beast, proponents of QAnon — the elaborate conspiracy theory purporting that President Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a ring of Democratic child sexual abusers — have been promoting MMS as a “cure” for coronavirus on Twitter, particularly the MMS-branded “20-20-20 spray,” with one account alleging it “kills viruses instantly.” Another prominent conspiracy theorist tweeted, “#coronavirus is a depopulation program,” recommending colloidal silver (a supplement that, if taken in large amounts, can result in discoloration of the skin and nails, or kidney damage) and MMS to ward off the disease.

Jan. 27

Reporters Facing Threats julian assange and swedens politically appointed judges indicter graphic

WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange (graphic by The Indicter Magazine and Swedish Doctors for Human Rights).

New York Times, Opinion: Reporters Face New Threats From the Governments They Cover, James Risen (right, a former reporter for The Times and james risen h s senior national security correspondent for The Intercept), Jan. 27, 2020 (print ed.). The cases against Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald may be models for a crackdown.

When Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, was charged last year by the Trump administration in connection with the publication of secret United States government documents nearly a decade earlier, many journalists expressed deep concern about the dangerous precedent the case could set for investigative reporting in America.

But few seemed to consider that the case might also serve as a model for other nations eager to clamp down on press freedom.

glenn greenwald hs On Tuesday, Glenn Greenwald, left, an American journalist living and working in Brazil, was charged, in a criminal complaint brought by Brazilian prosecutors, with cybercrimes in connection with his stories on private messages among Brazilian officials that revealed corruption and abuses at the highest levels of the government. Brazilian prosecutors asserted that Mr. Greenwald was part of a criminal organization that hacked the cellphones of government officials. He has denied the charges. (Full disclosure: Mr. Greenwald is a co-founder of The Intercept, where I work as a reporter; I also run the First Look Press Freedom Defense Fund, part of the nonprofit organization that includes The Intercept.)

The case against Mr. Greenwald is eerily similar to the Trump administration’s case against Mr. Assange. Last April, the Justice Department charged Mr. Assange with aiding a source, the former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, to gain access to a United States military computer database. In May 2019, the charges against him were broadened, and he was indicted under the Espionage Act in connection with the publication of American military and diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks.

Both cases are based in part on a new prosecutorial concept — that journalism can be proved to be a crime through a focus on interactions between reporters and their sources. Prosecutors are now scrutinizing the processes by which sources obtain classified or private information and then provide it to journalists. Since those interactions today are largely electronic, prosecutors are seeking to criminalize journalism by turning to anti-hacking laws to implicate reporters in the purported criminal activity of their sources in gaining access to data on computers or cellphones without authorization.

This blunt approach gives the government enormous leverage over journalists and, in the United States, provides them with a detour around First Amendment concerns. If these cases become templates that prosecutors in the United States and other nations follow, virtually every investigative reporter will become vulnerable to criminal charges and imprisonment.

jair bolsonaro brazil Both the Trump administration and the right-wing Brazilian government of President Jair Bolsonaro, right, seem to have decided to experiment with such draconian anti-press tactics by trying them out first on aggressive and disagreeable figures.

In fact, by the time of his indictment last year, there was still an ongoing debate within the media about whether Mr. Assange should even be considered a journalist at all.

Mr. Assange was both a publisher and an intermediary between sources and reporters, which made it difficult to define his journalistic role. His later involvement in the Trump-Russia case — in 2016, WikiLeaks obtained and released emails and other documents from the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee from a hacker believed to be a front for Russian intelligence — transformed Mr. Assange into an even more incendiary character with little public support. (The federal charges against Mr. Assange are not related to his involvement in the 2016 campaign.)

It will be tragic if journalists shrug off the attack on the contrarian Mr. Greenwald and don’t see his case for what it truly signifies — that Trump-like attacks on the press are spreading like a virus around the globe.

mary louise kelly john bolton cnn files

Washington Post, Emails support NPR host after Mike Pompeo calls her a liar in setting up contentious interview, Paul Farhi, Jan. 27, 2020 (print ed.). They indicate that the secretary of state’s press aide was aware that Mary Louise Kelly intended to ask him about several topics and the aide raised no objections, contrary to Pompeo’s characterization.

Pompeo’s statement implied that Kelly (shown above with Pompeo via separate file photos via CNN) had agreed before the interview to confine her questions to developments in Iran and that he would not be asked about other subjects. He made the same claim during the interview but Kelly pushed back, telling him she’d worked out a different arrangement with his staff.

But emails between Kelly and Pompeo’s press aide, Katie Martin, a day before the interview show that there was no such agreement and that Kelly made clear her intention to question Pompeo about other topics.

Washington Post, Opinion: The Post’s misguided suspension of Felicia Sonmez over Kobe Bryant tweets, Erik Wemple, Jan. 27, 2020.
The Post has suspended reporter Felicia Sonmez following her social-media activity over the death of NBA great Kobe Bryant. Here’s the explanation from Managing Editor Tracy Grant: “National political reporter Felicia Sonmez was placed on administrative leave while The Post reviews whether tweets about the death of Kobe Bryant violated The Post newsroom’s social media policy. The tweets displayed poor judgment that undermined the work of her colleagues.”

What did Sonmez do to deserve this brushback? She tweeted out a very good story from the Daily Beast.

News of Bryant’s death on Sunday prompted an immediate and overwhelming expression of grief on Twitter, with fans and followers praising an NBA icon. The perennial all-star perished in a helicopter crash along with eight other people, including his 13-year-old daughter Gianna. Sonmez wished to remind everyone of one incident in Bryant’s life.

An immediate and overwhelming expression of anger piled on Sonmez from Twitter users. Sonmez had directed her followers to this April 2016 story in the Daily Beast by Marlow Stern. Written at the time of Bryant’s farewell tour through NBA cities, the story takes a deep look at the sexual-assault allegation against Bryant stemming from his 2003 visit to Colorado’s Lodge & Spa at Cordillera. The case never made it to trial because the 19-year-old accuser — “who had been dragged through the mud for months by the media and Bryant’s defense team,” wrote Stern — declined to testify. She did, however, file a separate civil complaint, which Bryant settled.

Jan. 26

Reporters Facing Threats julian assange and swedens politically appointed judges indicter graphic

WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange (graphic by The Indicter Magazine and Swedish Doctors for Human Rights).

New York Times, Opinion: Reporters Face New Threats From the Governments They Cover, James Risen (right, a former reporter for The Times and james risen h s senior national security correspondent for The Intercept), Jan. 26, 2020. The cases against Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald may be models for a crackdown.

But few seemed to consider that the case might also serve as a model for other nations eager to clamp down on press freedom.

In fact, by the time of his indictment last year, there was still an ongoing debate within the media about whether Mr. Assange should even be considered a journalist at all.

glenn greenwald david miranda

Glenn Greenwald is show at right with his partner David Miranda.

Jan. 25

Washington Post, Sanders supporters have weaponized Facebook to spread angry memes about his Democratic rivals, Craig Timberg and Isaac Stanley-Becker, Jan. 25, 2020 (print ed.). Users are using mass-posting technologies to flood Facebook with attacks on Elizabeth Warren and others.

A Democrat in Michigan scrolled through a surge of nasty Facebook memes about Sen. Elizabeth Warren last week before fixing on one that captured his growing dislike of the candidate. It depicted her smiling face as a mask. Behind it was Hillary Clinton.

Matt Walters, 64, a retired factory worker and supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), shared the image onward to eight Facebook groups and tens of thousands of potential eyeballs with a few taps on his smartphone — using a popular new mass-posting technique that allows ordinary Americans to operate with rapid-fire speed reminiscent of Russian bots and trolls in 2016.

In that small way, Walters contributed to a massive wave of hostile memes about Sanders’s Democratic rivals that both reflects the rising divisiveness in the party’s nominating contest and, in the view of social media experts, exacerbates it.

The volume and viciousness of the memes — portraying Warren (D-Mass.) as a snake, a backstabber and a liar — reflect how Facebook identifies and rewards emotionally charged content to generate reactions from its billions of users. That serves the company’s ad-driven business model, which equates engagement with profit. But it also, in the view of experts who study Facebook’s effect on political speech, distorts democratic debate by confirming biases, sharpening divisions and elevating the glib visual logic of memes over reasoned discussion.

Facebook’s “algorithm not only aggregates people, it activates people in a way that accentuates extremism,” said George Washington University professor Steven Livingston, director of the university’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics. “It inflames passions. It inflames the nature of the discourse.”

Jan. 24

Press Freedom

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Open Letter to Brazilian Authorities on the Charges Against Journalist Glenn Greenwald, Jan. 24, 2020. A coalition of around 40 human rights and free speech NGOs have signed an open letter, organized by Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders, addressed to the Brazilian authorities condemning the charges that the Brazilian federal prosecutor’s office has brought against US journalist Glenn Greenwald (shown below in a file screenshot).

glenn greenwald cnn The charges must be now be examined by a federal judge, who could dismiss them and thereby preserve press freedom in Brazil. The NGOs firmly condemn the intimidatory nature of such judicial procedures, which are designed to intimidate other journalists. The letter to Brazilian authorities:

We, the undersigned press freedom and civil liberties organizations, emphatically condemn the Brazilian authorities’ criminal charges against the award-winning investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald.

These charges represent a straightforward attempt to intimidate and retaliate against Greenwald and The Intercept for their critical reporting on messages that appeared to show a judge advising federal prosecutors how to prosecute cases he was presiding over in the “Operation Car Wash” investigation. Further, by charging Greenwald with a cybercrime the government has essentially criminalized engaging in legitimate journalistic practices, which threatens to have a chilling effect on journalists and sources alike.

The recently disclosed charges are only the most recent development in a campaign of harassment against journalists covering the scandal. Threats against them have been documented since last June, when The Intercept began publishing a series of important public interest stories based on a cache of leaked Telegram messages between public officials.

A coalition of 29 free speech and human rights organizations penned a letter in July 2019 to denounce these threats.1 Then, as now, the implications affect not just Greenwald and his colleagues, but the broader free press in Brazil, including both domestic and international media.

The attacks on Greenwald and The Intercept have included specific death threats, public disinformation, and a criminal prosecution. Notably, in August 2019, in a remarkable opinion by a member of Brazil’s highest court ordered any police investigation into Greenwald halted and condemned any such efforts as “an unambiguous act of censorship” in violation of the country’s constitution.

The right of journalists to report on primary source materials documenting official malfeasance is a critically important press freedom issue. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office has abused its power by charging Greenwald for doing just that — despite a federal police conclusion just last month that there was no evidence that Greenwald committed any crime in relation to the leaked messages.

Given the Supreme Court injunction and that federal police conclusion, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office’s position that Greenwald conspired to commit a crime with his anonymous source is unjustifiable.

These charges await approval from a federal judge, giving the courts the opportunity to reject them and protect freedom of the press. Even so, the chilling effect of such legal intimidation remains. If these tactics are allowed to stand, it would jeopardize all Brazilians’ freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom to participate in democracy.

Media / People / Privacy

New York Times, Jeff Bezos, Tabloid Man, Karen Weise, Jan. 24, 2020 (print ed.). Just a year ago, the world’s richest man seemed to have a pretty low-key life. Times sure have changed.

At the beginning of 2019, Mr. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, was widely regarded as a low-key guy — or at least about as low-key as the world’s richest man, and one of the country’s top executives, could be. He’d geek out over “Star Trek” and he publicly joked that washing dishes every night was “the sexiest thing I do.”

That image exploded by the end of January, when The National Enquirer reported about his affair with Lauren Sanchez, a former TV personality, including contents of intimate text messages between the two. After the Enquirer reporting, Mr. Bezos said he had opened up an investigation into how the paper acquired the messages, hinting that Saudi Arabia may have been involved because of his ownership of The Washington Post.

This week, the United Nations released a statement, based largely on a forensic report commissioned by Mr. Bezos’ investigators, that essentially accused Saudi Arabia’s crown prince of hacking Mr. Bezos’ phone to spy on him. The Saudi government called the claims “absurd.”

The report did not provide evidence that hacked material ended up in The Enquirer. But it did provide a potent reminder of how much has changed in a year. Mr. Bezos had become a tabloid fixture, with yacht appearances, evening strolls and romantic dinners captured in detail.

New York Times, Opinion: Jeff Bezos’s Phone Hack Should Terrify Everyone, Charlie Warzel, Jan. 24, 2020 (print ed.).

Jan. 23

New York Times, Jim Lehrer, Longtime PBS News Anchor, Is Dead at 85, Robert D. McFadden, Jan. 23, 2020. For 36 years, mostly teaming with Robert MacNeil, he offered an alternative to network evening news programs with in-depth reporting, interviews and news analysis.

jim lehrer 2007 Jim Lehrer, the retired PBS anchorman who for 36 years gave public television viewers a substantive alternative to network evening news programs with in-depth reporting, interviews and analysis of world and national affairs, died on Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 85.

While best known for his anchor work, which he shared for two decades with his colleague Robert MacNeil, Mr. Lehrer (shown at right in a 2007 file photo) moderated a dozen presidential debates and was the author of more than a score of novels, which often drew on his reporting experiences. He also wrote four plays and three memoirs.

A low-key, courtly Texan who worked on Dallas newspapers in the 1960s and began his PBS career in the 1970s, Mr. Lehrer saw himself as “a print/word person at heart” and his program as a kind of newspaper for television, with high regard for balanced and objective reporting. He was an oasis of civility in a news media that thrived on excited headlines, gotcha questions and noisy confrontations.

Mr. Lehrer co-anchored a single-topic, half-hour PBS news program with Mr. MacNeil from its inception in 1975 to 1983, when it was expanded into the multitopic “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” It ran until Mr. MacNeil retired in 1995. The renamed “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” continued until 2009, when he reduced his appearances to two and then to one a week until his own retirement in 2011

Jan. 21

Press Freedom: Brazil

glenn greenwald cnn

Axios, Brazil charges American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes, Rashaan Ayesh, Jan. 21, 2020. Brazilian prosecutors charged American journalist Glenn Greenwald (shown above in a file screenshot) with cybercrimes on Tuesday for allegedly spreading cellphone messages "that have embarrassed prosecutors and tarnished the image of an anti-corruption task force," the New York Times reports.

The big picture: Greenwald, who is best known for publishing leaked documents from Edward Snowden about U.S. domestic surveillance, is a co-founder of The Intercept Brazil. The publication has faced attacks from far-right President Jair Bolsonaro after publishing leaked messages about a task force that prosecuted high-profile political figures, including former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Prosecutors allege that Greenwald did more than just receive the leaked messages and played a “clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime," per the Times.

Greenwald lives in Brazil and is married to Brazilian politician David Miranda, who lost a bid for a Brazilian congressional seat and has labeled himself as the "antithesis of Bolsonaro."

What he's saying: In a statement to The Daily Beast, Greenwald said: "The Bolsonaro government and the movement that supports it has made repeatedly clear that it does not believe in basic press freedoms—from Bolsonaro's threats against Folha to his attacks on journalists that have incited violence to Sergio Moro’s threats from the start to classify us as ‘allies of the hackers’ for revealing his corruption."

“Less than two months ago, the Federal Police, examining all the same evidence cited by the Public Ministry, stated explicitly that not only have I never committed any crime but that I exercised extreme caution as a journalist never even to get close to any participation,” he continued. “Even the Federal Police under Minister Moro's command said what is clear to any rational person: I did nothing more than do my job as a journalist—ethically and within the law.”

“This denunciation — brought by the same prosecutor who just tried and failed to criminally prosecute the head of the Brazilian Bar Association for criticizing Minister Moro — is an obvious attempt to attack a free press in retaliation for the revelations we reported about Minister Moro and the Bolsonaro government."

Press Freedom: Canada

Consortium News, Commentary: Consortium News has sent libel notices to a Canadian spy agency and major broadcaster after their reports said CN is part of a Russian-directed propaganda campaign targeting Canadian leaders, Joe Lauria, Jan. 21, 2020. Consortium News has sent libel notices to the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s version of the U.S. National Security Agency, and to a major Canadian television network, Global News, for a report that said Consortium News was “part of a cyber-influence campaign directed by Russia.”

Based on a CSE leak of a secret document, Global News’ website said in a Dec. 10, 2019 article entitled, “‘Canadian eyes only’ intelligence reports say Canadian leaders attacked in cyber campaigns,” that Consortium News led this campaign. “The first attack was a February 2017 report in the ‘online Consortium News’ followed ‘in quick succession’ by pro-Russian English language and Russian-language online media, the CSE report says,” according to Global News.

A caption on the Global News site under a screenshot of the Feb. 27, 2017 Consortium News article reads: “A CSE report says Consortium News was part of an attack from Russia on Chrystia Freeland’s reputation.” Freeland was the then Canadian foreign minister and is now deputy prime minister.

The libel notices were sent by a Toronto law firm on behalf of Consortium News, which seeks a retraction of all mention of Consortium News and an apology. CN is making a formal Access to Information Act request (Canada’s Freedom of Information Act) to obtain a copy of the CSE report. Part of the CSE report, classified “SECRET CEO,” CEO meaning Canadian Eyes Only, was broadcast by Global News.

The Feb. 27, 2017 Consortium News article, written by journalist Arina Tuskanova exclusively for CN, was titled “A Nazi Skeleton in the Family Closet.” It reveals that Freeland had lied about her grandfather’s past as an editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland during the war.

Jan. 19

Media News

New York Times, The Senate put limits on impeachment trial coverage. Even C-SPAN is annoyed, Michael M. Grynbaum, Jan. 19, 2020. The Senate will control the cameras during the impeachment trial, limiting what viewers see, and reporters will be confined to roped-off areas.

Journalists are up in arms about new restrictions on their movement inside the Capitol, which they say will prevent them from easily interviewing lawmakers about the proceedings. The rules, negotiated by Republican Senate leadership, have yet to be written down, causing confusion among reporters and the Capitol Police expected to enforce them.

Even sedate C-SPAN is aggrieved, calling on the Senate to allow its television crews to document the trial, instead of the government-controlled cameras that — as was the case during Bill Clinton’s trial 21 years ago — will limit what viewers see and hear inside the Senate chamber.

Hurling insults at journalists is standard fare for officials at the White House. But Congress, with its protocols and rituals, was considered a relatively safe space for reporters, where cordiality was prized.

The pretrial tensions suggest that the bash-the-press mentality that led the White House to kill off the daily briefing and strip reporters of their credentials has now crept into what senators like to call “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

New York Times, Commentary: Will The Chicago Tribune Be the Next Newspaper Picked to the Bone? David Jackson and Gary Marx (investigative reporters at the Chicago Tribune), Jan. 19, 2020. Journalists worry that a New York hedge fund with a big stake in the paper will impose draconian cuts, as it has elsewhere.

We are investigative reporters in a great American city infamous for its corruption and murders.

chicago tribune hq In recent years, we and our colleagues have exposed rapes and assaults inside nursing homes, deadly hazards in children’s toys, the staggering prevalence of sexual violence in Chicago’s public schools, grievous failure in America’s extradition system, mercury in store-bought tuna fish, prostitution schemes in residential treatment centers for foster children and rampant corruption at the highest levels of Illinois government.

Spurred by this reporting, federal, state and local legislators have changed laws in ways that have made people safer and our notoriously crooked government a little cleaner.

But now that type of journalism faces an urgent threat.

The hedge fund Alden Global Capital in November acquired 32 percent of Tribune Publishing Company shares, becoming the largest shareholder, and it is angling for control of the company. Tribune Publishing includes not only The Chicago Tribune — the largest daily newspaper in Illinois — but also The Daily News of New York, The Baltimore Sun, The Hartford Courant, The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun-Sentinel of South Florida, The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va., and The Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.

Alden’s strategy of acquiring struggling local newsrooms and stripping them of assets has built the personal wealth of the hedge fund’s investors. But Alden has imposed draconian staff cuts that decimated The Denver Post and other once-proud newspapers that have been vital to their communities and to American democracy. Those newsrooms, which put a spotlight on local political corruption, have served as forums for community voices and have driven the coverage of regional television, radio and online outlets.

In a signal of what may happen in Chicago, on Jan. 13, we and other newsroom staff members were offered buyouts. Now, we are bracing for the sight of colleagues with decades of experience walking out with cardboard boxes in their arms and tears streaming down their faces.

The Chicago Tribune was founded in 1847, and ever since it has played an outsize role in the national conversation. It supported the presidential candidacy of Abraham Lincoln, a subscriber. Even its pratfalls, like the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline of 1948, are the stuff of legend.

The Tribune has won 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and the other newspapers in our chain have claimed 37 more.

Among those awards was a special citation last year to The Capital Gazette, where a gunman in 2018 killed four journalists and another employee — the most deadly attack on journalists in United States history. The Pulitzer Prize Board cited the newspaper staff “for demonstrating unflagging commitment to covering the news and serving their community at a time of unspeakable grief.”

The courage displayed by the Capital Gazette symbolizes the importance of regional and local newsrooms as part of a vital free press.

Editor's note: The Justice Integrity Project's editor earned his first money in journalism as a stringer for the Chicago Tribune and worked 14 years as a reporter and editor for the chain's Hartford Courant, later authoring the book Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper, which served as a case study for how news outlets were being gutted by extreme profit-seeking by conglomerates acquiring media properties.

Jan. 18

Media / Propaganda

national archives womens march blurred Custom

Washington Post, National Archives exhibit blurs signs in Women’s March image critical of Trump, Jan. 18, 2020 (print ed.). The large color photograph that greets visitors to a National Archives exhibit celebrating the centennial of women’s suffrage shows a massive crowd filling Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration.

The 49-by-69-inch photograph is a powerful display. Viewed from one perspective, it shows the 2017 march. Viewed from another angle, it shifts national archives to show a 1913 black-and-white image of a women’s suffrage march also on Pennsylvania Avenue. The display links momentous demonstrations for women’s rights more than a century apart on the same stretch of pavement.

But a closer look reveals a different story.

The Archives, right, acknowledged in a statement this week that it made multiple alterations to the photo of the 2017 Women’s March showcased at the museum, blurring signs held by marchers that were critical of Trump. Words on signs that referenced women’s anatomy were also blurred.

Privacy, Civil Rights

New York Times, The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It, Kashmir Hill, Jan. 18, 2020. A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images. Its facial recognition tool “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.

Hoan Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.

Jan. 17

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) at the U.S. Capitol (Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP)

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) at the U.S. Capitol (Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP)

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Advocacy: RSF USA calls on the Senate to reverse unprecedented restrictions on the press, Jan. 17, 2020. RSF strongly condemns the restrictions the Senate sergeant at arms and the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration are imposing on Capitol Hill reporters during the impeachment trial for President Donald Trump. RSF calls on the Senate Majority Leader to reverse these rules immediately.

Members of the press covering the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump, which began January 16, are facing new “security measures” in the form of restrictions that are not typically imposed on Capitol Hill reporters. The full extent of these measures is unclear as the Senate Sergeant at Arms and the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration have not provided a formal document outlining them. However, one rule prohibits reporters from walking through the halls of Congress to ask senators questions. Others prevent reporters from bringing electronic devices into the Senate Chamber, require journalists to pass through a second security screening inside the Senate, and force them into pens and roped-off lines so they cannot access senators as they normally would.

“Until he reverses these arbitrary new rules, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is violating Americans’ First Amendment rights during a monumental moment in US history: the trial for the impeachment of the President of the United States,” said Dokhi Fassihian, Executive Director of RSF USA. “By preventing the press from asking questions on behalf of the American people during this trial, the Senate is escaping public scrutiny and effectively undermining the very foundation of our democracy.”

The Standing Committee of Correspondents, an organization that represents and accredits daily reporters on Capitol Hill, sent a letter to Senate leaders on January 14 protesting the rules. And on January 16, RSF joined 57 other media outlets and journalism organizations in sending a letter to Senate leadership opposing the restrictions.

The United States is ranked 48th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index.

TeleSUR, Abby Martin Banned From Speaking at US University For Refusing to Sign Pro-Israel Pledge, Jan. 17, 2020. Since 2014, 28 states, among those Georgia, have adopted anti-boycott laws, including five executive orders issued by governors.

Former teleSUR presenter and creator of The Empire Files Abby Martin was blocked from delivering a keynote speech at Georgia Southern University for refusing to "sign a contractual pledge to not boycott Israel" to comply with the anti-Boycott, Divest and Sanctions state law.

"After I was scheduled to give a keynote speech at an upcoming Georgia Southern conference, organizers said I must comply with Georgia's anti-BDS law," Martin tweeted on Friday.

Since 2014, 28 states, among those Georgia, have adopted anti-boycott laws, including five executive orders issued by governors.

"I refused and my talk was canceled. The event fell apart after colleagues supported me." Martin is an outspoken critic of Israel’s apartheid government and anti-Palestinian policies.

As the nationwide crackdown on BDS continues, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Dec. 11 that will effectively allow the government to interpret Judaism as both a race or nationality and religion under federal law so that the Education Department can take direct action against what he views as “anti-Semitism on college campuses.”

Trump stated clearly that the decision targets the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) calling it an “anti-Semitic campaign against Israel.”

The order will trigger Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that requires educational institutions receiving federal funding to not discriminate based on national origin; meaning the government can now withhold federal funding from any college or educational program that is deemed to allow or endorse “anti-Semitism.”

BDS has gained notoriety in college campuses across the U.S. with more people understanding and backing the Palestinian struggle.

The non-violent BDS movement, however, was founded in 2005 by 170 Palestinian unions, political parties, refugee networks, and women organizations, among others, has gained such renown that it was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Inspired by South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, BDS calls for non-violent pressure on Israel through boycotting any organization linked to the state of Israel, withdrawing investment from Israeli companies, and sanctioning the county until Israel recognizes the right of Palestinian refugees to return, ends the illegal military occupation of Palestine, and ends the apartheid regime by recognizing Palestinian's equal rights and stops human rights abuses.

Jan. 16

dana milbank Custom Washington Post, Opinion: Impeachment descends into darkness, Dana Milbank, right, Jan. 16, 2020 (print ed.). Under the glare of 61 floodlights, the House voted Wednesday to appoint managers to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate. Projectors beamed each lawmaker’s name and vote onto a wall for all to see.

And now comes the darkness.

As the long-delayed transfer of the impeachment articles finally got underway, President Trump’s allies in the Senate announced extraordinary new restrictions on press coverage of the upcoming trial, shielding senators in unprecedented ways from the prying eyes of the American public.

When House managers arrived with the impeachment articles in a ceremonial procession Tuesday evening, Senate Republican leadership had already decreed that their arrival would be filmed only by a single, shared TV camera (partially obstructed, it turned out) at the doors of the chamber in which the mostly empty desks of Republican senators also could not be seen.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his team — the Senate sergeant-at-arms and Rules Committee make the decisions, but McConnell (R-Ky.) is the driving force behind the restrictions, people involved tell me — further decreed that journalists would be confined during the entire trial to roped-off pens, forbidden from approaching senators in Capitol corridors.

The GOP leadership likewise rejected a request from the Standing Committee of Correspondents to allow journalists to bring laptops or silenced phones into the chamber so they could write (the House allows this) or to allow cameras in to capture the history of the moment (the House allowed this during the impeachment process).

It’s obvious what the restrictions are about, because they mirror McConnell’s general approach to the trial. He had signed on to a proposal to dismiss the House impeachment articles without a trial. He has resisted allowing documentary or testimonial evidence to surface during the trial. And now he’s doing everything in his power to shield senators from reporters — and from the public.

Because still and TV cameras aren’t allowed in the chamber, the only images will be C-SPAN-style footage from fixed TV cameras operated by government employees. The public won’t be able to see which senators are sleeping, talking or missing entirely.

McConnell’s team also decided to claw back seats typically reserved for the general public, to “augment” seating for their own friends and family; they’ll have at least 134 such seats. They offered no such augmentation for the media, which has 107 seats, only about 20 of which provide a full view of the Senate floor.

Nor can the senators be observed outside the chamber. At a private luncheon of Republican senators this week, Blunt showed where the media would be penned in and reportedly “joked” that the senators could now avoid reporters.

It’s a curious attempt at fortress-building after House Republicans noisily objected to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) taking depositions in his “basement bunker.” They can’t quash the trial itself, but McConnell’s restrictions will go a long way toward restricting what the American public sees of this historic moment.

The National Press Club Journalism Institute, Advocacy: National Press Club, Journalism Institute denounce press limits on Senate trial, Staff report, national press club logo Jan. 16, 2020. The National Press Club and its Journalism Institute strongly object to restrictions on press coverage during the Senate trial of President Donald Trump. The proposed limitations are onerous, unnecessary and serve only to limit the news media’s ability to properly report on this historic event to the American public.

We fully support the position taken by the Standing Committee of Correspondents, which tried to negotiate rules of coverage only to see its suggestions ignored.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has insisted that the Senate follow the same rules the Senate set for itself during the trial of President Bill Clinton 20 years ago. But when it comes to press coverage, the restrictions on news coverage planned by the Sergeant at Arms and the Capitol Police far exceed the access limits imposed during the Clinton trial. Indeed, the constraints are more restrictive than they are for State of the Union messages or Inauguration ceremonies.

“These constraints and security obstacles only impede the press from doing its job,” said National Press Club President Michael Freedman. “When the conduct of our elected officials is under the highest scrutiny, the government should not be restricting the ability of journalists to be eyes and ears for the American public.”

As spelled out by the Standing Committee of Correspondents, the proposed restrictions on the press for the upcoming trial include:

Security sweeps with magnetometer inside the Senate press gallery
Penning in reporters outside the Senate chamber to prohibit them from freely getting access to Senators as they enter or leave the chamber.
A single pool camera to record the transmission of Articles of Impeachment from the House to the Senate.
Restrictions on reporters’ ability to walk and interview Senators from the Senate subway to the Capitol elevators.

“These restrictions set a horrible precedent and reinforce the lie that the news media is dangerous and the ‘enemy of the people,’” said Angela Greiling Keane, the president of the National Press Club Journalism Institute. “Congress should be the most accessible institution in government. As the branch closest to the people, it is ironic that these limits only isolate those who are elected to serve.”

While penning reporters has become commonplace over the years to improve traffic flow outside the Senate chamber, reporters have had free access to approach senators to question them about issues of the day. Sweeping reporters with a magnetometer as they enter the Senate gallery is simply unnecessary overkill as they would have already gone through security entering the Capitol.

We especially fear that these restrictions will become the new standard for congressional coverage, a slippery slope that will reduce accountability and further erode an essential tenet of our democracy — the need for an informed electorate.

The National Press Club, the world’s leading professional organization for journalists, represents more than 3,000 reporters, editors and professional communicators worldwide. The Club’s nonprofit affiliate, the National Press Club Journalism Institute, promotes an engaged global citizenry through an independent and free press, and equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire civic engagement. JIP Editor's Note: JIP's editor is a member of the club's Press Freedom Committee.

Washington Post, Opinion: GOP senator’s vicious outburst shows the corruption of Trump’s defenders, Greg Sargent, Jan. 16, 2020. If you were martha mcsally o a United States senator who just snapped angrily at a reporter for politely asking whether compelling new information about a matter of great import to the nation was weighing on your understanding of that consequential matter, you probably wouldn’t see this as something to advertise.

But then again, you’re not Martha McSally of Arizona. McSally, right, just did exactly this — yet she is now treating it as a badge of honor; as something to boast about.

In a perverse way, it’s fitting that this episode is going viral at exactly the moment when President Trump’s impeachment trial is getting underway — that is, when Trump’s defenders in the Senate are set to put on a great show of pretending to give serious consideration to the case against Trump, before voting to acquit him.

McSally’s vile little performance puts the lie to that notion as effectively as anything possibly could.

DavidSwanson.org, Opinion: #CNNisTrash, David Swanson, Jan. 16, 2020. Why has the hash tag #CNNisTrash been popular since this week’s presidential primary debate? There was nothing new about the corporate, militarist, anti-progressive slant of the debate “moderation.”

What was new was the level of blatant bias so extreme that even viewers who knew nothing about the issues couldn’t miss it, plus the amount of time CNN focused on expressing its hostility toward a single candidate, Bernie Sanders.

Remarkably, CNN began Tuesday’s debate with a focus on endless U.S. wars in the Middle East, and with questions aimed at criticizing those who had supported the launching of some of those wars many years ago — support that various politicians and even media outlets like the New York Times (but not CNN) have long since been compelled to apologize for.

Yet the CNN moderator began by noting how close the United States had just come to war with Iran and then asking Bernie Sanders why he would be the best commander in chief, not why he would be the best president for making peace.

Next, CNN falsely claimed that Sanders had only recently admitted that his vote for war on Afghanistan was wrong, and equated that vote with Joe Biden’s vote for and promotion of war on Iraq, as well as Biden’s blatant lying about his record.

With each new topic, the bias grew in Tuesday’s debate. What can be read in the debate transcript was compounded by the titles CNN displayed on the lower part of the television screen during each segment. For example: “Sanders’ proposals would double federal spending over a decade; how will he avoid bankrupting the country?”

CNN, which added right-wing journalists to its panels of questioners at all four of its Republican primary debates in 2016, has adamantly refused to add progressive journalists to its panels at Democratic debates.

Then CNN turned to a story that it had reported on just prior to the debate, alleging that Sanders had told Senator Elizabeth Warren that he did not believe a woman could be elected U.S. president. The CNN moderator ignored Sanders’ assertions that he had a public record going back decades of stating that a woman could be elected president, that he had stayed out of the race in 2015 until Warren decided not to run, and that in fact he had told Warren no such thing. Then came this exchange:

CNN: So Senator Sanders — Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear here, you’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election?

SANDERS: That is correct.

CNN: Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?

Many viewers recognized the slant. Many even began to notice the strange double standard in never mentioning the cost of any of the wars, but pounding away on the misleading assertions that healthcare and other human needs cost too much.

Jan. 14

Media / Spy Agencies

Washington Post, News networks use retired military brass as war analysts without disclosing their defense-industry ties, Paul Farhi, Jan. 14, 2020 (print ed.). During eight appearances on Fox News and Fox Business Network in early January, Jack Keane was introduced several ways: as “a retired four-star general,” as the former “vice chief of staff for the U.S. Army,” and as Fox News’s “senior strategic analyst.”

jack keane All of those are accurate descriptions. Keane (shown when he was on active duty) is a distinguished veteran, having commanded American troops in such places as Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. Fox employs him to provide analysis of national security and military operations, such as the unfolding hostilities between the United States and Iran.

But another part of Keane’s résumé wasn’t mentioned: the former general is also executive chairman of AM General, a leading defense contractor, best known as the manufacturer of the Humvee and other tactical military vehicles. He is also a partner at a venture-capital firm that specializes in the defense industry. In other words, viewers never learned that Keane has a direct financial interest in the war policies he was assessing on the air.

Fox News’s nondisclosure of Keane’s role in the military-industrial complex is standard operating procedure for network news shows. Many of the retired military leaders employed by the networks as paid contributors have secondary affiliations that are rarely, if ever, mentioned, leaving viewers in the dark about whose interests they’re promoting.

Like Fox News, none of the leading networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and MSNBC — makes a regular practice of announcing its military analysts’ financial ties to the Pentagon, connections that could color their on-air comments.

Washington Post, NSA found a dangerous Windows 10 flaw and alerted Microsoft — rather than weaponize it, Ellen Nakashima, Jan. 14, 2020. The disclosure represents a major shift in the agency’s approach, choosing to put computer security ahead of building up its arsenal of hacking tools.

nsa logo 2 The National Security Agency recently discovered a major flaw in Microsoft’s Windows operating system — one that could potentially expose computer users to significant breaches or surveillance — and alerted the firm of the problem rather than turn it into a hacking weapon, according to people familiar with the matter.

The disclosure represents a major shift in the NSA’s approach, choosing to put computer security ahead of building up its arsenal of hacking tools that allow the microsoft logo Custom agency to spy on adversaries’ networks, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Microsoft plans to issue a patch for the flaw on Tuesday, the individuals said.

“Big kudos to NSA for voluntarily disclosing to Microsoft,” said computer security expert Dmitri Alperovitch in a tweet Tuesday morning. “This is the type of [vulnerability] I am sure the [NSA hackers] would have loved to use for years to come.”

Jan. 13

Media / Privacy / Spying

Julian Assange, center, at Ecuador's Embassy (Photo Collage by The Indicter Magazine)

The Hill, Opinion: Will Alleged CIA Misbehavior Set Julian Assange Free? James C. Goodale, Jan. 10, 2020. A few days before Christmas, Julian Assange testified to a Spanish court that a Spanish security company, UC Global S.L., acting in coordination with the CIA, illegally recorded all his actions and conversations, including with his lawyers, and streamed them back in real time to the CIA. He will, at the end of February, make a similar complaint to a British extradition court about the CIA’s alleged misbehavior.

Will such misbehavior, if proven, set Assange free?

The Daniel Ellsberg case may be instructive. You may recall that after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the “Pentagon Papers” case, Ellsberg was indicted under the Espionage Act for leaking Pentagon documents to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

julian assange facts wikileaks Custom After the trial commenced in San Francisco, it was brought to the judge’s attention that the “White House plumbers” broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Based on that information and other complaints of government misbehavior, including the FBI’s interception of Ellsberg’s telephone conversations with a government official, Judge William Matthew Byrne decided that the case should be dismissed with prejudice because the government acted outrageously.

For similar reasons, the case against Assange should be dismissed, if it reaches the U.S. courts.

The “plumbers” were a covert group formed by the Nixon White House to stop leaks of information from the government, such as the Pentagon Papers. They are notorious for their burglary at the Watergate complex, which led to former President Nixon’s downfall. Approximately nine months before the Watergate break-in, the plumbers, led by former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, burglarized a psychiatrist’s office to find information that could discredit Ellsberg.

The CIA also was involved with the break-in. It prepared a psychiatric profile of Ellsberg as well as an ID kit for the plumbers, including drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, and disguises consisting of red wigs, glasses and speech alteration devices.

Additionally, the CIA allowed Hunt and his sidekick, G. Gordon Liddy, to use two CIA safe houses in the D.C. area for meetings and storage purposes. Clearly, the CIA knew the plumbers were up to no good. It is unclear whether the CIA knew Ellsberg was the target, but it would not have taken much to figure it out.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais broke the story that UC Global invaded Assange’s privacy at the Ecuadorian embassy and shared its surveillance with the CIA. It demonstrated step-by-step, document-by-document, UC Global’s actions and its contacts with the CIA. UC Global reportedly installed cameras throughout Assange’s space in the embassy — including his bathroom — and captured Assange’s every word and apparently livestreamed it, giving the CIA a free TV show of Assange’s daily life.

After reading El Pais’s series, you would have to be a dunce not to believe the CIA didn’t monitor Assange’s every move at the Ecuadorian embassy, including trips to the bathroom.

Ecuador granted Assange asylum in their embassy for seven years, after he jumped bail in London to avoid extradition to Sweden for allegedly raping two Swedish women. (Those charges are now dismissed.) If you can believe it, Ecuador had hired UC Global to protect the Ecuadorian embassy and Assange. Not surprisingly, the CIA later made UC Global its spy to surveil Assange.

When there was a change of administration in Ecuador, Assange’s asylum was withdrawn, and he was immediately arrested by British police at the request of U.S. officials. The United States subsequently indicted him for violating the Espionage Act, for publishing the very same information published roughly contemporaneously by The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel. (Assange already was subject to a sealed indictment in the United States for computer hacking.)

The behavior of UC Global and the CIA seems indistinguishable from the government’s behavior in the Ellsberg case, which a federal judge found to have “offended a sense of justice” and “incurably infected the prosecution” of the case. Accordingly, he concluded that the only remedy to ensure due process and the fair administration of justice was to dismiss Ellsberg’s case “with prejudice,” meaning that Ellsberg could not be retried.

Can anything be more offensive to a “sense of justice” than an unlimited surveillance, particularly of lawyer-client conversations, livestreamed to the opposing party in a criminal case? The alleged streaming unmasked the strategy of Assange’s lawyers, giving the government an advantage that is impossible to remove. Short of dismissing Assange’s indictment with prejudice, the government will always have an advantage that can never be matched by the defense.

The usual remedy for warrantless surveillance is to exclude any illegally obtained information from the trial, but that remedy is inapplicable here. The government’s advantage in surveilling Assange is not the acquisition of tangible evidence but, rather, intangible insights into Assange’s legal strategy. There is no way, therefore, to give Assange a fair trial, since his opponents will know every move he will make.

When Assange begins his extradition hearing, this will be part of his argument — that the CIA’s misbehavior violates his human rights by depriving him of his right to a fair trial.

The CIA will no doubt attempt to trump this argument by defending the surveillance on grounds of national security. This may be easier said than done, however: It is one thing to say the CIA can engage in surveillance abroad for its own intelligence-gathering purposes, and another to say it can listen to the private lawyer-client communications of a person against whom the U.S. government has an open criminal investigation.

More to the point, it does not seem immediately clear why eavesdropping on conversations of legal strategy protects U.S. national security. In my experience in national security cases (I led The New York Times lawyers in the “Pentagon Papers” case), every time the government is backed into a corner in such cases, it will simply serve up a defense of “national security” because it is difficult to defend against such an assertion and the government, consequently, has the ability to trump every competing argument.

James C. Goodale was the vice chairman and general counsel of The New York Times and is the author of “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and other battles.”

New York Times, The Decimation of Local News Has Lawmakers Crossing the Aisle, Cecilia Kang, Jan. 13, 2020 (print ed.). Lawmakers from both parties blame companies like Facebook and Google for the struggles of local newspapers.

When a sport utility vehicle swerved out of its lane several weeks ago, slamming into a pickup truck and killing a teenager, a reporter from The Northeast Georgian raced to the scene. Within hours, the paper had posted the news on Facebook and updated it twice. It was shared by hundreds of people on the social network.

The fatal wreck consumed the town of Cornelia, Ga., nestled near the Chattahoochee National Forest about 90 miles northeast of Atlanta. The Northeast Georgian was the first to report the news, but unless the people who shared its story on Facebook follow a link to its website, either to see an ad or to subscribe to its twice-weekly print edition, the paper won’t get paid.

As with many small papers across the country, that business strategy is not working for The Northeast Georgian. The paper’s five employees do not just report and write. They also edit the articles, take photographs and lay out the newspaper.

But the tough economics facing small newspapers like Mr. NeSmith’s has generated rare bipartisan agreement in Washington.

Anger toward big technology companies has led to multiple antitrust investigations, calls for a new federal data privacy law and criticism of the companies’ political ad policies. Perhaps no issue about the tech companies, though, has united lawmakers in the Capitol like the decimation of local news.

Lawmakers from both parties blame companies like Facebook and Google, which dominate the online ad industry. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, gave a big boost last week to a bill that may provide some papers a lifeboat. The proposal would give news organizations an exemption from antitrust laws, allowing them to band together to negotiate with Google and Facebook over how their articles and photos are used online, and what payments the newspapers get from the tech companies. (The bill is backed by the News Media Alliance, a trade group that represents news organizations including The New York Times Company.)

New York Times, Setting Up Clash, Barr Asks Apple to Unlock Pensacola Killer’s Phones, Katie Benner, Jan. 13, 2020. William Barr asked the company to provide access to two phones used by the gunman in last month’s shooting at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla. The unusually high-profile request set up a confrontation between law enforcement and technology companies in the latest battle over privacy.

Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profile request to provide access to two phones used by the gunman.

Mr. Barr’s appeal was an escalation of an ongoing fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety.

“This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr. Barr said, calling on technology companies to find a solution and complaining that Apple had provided no “substantive assistance.”

Detailing the results of the investigation into the Dec. 6 shooting that killed three sailors and wounded eight others, Mr. Barr said the gunman, Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani — a Saudi air force cadet training with the American military — had displayed extremist leanings.

The government has also removed from the country some 21 Saudi students who trained with the American military, Mr. Barr said. He stressed that investigators found no connection to the shooting among the cadets but that some had ties to extremist movements or possessed child pornography. Mr. Barr said the cases were too weak to prosecute but that Saudi Arabia kicked the trainees out of the program.

New York Times, Russians Hacked Ukrainian Gas Company at Center of Impeachment, Nicole Perlroth and Matthew Rosenberg, Jan. 13, 2020. With President Trump facing an impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., right, and his son Hunter Biden, Russian military hackers have been boring into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the affair, according to security experts.

The hacking attempts against Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served, began in early November, as talk of the Bidens, Ukraine and impeachment was dominating the news in the United States.

It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.

The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign. In that case, once they had the emails, the Russians used trolls to spread and spin the material, and built an echo chamber to widen its effect.

Then, as now, the Russian hackers from a military intelligence unit known formerly as the G.R.U., and to private researchers by the alias “Fancy Bear,” used so-called phishing emails that appear designed to steal usernames and passwords, according to Area 1, the Silicon Valley security firm that detected the hacking. In this instance, the hackers set up fake websites that mimicked sign-in pages of Burisma subsidiaries, and have been blasting Burisma employees with emails meant to look like they are coming from inside the company.

The hackers fooled some of them into handing over their login credentials, and managed to get inside one of Burisma’s servers, Area 1 said.

“The attacks were successful,” said Oren Falkowitz, a co-founder of Area 1, who previously served at the National Security Agency. Mr. Falkowitz’s firm maintains a network of sensors on web servers around the globe — many known to be used by state-sponsored hackers — which gives the firm a front-row seat to phishing attacks, and allows them to block attacks on their customers.

“The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the G.R.U. hacks we saw in 2016 against the D.N.C. and John Podesta,” the Clinton campaign chairman, Mr. Falkowitz said. “Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”

The Justice Department indicted seven officers from the same military intelligence unit in 2018.

The Russian attacks on Burisma appear to be running parallel to an effort by Russian spies in Ukraine to dig up information in the analog world that could embarrass the Bidens, according to an American security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. The spies, the official said, are trying to penetrate Burisma and working sources in the Ukrainian government in search of emails, financial records and legal documents.

Will such misbehavior, if proven, set Assange free?

After the trial commenced in San Francisco, it was brought to the judge’s attention that the “White House plumbers” broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Based on that information and other complaints of government misbehavior, including the FBI’s interception of Ellsberg’s telephone conversations with a government official, Judge William Matthew Byrne decided that the case should be dismissed with prejudice because the government acted outrageously.

For similar reasons, the case against Assange should be dismissed, if it reaches the U.S. courts.

After reading El Pais’s series, you would have to be a dunce not to believe the CIA didn’t monitor Assange’s every move at the Ecuadorian embassy, including trips to the bathroom.

When Assange begins his extradition hearing, this will be part of his argument — that the CIA’s misbehavior violates his human rights by depriving him of his right to a fair trial.

James C. Goodale was the vice chairman and general counsel of The New York Times and is the author of “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and other battles.”

Jan. 10

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Collage of Daily Mail and The Sun, photo illustration by Slate

Slate, The British Press Is Losing Its Mind Over Harry and Meghan, Heather Schwedel, Jan. 10, 2020. Exiled wax figures and asparagus prognostication have stormed the tabloids. For the United Kingdom’s tabloid press, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan’s decision to “step back” from their duties as royals is an all-hands-on-deck situation.

There have been no shortage of royal events that brought with them wall-to-wall press coverage over the past decade as this generation’s royals have come of age — engagements, weddings, babies — but never has there been a story quite like a princess quitting the entire institution and taking her prince with her. Apparently lost on the press is the irony that part of what prompted the move is its own racist coverage.

Harry and Meghan have had an understandably tense relationship with the tabs — they’re literally suing one of them. While they maintain a veneer of just-in-it-for-the-drama neutrality, it’s also clear that some of the papers’ sympathies lie with Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the Windsors, evidenced especially by the Daily Mirror’s front page: “They Didn’t Even Tell the Queen.”

Elsewhere, journalists criticized the move as “selfish” and “an atrocious lapse of judgment.” The Daily Telegraph went with the headline “Harry and Meghan quit the firm,” invoking some vintage slang for the royal family. In addition to “Megxit,” further punnage was attempted, to middling success: The Sun offered “Meg It Work” and “Meg Your Mind Up,” while the Daily Star is trying to make “pass the duchy” happen.

Washington Post, Meghan flies back to Canada; Prince Harry in ‘crisis’ talks with Prince Charles, Karla Adam, Jan. 10, 2020. Her departure renewed speculation that the couple will make Canada their part-time home.

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, has flown back to Canada following the bombshell announcement that she and her husband, Prince Harry, are "stepping back" from royal duties, prompting intensified speculation that the couple will make Canada their part-time home.

An official at Buckingham Palace confirmed reports that Meghan had returned to Canada — the latest act in a drama that the British press has dubbed “Megxit.”

Meanwhile, Harry remains in Britain, where he is reportedly in deep discussions with his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II; his father, Prince Charles; and his brother, Prince William, about the couple’s future role.

Media Matters, Opinion: The final, inevitable collapse of the right-wing media’s Uranium One conspiracy theory, Matt Gertz, Jan. 10, 2020. In 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed U.S. attorney John Huber to review the sale of the company known as Uranium One. Fox News and conservative media had spent years fixated on the case, portraying it as a scandal aimed at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Some mainstream outlets even played along.

Huber reportedly is now closing the two-year review without bringing any charges.

The Uranium One pseudoscandal has its roots in the work of the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit conservative investigative research organization founded by Steve Bannon and helmed by Peter Schweizer, a conservative author with a record of major factual errors and questionable sourcing. During the 2016 election, The New York Times and The Washington Post made “exclusive agreements” with Schweizer “for early access to his opposition research on Hillary Clinton.”
That's how this false, right-wing lie ended up on the front page of The New York Times:

From there, the story became a major part of the 2016 campaign, with it often mentioned by Trump. And rather than fade away after the election, it became a major Fox News talking point after special counsel Robert Mueller began reviewing ties between Trump’s associates and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Fox hosts like Hannity flogged the story repeatedly in 2017 thanks to a misleading report from John Solomon, right. (Solomon's "report" featured someone he called a whistleblower who was represented by Victoria Toensing; we know now that Toensing is also Solomon's own attorney. When the whistleblower was questioned by House investigators, he had no information.) The story was so prominent in right-wing media at this point that then-Fox host Shep Smith ran a segment reiterating that it was a false conspiracy theory.

Sessions appointed Huber at this point, after Fox host Jeanine Pirro reportedly criticized the Attorney General to Trump in the Oval Office. Now that investigation is ending with nothing having been turned up.

Not that this will break through to the Fox News audience. Shep has left the network, and Hannity furiously said on Friday that he still believes there is wrongdoing. Maybe in 2020, though, outlets like The New York Times will think a bit before teaming up with Steve Bannon.

New York Times, ‘Chaos Is the Point’: Russian Hackers and Trolls Grow Stealthier in 2020, Matthew Rosenberg, Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger, Jan. 10, 2020. While U.S. cyberdefenses have improved since 2016, many of the vulnerabilities remain. And attacks are getting more sophisticated. The Russians were sloppy in 2016 because they could be: They caught Americans off guard. Now hackers and trolls are working far harder to cover their tracks.

The National Security Agency and its British counterpart issued an unusual warning in October: The Russians were back and growing stealthier.

Groups linked to Russia’s intelligence agencies, they noted, had recently been uncovered boring into the network of an elite Iranian hacking unit and attacking governments and private companies in the Middle East and Britain — hoping Tehran would be blamed for the havoc.

For federal and state officials charged with readying defenses for the 2020 election, it was a clear message that the next cyberwar was not going to be like the last. The landscape is evolving, and the piggybacking on Iranian networks was an example of what America’s election-security officials and experts face as the United States enters what is shaping up to be an ugly campaign season marred by hacking and disinformation.

Fox #MeToo Scandals

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Washington Post, ‘I do wish I had done more’: Megyn Kelly tearfully reacts to ‘Bombshell’ and the fallout of the Fox News sexual harassment scandal, Katie Shepherd, Jan. 10, 2020. Hot, dry and windy conditions caused two large blazes to merge into one the size of the state of Delaware — or about eight times larger than New York City. As the young woman excitedly pitched herself for a job to the company’s senior executive, a man dressed in an expensive suit, he appeared to be listening intently, nodding as she listed all of the skills she could bring to the position. Then, he gave her an order: “Do a little spin for me.”

The uncomfortable scene comes from the recently released film “Bombshell” (shown above), but the story could have been told by many women at Fox News who said former chief roger ailes w executive Roger Ailes, right, asked them the same question in his office.

“Turn around let me see your ass,” Juliet Huddy, a former Fox News host, recalled Ailes telling her in a video shared Thursday by Megyn Kelly after the women watched the movie together. Two other victims of harassment at Fox, Rudi Bakhtiar and Julie Zann, joined them to share their thoughts on the fictionalized drama about the scandal that upended their careers.

All four of the women said Ailes had asked them to twirl for him. Only Bakhtiar, a former Fox News correspondent, said she refused. Kelly recalled the humiliation she felt after Ailes asked her to spin for him.

Jan. 9

Climate Change / Media / Economy

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Down With Tyranny! Opinion: Jane Fonda Is Pitching For Our Future. Lend an Ear, Skip Kaltenheuser, Jan. 9, 2020. Even for those already in the climate choir, Jane Fonda’s sermon last month at the National Press Club is well worth the time to read or watch and listen to. I’ve logged loads of press club luncheon speeches over the years. This was one of the finest I’ve heard. Fonda eloquently described how global warming has us up against the wall. Not just the heartfelt delivery one expects from Oscar winners, but the essential substance and slightly wicked wit woven throughout. Send it to those needing motivation to confront the stark realities before us and to act (59 min. video here via C-SPAN and YouTube).

Fonda’s many actions include Fire-drill Fridays, protests for which she temporarily moved to DC in September, at which she’s been arrested a half dozen times. If you’re around Washington, the last drill before her return to acting commitments in L.A. is Jan. 10. Guest speakers include Bill McKibben and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Fonda's speech took no prisoners, calling out a range of climate villains, including Exxon, which over forty years ago knew the truth about the effect of increasing CO2 gases and the short window to address it, and whose executives, when their scientists informed them of the global impacts, replied “This problem is not as significant to mankind as a nuclear holocaust or world famine.”

jane fonda dec.17 npc "And they continued to drill," said Fonda, right. "Exxon, Shell, Mobil, and others knew that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks. So they used the same consultants that the tobacco companies had used to launch a huge communications effort, to develop strategies on how to fool us."

"The difference is that tobacco companies were primarily harming people who smoke. The fossil fuel companies are harming the entire planet and all its inhabitants. The companies not only hid what they knew, a coalition, together with the Koch brothers and other billionaires spent tens of millions of dollars on think tanks, like the Heartland Institute, that promote false science, sowing confusion about global warming, so that people won't try to stop them. Their line was, and continues to be, that the, “Science about climate change is not clear. And even if it were, the fault lies with governments and consumers, not with them.” You see, but the thing is, these oil companies have played a big role in actively stopping governments from enacting clean energy policies, with Exxon leading the way."

That includes Exxon’s undermining the 1998 International Treaty on Climate, the Kyoto Protocol. Fonda points to other bad actors, like the American Petroleum Institute, with its new video, America’s Energy Security: A Generation of Progress at Risk, equating fracking and drilling with patriotism, as Republicans including Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania introduce resolutions to prohibit a President from implementing a unilateral moratorium on fracking, and as the Manhattan Institute, with significant backing from fossil fuels concerns, warns of global recession if the US bans fracking. It won’t shock that Fonda advocates legal consequences for knowing deceptions and environmental damage.

To claims like Toomey’s that American oil and gas production is the only path to energy security, Fonda asks if it’s necessary for energy security, what are we doing shipping it overseas? She quoted Oil Change International that 45% of existing drilling wouldn’t be profitable without taxpayers subsidizing fossil fuels with over $16 billion dollars a year.

She didn’t mention it, but that’s dwarfed by military expenditures underpinning escapades with oil in mind. They arguably include backing Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-88, the invasions of Iraq, and shoring up the Saudi regime and the UAE and pumping up their ally Israel. Now we’re doing that trio's bidding with a dance in the dark with Iran.

New York Times, White House Moves to Exempt Big Projects From Environmental Review, Lisa Friedman, Jan. 9, 2020. The Trump Administration, hoping to speed infrastructure projects like pipelines, will formally introduce changes to a landmark environmental law.

The White House on Thursday introduced major changes to the nation’s benchmark environmental protection law, moving to ease approval of major energy and infrastructure projects without detailed environmental assessment or consideration of climate change.

Many of the changes to the law — the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act, a landmark measure that touches nearly every significant construction project in the country — had been long sought by the oil and gas industry as well as trade unions, which have argued that the review process is lengthy, cumbersome and used by environmental activists to drag out legal disputes and kill infrastructure projects.

Under the law, major federal projects like bridges, highways, pipelines or power plants that will have a significant impact on the environment require an review, or environmental impact statement, outlining potential consequences. The proposed new rules would narrow the range of projects that require such a study and impose strict new deadlines on completing assessments.

Kangaroo rushes past a burning house Tuesday in Lake Conjola, New South Wales, Australia (Photo: Matthew Abbott for The New York Times).

Washington Post, A billion animals have been caught in Australia’s fires. Some may go extinct, Karin Brulliard and Darryl Fears, Jan. 9, 2020. Some of the rarest species on Earth are threatened by fires scorching their habitats, scientists warn. Expert says Australian habitats might take centuries to recover — if at all

The mouse-size dunnart is not as iconic as the koalas or platypuses that draw tourists, but it is arguably the most special mammal on Australia’s Kangaroo Island.

Now the Kangaroo Island dunnart’s days may be numbered. Before bush fires struck, it was already endangered, so rare that even researchers who studied them had never seen one. Now they fear they never will. One-third of the 1,700-square-mile island has burned, including the entire area where these dunnarts are known to live.

“One hundred percent — all of our records since 1990 are within the burned fire scar. The entire range of the species has been burned,” said Rosemary Hohnen, an ecologist who spent more than two years surveying the Kangaroo Island dunnart. “They’re in true peril, real peril of extinction.”

Jan. 7

Media Matters, Opinion: The myth of "Donald the Dove" shows the perils of a gullible press, Parker Molloy, Jan. 7, 2020. In the lead up to the 2016 election, opinion writers across several major outlets published articles that argued of the two major party candidates, Donald Trump was less inclined to enter a war. Infamously, Maureen Dowd published an opinion article titled, “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk.”

This article and others cemented the simplistic idea in voters minds, all the while ignoring the many public statements Donald Trump had made previously that indicated otherwise.

While Trump’s statements on foreign policy were often conflicting, they should not have been too difficult for journalists to parse. On an August 11, 2015, episode of Fox & Friends, Trump declared that he was “the most militaristic person there is.” Further, Trump said that he would “take out” families of terrorists, a move widely considered a war crime, vowed to bring back waterboarding, and called for massive increases in military spending.

The notion that Trump was going to be an anti-militaristic candidate directly contradicted many of his own public comments, and is yet another example of how Trump was not judged on his own merits in the 2016 election. While “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk,” made for a clever use of alliteration, it didn’t inform people on what to expect under a Trump presidency.

Jan. 7

Media News

Madcow News, Investigation & Commentary: Paint It Mint, Daniel Hopsicker, right, Jan. 7, 2020. On the eve of war, with breaking news advancing like an electrical storm across the horizon, I was outmaneuvered by an internet troll into promising to explain what I know about a bizarre little Minneapolis news site called MintPress News.

This is that story.

Who stands behind Mint Press, a small Minneapolis-based site with a progressive bent that hides its funding even from employees and has mysterious connections to the Middle East?

Their poking around also establishes the nature of the mystery. The background to the case.

In stories filed with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, MinnPost, and the Colombia Journalism Review, journalists on the ground in Minnesota provided most of the following details.

Interviews with former employees and people familiar with the inner workings of Mint Press, they wrote, paint a portrait of a dysfunctional outlet where employees are left in the dark about the site’s sources of funding and are alienated from the Muhawesh family that runs it:

odeh muhawesh Custom Mnar Muhawesh, the editor-in-chief, her brother-in-law and managing editor Muhammad Muhawesh, and her father-in-law Odeh Muhawesh, 54, left, a Minneapolis businessman born in Jordan.

They also revealed an agenda that lines up, from its sympathy with the Syrian regime to its hostility to Sunni Saudi Arabia, with that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where Odeh Muhawesh studied under an ayatollah for five years after the Islamic Revolution, and where he visited as recently as last summer.

A fellow researcher recently discovered information indicating Odeh Muhawesh was part of a government operation with the father of Peter Strzok, the recently-famous and controversial FBI Agent.

Before to the invasion of Iraq by the George W. Bush regime, Muhawesh opened an office as president of Middle East Trading Company, Inc. in Jordan to provide agricultural and developmental projects within Iraq with funding from federal agencies like U.S. AID and the United Nations World Food Progress.

Peter Strzok, Sr. was the former director of humanitarian and development programs throughout the Middle East. Strzok organized a program to send used tractors and other farm equipment to Iraq.

Both Muhawesh and Srtzok’s Dad, himself a former FBI Agent, are affiliated with the Minnesota-based American Refugee Committee, part of a USAID program to distribute relief supplies in Iraq.

If their USAID program wasn’t connected to the CIA, it would likely be the only one operating in country.

Justice Integrity Project Editor's Note: The project has not independently verified the allegations in the investigation above made by Hopsicker, author of Barry and the Boys, whose cover is shown at right, and Welcome To Terrorland. Our project has excerpted columns also by MintPress News, most notably a series of cutting-edge reports by Whitney Webb during the summer of 2019 regarding context for the Jeffrey Epstein scandals. We are seeking reaction from MintPress News and Webb to Hopsicker's report.

Justice Integrity Project, MintPress News Denounces Hopsicker's Claims As Error-Filled 'Smear,' Andrew Kreig, Jan. 13, 2020 (updated). MintPress News Editor-in-Chief Mnar Muhawesh and correspondent Whitney Webb rebutted claims made Madcow News founder Daniel Hopsicker in the column above, describing it as a poorly researched, inaccurate and highly biased "dangerous smear."

Webb, shown below in one of the photos she uses to illustrate her columns, wrote on Twitter on Jan. 8, "Dangerous smear about Mintpress sadly coming from D Hopsicker, who falsely claims that it has 'direct ties' to Iran and specifically Soleimani at a time when the US is about to go to war w Iran and MSM calling Soleimani a 'terrorist'. Clear attempt to get MPN deplatformed."

She wrote also, using the Twitter name @whitneywebb, "Hopsicker also claiming, after looking up the names of my relatives, that my dad worked for the OSS, an agency that was liquidated years before my dad was even born. Hopsicker began to 'investigate"'me after he implied I was a Nazi for merely being an American living in Chile."

"Hopsicker's problem with me," Webb continued, "is because I wrote about the links between Epstein and Israeli intel (I also covered his links to US Intel btw). His smears now being promoted by other alt media ppl who think it's impossible that I wrote my Epstein series w/o special help fr a govt."

In another Tweet, she wrote, "Nearly [sic] smear since my Epstein series has come from old men in alt media who are clearly upset that a woman half their age (I'm 30) made connections in that case in a couple of months that they couldn't make for years."

MintPress editor Muhawesh wrote in a separate Tweet, "No mention of my response to BuzzFeed smear & Odeh's role as a tech & HR advisor when I first started MPN. Why didn't Hopsicker mention my actual editorial & other business advisors like Mickey Huff & Kate Madonna. Is it because they are not brown Muslims?"

The MintPress website describes its background and alliances in part as follows: "MintPress News is proud to partner with leading journalism venues and activist sites that work tirelessly to bring attention to social justice issues at home and abroad. These syndication partners include: Shadow Proof, TruthOut, CommonDreams, Media Roots, War Is A Crime, Occupy.com , and several others. Become a MintPress partner! If you’d like to become a syndication or news partner or are simply interested in collaborating on an investigation with MintPress, contact our editor Mnar Muhawesh."

Hopsicker replied with a Jan. 11 Tweet asserting in call capitals, "THE SECOND THING...WHITNEY WEBB DISSOCIATED HERSELF FROM MINT PRESS NEWS YESTERDAY."

Webb responded the same day as follows: "For those asking, this is not even remotely true. I have several reports coming out for Mintpress this week. An absurd smear campaign inventing its own victory lap. Can't make this stuff up."

Jan. 5

Weinstein Trial To Begin

New York Times, Weinstein Heads to Trial in a Case Seen as Larger Than One Man, Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor and Jan Ransom, Jan. 5, 2020. The Hollywood producer (shown at right) faces sexual assault charges in a case that has already been fraught both for prosecutors and his legal team.

Since the Harvey Weinstein story broke more than two years ago, everything about it has been outsized: the scope of the allegations of sexual harassment and assault, stretching back decades; the number of his accusers, who total more than 80; and the global scale of the reckoning their stories have inspired.

Many supporters of the #MeToo movement that Mr. Weinstein’s accusers helped ignite are looking to see whether the legal system can deliver justice for victims. Lawyers for Mr. Weinstein, who lost his company, his reputation and his marriage, are arguing that the case is proof that #MeToo has gone too far. At the courthouse, media from around the world, demonstrators outside and spectators in packed galleries will be watching.

Now, as the Hollywood producer’s criminal trial begins Monday in Manhattan, the outcome already is anticipated as a verdict on much more than one man’s alleged wrongdoing.

Media Trends

New York Times, How Big Tech Is Turning New York Into a Silicon Valley Rival, Matthew Haag, Jan. 5, 2020. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google will soon have 20,000 workers in the city, many in a cluster of offices on the West Side.

Facebook’s push to accommodate its booming operations is part of a rush by the West Coast technology giants to expand in New York City. The rapid growth is turning a broad swath of Manhattan into one of the world’s most vibrant tech corridors.

Jan. 2

Page Six, Chuck Todd’s ‘Meet the Press Daily’ may be sidelined to make room for Nicolle Wallace, Emily Smith, Jan. 2, 2020. Chuck Todd’s “Meet chuck todd nbc cropped the Press Daily” could be sidelined at MSNBC as part of a dramatic anchor reshuffling at the cable network to promote rising star Nicolle Wallace.

While the “MTP” flagship, also under NBC political director Todd, right, remains the No. 1 rated Sunday political show, with over 3 million viewers, his weekday 5 p.m. spinoff show has seen a dip in the all-important 25-to-54 age demographic. It airs between more popular, opinionated shows: Wallace’s “Deadline: White House,” which peaked with 2 million viewers in 2019, and “The Beat With Ari Melber.”

msnbc logo Custom TV insiders say NBC News boss Andy Lack and MSNBC’s Phil Griffin had tried to persuade Todd to move “Daily” to 9 a.m., directly after the network’s politically influential “Morning Joe.” The plan would allow Wallace — a breakout cable star — to broadcast for two hours on weekdays, 4 to 6 p.m.

Plus, the 9 a.m. slot could soon be open, Page Six revealed. That hour’s host, Stephanie Ruhle, has just signed to become NBC’s senior business correspondent, appearing across all shows including “Today” and “NBC Nightly News.”

But a TV insider said, “Chuck doesn’t want to move to 9 a.m. He’d rather leave MSNBC completely and focus on ‘Meet the Press’ on Sunday, and continue to provide news and political analysis across all NBC News platforms including digital. He sees his show as news, not opinion.” Another insider mused it was “madness for NBC to upset the face of its political coverage ahead of 2020. They need Chuck on air every day.”

A third MSNBC source conceded that news chiefs had asked Todd to move “Daily” because “the show doesn’t fit in the 5 p.m. slot.” But the insider insisted, “There’s no way MSNBC wants to lose ‘MTP Daily’ and Chuck. He’s NBC’s biggest political star.” The move comes as Todd faces backlash for highlighting a letter to the editor of a small newspaper that stated voters who believe in “fairy tales” and Noah’s Ark were more likely to vote for Donald Trump.

Jan. 1

Project Censored, Top 25 stories of 2018-2019, Staff report, Jan. 1, 2020. The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2018-2019 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust.

During this year’s cycle, Project Censored reviewed over 300 Validated Independent News stories (VINs) representing the collective efforts of 283 college students and 24 professors from 15 college and university campuses that participated in the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program during the past year.

1. Justice Department’s Secret FISA Rules for Targeting Journalists. A pair of 2015 memos, from former attorney general Eric Holder to the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, show how the government could use court orders.

2. Think Tank Partnerships Establish Facebook as Tool of US Foreign Policy. Under the guise of fighting “fake news” and protecting US democracy from “foreign influence,” in 2018 social media giant Facebook established partnerships with the Atlantic Council, a NATO-sponsored think tank.

3. Indigenous Groups from Amazon Propose Creation of Largest Protected Area on Earth. Sweeping development throughout the Amazon rainforest is an abiding concern for indigenous groups. The Amazon’s extraordinary biodiversity is being destroyed for profits and political gain.

4. U.S. Oil and Gas Industry Set to Unleash 120 Billion Tons of New Carbon Emissions. The US oil and gas industry has the potential to “unleash the largest burst of new carbon emissions in the world” through 2050, according to a January 2019 report.

Note: This near-daily summary of Media News is encompasses news stories beginning in 2020. For previous periods extending back to 2018, kindly visit these links: 2018, 2019 and 2020.

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