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;
• Heavy-handed political control, increasingly with partisan agendas, over schools, colleges, textbooks
• 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. Most focus on U.S. mass media, but some items related to global press freedom, education, high tech, religion, sports and other entertainment.

• 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.'
  

 2021

Note: This segment of our near-daily summary of Media News encompasses news stories that began in 2021. For previous periods extending back to 2018, kindly visit these links: 2018, 2019 and 2020.

 

December 2021

Dec. 31

 

Yahoo News, Investigation: CBP launches review of secretive division that targeted journalists, lawmakers and other Americans, Jana Winter, Dec. 31, 2021. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is conducting a review of a secretive division that uses some of the country’s most sensitive databases to investigate the travel and financial records and personal connections of journalists, members of Congress and other Americans not suspected of any crime.

“A review is underway to ensure that the activities in question during the prior Administration remain an isolated incident and that proper safeguards are in place to prevent an incident like this from taking place in the future,” Luis Miranda, a spokesperson for CBP, told Yahoo News.

CBP’s internal probe was prompted by Yahoo News’ reporting earlier this month on Operation Whistle Pig, a leak investigation targeting reporter Ali Watkins and her then boyfriend, James Wolfe, a Senate staffer (shown above). The investigation was launched by Jeffrey Rambo, a border patrol agent assigned to CBP’s Counter Network Division who was looking at whether Wolfe provided classified information to Watkins and other reporters.

As many as 20 national security reporters were also investigated during this time, according to an FBI counterintelligence memo included in the Department of Homeland Security inspector general report obtained by Yahoo News.

The DHS inspector general investigation was launched in response to an article in the Washington Post identifying Rambo as a border patrol agent who used a fake name to meet with Watkins, then a reporter for Politico. During the meeting, he questioned her about her sources and about her relationship with Wolfe, and also discussed leak investigations.

At the end of their two-year probe, investigators referred Rambo, his supervisor Dan White and a colleague Charles Ratliff for potential criminal charges including conspiracy and misuse of government computers. White was also referred for multiple potential counts of making false statements. Federal prosecutors declined prosecution, citing, among other reasons, the lack of policies and procedures governing their work.

Rambo told Yahoo News he was authorized every step of the way, and records included in the DHS investigative report show that his supervisor Dan White ordered him to expand his probe into journalists. White is still working at the Counter Network Division, and Rambo is currently employed as a border patrol agent in San Diego.

The Counter Network Division regularly investigated potential contacts, including journalists, as part of a process it referred to as “vetting.” As part of this process, the subject would be run through multiple databases, including a terrorism watch list.

The division regularly conducts database checks on reporters “to determine personal connections,” Rambo’s supervisor Dan White told investigators, according to the DHS investigation report obtained by Yahoo News.

Charles Ratliff, another CBP employee brought in to assist Operation Whistle Pig, used the vast resources and databases available to the division to build what investigators later described as a phone tree of contacts — mapping out connections between people to identify a hidden network. Such work, which was used to track terrorists, was also directed at Americans, including congressional members and staffers and journalists..

“When Congressional “Staffers” schedule flights, the numbers they use get captured and analyzed by CBP,” Rambo’s supervisor, White, told investigators.

“White stated that Ratliff “does this all the time –inappropriate contacts between people.”

Ratliff regularly compiled reports on members of Congress with alleged ties to someone in the Terrorist Screening Database, according to the investigative report obtained by Yahoo News.

CBP marshaled those same resources to identify journalists' confidential sources, which was then passed to the FBI.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza was one of the journalists vetted by the Counter Network Division — targeted only because she’d reported on forced labor, one of the issues related to CBP’s work. Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington was also swept up in its dragnet.

“There is no specific guidance on how to vet someone,” Rambo later told investigators. “In terms of policy and procedure, to be 100 percent frank there, there’s no policy and procedure on vetting.”

The Counter Network Division also investigated NGOs, members of Congress and their respective staffs. Enough Project, a nonprofit named by CBP as one of those organizations investigated by Rambo’s team, told Yahoo News it was troubled by the revelations.

“If the Enough Project was in fact targeted for ‘extreme vetting’ by a United States government agency for our work to improve mineral supply chains originating in the Democratic Republic of Congo and investigate corruption that robs the Congolese people of their country’s natural resource wealth, it would be deeply troubling,” the organization said in a statement to Yahoo News. “Such invasive and arbitrary targeting of human rights defenders would be a violation of privacy, a hindrance to this important work, and a waste of public resources.”

A CBP official who asked not to be named told Yahoo News that the National Targeting Center has put in place new procedures and training designed to ensure that the First and Fourth amendments are not being violated. The official declined, however, to specify what those measures were.

Congressional oversight committees have also begun looking into the division’s activities.

Rep. Benny Thompson, left, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee and Carolyn Maloney, right, chair of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, sent a letter to the DHS inspector general requesting the report.

“We write you regarding disturbing reports that the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Counter Network Division used government databases to “vet” journalists, government officials, congressional members and their staff, NGO workers, and others by obtaining travel records as well as financial and personal information,” they wrote in a Dec. 14 letter to the DHS inspector general.

“The Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigated at least one Counter Network Division employee, Mr. Jeffrey Rambo, who used government databases to gather information on an American journalist Ali Watkins,” Thompson and Maloney wrote the DHS, citing reporting by Yahoo News.

Chairs Thompson and Maloney requested a copy of the Office of the Inspector General report for its investigation into Rambo and any other reports related to conduct by the Counter Network Division by Dec. 21, 2021. The DHS inspector general has to date not provided the committees with the requested information, according to congressional sources.

Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which has oversight over CBP, has also requested a copy of the inspector general report, but a spokesman for Wyden said he has still not received a copy.

The inspector general did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo News about the congressional requests.

The DHS has declined to answer any questions posed by Yahoo News about Operation Whistle Pig and the activities of the Counter Network Division. However, in a statement, the department said that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas “is deeply committed to ensuring the protection of First Amendment rights and has promulgated policies that reflect this priority.”

“We do not condone the investigation of reporters in response to the exercise of First Amendment rights,” the statement continued. “CBP and every component agency and office in the Department will ensure their practices are consistent with our values and our highest standards.”

CounterPunch, Commentary: JFK Revisited: Oliver Stone and the New JFK Fact Pattern, Jefferson Morley, right, Dec. 31, 2021. When Oliver Stone first ambles through Dealey Plaza in Dallas in the opening frames his new documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, I couldn’t help but think the man is a soldier. Rumpled, restless, and searching, the 75-year old director looks around the scene of the murder of President John F. Kennedy with the gaze of a combatant and a survivor.

Stone is the dogged veteran of a culture war that has been going on for thirty years since the release of his 1991 Oscar-winning feature film, JFK, a struggle to define American history that ripples through the culture with every new development in the ever-evolving JFK story. He is also a Vietnam veteran who did a dangerous tour of combat duty, as depicted his 1987 film Platoon. The man risked his life for his country, I thought, a sacrifice that few of his harshest critics have ever made.

When I shared that thought with Stone in a telephone interview, he demurred. “Serving as a soldier doesn’t give me any better political insights than someone who did not,” he insisted, with the modesty that has recurred in our occasional conversations over the years. As film critic Ann Hornaday observed in a recent Washington Post piece that was actually fair to the Oscar-winning director. “To spend time with Oliver Stone is to enter a different kind of looking glass,” Hornaday wrote, “A man often caricatured as wild-eyed provocateur is thoughtful, easygoing and generous even at his most contrarian.”

Knowing Stone personally, I can say the canard that he is a fabulist or a fanatic is unfounded and unfair. In person, he is thoughtful, playfully aggressive, and occasionally insecure. The word “encyclopedic” does not do justice to his knowledge of American history or the cinema or politics. His anti-imperialist digressions offend conservatives who believe in the civilizing mission of American empire. His conspiratorial take on JFK’s assassination bothers liberal intellectuals still huddled in that last redoubt of American exceptionalism, the Warren Commission report, which assured a doubting public that it couldn’t happen here. He has made at least four terrific movies (JFK, Nixon, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July), and many more good ones than duds. Viewed with any detachment, he is an accomplished if heretical interpreter of the world, an iconoclastic moralist who distills his search for truth in celluloid.

Reviewing the Record

Stone and his writing partner James DiEugenio perform a basic task of journalism and history in their new documentary JFK Revisited, a task curiously ignored by our newspapers of record and academic historians. In the two-hour film, available on Showtime, the Oscar-winning director revisits a significant historical event—the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963–in light of substantial new evidence. You wouldn’t know it from the predictable media abuse, but his method is time-tested and honorable.

The Washington Post performed this function in June 2007 when the CIA declassified “the Family Jewels,” a file of allegations of CIA misconduct collected in 1973 amidst the Watergate scandal. Under court order, the Agency finally coughed up the 600-plus pages of material 33 years later. I was the World News editor at Washingtonpost.com at the time and role player in the journalistic full-court press that followed.

Bob Woodward took the lead while other senior reporters sifted the papers for new information about the Watergate scandal. We looked for what was new and what it meant for historical understanding of the Watergate affair. At the Post web site, we strove to put the new information in context so readers could make sense of a major event in Washington memory. The in-depth coverage was capped by Woodward’s incisive take on what was truly newsworthy: CIA director Richard Helms emerged from the new files as “the perfect Watergate enabler.” This was proficient journalism as the first draft of history.

Stone’s granular documentary, narrated by actors Whoopi Goldberg and Donald Sutherland, seeks to do the same for JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963: make sense of the newest information. A huge body of new information has come into the record since Stone made his movie. The commercial and critical success of JFK shamed Congress into releasing millions of pages of long-secret government files related to Kennedy’s assassination. Since passage of the 1992 JFK Records Act, federal agencies have made public more than 319,000 once-secret government records, amounting to a new historical record of JFK’s assassination, that is much more comprehensive and detailed than the record available to Stone in 1991.

Dec. 30

 

Sex trafficking defendant Ghislaine Maxwell, right, in an undated photo with her onetime lover and boss Jeffrey Epstein (Photo submitted to jury by U.S. Department of Justice).

Vicky Ward Investigates, Maxwell Unfiltered: The Full Transcript from My 2002 Interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, Vicky Ward, Dec. 30, 2021. Vicky Ward, shown above, is a journalist working at the intersection of power, money and corruption. She has been a New York Times bestselling author, is working on her fourth book and is host and reporter of "Chasing Ghislaine" streaming on Audible / Discovery.

So, it’s over. This chapter of the Jeffrey Epstein saga, at least. Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted on five counts out of six charges that constitute hideous sex crimes against children. She was reportedly emotionless as she heard the verdict. The mystery is what is going on inside her head.

We never got to hear from Maxwell herself this whole trial. Her defense’s strategy was to undermine the credibility of the accusers, not to explain her narrative.

So I went back and looked over the transcript of my 2002 interview with Maxwell about Maria and Annie Farmer, the latter who so bravely testified a couple of weeks ago. It was the one and only conversation I had with her on the topic of Annie and Maria Farmer.

It’s very revealing because it tells us—in her own words—who Maxwell really is and what she values. (It also shows that she lied to me about not giving Annie Farmer a massage.)

Here, for the first time, is our conversation, which was transcribed from micro-cassettes by a professional transcription service. The only redaction is the name of an employee who worked at Zorro Ranch, Epstein’s home in New Mexico.

WARD: Hi.

MAXWELL: Hi. Listen, I just got faxed something from the fact checker at Vanity Fair...the implication of which is so outrageous and disgusting to me that I cannot understand for the life of me why you would put something like that in it and not even [Overlap/Inaudible]

....

MAXWELL: Okay. Terrific. Bye.

WARD: Okay. Bye.

So, there you have it—in full, just as Maxwell insisted.

Her false denials condemn her almost as much as the credible testimony of Annie Farmer, which I believed then as now and which was entitled to be told, and all the others.

After my call with Maxwell, I submitted the story to my bosses at Vanity Fair—with the Farmers' description of events and a general denial from Epstein and Maxwell included. I did my journalistic duty: telling both sides of this ugly story. As I was taught from Day 1, journalism lets the readers to decide.

But Vanity Fair had other plans.

There was no subsequent conversation between Maxwell and myself because, shortly after my interview with the Farmer sisters and the follow-up with Maxwell, Epstein paid a visit to Graydon Carter at the Vanity Fair offices, and the Farmers’ allegations were cut from my article and a subsequent blog—to my eternal regret. I have felt deeply for the Farmers ever since. (Carter has said I didn’t have sufficient reporting. I disagree.)

But what this conversation shows is Maxwell’s entitlement—and her belief that money trumps all. It was “crazy” that I could believe strangers over her and report the on-record allegations. It was also outrageous to think she would have time to give people massages. And how lucky these two girls were to benefit from Epstein’s generosity.

Right there, in this conversation is everything you need to know. This is the narrative that was missing from the courtroom these past weeks, but it does validate the jury’s verdict.

“Use your common sense,” AUSA Maurene Comey had told the jury during her closing arguments.

Apparently, they did.

Vicky Ward's documentary series “Chasing Ghislaine” (based on her Audible podcast of the same name) started streaming on discovery+ on November 22nd and has been be available on DiscoveryID since Dec. 3. She has been a senior reporter at CNN, the editor at large of HuffPost and HuffPost’s long-form magazine, Highline, as well as at Town & Country magazine. I was also a contributor to Esquire, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair for eleven years, and a columnist for the London Evening Standard. In June 2020, she joined the Council on Foreign Relations. Her most recent book — Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) — was an instant New York Times bestseller.

Dec. 29

Axios, New era for local journalism, Sara Fischer, Dec. 29, 2021. New, independent digital outlets and nonprofits have begun to fill some of the gap left by fading local newspapers. Limited resources and the pandemic have driven many toward providing community news, information and services rather than traditional accountability journalism.

Why it matters: "It's not just about a legal or structural shift, but it also represents a shift in how the mission of journalism is changing," said Emily Roseman, research director & editor at the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN).

"The decline of local newspapers has not just led to more government corruption and waste, but also polarization and misinformation," said Steven Waldman, president and co-founder of Report for America, a local journalism nonprofit.

By the numbers: There are now more than 700 independent local news startups in the U.S. and Canada, according to Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION), a trade organization.

LION now has over 400 paying members, up from 177 at the start of the pandemic, executive director Chris Krewson told Axios. By comparison, at least 100 newspapers have closed during COVID, said Penny Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Without additional government support, the U.S. could lose 100 more newspapers next year and another 500 over the next five years, she estimates.

Between the lines: New digital sites and legacy local newspapers alike are finding it difficult to attract sustainable, commercial investment, making philanthropic support and reader donations more important.

The number of local news companies that have registered as nonprofits has roughly doubled in the past five years, per INN.

The past year, saw "a tipping point" of people in the philanthropic world "understanding that nonprofits have to play a bigger role in local news," said Waldman.

Dec. 27

Associated Press, Outlets hurt by dwindling public interest in news in 2021, David Bauder, Dec. 27, 2021. The presidential election, pandemic and racial reckoning were stories that drove intense interest and engagement to news outlets in 2020. To a large degree, 2021 represented the inevitable hangover.

Various metrics illustrate the dwindling popularity of news content.

Cable news networks were the main form of evening entertainment for millions of Americans last year. In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38% at CNN, 34% at Fox News Channel and 25% at MSNBC, according to the Nielsen company.

The decline was less steep but still significant at broadcast television evening newscasts: 12% at ABC’s “World News Tonight” and the “CBS Evening News;” 14% at NBC’s “Nightly News,” Nielsen said.

The Trump era saw explosive subscriber growth for some digital news sites like The New York Times and Washington Post. Yet readers aren’t spending as much time there; Comscore said the number of unique visitors to the Post’s site was down 44% in November compared to November 2020, and down 34% at the Times.

While a Dec. 23 headline on the Los Angeles Times front page — “How Much More Can We Take?” — referred to COVID-19, it could easily be applied to the news appetite in general.

For the most part, smart news executives knew the peaks of 2020 were not sustainable.

“It was entirely predictable,” said news media analyst Ken Doctor.

Perhaps that was most obvious at the cable news networks. They built a prime-time model almost entirely focused on political combat during the Trump years, which made it difficult for them to pivot to something different, said Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

“You become, to some extent, a prisoner of the audience you built,” Rosenstiel said.

Those networks remain focused on politics even as viewership interest wanes. The media monitoring company NewsWhip looked at 14 million political articles online last year and found they had an average of 924 engagements, or social media interactions. The 13.5 million articles NewsWhip has traced in 2021 had an average of 321 engagements.

To a certain extent, these outlets have turned elsewhere for revenue opportunities, Doctor said. CNN is preparing to debut a new streaming service early next year, and recently poached Fox News’ Chris Wallace to join that effort.

Fox News, while doubling down on conservative commentary following perceived threats from outlets like Newsmax and OANN, directed fans to its Fox Nation streaming service. Arguably Fox’s most attention-getting programming of the year was a documentary on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot by Tucker Carlson, that asserted it was an effort to silence Trump supporters.

New York Times, ‘Magic’ Weight-Loss Pills and Covid Cures: Dr. Oz Under the Microscope, Trip Gabriel, Dec. 27, 2021 (print ed.). The celebrity physician, a candidate in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for Senate, has a long history of dispensing dubious medical advice on his daytime show and on Fox News.

A wealth of evidence now shows that the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were not effective at treating Covid-19 and carried potential risks.

But in the early months of the pandemic, Dr. Mehmet Oz, right, the celebrity physician with a daytime TV show, positioned himself as one of the chief promoters of the drugs on Fox News. In the same be-the-best-you tone that he used to promote miracle weight-loss cures on “The Dr. Oz Show,” he elevated limited studies that he said showed wondrous promise.

His “jaw dropped,” he said, while reviewing one tiny study from France, calling it “a game changer.” In all, Dr. Oz promoted chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in more than 25 appearances on Fox in March and April 2020.

When a Veterans Affairs study showed that Covid-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than untreated patients, that advocacy came to an abrupt halt.

“We are better off waiting for the randomized trials” that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, had been asking for, Dr. Oz told Fox viewers.

As Dr. Oz jumped last month into the Republican primary for Senate in Pennsylvania, where his celebrity gives him an important advantage in a crucial race, he tied his candidacy to the politics of the pandemic. He appealed to conservatives’ anger at mandates and shutdowns, and at the “people in charge” who, he said, “took away our freedom.”

But the entry into the race of the Cleveland-born heart surgeon, a son of Turkish immigrants who has been the host of “The Dr. Oz Show” since 2009, also brought renewed scrutiny to the blemishes on his record as one of America’s most famous doctors: his long history of dispensing dubious medical advice.

In ebullient language, he has often made sweeping claims based on thin evidence, which in multiple cases, like that of hydroxychloroquine, unraveled when studies he relied on were shown to be flawed.

Over the years, Dr. Oz, 61, has faced a bipartisan scolding before a Senate committee over claims he made about weight-loss pills, as well as the opposition of some of his physician peers, including a group of 10 doctors who sought his firing from Columbia University’s medical faculty in 2015, arguing that he had “repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine.” Dr. Oz questioned his critics’ motives and Columbia took no action, saying it did not regulate faculty members’ participation in public discourse.

New York Times, The Companies Benefiting From Fragmenting Internet Privacy Rules, David McCabe, Dec. 27, 2021. An industry has sprouted up to help others navigate the varied laws around the world governing websites.

In 2018, California lawmakers mandated that consumers be able to request their personal data from companies through a toll-free number. And then a group of lawyers, engineers and salespeople for a company in Atlanta got to work.

The company, a start-up called OneTrust, now based in a suburb on the city’s outskirts, makes software for businesses trying to stay on the right side of the growing number of internet regulations. In response to the new California law, OneTrust made it easy for companies to set up a number to manage the requests.

In an attempt to rein in tech giants like Facebook and Google, governments around the world in recent years have approved new laws governing how websites must handle consumer data, treat their competitors and protect young people. The European Union has a data privacy law that governs the entire bloc. California has approved two privacy measures in recent years, and other states have followed suit.

Out of those regulations has arisen something else: An industry to help companies navigate the increasingly fragmented rules of the global internet.

New York Times, E.O. Wilson, a Pioneer of Evolutionary Biology, Dies at 92, Carl Zimmer, Dec. 27, 2021. A Harvard professor for 46 years, he was an expert on insects and explored how natural selection and other forces could influence animal behavior. He then applied his research to humans.

When Dr. Wilson began his career in evolutionary biology in the 1950s, the study of animals and plants seemed to many scientists like a quaint, obsolete hobby. Molecular biologists were getting their first glimpses of DNA, proteins and other invisible foundations of life. Dr. Wilson made it his life’s work to put evolution on an equal footing.

As part of his campaign, Dr. Wilson wrote a string of books that influenced his fellow scientists while also gaining a broad public audience. “On Human Nature” won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1979; “The Ants,” which Dr. Wilson wrote with his longtime colleague Bert Hölldobler, won him his second Pulitzer, in 1991.

Daily Howler, Media Criticism: When Edward O. Wilson said the wrong thing..., Bob Somerby, Dec. 27 2021. Edward O. Wilson died yesterday at the age of 92. His stature is captured in the headline in the Washington Post: "Edward O. Wilson, Harvard naturalist often cited as heir to Darwin, dies at 92."

Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard naturalist whose mapping of social behavior in ants led him to study social behavior in all organisms and who became one of the greatest naturalists of his generation, died Dec. 26 in Burlington, Mass. He was 92.

The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation announced his death but did not provide a cause.

Often cited as Charles Darwin’s greatest 20th-century heir, Dr. Wilson was an eloquent and immensely influential environmentalist and was the first to determine that ants communicate mainly through the exchange of chemical substances now known as pheromones.

He discovered hundreds of new species by putting his hands in the dirt as a field biologist, synthesized evolving thinking in science and coined new terms, such as biodiversity and biophilia, to explain it. Of his many accomplishments in evolutionary biology, his biggest contribution was probably in the new scientific field of sociobiology, in which he addressed the biological basis of social behavior in animals, including humans.

This "heir to Darwin" had "addressed the biological basis of social behavior in animals." Even in us humans!

Apparently, some of us human didn't like that much. Later, Patricia Sullivan takes us back to 1975, when Wilson published his famous book, "Sociobiology." Uh-oh! Familiar conduct emerged:

SULLIVAN: The controversy came from the last chapter, on humankind. Dr. Wilson proposed that human behavior is genetically based, that humans inherit a propensity to acquire behavior and social structures, including a division of labor between the sexes, parental-child bonding, heightened altruism toward closest kin, incest avoidance, suspicion of strangers, tribalism, male dominance and territorial aggression over limited resources.

He later noted in Naturalist, his 1994 autobiography, that his was “an exceptionally strong hereditarian position for the 1970s.”

The response was furious, starting at his own school, where colleagues accused him of genetic determinism and tied the theory to Nazi eugenics, racism, sexism, sterilization and restrictions on immigration. Demonstrators disrupted the campus, calling his theory an apologia for the status quo.

The fact that sociobiology made the cover of Time magazine or that Dr. Wilson debated the proposition on the “Today” show and Dick Cavett’s talk show did not impress them. The protests culminated with a takeover of the stage at the 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, where one demonstrator was said to have drenched him with a pitcher of ice water, declaring, “Wilson, you’re all wet!”

New York Times, As Other Arab States Falter, Saudi Arabia Seeks to Become a Cultural Hub, Vivian Yee and Ben Hubbard. Dec. 27, 2021 (print ed.). While conflicts and crises have battered the region’s cultural capitals, Saudi Arabia is hosting film festivals and bankrolling new movies.

Dec. 26

Proof, Investigation: The Coming Collapse of Donald Trump’s January 6 Conspiracy, Part 1: Alex Jones, Seth Abramson, left, Dec. 27, 2021. This shocking new PROOF series details mounting evidence that Trump's seditious January 6 conspiracy is at the point of collapse because of the cowardice, fear, and perfidy of his co-conspirators. Note: This is Part 1 of an ongoing series in the January 6 section at Proof. Part 2 is due soon.

Introduction: One difficulty journalists face in writing about Alex Jones (shown above in a screenshot) is that the man produces so much content daily that sifting through it all is nearly impossible. Those who do are richly rewarded, however; on Jones’s nightly Infowars program (The Alex Jones Show) and in other venues, the infamous far-right conspiracy theorist and self-described “performance artist” has made so many controversial and even self-incriminating statements that one could craft an endless breaking news cycle just by finding obscure video and audio of Jones in which he discusses the January 6th insurrection and his role in it.

Proof has already reported on some of the most shocking statements Jones has made about the attack on the U.S. Capitol, including interviews he has conducted with his Stop the Steal “movement” co-conspirators, domestic terrorist Ali Alexander and longtime Trump friend and political adviser Roger Stone. You can find a few of these reports (in chronological order) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

A less commonly discussed component of Jones’s carefully constructed public persona is the incredibly delicate state of his relationship with the man who he agreed to lead the march on the Capitol for: Donald Trump. Jones has never been a particularly loyal Trumpist, which makes him a potential weak spot in Trump’s January 6 conspiracy and the ongoing effort to steal the 2024 presidential election linked to that conspiracy.

On November 22, 2021, Congress’s House January 6 Committee (hereafter “HJ6C”) subpoenaed Jones. The subpoena launched a raft of speculation about whether Jones would cooperate with Congress in order to save his own skin—and precisely how far he would be willing to go, and how much damage he would be willing to do to Trump, in an attempt to do so.

Alex Jones and Donald Trump: A Troubled History

The relationship between Jones and Trump has always been an uneasy one, but it’s been especially bad since the attack on the Capitol on January 6. On March 3, 2021, leaked video of a Jones tirade about Trump in 2019—which Jones did not appear to realize was being recorded—was published by a number of media outlets. In the video, Jones says the following of his nominal ally (emphasis supplied):

It’s the truth, and I’m just going to say it—that I wish I never would have fucking met Trump. I wish it never would’ve happened. And it’s not the attacks I’ve been through. I’m so sick of fucking Donald Trump. God, I’m fucking sick of him. And I’ve not doing this [carrying water for him] because, like, I’m kissing his fucking ass, you know. It’s, like, I’m sick of it.

In a longer version of the video, according to Caolan Robertson, who leaked it to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Jones derides his audience for being willing to “buy anything” and boasts about earning tens of millions of dollars—not just millions—via his far-right, often pro-Trump rhetoric.

Seth Abramson, shown above and at right, is founder of Proof and is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who teaches digital journalism, legal advocacy, and cultural theory at the University of New Hampshire. A regular political and legal analyst on CNN and the BBC during the Trump presidency, he is a best-selling author who has published eight books and edited five anthologies.

Abramson is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the Ph.D. program in English at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include a Trump trilogy: Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump (2020); Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump's International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy (2019); and Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America (2018).

Press Run, Commentary: Media ignore a monster story — the brainwashing of Covid zombies, Eric Boehlert, right, Dec. 26, 2021. Trump voters gone mad.
New York Times still won't call them "brainwashed."

Sunday’s New York Times features a front-page piece about ‘vaccine resistant’ Americans — who are overwhelmingly Republican — and how despite the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, they refuse to get a free, safe, and miraculously effective vaccine. What was glaringly absent from the article was any discussion of “brainwashing,” when describing people who have obviously been brainwashed.

As background, see: Press Run, Commentary: Media ignore a monster story — the brainwashing of Covid zombies, Eric Boehlert, Sept. 22, 2021. Trump voters gone mad. National Public Radio relayed more shocking Covid news on Monday: “In 2020, for the first time in recorded history, more people died in Alabama than were born in the state.” The pandemic has shrunk the red state. Yet local Republican leaders still oppose mask and vaccine mandates, leaving the Trump outpost exposed to more fatalities.

But like so many news outlets, NPR missed the real story. The pile of Alabama deaths continue to mount not simply because of Covid. But because so many people in the Trump-friendly state have been brainwashed by bad-faith partisan actors and they refuse to get inoculated. Anti-science Republicans seem determined to spread the virus among their own voters, which seems inconceivable.

Millions of conservative Americans are being brainwashed about the pandemic, and thousands are killing themselves in the process. Yet the media downplay the huge story, framing it simply as “vaccine hesitancy.”

The number of Americans who are dying every 36 hours from Covid now surpasses the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed during 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. It’s an entirely preventable crisis, yet it rages because we have people like the red state restaurant owner who is kicking out patrons if they refuse to take off their masks. It’s pure nihilism.

The mindless behavior is hard to describe, and the rest of the world must be looking on in slack-jawed astonishment as Trump voters lead a mad movement powered by Fox News. The network is doing what no other outlet has done in the history of television news — it’s deliberately getting people killed during a public health crisis by feeding eagerly gullible red state viewers a mountain of lies.

From PizzaGate, to QAnon, to the current anti-vaccine and anti-mask hysteria, the GOP has been brainwashed. It’s no secret — lots of victims openly admit it. Still, the press shies away, nervous about offending conservatives by portraying them as mindless zombies being easily duped about a miraculously safe and effective vaccine. (It’s the same reason news outlets refused to call Trump a “liar.”)

Dec. 25

Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA), Commentary: Recently Released JFK Assassination Records, Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., J.D., right, famed medical school professor, CAPA chairman, former coroner in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County, author of the recent book The JFK Assassination Dissected and author or co-author of 60 other books, including texts widely used among fellow forensic pathologists).

CAPA has performed a preliminary review of the articles outlining the JFK assassination records that were recently released (a more detailed review will be undertaken in the near future and our assessment passed on to our supporters). The Daily Mail --  Classified JFK assassination files are FINALLY released by Jennifer Smith and Keith Griffith, updated Dec. 16, 2021 -- provided the most detailed information on the subject.

Our initial response to these documents is that they have one thing in common − they all can be construed to support the Warren Commission Report conclusion that [Lee Harvey] Oswald alone killed JFK. For instance, much is made of Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico. However, the photographs alleged to be Oswald were obviously not Oswald and the audio recordings allegedly of him calling the embassy were listened to by the 12 special agents of the FBI familiar with his voice and firmly rejected as inauthentic and not Oswald in a confidential bureau memo.

It appears that the documents described so far seem to confirm Oswald’s connection to Russia and the KGB, intimating Oswald was a pawn of Russia and killed JFK at their behest. This has been reported for years though the concept of Oswald as the lone assassin has been totally disproved. However, the question arises, what if these documents that connect Oswald to Russia/KGB actually prove that Oswald WAS an intelligence asset of the U.S. being set up to be a future patsy for the assassination?

As quoted in the article, “In September 1963, two months before he killed JFK, Oswald met with Consul Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, a KGB agent in Mexico City.” Note how the article states that “Oswald killed JFK” is a fact, as if there is no debate or question on the issue. The entire article is written with the assumption that Oswald, acting alone, killed JFK.

It is blatantly obvious that this release of documents serves the purpose of the government to keep any incriminating evidence out of the hands of the citizens and, particularly, researchers who are familiar with the case.

Dec. 24

Washington Post, Rudy Giuliani and One America News sued by Georgia poll workers falsely accused of electoral fraud, Andrew Jeong, Dec. 24, 2021 (print ed.). Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss allege that Giuliani and the far-right network knowingly spread misinformation.

Two election workers who counted votes for the 2020 presidential election filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday against the parent company of One America News, senior staff at the far-right TV network and Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as a personal lawyer to former president Donald Trump.

Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who worked in Fulton County, Ga., allege that One America News and Giuliani, who frequently appears on the network, knowingly spread misinformation about them, including falsehoods that they logged illegal ballots for Joe Biden in the election.

The two women “have become objects of vitriol, threats, and harassment … because of a campaign of malicious lies,” their attorneys wrote in the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “Deliberate efforts to spread disinformation about America’s election workers undermine the integrity of American elections … and accordingly, threaten democracy.”

The legal action seeks to force the defendants to delete false statements about the two women from their platforms. It also asks for compensatory and punitive damages.

Biden narrowly won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes in 2020, marking the first time a Democratic presidential nominee emerged victorious there since Bill Clinton in 1992. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly and falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen.

Giuliani, One America News and its senior staff named in the lawsuit — chief executive Robert Herring, president Charles Herring and chief White House correspondent Chanel Rion — did not immediately return requests for comment late Thursday.

The plaintiffs allege that One America News replayed a misleading video produced by the Trump campaign, which was presented by volunteer Trump attorney Jacki L. Pick as an example of election workers stuffing fraudulent ballots from purportedly hidden “suitcases.” Pick did not name the workers, although she said “one of them had the name Ruby across her shirt somewhere.”

Washington Post, A year ago, Fox News considered a breakup with Trump. 2021 changed those plans, Sarah Ellison, Dec. 24, 2021 (print ed.).
Going into 2022, the network’s alignment with Trump has it grappling with a pair of potentially catastrophic lawsuits. But its ratings are on top again.

In the weeks before the 2020 election, as Fox News executives and luminaries came to terms with its possible outcome, some began to see in it a long-awaited opportunity — a chance to break up with Donald Trump.

Yet the post-Trump era opened for Fox with a ratings drop that quickly prompted a recalibration of those 2021 visions.

Now, one year later, the dream some harbored of distancing from Trump is long over. The biggest threat Fox now faces is a pair of looming lawsuits from two voting technology companies that claim the network, far from turning away from Trump, allowed Trump-allied personalities — including on-air hosts as well as guests — to falsely malign them with bogus conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud in 2020.

Over the course of the year, Fox managed to reassert itself as the No. 1 ranked cable programmer — and wholeheartedly realigned itself with the former president and his supporters.

Washington Post, Russia fines Google as Moscow pressures foreign tech firms to comply with strict rules on banned content, Isabelle Khurshudyan, Dec. 24, 2021. The $100 million penalty is by far the country’s largest fine on a Western tech giant to date. The content in question often relates to jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s network, which has been labeled as “extremist” in Russia.

A Russian court fined Google nearly $100 million Friday for “systematic failure to remove banned content” — the largest such penalty yet in the country as Moscow attempts to rein in Western tech giants.

The fine was calculated based on Google’s annual revenue, the court said. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s Internet regulator, told the court that Google’s 2020 turnover in the country exceeded 85 billion rubles, or about $1.15 billion.

The fine represents an escalation in Russia’s push to pressure foreign tech firms to comply with its increasingly strict rules on what it deems illegal content — particularly apps, websites, posts and videos related to jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s network, which has been labeled as extremist in the country.

New York Times, Judge Upholds His Block on New York Times Coverage of Project Veritas, Michael M. Grynbaum, Dec. 24, 2021. A New York trial court judge has upheld his order preventing The New York Times from publishing documents prepared by a lawyer for the conservative group Project Veritas, in a move that alarmed First Amendment advocates concerned about judicial intrusion into journalistic practices.

In a ruling made public on Friday, the judge, Justice Charles D. Wood of State Supreme Court in Westchester County, went further: He ordered The Times to immediately turn over any physical copies of the Project Veritas documents in question, and to destroy any electronic copies in the newspaper’s possession.

The Times said it would seek a stay of the ruling and was planning to appeal it.

“This ruling should raise alarms not just for advocates of press freedoms but for anyone concerned about the dangers of government overreach into what the public can and cannot know,” the publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger, said in a statement on Friday. “In defiance of law settled in the Pentagon Papers case, this judge has barred The Times from publishing information about a prominent and influential organization that was obtained legally in the ordinary course of reporting.”

Mr. Sulzberger said Justice Wood’s order that the company return the documents had “no apparent precedent” and “could present obvious risks to exposing sources.”

A lawyer for Project Veritas, Elizabeth Locke, said in a statement on Friday: “Today’s ruling affirms that The New York Times’s behavior was irregular and outside the boundaries of law. The court’s thoughtful and well-researched opinion is a victory for the First Amendment for all journalists and affirms the sanctity of the attorney-client relationship.” Ms. Locke accused The Times of being “a vehicle for the prosecution of a partisan political agenda.”
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The judge’s order came about as part of a libel lawsuit filed in 2020 by Project Veritas, which is led by the provocateur James O’Keefe, that accused The Times of defamation.

The Justice Department is investigating Project Veritas for its possible role in the theft of a diary that belonged to Ashley Biden, President Biden’s daughter. The Times, in reporting on the investigation, published an article in November that quoted memos prepared by a lawyer for Project Veritas, which expounded on strategies that would allow the group to engage in deceptive reporting practices without breaking federal law.

Those memos predate, by several years, the libel case against The Times. But Project Veritas accused the newspaper of intruding on its right to attorney-client privilege. The group argued that the memos prepared by its lawyer were related to legal issues in its libel lawsuit against The Times and that the publication of the memos amounted to an attempt to embarrass a litigation opponent.

The order, issued by Justice Wood last month, had temporarily prevented the paper from further disseminating or seeking those memos and other privileged materials.

The leader of Project Veritas, Mr. O’Keefe, often uses surreptitious cameras and faked identities in videos that are meant to embarrass news outlets, Democratic officials, labor groups and liberals. In a statement on Friday about the judge’s ruling, Mr. O’Keefe wrote: “The Times is so blinded by its hatred of Project Veritas that everything it does results in a self-inflicted wound.”

In his new ruling, Justice Wood rejected the argument by The Times that the memos prepared by Project Veritas’s lawyer — which advised the conservative group on how to legally carry out deceptive reporting methods — were a matter of public concern.

“Undoubtedly, every media outlet believes that anything that it publishes is a matter of public concern,” the judge wrote. He added: “Our smartphones beep and buzz all day long with news flashes that supposedly reflect our browsing and clicking interests, and we can tune in or read the news outlet that gives us the stories and topics that we want to see. But some things are not fodder for public consideration and consumption.”

Justice Wood contended that his ruling did not amount to a restriction on the newspaper’s journalism.

“The Times is perfectly free to investigate, uncover, research, interview, photograph, record, report, publish, opine, expose or ignore whatever aspects of Project Veritas its editors in their sole discretion deem newsworthy, without utilizing Project Veritas’s attorney-client privileged memoranda,” the judge wrote.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer who represents media outlets including CNN, said in an interview on Friday that the judge’s ruling was “way off base and dangerous.”

“It’s an egregious, unprecedented intrusion on news gathering and the news gathering process,” Mr. Boutrous said. “The special danger is it allows a party suing a news organization for defamation to then get a gag order against the news organization banning any additional reporting. It’s the ultimate chilling effect.”

Washington Post, A year ago, Fox News considered a breakup with Trump. 2021 changed those plans, Sarah Ellison, Dec. 24, 2021 (print ed.).
Going into 2022, the network’s alignment with Trump has it grappling with a pair of potentially catastrophic lawsuits. But its ratings are on top again.

In the weeks before the 2020 election, as Fox News executives and luminaries came to terms with its possible outcome, some began to see in it a long-awaited opportunity — a chance to break up with Donald Trump.

Yet the post-Trump era opened for Fox with a ratings drop that quickly prompted a recalibration of those 2021 visions.

Now, one year later, the dream some harbored of distancing from Trump is long over. The biggest threat Fox now faces is a pair of looming lawsuits from two voting technology companies that claim the network, far from turning away from Trump, allowed Trump-allied personalities — including on-air hosts as well as guests — to falsely malign them with bogus conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud in 2020.

Over the course of the year, Fox managed to reassert itself as the No. 1 ranked cable programmer — and wholeheartedly realigned itself with the former president and his supporters.

Washington Post, White House reporters ask for virtual press briefings during the latest covid surge, Paul Farhi, Dec. 24, 2021. With a fierce new variant of the coronavirus on the loose, White House reporters are urging press secretary Jen Psaki to move her daily briefings online — but it’s an idea Psaki has been cool to so far.

The White House Correspondents’ Association has proposed holding the daily briefings on Zoom or some other online platform to avoid face-to-face contact in the White House’s cramped briefing room.

The WHCA is concerned that reporters face an elevated risk of being infected with the highly contagious omicron variant — or infecting their colleagues with it — while congregating in the 49-seat briefing room or the narrow workspaces behind it.

In a memo sent to members on Tuesday, the group’s president, Steven Portnoy, noted that President Biden himself had said in a speech earlier in the day that omicron cases are likely to be widespread in many workplaces, including at the White House.

Portnoy urged reporters “not directly tasked by their managers with being at the White House to please not come in.” He also wrote that his organization had suggested Zoom to Psaki, but “no changes are expected at this time.”

White House officials have told the WHCA that the administration’s covid protocols — which include mask requirements, and vaccine and booster checks or tests for those entering the White House premises — are sufficient protection against omicron.

In a statement, Psaki said the White House has followed the guidance of health experts who have said its current protocols are effective. She added: “We don’t think it sends the right message to the country or the world to close the briefing room or pause in-person briefings.”

Thursday’s in-person briefing at the White House was sparsely attended, possibly reflecting both the approach of the Christmas holiday and Portnoy’s memo urging reporters to avoid the briefing room.

Psaki greeted reporters by quipping that “only the bold and the brave” were covering the briefing.

As a fallback strategy, the WHCA is considering capping the number of reporters permitted into the briefing room at 14 to ensure greater social distancing. The group doesn’t control who can enter the grounds or the building, but it is in charge of assigning seats in the briefing room and allocating the adjacent workspace.

Last year, before the widespread availability of coronavirus vaccines, the organization established a rotation among news organizations, limiting briefings to just 14 reporters. Psaki appeared to favor this approach, saying, “we are open to considering a request to go back to the smaller-sized briefings.”

 Washington Post, Joan Didion (1934–2021): Author who chronicled decadence and hypocrisy in America dies at 87, Harrison Smith, Dec. 24, 2021 (print ed.). Joan Didion, a virtuosic prose stylist who for more than four decades explored the agitated, fractured state of the American psyche in her novels, essays, criticism and memoirs, and who as one of the “New Journalists” of the 1960s and ’70s helped reportorial nonfiction acquire the status of an art form, died Dec. 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to a statement from her publisher, Knopf.

With an unwavering eye and piercing intellect, Ms. Didion (shown at right in a 2008 photo via Wikipedia) revealed an America gripped by moral decadence and self-deception, in thrall to false narratives that offered little explanation about how the world worked.

Her trenchant, frequently contrarian opinions on subjects as varied as the films of Woody Allen and the traffic in Los Angeles were matched by a precise style that was nearly universally admired. “Try to rearrange one of her sentences,” New York Times critic John Leonard once wrote, “and you’ve realized that the sentence was inevitable, a hologram.”

Washington Post, Joan Didion was essence of effortless cool amid a life of loss and disillusionment, Margaret Sullivan, right, Dec. 24, 2021 (print ed.). Her writer’s voice is an unmistakable through-line from work as early as “On Keeping a Notebook,” from the 1968 collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” all the way to “Blue Nights” in 2011.

New York Times, Appreciation: Didion’s Prophetic Eye on America, Michiko Kakutani (a former chief book critic of The Times. She reviewed several works by Joan Didion over the decades and interviewed Ms. Didion), Dec. 24, 2021.

Joan Didion was a writer uniquely attuned to the disorder and fragmentation of our times, the dizzying changes overtaking America since the 1960s, when, as she wrote in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” lines from Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming” reverberated “in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there”:

For Didion, who died on Thursday at 87, the late ’60s and early ’70s were a time of social and political tumult, abrupt leave-takings and random violence: the Manson murders and Altamont and young people pulling up stakes to wander the streets of Haight-Ashbury. She was uncannily attuned to the dark undercurrents of the day — the social fractures and divides that fueled carelessness and alienation. This is one reason Didion’s work resonates so deeply with us today. Once again, we are living in times defined by chaos and uncertainty, and what Didion called “the jitters” are settling in again, as we worry about Covid and climate change and police brutality and mass shootings at schools.

Congress cannot seem to pass legislation wanted by large majorities of people. Democracy itself is under threat with an all-out assault on voting rights by former President Donald Trump and his allies. QAnon followers — some wearing superhero costumes, horns and animal pelts and camo and sporting lots of tattoos — participated in the insurrection at the Capitol last January and more recently gathered near Dealey Plaza in Dallas to await the return of John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in 1999. Doctors and nurses are being threatened for dispensing Covid shots, and school board members are being assailed for supporting mask mandates. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel we are living through another surreal and dangerous iteration of Didion’s America, where “disorder was its own point.”

It turns out that Didion was also remarkably prescient in writing about the fracturing of truth as people increasingly filtered reality through the prism of their own prejudices. And decades ago, she was already pointing to the startling disconnect between much of the American public and the political and media elites who “invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life” — a disconnect that today is fueling populist politics and partisan divides. In 2003 she wrote even more explicitly about how our political process not only spurns consensus but also works by “turning the angers and fears and energy of the few” against “the rest of the country.”

Narratives preoccupied Didion — because she was a novelist and screenwriter, as well as a journalist, and because writing had always been a means for her to impose order on a threatening and chaotic world. A frequent theme in both her fiction and her nonfiction involves the story lines people construct about themselves and others, the ways in which they choose to connect (or not connect) the dots of personal or political events. In fact, Didion found in her own experiences and fears a mirror for what was happening in America.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion wrote in “The White Album.”

Didion’s utterly distinctive writing style — distinguished by its spareness, its surgical precision, its almost staccato yet incantatory rhythms — was also a tool for containing her often harrowing subject matter, be it her own experiences of loss and grief, reportorial assignments involving murder or war, or the melodramatic situations that the heroines in her novels so often faced. She had an eye for the prophetic detail and telling gesture, an ear for the line of overheard dialogue that might reveal all.

Dec. 23

 

Palmer Report, Opinion: Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone makes his move, Bocha Blue, Dec. 23, 2021. To find love, we need look no further than among each other — and the valiant heroes who fought for us on January 6. One of those heroes is Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone (shown above in a file photo).

You may have seen him on television, in particular CNN. He is as brave a hero as one can find. And on January 6, he was viciously beaten by crazed insurrectionists. They could not take away the love that shines from him.

Fanone has been an outspoken critic of the January 6 attacks and has become an activist in his own right. He also testified before the January 6 committee. Sadly, some of his colleagues were reportedly not pleased with his activism. And now Fanone has resigned from the police force.

“Clearly, there are some members of our department who feel their oath is to Donald Trump and not to the constitution,” Fanone said. “I no longer felt like I could trust my fellow officers and decided to make a change.”

It is unfortunate that such a brave soul could possibly receive derision for his bravery, but this is the world we now live in.

The good news is that Fanone has a new job — and it’s with CNN. This is one of their better decisions. CNN has hired Fanone as a contributor on issues of law enforcement. The world is a better place with Fanone in it, and CNN will undoubtedly be a better network with Fanone on it. We wish him all the best in his new occupation.

Washington Post, Americans distrust Facebook, TikTok, Instagram with their data and want privacy laws, poll finds, Heather Kelly and Emily Guskin, Dec. 23, 2021 (print ed.). Pulled between not trusting some tech companies and still wanting to use their products, people look to government regulation, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.

Dec. 22

Future of Freedom Foundation, Opinion: Max Boot’s Rant Against Oliver Stone, Jacob G. Hornberger, right, Dec. 22, 2021. Max Boot, a conservative who has long favored regime-change operations on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, is going after Hollywood producer and director Oliver Stone. His beef with Stone? He’s upset because Stone has long maintained that the U.S. national-security establishment employed one of its patented regime-change operations here at home, against President John F. Kennedy.

The title of Boot’s piece, which was published in the Washington Post, is “Oliver Stone Just Can’t Stop Spreading Lies About JFK’s Assassination.” In his article, he attacks Stone not only for his 1991 movie JFK but also for Stone’s latest update to the movie, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.

Interestingly, Boot makes a reference to Stone’s accusation “that Kennedy’s autopsy reports were falsified.”

Actually, the more accurate way to put it is that the U.S. national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy. That fraud was reflected in both the autopsy photographs as well as the final autopsy report.

But like many other proponents of the official lone-nut theory of the assassination, Boot doesn’t address any of the main features of the autopsy fraud in his rant against Stone.

Let’s take two examples. (Others are detailed in my two books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.)

For 30 years, the national-security establishment had falsely claimed that there was only one brain examination in the Kennedy autopsy.

It was a lie. And when people are lying about something that important, you know that they are up to something that is rotten and no good.

In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s determined that there were two different brain examinations in the JFK autopsy, the second of which involved a brain that did not belong to Kennedy.

How did they determine this? The official photographer for the autopsy, John Stringer, was at the first brain exam. He stated that at that brain exam, the brain was “sectioned” or cut like a loaf of bread is cut. That’s standard procedure with an autopsy that involves a gunshot to the head. Stringer took photographs of the brain, which also is standard procedure.

One of the three military pathologists who conducted the autopsy, Col. Pierre Finck, stated that he attended the brain examination. But he was not at the brain exam that Stringer attended. Stringer verified that. That means that there was a second brain exam. At that second brain exam, a different photographer was present taking photographs. The brain at the second brain exam was not “sectioned.” A sectioned brain cannot be reconstituted into a non-sectioned brand. That’s how we know that the brain at the second brain exam had to be a brain of someone other than Kennedy.

It’s also worth mentioning two other things about the brain exam. First, when Stringer was asked to examine the official photographs of Kennedy’s brain, he specifically denied that those were the photographs he took. Second, the autopsy report reflects that Kennedy’s brain weighed 1500 grams. An average brain weighs around 1350 grams. Everyone agrees that an extremely large portion of Kennedy’s brain was blown out by the shot that hit him in the head. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no possibility that Kennedy’s brain could have weighed 1500 grams after having a large portion of it blown away by the gunshot.

What does Boot, right, say about the two brain exams? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

There is something else worth noting. If it hadn’t been for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, we would never have learned about this fraud. That’s because the national-security establishment would have continued lying about there being only one brain exam. It was Stone’s movie that led directly to the JFK Records Act and the ARRB whose job it was to enforce it. That’s how we learned about the fraud relating to the two brain exams.

Dec. 21

 

Washington Post, A UAE agency put Pegasus spyware on the phone of Jamal Khashoggi’s wife months before his murder, new forensics show, Dana Priest, Dec. 21, 2021. The new analysis, conducted by a research group devoted to uncovering cyber espionage, provides the first indication that a UAE agency placed the military-grade spyware on a phone used by someone in Khashoggi’s inner circle in the months before his murder.

Emirates flight attendant Hanan Elatr surrendered her two Android cellphones, laptop and passwords when security agents surrounded her at the Dubai airport. They drove her, blindfolded and in handcuffs, to an interrogation cell on the edge of the city, she said. There, she was questioned all night and into the morning about her fiance, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi (shown above entering the facility where he would be butchered and at left in the Washington Post's newsroom).

The next day, at 10:14 a.m. on April 22, 2018, while her devices were still in official custody, someone opened the Chrome browser on one of the Androids.

The spyware had been developed by an Israeli firm, NSO Group, for what it says is use against terrorists and criminals. The website was configured by NSO for a United Arab Emirates customer, said Marczak, whose research group is based at the University of Toronto and devoted to uncovering cyberespionage.

The new analysis provides the first indication that a UAE government agency placed the military-grade spyware on a phone used by someone in Khashoggi’s inner circle in the months before his murder.

“We found the smoking gun on her phone,” said Marczak, who examined Elatr’s two Androids at The Washington Post’s and her request. Emirati authorities returned them to her several days after her release.

New York Times, ‘Q’ Has Been Quiet, but QAnon Lives On, Davey Alba, Dec. 21, 2021 (print ed.). With the absence of a leader, the movement has transformed into more of a “choose your own adventure” conspiracy theory.

On Dec. 8, 2020, a few weeks after Joseph R. Biden was elected president, “Q” — the anonymous online account that set off the QAnon conspiracy movement — posted a link to a video with scenes of cars burning on the streets, fighter jets over a stadium and Donald J. Trump with his hand on a Bible, being sworn in as president. The images played over a song by Twisted Sister, “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

The Q account has not posted since, and its major predictions have not come to pass.

But the QAnon movement — initially based on a pro-Trump conspiracy theory, that a group of global liberal elites run a child sex ring that Mr. Trump would stop — has continued to flourish. In some ways, it is now woven even deeper into the country’s political and social fabric than it was 12 months ago.

Over 40 candidates who have publicly stated some support of QAnon are running for national office in 2022, according to a tally by the liberal advocacy group Media Matters. They include Luis Miguel, a Republican from Florida who has tweeted the QAnon slogan, and Omar Navarro, a Republican from California who has publicly stated his belief in some of the movement’s conspiracy theories, including the lie that Hollywood is running a child trafficking scheme.

Followers of QAnon also regularly show up at events and successfully spread new fallacious claims. Last month, hundreds of people turned up in Dallas expecting to see John F. Kennedy Jr. — the former U.S. president’s son, who died in a plane crash in 1999 — announce his intentions to be Mr. Trump’s running mate in 2024. Many QAnon followers pushed the theory that the recent Astroworld Festival in Houston, in which 10 people died and hundreds more were injured, was a front for a satanic ritual sacrifice.

Conspiracy theories often evolve far beyond their initial notions, whether it be about the moon landing or what really happened on Sept. 11, once they reach a large audience. But QAnon — a conspiracy theory born online, and spread online — stands out because its longevity has depended on that same large community to crowdsource the movement’s new direction.

QAnon’s survival means that the falsehoods embraced by its supporters are likely to influence American elections in 2022, just as they did in 2020, when they helped drive enthusiasm for conservative Republicans. And it will happen even though many of the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, have banned explicit promotion of the bogus claims.

“The evolution of Q is that it is leaving behind the iconography of the Trump era and becoming a conspiracy of everything,” said Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory researcher and the author of “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.”

With the absence of “Q” leading the way, some of QAnon’s followers have turned the movement into more of a “choose your own adventure” conspiracy theory, Mr. Rothschild said.

The QAnon movement dates to October 2017, when the first post attributed to “Q” appeared on 4chan, the notoriously toxic message board. An anonymous account calling itself Q Clearance Patriot claimed to be a high-ranking government insider with access to classified information about Mr. Trump’s war to break up the global cabal. By August 2018, adherents of the movement had begun to appear at re-election rallies for Mr. Trump with “Q” signs and T-shirts.

Dec. 19

 

Daily Beast, Investigation: Inside the Disastrous Conspiracy Roadshow That Likely Killed a COVID-Denying Ex-CIA Agent, Justin Rohrlich, Dec. 19, 2021. Robert David Steele (shown above in two photos) indulged in champagne and luxury hotels for his roadshow promoting Trump’s election lies.... until the money ran out and he developed a nasty cough.

Ex-CIA officer, QAnon acolyte, 9/11 truther, anti-vaxxer, COVID denier, antisemite, and “Big Lie” proponent Robert David Steele stiffed the production crew working his national “Arise USA!” roadshow out of some $50,000 when he suddenly claimed he was out of money after blowing enormous sums on luxury coaches and lavish spreads of Champagne, smoked salmon, and brie that he demanded daily, according to Steele’s former tour manager.

But collecting is going to be tough: Steele died in August from the very virus he claims was a hoax—which the tour manager, Jon Stensland, believes the “lying, deceitful conman” caught while out spreading his fringe beliefs.

“Robert Steele and his minions knew they were fucking over working-class people when they pulled the plug and refused to discuss any sort of buyout or severance on the employment agreement Steele signed,” said Stensland, an experienced road warrior who has worked with such artists as Poison, Stryper, and Ratt.

“For a group of people who claim to be good, family-oriented Christians, they certainly had no problem screwing over the crew that worked day in and out to make their events happen.”

Steele launched the Arise USA! tour last May as a way to call attention to former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election-rigging, as well as “to illuminate for the public the treason and high crimes represented by the fake pandemic, unconstitutional lockdown, mask idiocy, and the deaths and sterilization and mutations associated with the untested toxic ‘vaccines’ that are neither approved nor warranted—junk science is now criminal science.”

“As a former spy intimately familiar with bribery, blackmail, and brainwashing, I have this to say: Elected and appointed ‘leaders’ at the federal, state, and local levels have become tools of the Deep State,” Steele wrote on a now-defunct website he created to promote Arise USA!. “Most—not all but most—are more often than not bribed, blackmailed with Satanic Pedophilia entrapment a la Jeffrey Epstein, or brainwashed (MKULTRA). Only the sheriffs, pastors, and LOCAL magistrates represent the interest and will of the local people.”

Along with Steele, the speakers who appeared onstage during the “tour of the century, riding for faith, family, and freedom,” included some of today’s most extreme conspiracy theorists. The lineup included at least one member of the so-called Disinformation Dozen, a group of 12 people that the Center for Countering Digital Hate says is responsible for roughly two-thirds of the anti-vaccine untruths spread on social media. Also featured was an Arizona “constitutional sheriff” who has been flagged by the Anti-Defamation League as a far-right anti-government extremist, and a devoted QAnon-believing anti-vaxxer lawyer for the Church of Scientology who filmed herself storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Last spring, an associate of Steele’s contacted Stensland and asked him to sign on to work the upcoming Arise USA! tour.

Stensland was to oversee the tour’s day-to-day operations, as well as provide production staff for the planned 110-day run. He said he had no idea at the time about Steele’s beliefs, and that after a year of inactivity due to COVID-19, he was just happy to be employed.

“He called me up and was like, ‘Hey, how do you feel about doing a political speaking tour?’” Stensland told The Daily Beast. “And then he told me this guy’s got a good budget. And I’m like, well, count me in.”

Stensland said that to him and the other three crewmembers, “it was just another gig. We didn’t care about the politics of the tour, we just wanted to work.”

Pre-production began in April, in advance of a May 17 start date. The tour was going to kick off in Atlanta, to be followed by stops in each of the 50 U.S. states. But almost immediately, there were issues.

“This tour didn’t go to real venues, because Robert couldn’t get event insurance,” according to Stensland, who said they often found themselves working in parking lots, retail stores, and disused hay barns. “I mean, I went to insurance companies that will insure a GWAR concert. And they wouldn’t touch Robert. But they had no problem insuring a band that was going to go in there and spray stuff all over the venue and destroy equipment.”

Still, Steele— “a prolific purveyor of antisemitism who…deems Jews ‘a secret society that believes itself to be exempt from all laws and customs of others,’” according to the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights—hit the road with six brand-new luxury tour buses, fully equipped with sleeping quarters and lounges for talent and crew.

Each bus was wrapped top-to-bottom in Arise USA! advertising featuring Steele’s face flanked by his sidekicks, and Stensland said Steele insisted they were only to be driven during daylight hours so people could see them clearly.

“That’s what the man lived on, Champagne, smoked salmon, and brie—as he rides around the country on a million-dollar bus.”

However, Stensland said nobody slept on the buses because Steele was paying for hotel rooms at high-end Marriotts every night, completely defeating the purpose of leasing the more expensive sleeper coaches.

“Everything with Robert was, ‘Nothing but the best,’” said Stensland. “‘We will take nothing but the best, we want the finest.’ I mean, I don’t know how many times I heard that.”

Steele opened his speeches by telling the crowd that he was near-broke, living on Social Security in his “soon-to-be ex-wife’s basement,” according to Stensland.

“And then he’d go back to his bus and drink Champagne and eat brie and smoked salmon,” Stensland said. “That’s what the man lived on, Champagne, smoked salmon, and brie—as he rides around the country on a million-dollar bus.”

Steele didn’t only foist his out-there views on audiences, he also did his best to convert those behind the scenes, Stensland explained.

The tour had barely gotten underway when Steele insisted that everyone on the crew was being bombarded by electromagnetic fields—so-called EMFs—and needed to protect themselves.

To do this, Stensland said Steele told them they needed to buy an anti-EMF bracelet from him for $20. (EMF blockers are pure quackery, according to experts, who say that everyday levels of EMF radiation are not harmful in the first place.)

Stensland told Steele that he had spent most of his life as a roadie around all manner of radio-frequency-emitting devices, and refused to spend his money on such a device.

“I walk around with an earpiece in my ear all day,” Stensland laughed. “If EMF is what’s gonna kill me, then I’m too far gone.”

In mid-July, Steele “started bitching about money,” said Stensland, who resisted the urge to say, “I told you so.” But he kept his feelings to himself, hoping to tough it out until the end so he could earn the rest of what he had been promised.

On July 20, Steele called a meeting and informed everyone he was cutting the tour short five weeks early due to his dwindling finances.

The final event would be held on July 30, said Steele, giving the crew only 10 days to find other gigs. Later that day, Steele changed his mind and told the crew that the following day would be their last.

“I’m like, ‘You’re giving me less than 24 hours notice to tell my crew they’re out of work?’” said Stensland. “And I laid into him.”

Knowing that all other tours were already fully staffed, making it next to impossible for anyone to get hired on for the remainder of the season, Stensland demanded that Steele make a good-faith severance payment to the crew.

He told Steele that paying everyone for the remaining five weeks, as specified in their contracts, would be ideal. “I said, ‘Three weeks would be very noble of you.’ And I said, ‘Two weeks is what we’ll accept as a last resort.’”

Stensland asked Steele to sign a promissory note that he’d make good on the deal. In return, Stensland told Steele that he would “overlook the breach of contract.”

Steele’s final offer was $10,000 cash, $39,000 short of the $49,000 the crew was owed.

“So we all walked away, the entire crew walked off,” said Stensland, who began booking flights home for himself and his team. “And Robert is shutting the [credit] cards off, as we’re booking flights.”

They eventually managed to get tickets home, on Steele’s dime.

By this time, some of the speakers—including Steele—began to get sick with what Stensland, who is fully vaccinated, believed was COVID. But Steele blamed his persistent, hacking cough on having recently quit smoking cigars.

Steele continued on as a one-man show, driving his car to the remainder of the dates for town hall-style meet-and-greets in the lobbies of hotels and other such spots. And, in fact, he had come down with COVID during the tour—even as Steele continued to dismiss the virus as nonexistent.

Robert Steele revealed in a blog post that he was severely ill after testing positive for COVID.

Steele died from COVID-related complications a few weeks later in a Florida hospital, at the age of 69.

“I will not take the vaccination, though I did test positive for whatever they’re calling ‘COVID’ today, but the bottom line is that my lungs are not functioning,” he wrote in his final blog post.

Karen Staley, a conspiracy-minded singer who performed on the Arise USA! tour, claimed on Facebook that Steele had in fact died from “non-COVID pneumonia & heartbreak.”

“The only good news is that he said he met Jesus on our tour,” Staley posted. “So we feel certain God’s got him. After the heartbreak of some extreme betrayal AND the tour manager embezzling $300,000 (which shut down the tour) I’m glad he is out of pain.”

Stensland called Staley’s embezzlement claim nonsense, noting that he has toured with professional bands and crews for many years without complaint. Any monies that were “lost” were simply wasted on unnecessary expenditures by Steele, said Stensland.

He’s now hoping the courts will help recoup the money owed him and the others, filing a complaint with county authorities to get remunerated by Steele’s estate.

“Then finally, after we did that, Robert’s wife reached out to me via email,” said Stensland. “I’ve spoken with several attorneys. I will put a lien on [Steele’s] house if, by the end of January, we don’t start seeing something. I’ve sent certified letters, and my attorneys sent certified letters, with no response.”

In an email to The Daily Beast, Steele’s widow, Kathy, acknowledged that Stensland and the crew have not yet been made whole, but said the issue is largely out of her hands.

“Mr. Stensland’s arrangements were with my husband’s nonprofit company, [Earth Intelligence Network], which my family and I have no involvement with,” she wrote. “We have informed Mr. Stensland multiple times that Robert’s company is still undergoing review by his accountant before any actions can be taken. We have told Mr. Stensland that we will keep him informed of this process as we learn more, and have responded to each of his many emails.”

The accountant listed in the Earth Intelligence Network’s most recent tax filing, Elizabeth Moffett, told The Daily Beast that she “disengaged” from Steele’s organization in 2020 and was unable to provide any further information.

Stensland, who himself came down with COVID last month, has managed to get a few weeks of work and had some savings to fall back on, he said. The other crewmembers who were on the Arise USA! tour, however, haven’t been as fortunate. To help them make ends meet, Stensland launched a GoFundMe campaign, which, as of Friday, has yet to receive a single donation.

“It hasn’t gained any traction,” said Stensland. “Because people either love Robert or think that everything associated with his name is a joke.”

Dec. 17

Washington Post, Judge rejects Fox News request to dismiss Dominion Voting’s defamation lawsuit over election claims, Timothy Bella, Dec. 17, 2021. A judge on Thursday rejected a request from Fox News to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over baseless claims made against the company during the 2020 presidential election, allowing the suit to move forward.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis said it was “reasonably conceivable” for the Denver-based voting-machine company to have a defamation claim.

“The Court can infer that Fox intended to avoid the truth,” Davis wrote in a 52-page ruling. “Whether Dominion ultimately will prove Fox’s actual malice by clear and convincing evidence is irrelevant on a motion to dismiss. … Accordingly, Fox’s Motion should be denied.”

Dominion filed the lawsuit against Fox News earlier this year, claiming that some of its highest-profile on-air talent helped elevate false charges that the company had changed votes to favor Joe Biden over then-President Donald Trump. The lawsuit claims that hosts such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro brought Trump allies onto their shows to spread lies asserting that Dominion was using algorithms in voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig multiple elections for Hugo Chávez, the late president.

Dominion alerted Fox News and its anchors to information disproving the false claims being broadcast against the company, according to the judge. The allegations from Dominion in the lawsuit show that Fox was given “signs indicating the reports were false,” Davis wrote.

“Fox possessed countervailing evidence of election fraud from the Department of Justice, election experts, and Dominion at the time it had been making its statements,” the judge wrote. “The fact that, despite this evidence, Fox continued to publish its allegations against Dominion, suggests Fox knew the allegations were probably false.”

In a statement, Fox News Media said it would continue to fight Dominion’s defamation lawsuit.

Dec. 16

Washington Post, Opinion: Vulture capitalists are circling my old newspaper. Here’s why we need to fight them off, Margaret Sullivan, Dec. 16, 2021. Horror is not too strong a word for how the news hit me. Alden Global, the most rapacious of the ownership groups currently wrecking local newspapers, wanted to buy my old paper, the Buffalo News.

My reaction came partly from sentiment. The daily, one of two that came to my family’s door throughout my childhood, was where I got my start as a summer intern, eventually becoming its top editor.

A decade ago, I was still in that job. Over the years, I had hired scores of journalists and, helped by a talented group of editors, had overseen the coverage of everything from the assassination of a local abortion provider to the high cost of being poor in one of the nation’s most impoverished cities. We certainly weren’t perfect but we did a lot of important work.

My reaction also came from hard knowledge of what has happened elsewhere.

When Alden buys a paper, the results are unfailingly negative for the community. It had already happened in Denver, San Jose and a multitude of other places. Alden slashes newsroom staffs, sells off its real estate and focuses on wringing out the last possible drop of revenue while ignoring long-term sustainability, hence earning the name “vulture capitalists.” I knew this from years of covering the news media and from writing a book about the dire effects on our democracy when local news declines. In short, we become more politically polarized and less engaged in our communities.

Democracy itself is suffering as local news fades. The renowned Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who wrote “On Tyranny,” describes this as the most troubling media story of our time, a major contributor to the loss of a common basis of reality that’s necessary for successful self-governance.

What happens to society — and our democracy — when community and regional journalism dries up

The Buffalo News has been relatively stable under its current owner, Lee Enterprises, especially compared with other papers around the country.

Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owned the News while I was there, got out of the newspaper business in recent years by selling his dozens of papers to Lee. In 2018, he praised the company as one that “has led the industry in overall innovation and performance, all while faithfully fulfilling its public trust.”

Our newsroom employed about 200 people for several decades; after a long, slow decline, it’s down to about 80. And yet, digital subscriptions have increased, and the staffers I’ve talked to believe the paper continues to be profitable, though not nearly at the sky-high levels of the 1990s. The Buffalo News still has a strong local staff and fine reporters in Washington and Albany. It has even done some hiring and right now has several job openings for reporters.

So the notion that the main news source for my hometown might be destroyed was gutting. So was the flurry of texts and phone calls from News staffers who were afraid for their livelihoods and hoped that I might have some insight or reassurance. I didn’t have much to offer.

NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd, left, with Adam Perlman (Photos by Jesse DeYoung and William B. Plowman via NBC).

Hollywood Reporter, Chuck Todd Producing Presidential Assassin Anthology for Peacock (Exclusive), Rick Porter, Dec. 16, 2021. Adam Perlman will write the drama, which will delve into the minds of several presidents and the people who tried to kill them (and sometimes succeeded).

Chuck Todd is branching out into scripted programming.

The Meet the Press host and NBC News political director will executive produce American Assassin, an anthology series about presidential assassinations and attempts that’s in development at Peacock. Adam Perlman (Billions, The Good Wife) will write and executive produce; Universal Studio Group’s UCP is producing.

American Assassin is described as a “two-hander true crime anthology” that dives into the singular minds of American presidents and the people who tried to knock them from their perch. The first season will tackle a lesser known killing: that of James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, by Charles J. Guiteau in 1881. Subsequent seasons would track different assassinations or attempts, including those of presidents Lincoln, McKinley and Kennedy.

Todd and Perlman will executive produce, along with George Heller of Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

The project is the first foray into the scripted world for Todd, who has moderated Meet the Press since 2014 and was formerly NBC’s chief White House correspondent. He is repped by UTA.

Perlman is currently executive producing Lure, an Apple TV+ drama executive produced by and starring Robert Downey Jr. In addition to Showtime’s Billions and CBS’ The Good Wife, he has worked on HBO’s The Newsroom and is writing a feature script for Bag Man, based on a Rachel Maddow podcast of the same name, for Focus Features. He’s repped by Gersh, Brillstein Entertainment Partners and Jackoway Austen.

Dec. 15

Associated Press, Investigation: How a Kennedy built an anti-vaccine juggernaut amid COVID-19, Michelle R. Smith, Dec. 15, 2021. While many nonprofits and businesses have struggled during the pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine group has thrived. An investigation by The Associated Press finds that Children’s Health Defense has raked in funding and followers as Kennedy used his star power as a member of one of America’s most famous families to open doors, raise money and lend his group credibility. Filings with charity regulators show revenue more than doubled in 2020, to $6.8 million.

Since the pandemic started, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) has expanded the reach of its newsletter, launched an internet TV channel and started a movie studio. In addition to opening new U.S. branches, it now boasts outposts in Canada, Europe and Australia and is translating articles into French, German, Italian and Spanish.

The group has become one of the most popular “alternative and natural medicine sites” in the world, according to data from digital intelligence company Similarweb. It now draws millions of monthly visitors to its articles — many of which sow doubt about the COVID vaccine — up from less than 150,000 before the pandemic.

As CHD has worked to expand its influence, experts said, it has targeted its false claims at groups that may be more prone to distrust the vaccine, including mothers and Black Americans. It’s a strategy that experts worry has deadly consequences during a pandemic that has killed more than 5 million people, when misinformation has been deemed a threat to public health.

Kennedy (shown in a photo by Gage Skidmore) has been a key part of the anti-vaccine movement for years, but doctors and public health advocates told the AP that COVID-19 launched him to a new level.

“With the pandemic, he’s been turbocharged,” said Dr. David Gorski, a cancer surgeon at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and a critic of the anti-vaccine movement.

Dr. Richard Allen Williams, a cardiologist and founder of the Minority Health Institute, said Kennedy is leading “a propaganda movement” and “absolutely a racist operation” that is particularly dangerous to the Black community.

“He’s really the ringleader of the misinformation campaign,” said Williams.

Even Kennedy’s own family members call his work “dangerous.”

Kennedy, 67, is a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of his slain brother. He carved out a career as a top environmental lawyer fighting for public health priorities such as clean water.

More than 15 years ago, he became fixated on a belief that vaccines are not safe. While there are rare instances when people have severe reactions to vaccines, the billions of doses administered globally provide real-world evidence that they are safe. The World Health Organization says vaccines prevent as many as 5 million deaths each year.

A Kennedy spokesperson told the AP he was not available for an interview.

More than 200 million Americans have been given a COVID-19 vaccine, and serious side effects are extremely rare. Government safety tracking and testing have shown that any health risks posed by the vaccine are far lower than the risks posed by the virus.

Children’s Health Defense and its followers, seeking to undermine that message, use canny techniques to bring anti-vaccine misinformation even to those not looking for it.

The AP found links to Children’s Health Defense articles all over Facebook, with many posted in the comments sections on pages that people turn to for reliable information, including official government Facebook pages in all 50 states. They were also shared outside the United States, on Facebook pages in places such as Canada, Norway and Greece.

Kennedy has hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter, although he was kicked off Facebook’s Instagram platform earlier this year. Children’s Health Defense remains on all three platforms.

CHD’s website has seen an explosion in traffic. According to Similarweb, in November 2019, a few months before the pandemic began, Children’s Health Defense received 119,000 visits. That had grown to around 3 million visits last month, after peaking in August at nearly 4.7 million.

According to tax filings, Kennedy was paid $255,000 by Children’s Health Defense in 2019.

Still, he told the conspiracy site InfoWars this month that he had “the opposite of a profit motive.”

“Probably I’ve lost 80 percent of my income because of what I’m doing, along with a lot of friendships and, you know, and damaged relationships even with people in my family,” Kennedy said.

Still, CHD’s fundraising success has only grown with Kennedy’s involvement.

Filings the group made with charity regulators in California show that in 2018, CHD reported $1.1 million in gross revenue. That grew to nearly $3 million in 2019. By 2020, the most recent year available, revenue had more than doubled to $6.8 million.

Children’s Health Defense’s new movie studio released a film this year, called “Medical Racism.” Doctors and public health advocates said it was aimed at spreading misinformation and fear of vaccines within the Black community, which has been disproportionately hit by the coronavirus.

The movie brings up racist abuses in medicine, such as the Tuskegee experiment, when hundreds of Black men in Alabama with syphilis were left untreated, to question whether the vaccine can be trusted or is necessary.

Williams, of the Minority Health Institute, pointed out that in the Tuskegee study, people were denied medication to treat a disease. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, medication is available – but anti-vaccine activists are trying to persuade people not to take it. He said the film is “not only harmful, but it is deadly.”

In the movie, Kennedy and others invoke the legacy of his family and its involvement in causes such as civil rights, the Special Olympics and health care advocacy. In fundraisers, he has offered a trip to the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod as a lure to drum up donations for Children’s Health Defense.

“There’s always plenty of people and good conversation,” he said in one video posted in 2020. “If my mom decides to come, adventure is guaranteed.”

His sister, Kerry Kennedy, who runs Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the international rights group founded by their mother, Ethel, told AP her brother had taken down some family-related content at her request. Still, she noted, he continues to reference President Kennedy to advance his anti-vaccine stance.

“Anyone who believes this does not know their history. Vaccinations were a major effort of John F. Kennedy, both as a senator and later as president,” she said.

“I love Bobby, I think he’s just completely wrong on this issue and very dangerous,” she said. “Failure to take vaccines puts people’s lives at risk. It not only impacts the person who refuses the jab but imperils the community at large.”

Last month, Kennedy appeared at protests in Switzerland and Italy. He complained of conspiracies by government officials and Big Pharma operatives and claimed falsely that the Pfizer COVID-19 shot kills more people than it saves. Kennedy promised that he would “see you all on the barricades” and that “I and many others are ready to die with our boots on for liberty.”

It has become something of a stump speech for Kennedy, one delivered not to win political office but to persuade as many people as possible not to get vaccinated.

Associated Press writers Lauran Neergaard, Colleen Barry, Hillel Italie, Matt O’Brien and AP researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.

Washington Post, Project Veritas nearly doubled its funding in 2020 while amplifying baseless election fraud claims, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Dec. 15, 2021 (print ed.). The nonprofit, known for hidden-camera videos targeting journalists and liberals, raised nearly $22 million.

Two days after the 2020 election, as President Donald Trump raised alarm about mass voter fraud, Project Veritas produced a video it claimed furnished stunning proof.

The organization, which has used deceptive tactics in attempts to expose wrongdoing by journalists, liberals and labor unions, aired allegations from a Pennsylvania postal worker who said his supervisors had tampered with mail-in ballots. The video was cited in right-wing media and by a top Republican lawmaker.

Then the claims fell apart: The worker recanted to federal agents. But as its high-profile investigation was being debunked, Project Veritas was concluding a banner year for fundraising.

The organization nearly doubled its revenue last year, according to a recent public filing. Project Veritas, led by James O’Keefe, raised about $22 million in 2020, compared with $12 million in 2019, the tax filing shows. O’Keefe earned a salary of $412,000 from the group, whose methods have drawn scrutiny from federal law enforcement. The FBI last month searched two locations associated with Project Veritas as part of an investigation into how a diary reportedly belonging to President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, became public just before the 2020 election. O’Keefe, 37, said his group acquired the diary lawfully and did not publish it because its authenticity could not be confirmed.

Washington Post, Snyder worked to disrupt NFL investigation, records and interviews show, Will Hobson and Liz Clarke, Dec. 15, 2021 (print ed.). The Washington Football Team’s owner, shown above, took former employees to court, deployed private investigators and was accused by the league's investigator of trying to “silence” a key accuser.

In July 2020, just a few days after prominent D.C. attorney Beth Wilkinson began investigating allegations of widespread sexual harassment in the Washington Football Team workplace, she learned of a decade-old allegation of sexual misconduct against team owner Daniel Snyder.

Snyder had for years privately denied the woman’s claims. But the existence of an allegation against him, which had been kept secret by a confidential $1.6 million settlement, had the potential to rock a franchise already reeling from scandal. A few weeks later, Wilkinson sought to interview the former team employee who had made the accusation, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Then Snyder and his team stepped in.

Despite the owner’s public pledge to cooperate “with all aspects of the investigation,” his attorneys attempted to prevent Wilkinson from speaking to Snyder’s accuser, according to a letter the woman’s attorney wrote to Snyder’s lawyers that was filed in federal court.

The Washington Post has not reviewed this letter, which was filed under seal as part of a legal dispute between Wilkinson, left, and a former lawyer for the team. The letter was described by people with knowledge of its contents.

According to these people, the woman’s lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, accused Snyder’s lawyers of offering his client more money beyond the $1.6 million the team paid in 2009, if she agreed not to speak to anyone about her allegations against Snyder and her settlement with the team. In court filings, Wilkinson later described phone calls to Sullivan from Snyder’s lawyers as an attempt to “silence” the 2009 accuser. Wilkinson and Sullivan declined to comment.

Snyder’s attorneys, in their own sealed letter filed in court, denied trying to block the interview and offering the woman more money, according to people familiar with that letter.

In a statement released after this story published online, A. Scott Bolden of the law firm Reed Smith, which represents Snyder and the team, said, “Untrue. It did not happen. Absolutely no effort was made by me or any Reed Smith lawyers to dissuade anyone from speaking with Beth Wilkinson or otherwise cooperating with her investigation, nor was any money offered to anyone not to cooperate. Anyone suggesting something to the contrary is lying.”

Snyder declined an interview request. Lawyers representing Snyder and the team declined interview requests.

Daniel Snyder pushed back as the NFL probed. Here are takeaways from The Post’s reporting.

The alleged effort to block the interview is one of several instances in which lawyers and private investigators working on Snyder’s behalf took steps that potential witnesses for Wilkinson viewed as attempts to interfere with the NFL’s investigation, according to a review of hundreds of pages of court records and interviews with more than 30 people, including current and former team and league officials.

Washington Post, Opinion: The NFL’s silence about Daniel Snyder says plenty about its principles, Sally Jenkins, right, Dec. 15, 2021 (print ed.). At this point, the bigger problem for the NFL is not the stinking algae bloom that is Daniel Snyder but rather the strong whiff of its own toxic cleansers. Commissioner Roger Goodell, you see, knows the Washington Football Team owner was accused of sexual misconduct on his plane and settled a claim over his alleged behavior. Yet the league office has said nothing, not to the team’s legion of victims of sexual harassment, nor to the public that foots the NFL’s bills. If silence can have bad breath, Goodell’s reeks.

The promises of “transparency” were all bamboozlement. What a con. You hire a former federal prosecutor, Beth Wilkinson, to do a supposedly “independent” investigation of Snyder’s sordid workplace, then tell her not to document anything. Question: For exactly how long have league officials known about the accusation against Snyder, and what were the specifics and merit of it?

Press Run, Commentary: Chris Wallace picked the right week to quit Fox News, Eric Boehlert, right, Dec. 15, 2021. The Murdoch debacle. Forget about the homeless man who burned down Fox News’ metal Christmas tree last week. The network’s real troubles began Sunday morning when longtime host Chris Wallace announced his resignation on live TV, in order to jump to rival CNN. The network’s woes then exploded into full view Monday night when it was revealed a laundry list of Fox News hosts anxiously texted Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on January 6, begging Trump to stop the deadly mob that was laying siege to the U.S. Capitol.

“Please get him on TV,” the network’s Brian Kilmeade messaged. “Destroying everything you have accomplished.” Pleaded Laura Ingraham: “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” And from Sean Hannity, “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol?”

For hours, Trump did nothing to stop the insurrection, before eventually issuing a bland, irrelevant statement on that very dark day.

The Sunday news flash about Wallace was a punch in the gut for Fox, mostly because it robs the network of its ability to point to the morning host as supposedly a ‘serious journalist’ when trying to knock down the obvious claim that the network is nothing more than a bigoted propaganda outlet.

“The abrupt departure of “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace (left) stripped the network of its foremost fig leaf, and gave reality-based journalists clear license to stop the lame euphemisms and call Fox what it is: a propaganda and disinformation operation,” wrote media critic Dan Froomkin.

The second, more serious newsflash about the text messages ripped away the Fox veneer that’s been constructed since January 6, that the insurrection was no big deal (i.e. a bunch of grandparents marching around with placards), and that any investigation today represents a partisan witch hunt. Just last week, Kilmeade, who was privately beseeching for action on January 6, mocked news outlets for spending too much time reporting on the revelations that keep tumbling out about Trump’s coup attempt last winter, and about the widespread obstruction of justice on display.

Since everyone at Fox News operates without a moral compass, none of the millionaire hosts will have trouble sleeping despite their insurrection hypocrisy making headlines this week. Still, the network privately hates episodes like this, because it puts them on the defensive and it chips away at the preferred fantasy they push on Madison Avenue and within the Beltway that Fox is merely a conservative media outlet and that it actually employs a “news” division.

It was an awful 36 hours for Fox, and Wallace definitely picked a prime time to leave. I wonder if he knew the release of the Insurrection Day texts from his colleagues was imminent, and if that sped up what appeared to be his hasty exit from his TV home for 18 years. Either way, his move was a stinger for the network, for lots of reasons.

The exit, and how it was choreographed, came with an unmistakable scent of F.U. directed to Wallace’s former bosses. According to reports, virtually nobody inside Fox’s Washington D.C. bureau knew about the departure before Wallace announced it live on television. Worse, he’s jumping straight to Fox News’ most hated rival — CNN. That’s a poke in the eye for the right-wing network, which hates the fact that CNN doggedly details Fox’s dishonest ways. It’s unheard of for a high-profile Fox player like Wallace to pack their bags and head directly to CNN.

When Rupert Morduch’s network on Sunday released a perfunctory statement about Wallace, it was clear the two did not leave on good terms, which is rather stunning considering he’s been among their most recognizable faces for nearly two decades.

That personnel headache was soon superseded by the insurrection controversy, when Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the vice chair of the House select committee investigating January 6, read the Fox News texts aloud Monday night during a primetime hearing. Of course Fox News stonewalled the insurrection text news for 24 hours, refusing to acknowledge that its horrified hosts desperately communicated with Trump’s top aide in real time on January 6, trying to get the president to stop the deranged coup attempt.

They ignored the blockbuster news because Fox employees today are paid to whitewash the insurrection. Last summer, Ingraham openly mocked Capitol Police officers who testified before Congress about the chaos and trauma of Insurrection Day, when law enforcement was attacked and many thought they would die.

And just last month, “Fox News host Tucker Carlson produced a documentary, “Patriot Purge,” for the Fox Nation streaming platform that included the baseless claim that the deadly attack was a “false flag” operation intended to demonize conservatives,” Huff Post notes. Carlson infamously told viewers in September that the Capitol rioters “don’t look like terrorists. They look like tourists.”

CT Insider, CNN fires Connecticut producer accused of offering to train girls to be ‘sexually submissive,’ Tara O’Neil and Peter Yankowski, Dec. 13, 2021.  CNN said it has fired a Connecticut producer accused in a federal indictment of trying to lure women to his Vermont ski home to train their daughters to be “sexually submissive.”

CNN said it has terminated John Griffin, a long-time staffer and producer from Connecticut indicted last week on federal charges alleging he tried to lure women to his Vermont ski home to train their daughters to be “sexually submissive.”

“The charges against Mr. Griffin are deeply disturbing. We learned of his arrest Friday afternoon and terminated his employment today,” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement Monday to Hearst Connecticut Media Group.

Griffin’s attorney, Joseph Martini, declined to comment when reached on Monday.

Griffin, 44, of Stamford, was arrested Friday by the FBI after a federal grand jury in Vermont charged him with three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to attempt to entice minors to engage in unlawful sexual activity.

The FBI's office in Albany, N.Y., announced the charges against Griffin Friday in a tweet.

"The allegations are deeply disturbing, and our office is committed to working with our partners at the United States Attorney's Office District of Vermont to ensure Mr. Griffin is held accountable for his actions," Janeen DiGuiseppi, Special Agent in Charge of the Albany office, said in a statement. "The FBI, along with our law enforcement partners, will continue to aggressively investigate those who victimize the most vulnerable in our communities."

According to his LinkedIn profile, Griffin had been a CNN employee since 2013.

Griffin was once a producer for the Chris Cuomo show and was most recently a producer for CNN senior political analyst John Avlon.

Property records indicate Griffin purchased the Vermont home on the eastern slope of Okemo Mountain through an LLC in February 2020, paying just under $1.8 million.

About two months later, Griffin began using the alternative website, alt.com, to seek women who were “submissive” and “open-minded,” according to his indictment.

Griffin then used messaging features on Kik and Google Hangouts to communicate with some of the women, pretending to be the parents of underage girls. In the communications, Griffin tried to persuade parents to let him “train their daughters to be sexually submissive,” the indictment stated.

In June 2020, Griffin told a mother of 9- and 13-year-old girls that she needed to have her daughters “trained properly,” the indictment stated. Griffin then transferred about $3,000 to the woman for plane tickets so she and her 9-year-old could fly from Nevada to Boston’s Logan airport, the indictment stated.

The mother and child flew to Boston in July 2020. Griffin picked them up and drove them to his home in Ludlow, Vt., where prosecutors said the girl was forced to engage in illegal sexual contact.

Dec. 14

New York Times, Three Fox News hosts texted Mark Meadows during the Jan. 6 riot urging him to tell Donald Trump to try to stop it, Jim Windolf and John Koblin, Dec. 14, 2021 (print ed.). Afterward, on their shows, Laura Ingraham spread the false claim of antifa involvement, and Sean Hannity referred to the 2020 election as a “train wreck.”

Three prominent Fox News anchors sent concerned text messages on Jan. 6 to Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff for President Donald J. Trump, urging him to persuade the president to take the riot seriously and to make an effort to stop it.

The texts were made public on Monday, shortly before the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol voted 9-0 in favor of recommending that Mr. Meadows be charged with contempt of Congress. Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, read the text messages aloud.

The texts, part of a trove of 9,000 documents that Mr. Meadows had turned over before he stopped cooperating with the inquiry, were sent to the former White House chief of staff by Laura Ingraham, the host of the nighttime show “The Ingraham Angle”; Sean Hannity, a longtime prime-time host who once appeared onstage with Mr. Trump at a campaign rally; and Brian Kilmeade, a host of the morning show “Fox & Friends.”

“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Ms. Ingraham wrote. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”

Mr. Kilmeade echoed that concern, texting Mr. Meadows: “Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished.”

Sean Hannity texted: “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”

Ms. Ingraham’s text came in contrast with what she said on her Fox News program in the hours after the attack, when she promoted the false theory that members of antifa were involved.

“From a chaotic Washington tonight, earlier today the Capitol was under siege by people who can only be described as antithetical to the MAGA movement,” Ms. Ingraham said on the Jan. 6 episode. “Now, they were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.”

Ms. Ingraham went on to cite “legitimate concerns about how these elections were conducted,” while adding that any dissatisfaction with the vote should not have resulted in violence.

Mr. Hannity, a onetime informal adviser to Mr. Trump, condemned the attack, saying at the top of his Jan. 6 show, “Today’s perpetrators must be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” He also said that the nation must do more to protect law enforcement and political representatives.

Dec. 13

Press Run, Opinion: Slow-walking the coup PowerPoint, Eric Boehlert, right, Dec. 13, 2021. Twelve months after the press shied away from calling Trump’s coup attempt a “coup,” the Beltway media continue to go slow on the latest revelation about how deeply enmeshed the White House was in its blatant push to sabotage democracy following the Republican’s lopsided loss to Joe Biden.

The discovery of a pro-coup PowerPoint circulating within the White House last winter, designed to nullify millions of American votes, ought to be covered nonstop today, and used as proof that Trump is not suitable to hold office in this country. Instead, the PowerPoint has received mostly passing, disinterested coverage.

Titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN,” the 38-page presentation is a rocket ship ride into the Big Lie abyss. The proposed plan was for Trump to declare a national emergency and for all electronic voting to be rendered invalid, citing foreign “control” of electronic voting systems. The chilling PowerPoint came to light recently when Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, turned the electronic presentation over to investigators at the January 6 Committee. Days later, Meadows stopped cooperating with the panel.

The PowerPoint included plans for Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6 to reject electors from “states where fraud occurred.” It also included a proposal in which the certification of Biden’s victory would be delayed, and U.S. marshals and National Guard troops would help “secure” and count paper ballots in supposedly disputed states.

A criminal conspiracy to overthrow last year’s election, the PowerPoint is a heavy-handed plot twist that most Hollywood scriptwriters would dismiss as not being believable. Yet here we are, as Trump plans his re-election run and we learn more about the runaway criminal enterprise he oversaw as president.

We’re learning about it slowly though, and what seems to be reluctantly by the Beltway press, which instead of touting the PowerPoint as a smoking gun that reveals the GOP’s proudly anti-democratic ways, are treating the proposal timidly — an oddity that doesn’t demand much attention. Virtually none of the coverage I’ve seen has included key context, such as quotes from experts on authoritarianism regarding the stunning implications of a White House likely consulting a sabotage plan like that.

“PowerPoint Sent to Mark Meadows Is Examined by Jan. 6 Panel,” was the ho-hum headline the New York Times produced over the weekend. As of Sunday night, there had been no Times follow-up on the story, suggesting the paper does not see the PowerPoint as being overly important or worthy of ongoing coverage.

The coup blueprint still has not appeared on the front page of single major American newspaper, nor has any influential editorial page weighed in. Republican members of Congress have not been repeatedly pressed to explain the document and why, twelve months ago, the president’s chief of staff took a meeting with the author of the unhinged PowerPoint. Or why members of the author’s conspiracy team, just days before the deadly January 6 insurrection, spoke to a group of Republican senators and House members, briefing them on the bogus claims of foreign interference in the election.

As of Sunday afternoon, “PowerPoint” had been mentioned just 20 times on CNN in the previous week, 50 times on MSNBC, and to nobody’s surprise, 0 times on Fox News. There has not been a single network evening news mention, according to a search of Nexis.

The media’s shoulder shrug response has left Democrats perplexed and enraged. “Can someone explain to me why this isn’t the only thing in the news?” tweeted Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI). “I deeply respect the fourth estate, but, holy shit they had a plan to just end democracy, and is the press gonna just be like “are democrats using the wrong words again?”

There’s a long and disturbing history of the press sleepwalking through this coup story. The press embraced a timid storyline immediately following Trump's defeat as he unleashed a vicious campaign against free and fair elections in America.

Instead of detailing his treasonous, post-election behavior surrounding the would-be coup as a power-hungry authoritarian out to steal an election, news consumers received updates about Trump’s “tactics,” his vague “moves” and “chicanery”; his legal “strategy” and “power play” while he was “sulking” and “brooding” inside the White House.

One Politico dispatch at the time dismissed Trump’s anti-democratic behavior as merely “bad sportsmanship.”

Back in October 2020, when he was asked whether he would agree to the peaceful transfer of power if he lost, Trump became the first president in American history to balk at the centerpiece of our democratic tradition. The Times placed the story inside the paper on page 15, gently noting that Trump had "declined an opportunity on Wednesday to endorse” the idea. "Trump Won't Commit to Peaceful Transfer of Power" should have been the headline on the front page of every major newspaper in America. It didn't appear on a single one.

Now they’re sleepwalking past the coup.

Dec. 12

New York Times, Chris Wallace to Leave Fox News, Michael M. Grynbaum, Dec. 12, 2021. The “Fox News Sunday” host had been with the network for 18 years. He announced his departure on his program. “I want to try something new.”

Chris Wallace, left, whose stewardship of two presidential debates and penetrating interviews of world leaders made him the leading anchor of Fox News’s reportorial ranks, announced on Sunday that he had decided to leave the Rupert Murdoch-owned network after 18 years.

His exit came as a surprise to the television news industry and will deprive Fox News of a prominent figure who has been the face of its influential Sunday program, “Fox News Sunday,” and the first anchor at the network to receive an Emmy Award nomination for his work.

“It is the last time, and I say this with real sadness, we will meet like this,” Mr. Wallace told viewers at the end of his Sunday broadcast.

“I want to try something new, to go beyond politics to all the things I’m interested in; I’m ready for a new adventure,” Mr. Wallace said. “And I hope you’ll check it out. And so for the last time, dear friends, that’s it for today. Have a great week. And I hope you’ll keep watching Fox News Sunday.”

Mr. Wallace covered the Reagan White House as an NBC News correspondent (and briefly moderated “Meet the Press”) before Roger Ailes, the co-founder of Fox News, hired him away from ABC News in 2003 to anchor the Murdoch network’s leading political news program.

An equal-opportunity interrogator of Democrats and Republicans, Mr. Wallace proved himself an outlier at times at Fox News, particularly in recent years when the network’s conservative opinion hosts closed ranks behind former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Wallace’s criticisms of Mr. Trump earned rebukes from some viewers and the president’s own Twitter account, but he also irritated liberals who wished he would denounce his partisan colleagues.

In his on-air remarks on Sunday, Mr. Wallace said that “the bosses here at Fox promised me they would never interfere with a guest I booked or a question I asked, and they kept that promise. I have been free to report to the best of my ability, to cover the stories I think are important, to hold our country’s leaders to account. It’s been a great ride.”

Fox News said in a statement: “We are extremely proud of our journalism and the stellar team that Chris Wallace was a part of for 18 years. The legacy of ‘Fox News Sunday’ will continue with our star journalists, many of whom will rotate in the position until a permanent host is named.”

Dec. 10

Real Clear Politics, Brian Williams Quits TV: America In 2021 Is "Unrecognizable," Tim Hains, Dec. 10, 2021. Longtime NBC News broadcaster Brian Williams issued a strange warning Thursday as he retired from his 11 p.m. MSNBC show.

"The reality is though, I will wake up tomorrow in the America of the year 2021, a nation unrecognizable to those who came before us and fought to protect it, which is what you must do now," Williams said. "They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside. That should scare you to no end as much as it scares an aging volunteer fireman."

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: Well, look at the time. I’ll try to keep this brief. After 28 years of peacock logos on much of what I own, it is my choice now to jump without a net into the great unknown. As I do for the first time in my 62 years, my biggest worry is for my country.

The truth is, I’m not a liberal or a conservative. I’m an institutionalist. I believe in this place. And in my love of my country, I yield to no one.

But the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods. It is now at the local bar, and the bowling alley, the school board, and the grocery store. And it must be acknowledged and answered for.

Grown men and women who swore an oath to our Constitution, elected by their constituents, possessing the kinds of college degrees I could only dream of, have decided to join the mob and become something they are not while hoping we somehow forget who they were.

They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside. That should scare you to no end as much as it scares an aging volunteer fireman.

To my coworkers, my love and thanks...

As a proud New Jersey native, this is where I get to say, "regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention."

What a ride it’s been. Where else, how else was a kid like me going to meet presidents and kings and the occasional rock star? These lovely testimonials that I can never truly repay make me hyper-aware that it has been and remains a wonderful life. It’s as if I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning in Bedford Falls.

The reality is though, I will wake up tomorrow in the America of the year 2021, a nation unrecognizable to those who came before us and fought to protect it, which is what you must do now. My colleagues will take it from here.

I will probably find it impossible to be silent and stay away from you and lights and cameras after I experiment with relaxation and find out what I’ve missed and what’s out there.

Every weeknight for decades now, I’ve said some version of the same thing. Thank you for being here with us. Us, meaning the people who produced this broadcast for you. And you, well, without you, there’s no us.

I’ll show myself out. Until we meet again, that is our broadcast for this Thursday night.

Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), More than 6,150 news workers were laid off amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Gabby Miller, Dec. 10, 2021. Introduction: In March 2020, The Tow Center for Digital Journalism began collecting data on U.S. newsroom cutbacks related to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn. In the fall of last year, we turned more than 5,800 rows of data on individual cutbacks at news organizations into an interactive map that shows which newsrooms were affected across the country and how.

Nearly two years after COVID-19 first brought the U.S. to a standstill, the Tow Center is releasing data on news organization layoffs that shows the scale of an industry further devastated by the pandemic. By our count, 6,154 news workers have been laid off from at least 343 individual news outlets with an additional 35 news media chains that implemented chain-wide layoffs from March 2020 through August 2021.

These layoffs weren’t merely a reshuffling of workers across the industry. No facet of the news media workforce was unaffected, with freelance budgets cut at newspapers like the New York Post and Boulder Weekly, advertising and sales departments diminished, and editorial teams working in overdrive to cover a global health crisis with, in many cases, significantly fewer resources than before.

Many news organizations used innovative strategies to stay afloat, like creating independent journalism funds, implementing tiered subscription models, and launching an array of newsletters and interactive mobile sites to engage readers more directly. Still, an alarming number of outlets across the country permanently closed, and entire offices were laid off. By Tow’s count, at least 100 outlets have closed at some point since March 2020, with just 14 later reopening in various capacities. Another 42 outlets were eliminated through acquisition by other publications, bringing the total number of eliminated outlets up to 128 at the time of publication.

The pandemic also impacted the news industry in uneven ways, often determined by a newsroom’s size and whether its coverage was national, regional, or local in scope. While waves of layoffs afflicted news organizations of all types, some are emerging from the later stages of the pandemic in better positions now than they were prior to COVID-19, primarily with subscriber growth, workforce size, and overall financial well-being.

Key findings:

• At least 6,154 news organization workers, which includes both editorial and non-editorial staffers, were laid off beginning March 2020 through August 2021.
• At least 100 U.S. news organizations have closed throughout the pandemic, although 14 of those same outlets have since resumed operations to varying extents.
• Another 42 outlets were absorbed by publications through mergers and acquisitions.This brings the number of news outlet eliminations up to 128.
• Local news outlets particularly struggled to stay afloat, running on thin margins and operating with significantly diminished staff.
• While the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and emergency relief funds from tech platforms helped partially mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on news organizations, in some cases it delayed layoffs and other cutbacks.
• A lucky number of news organizations are emerging from the economic downturn in seemingly better financial positions now than they were prior to the pandemic. Others are staffing up or have big plans for workforce growth, although these efforts are less scaled at local news outlets.

 

Washington Post, Analysis: With delays to Gigi Sohn confirmation, Democrats’ FCC majority still elusive, Cristiano Lima and Aaron Schaffer, Dec. 10, 2021. For the entirety of President Biden’s term, the Federal Communications Commission has operated without a Democratic majority, hobbling the party’s ability to carry out its agenda on major issues, including net neutrality and Internet connectivity.

Now, delays to FCC nominee Gigi Sohn’s confirmation, the appointment that would break the 2-2 split at the agency, mean the deadlock likely will extend into next year.

Sohn was notably absent from the agenda of a crucial upcoming meeting, held by the panel needed to advance her nomination to the Senate floor. Senate Commerce Committee spokeswoman Tricia Enright said the panel omitted Sohn because lawmakers wanted more time to meet with her, as reported earlier by Politico.

Sohn has emerged as perhaps Biden’s most controversial tech or telecom nominee, facing strong opposition from Senate Republicans. Republicans have pointed to Sohn’s past critical statements about Fox News to claim she’s “hyperpartisan,” a charge Sohn and her allies have pushed back on.

Despite the GOP uproar, Democrats could still advance and confirm Sohn along a party-line vote — if only they could find the time.

Barring last-minute changes to the meeting’s agenda or the Senate’s legislative calendar, the decision to leave her off the agenda next week leaves lawmakers with little-to-no time to confirm Sohn and lock in a long-sought FCC majority before the end of the year.

That means it would take even longer for the agency’s Democratic leadership to kick into gear its most aggressive proposals, including restoring the Obama-era net neutrality rules that dictate that Internet providers should treat all Web traffic equally. The delay could also have a spillover effect on their efforts to make accessing the Internet easier and more affordable nationwide.

Republicans have voiced concern over her past role sitting on the board of Locast, a nonprofit television streaming service that shut down after facing allegations it violated copyright laws.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), the top Republican on the Senate’s intellectual property panel, has called Sohn an “anti-copyright activist” and urged Biden to withdraw her nomination.

Sohn addressed the matter at her confirmation hearing. “I take very seriously allegations of bias, and I’ve been working very closely with the Office of Government Ethics to make sure I have no conflicts and I have no predetermined biases,” she said, adding that her work with Locast wouldn’t bias her “in any way.”

Dec. 9

Washington Post, Opinion: Bookstores are dying. Barnes & Noble’s pricing policy may help explain why, Allan Sloan, Dec. 9, 2021. Undercutting the retail store price of bestsellers on bn.com is one thing. Allowing Amazon to undercut the price in pop-up ads on bn.com is another.

I’m fond of a Barnes & Noble store that’s close to my house in suburban New Jersey. I’ve taken grandkids there to browse and buy, my wife and I have browsed and bought, the store’s staff is very good and very helpful. So I wanted to go there to buy Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order, the new bestseller by billionaire Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates.

I try to patronize local businesses because they employ people in my community and pay rent and various taxes that help support it. Lots of physical stores are suffering from a retail apocalypse these days, and I want to do my bit to help keep it at bay.

To make sure the store had Dalio’s book, I went to bn.com and saw that the book, with a publisher’s price of $35, was available at the store and was being sold on bn.com for $27.99. And that $27.99 would have included free shipping to my home, if I had wanted the book sent to me.

When I was checking out of the store, I was surprised to see that I was being charged $31.50 rather than $27.99. That’s the full $35 list price, less the 10 percent discount that I get from my Barnes & Noble membership.

Dec. 8

Washington Post, Amazon’s search results are full of ads ‘unlawfully deceiving’ consumers, new complaint to FTC claims, Cat Zakrzewski and Jay Greene, Dec. 8, 2021. More than a quarter of search results on Amazon are paid ads, according to the complaint filed by a coalition of labor unions.

But because the company doesn’t clearly label sponsored results, Amazon could be “unlawfully deceiving” customers into clicking on them without knowing, a practice that raises questions about the integrity and quality of Amazon’s search results, the petition alleges.

The complaint, shared exclusively with The Washington Post, is based on an analysis of more than 130,000 search results for popular products. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Ad sales are one of Amazon’s fastest-growing businesses, and the complaint alleges that the lack of disclosures on these practices runs afoul of consumer protection law. The company delays labels indicating that a search result is sponsored by an advertiser for several seconds after a page loads, the group claims, a practice that “deliberately obfuscat[es]” ads. The coalition’s researchers determined that the company was “substantially or entirely out of compliance” with all of the federal guidelines to ensure ads can easily be distinguished from organic search results.

“Amazon customers should be very conscious and examine closely when they do a search on Amazon whether they’re getting an advertisement or an organic search result,” said Marka Peterson, SOC legal director. “They should be very aware of the different methods that Amazon uses to obscure its advertising.”

New York Times, Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, ‘It’s Unreliable’ Elizabeth A. Harris, Dec. 8, 2021 (print ed.). Social-media fandom can help authors score book deals and bigger advances, but does it translate to how a new title will sell? Publishers are increasingly skeptical.

A book by Billie Eilish seemed like a great bet. One of the most famous pop stars in the world, Ms. Eilish has 97 million followers on Instagram and another 6 million on Twitter. If just a fraction of them bought her book, it would be a hit.

But her self-titled book has sold about 64,000 hardcover copies since it came out in May, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks most printed books sold in the United States — not necessarily a disappointing number, unless Ms. Eilish got a big advance. Which, of course, she did. The book cost her publisher well over $1 million.

It’s difficult to predict whether a book will be a hit. A jar of tomato sauce doesn’t change that much from year to year, making demand reasonably predictable. But every book is different, an individual work of art or culture, so when the publishing industry tries to forecast demand for new titles, it is, however thoughtfully, guessing. Because there are so few reliable metrics to look at, social-media followings have become some of the main data points publishers use to try to make their guesses more educated.

An author’s following has become a standard part of the equation when publishers are deciding whether to acquire a book. Followings can affect who gets a book deal and how big an advance that author is paid, especially when it comes to nonfiction. But despite their importance, they are increasingly seen as unpredictable gauges of how well a book is actually going to sell.

Even having one of the biggest social-media followings in the world is not a guarantee.

“The only reliable part about it,” said Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble, “is that it’s unreliable.”

An author’s platform has long been something publishers look at — does she have a radio show, for example, or a regular guest spot on TV? But as local news outlets and book coverage have dwindled, the avenues for book publicity have shrunk, making an author’s ability to help get the word out more crucial. And when an author speaks to her followers about a book she wrote, she is talking to people who are at least a little bit interested in what she has to share.

“It’s become more and more important as the years went on,” said Marc Resnick, executive editor at St. Martin’s Press. “We learned some hard lessons along the way, which is that a tweet or a post is not necessarily going to sell any books, if it’s not the right person with the right book and the right followers at the right time.”

Dec. 7

Washington Post, Biden’s presence at the Kennedy Center Honors signals to many a return to tradition and normalcy, Roxanne Roberts, Dec. 7, 2021. Since the annual event began in 1978, every president has attended — except Donald Trump, who skipped it throughout his term.

There’s an old saying that 80 percent of life is just showing up — and President Biden got three standing ovations Sunday night without saying a word.

The audience broke into loud and extended applause when he and first lady Jill Biden stepped into the presidential box for the 44th Kennedy Center Honors, one of Washington’s most prestigious social and cultural events. They brought along Vice President Harris and the second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

Since the annual event began in 1978, every president has attended — except Donald Trump, who skipped it throughout his term. This year, to many attendees, especially the Democrats, Biden’s presence at the Honors in support of the arts was a signal of a return to normalcy in Washington.

“It’s nice to see the presidential box once again being occupied,” 2012 honoree David Letterman told the audience. Then Letterman slyly delivered the coup de grace: “And the same with the Oval Office.”

Still, the emphasis wasn’t on politics but celebrating this year’s honorees, who sat next to the Bidens in the Opera House balcony: Bette Midler, Joni Mitchell, Justino Díaz, Berry Gordy and Lorne Michaels. The Bidens also hosted the traditional preperformance White House reception, where the president lauded each of the artists with personal stories and dad jokes, then reaffirmed his commitment to cultural institutions.

Washington Post, Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial page editor, dies at 66, Matt Schudel, Dec. 7, 2021 (print ed.). Fred Hiatt, a onetime foreign correspondent who in 2000 became The Washington Post’s editorial page editor and greatly expanded the global reach of the newspaper’s opinion writers in the era of 9/11, the election of Barack Obama and the destabilizing presidency of Donald Trump, died Dec. 6 at a hospital in New York City. He was 66.

He had sudden cardiac arrest on Nov. 24 while visiting his daughter in Brooklyn, said his wife, Margaret “Pooh” Shapiro, and did not regain consciousness. He had been treated for heart ailments in the past.

Mr. Hiatt was one of Washington’s most authoritative and influential opinion-makers. For two decades, he either wrote or edited nearly every unsigned editorial published by The Post — more than 1,000 a year — and edited the opinion columns published on the paper’s op-ed page and website. He also wrote a column and was a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing.

“Over the past two decades, Fred’s leadership made The Post’s editorial page into the most consequential in the news industry,” Washington Post publisher and chief executive Frederick J. Ryan Jr. said in a statement to the staff. “A 40-year veteran of The Post, he built friendships throughout the company and made immense contributions as a writer, an editor, and a mentor to so many across the organization. His legacy also spans the globe: Few journalists have rivaled his idealism and complete dedication to the causes of democracy and human rights worldwide.”

Mr. Hiatt joined the editorial page in 1996, after 15 years as a Post reporter covering regional politics and national security and serving as a correspondent in Tokyo and Moscow. In 2000, he took over the editorial page after the death of Meg Greenfield, who had guided the section for two decades, and an interim period when it was led by Stephen S. Rosenfeld.

Mr. Hiatt inherited a staff of about a dozen people whose cloistered, quasi-judicial manner of working had changed little in decades. They mulled over the issues of the day and prepared unsigned editorials that reflected the newspaper’s institutional views on matters from presidential elections to foreign affairs to local politics and education.

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• Washington Post, Retropolis, The Past, Rediscovered: The vicious 150-year rivalry between Utah’s two biggest newspapers, Daryl Austin

Dec. 5

 

Between January 2005 and December 2020, about a quarter of U.S. local print newspapers ceased publishing, according to data that Northwestern professor Penny Muse Abernathy collected while at the University of North Carolina. By 2020, out of the 3,000-plus U.S. counties, half had just one local print newspaper of any kind. Only a third had a daily newspaper. Over 200 counties had no newspaper whatsoever.

Washington Post Magazine, Perspective: A Vast Landscape of Lost Newspapers: What happens to society — and our democracy — when community and regional journalism dries up? Margaret Sullivan, right, Nov. 20, 2021 (Dec. 5 print ed.). Americans must understand the existential threat facing local news outlets.

"It has been our great privilege to bring you news from Stoneham and Woburn over the years,” read the announcement. “We regret to inform you that this will be the final edition of the Sun-Advocate newspaper.” The Massachusetts weekly, as of August, is no more.

It is an increasingly familiar story across the United States. Already in a sharp downward spiral, the local news industry was hit hard by the covid-19 pandemic. The worst blows were taken by newspapers — businesses that, as a group, had never recovered from the digital revolution and the 2008 recession.

Between 2005 and the start of the pandemic, about 2,100 newspapers closed their doors. Since covid struck, at least 80 more papers have gone out of business, as have an undetermined number of other local publications, like the California Sunday Magazine, which folded last fall — and then won a Pulitzer Prize eight months later.

Those papers that survived are still facing difficult straits. Many have laid off scores of reporters and editors — according to Pew Research Center, the newspaper industry lost an astonishing 57 percent of its employees between 2008 and 2020 — making these publications a mere specter of their former selves. They are now “ghost newspapers”: outlets that may bear the proud old name of yore but no longer do the job of thoroughly covering their communities and providing original reporting on matters of public interest.

Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University journalism professor, describes the loss of the Sun-Advocate in Massachusetts as “a grim picture but not nearly as catastrophic as in some parts of the country.” After all, he told me, there are other news organizations nearby, including the Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn and WickedLocal.com, a digital site run by Gannett that serves swaths of Massachusetts. (Gannett had owned the Sun-Advocate until its closure.)

By contrast, in many regions of the country, there is no local news coverage at all, or next to none. These areas have come to be known as “news deserts” — a term used by academics and researchers to refer to areas where coverage of the community by local news outlets is minimal or nonexistent. It’s in such places that the collapse of local news is being felt most dramatically. Then again, even if you don’t live in a defined news desert, you may have noticed that your regional paper long ago ditched actively covering your community if it is outside the immediate city and first-ring suburbs.

A Vast Landscape of Lost Newspapers

This trend in local news has been life-changing, of course, for the employees who lose their jobs and incomes. But even more concerning is what happens to the communities they used to serve — and, more broadly, what happens to our society and our ability to self-govern when local news dries up.

An extreme case of the withering of local news over the past decade is Youngstown, Ohio, where the beloved 150-year-old daily newspaper, the Vindicator, abruptly went out of business in 2019. The death of “the Vindy” made Youngstown — just minutes from the former General Motors manufacturing plant in Lordstown — the biggest U.S. city without its own daily newspaper. (A neighboring city’s newspaper began putting out a Vindicator edition, plus a small group of former staffers launched a digital news site, Mahoning Matters. But it is not the same as a dedicated newsroom of 40 journalists.)As I researched my 2020 book, Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy, I traveled to Youngstown just after the shocking announcement. Residents had gathered at a quickly called public meeting, and many were in tears as they contemplated the future of their city and region without this institution.

The Lost Local News Issue

Since 2005, about 2,200 local newspapers across America have closed. Here are some of the stories in danger of being lost — as told by local journalists.

I spent some time with Bertram de Souza, the paper’s editorial page editor, who had been at the Vindicator for 40 years. As a reporter, he helped reveal the corruption of James Traficant, who was expelled from Congress and sent to prison in 2002 after being convicted of racketeering, taking bribes and using his staff to do chores at his home and on his houseboat.

Youngstown “is absolutely the kind of place that needs watchdog reporting,” de Souza told me, “and this newspaper was committed to exposing corruption.” The problem, going forward, is that when it comes to revealing malfeasance, you don’t know what you don’t know: If there’s no one to keep public officials honest, citizens might never find out how their faith is being broken and their tax dollars squandered.

Mark Brown, the paper’s general manager and a member of the family that owned it, said something I found poignant as he recalled the Vindy’s heyday, when editors were able to send a reporter or freelancer to all of the municipal board and school board meetings in a three-county area. Public officials knew journalists were present, Brown said, “and they behaved.”

What happened to the Vindicator was a particularly notable version of an oft-repeated story: There just wasn’t enough money anymore to keep the paper afloat and pay the staff. Brown told me that the Vindy had lost money for 20 of the 22 years before its closing because of shrinking circulation, limited advertising revenue and rising costs.

While it was still in business, the Vindicator was relatively lucky because it was owned by a local family for 132 years. Many other newspapers have fallen out of local hands and under the control of large chains, some owned by private equity firms or hedge funds. One of these, Alden Global Capital (sometimes known as Digital First Media), perhaps the worst of the so-called vulture capitalists, earlier this year snapped up the storied Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and others in the well-regarded Tribune chain.

From a journalism perspective, this was widely — and rightly — regarded as a disaster. “Devastating” is how Ann Marie Lipinski, the Tribune’s former top editor, now curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, characterized the development to me in an interview.

And tech journalist Karl Bode commented darkly on Twitter: “we’re slowly replacing a functional press with PR spam, hedge fund dudebros, trolling substack opinion columnists, foreign and domestic disinformation, brand-slathered teen influencers, and hugely consolidated dumpster fires like Sinclair Broadcasting.” (Sinclair Broadcast Group, the second-largest owner of local television stations in the country, has at times required its news anchors to read scripts with a strong conservative bent on the air.)

It’s not just watchdog journalism that suffers when news organizations shrink or die. The decline affects civic engagement and political polarization, too. Studies show that people who live in areas with poor local news coverage are less likely to vote, and when they do, they are more likely to do so strictly along party lines. To put it bluntly, the demise of local news poses the kind of danger to our democracy that should have alarm sirens screeching across the land.

Then there’s the matter of public trust. In general, people trust the mainstream news media — or as I prefer to call it, the reality-based press — far less now than they did several decades ago. Around the time of The Washington Post’s landmark reporting of the Watergate scandal, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers (the secret history of the Vietnam War) by the New York Times and The Post, the vast majority of citizens basically believed what they heard and read in the traditional media. CBS’s Walter Cronkite was known as “the most trusted man in America.”

Most studies show that there is one exception to this steady decline in trust: Americans find their local news sources significantly more credible than national news sources. Yet these are the very same outlets that are rapidly disappearing. That’s especially worrisome at a time when conspiracy theories and misinformation are rampant.

Timothy Snyder, left, a Yale history professor and author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, has called the loss of local news “the essential problem of our republic.” It is nothing less than a crisis, he says, and a deepening one. “The only way we can talk to other people is with some common understanding of the facts, for example whether or not our water is polluted or whether or not the teachers in our school are on strike,” Snyder told E-International Relations. We don’t have to like what we learn about our communities through local news reporting, he noted, but it benefits us nonetheless. “When local news goes away, then our sense of what is true shifts from what is helpful to us in our daily lives to what makes us ‘feel good,’ which is something entirely different,” Snyder said. And, I would add, something very troubling.

This crisis, to be sure, is not just about newspapers, and certainly not just about newspapers in their printed incarnations. What’s important is the journalism, not the precise form it comes in. Local newspapers have been the center of most regions’ media ecosystems for many years because historically they have employed the most journalists and as a result produced the majority of original news. But they aren’t the only way to provide local news, by any means. Public radio, local television and digital-only news sites — often newly formed nonprofits — are increasingly part of the equation. And if there is a future, it surely is a mostly digital one.

But digital news sites, too, have struggled, and many have closed during the pandemic, including the well-regarded Bklyner, whose Brooklyn-based editor and publisher Liena Zagare wrote a heart-rending note in late August announcing a September end to publication. “Since I never figured out how to get paid regularly for the many hats I still wear … I cannot hire someone to fill in while I take the time off that I need to make sure that I, too, can be sustainable,” she explained. Among her roles: assigning stories, fact-checking, editing, reporting, writing, copy-editing, publishing, social media, tech, subscriptions, ad sales and handling payroll.

All of this leaves many localities — from rural areas to New York City’s most populous borough — struggling for answers. And yet, while the situation is undeniably troubling, some partial solutions are beginning to take shape. Digital news outlets are getting help through organizations such as the American Journalism Project, which raises money to fund and guide nonprofit, nonpartisan newsrooms. Just weeks ago, the group and a coalition of Cleveland-based organizations announced the Ohio Local News Initiative to bolster regional reporting in the state, starting next year with a newsroom in Cleveland. Report for America, based loosely on Teach for America, puts young journalists in underserved communities to shore up the staffs of existing news organizations.

There is no single answer to this crisis. Any solution, if there even is a solution, will require a multifaceted approach. But before local news can be saved, or successfully reinvented, one thing is absolutely necessary: American citizens must understand the existential threat local outlets are facing — and the incalculable value that their journalism brings to our democracy.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Cable news is in freefall, Bocha Blue, Dec. 4, 2021. Cable news is cratering. Per Deadline.com, The ratings for all of the three major cable news networks are dipping lower and lower. This includes Fox Non-news. Fox has seen a dip in its prime time viewership of about 35% lower than last year at this time. They are down 20% for their daytime ratings as well.

MSNBC is also down with a decline of 59% for its prime time viewership.

But CNN is at the top of the list with wildly flailing ratings. CNN’s prime time ratings are down a whopping 77%. In the 25-54 Demographic, CNN’s at a stunning 148,000. None of this should be a surprise, although the numbers are even worse than expected. All three of the stations have major problems.

Although many believe it is a simple issue of Trump not being in office anymore and folks losing interest, I think the problem is more significant than that.

These networks have become frantic in recent months, trying anything and everything in attempts to gin up ratings. Many pundits have become even more vicious and vulgar in their presentation, and it is no wonder people are becoming sick of it.

I believe if the networks would get back to simply reporting the news, the ratings might again begin to climb.

Think about it. Non-stories are becoming all the rage. Allow me to back that up with this beauty from CNN. It is a headline on their website about President Biden. This headline is: “A gravelly voiced President Biden says he has a cold.”

Would you click on that? I have no idea what the story is about, nor do I care. With a headline like that, I have no desire to read it. I imagine others feel the same. The motivation of Fox is obvious. They lost a boatload of viewers who thought they were not “Trumpian enough.”

And these viewers were upset that the network tried to do the right thing for once in their miserable lives and called Arizona for Biden on election night. I hope that Cable News goes back to what they once were, many moons ago. I, however, am not optimistic.

Dec. 3

The Hill, Fauci calls out Fox News for letting host compare him to Nazi doctor: 'Astounded,' Sarakshi Rai, Dec. 3, 2021. Anthony Fauci on Thursday blasted Fox News and said he was "astounded" that the network did not discipline host Lara Logan for comparing him to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who worked at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

"What I find striking is how she gets no discipline whatsoever from the Fox network. How they can let her say that with no comment and no disciplinary action. I’m astounded by that," the chief White House medical adviser said in an appearance on MSNBC.

He said it was an insult to all of the people who suffered and died under the Nazi regime in the concentration camps.

"It's unconscionable what she said. She was being totally slanderous to me and, as usual, had no idea what she was talking about," he said.

Fox News did not immediately respond to The Hill's request for comment.

"What you see on Dr. Fauci, this is what people say to me, that he doesn't represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele ... the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps," Logan said on Monday during "Fox News Primetime."

"And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this. Because the response from COVID, what it has done to countries everywhere, what it has done to civil liberties, the suicide rates, the poverty, it has obliterated economies," she added.

After her comments, Logan was condemned by Jewish organizations — including the Anti-Defamation League and the Auschwitz Memorial.

The American Jewish Committee also tweeted asking "why is Fox News staying silent?" in response to Logan doubling down on her comments. ADL spokesperson Jake Hyman said in a statement to CNN, “Logan and the network seem to be immune to shame and allergic to remorse."

Washington Post, Twitter’s new CEO unveils big reorganization of social networking company, Will Oremus and Elizabeth Dwoskin, Dec. 3, 2021. Twitter's engineering and design leaders are out as Parag Agrawal puts his mark on the company.

Twitter’s new chief executive, Parag Agrawal, announced a major reorganization of the company Friday, putting his stamp on the organization following the sudden departure of co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey earlier this week.

The shake-up, meant to streamline the company’s operations and accelerate its growth, will bring together employees previously divided by job function — such as engineering, design and product development — on teams organized by what they’re working on, such as consumer product, revenue and core tech. Two executives, head of engineering Michael Montano and chief design officer Dantley Davis, will step down as part of the reshuffling and leave the company by year’s end.

In a companywide email obtained by The Washington Post, Agrawal said that he will focus on “clear decision-making, increased accountability, and faster execution,” and said he was “making a number of organizational and leadership changes to best position us to achieve our goals. … We’ve all discussed the critical need for more operational rigor and it must start from the top.”

New CEO Parag Agrawal said he made the changes in the name of “operational rigor” and “faster execution.”

Twitter says it suspended accounts in error following flood of ‘coordinated and malicious’ reports

Washington Post, Pegasus spyware was used recently to hack U.S. diplomats working abroad, Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell and Ellen Nakashima, Dec. 3, 2021. Confirmation of the attacks comes one month after the U.S. blacklisted NSO Group

Apple has alerted 11 U.S. Embassy employees that their iPhones have been hacked in recent months with Pegasus spyware from NSO Group, an Israel-based company that licenses software to government clients in dozens of countries that allows them to secretly steal files, eavesdrop on conversations and track the movements of its targets, according to people familiar with the notifications.

The revelation, the first confirmed cases of Pegasus being used to target American officials, comes a month after U.S. officials blacklisted the NSO Group amid allegations that its foreign government clients had enabled hacking against unspecified embassy employees, political activists, human rights workers and others.

These and other actions come after the July publication of the Pegasus Project, an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations into the activities of NSO Group. One of the investigation’s findings was that U.S. diplomats and other embassy employees were at risk from Pegasus, especially when they used phone numbers based overseas.

Dec. 1

 

Daystar founder Marcus Lamb and his wife, Joni Lamb.

Washington Post, Marcus Lamb, head of Daystar, a large Christian network that discouraged vaccines, dies after getting covid-19, Michelle Boorstein, Dec. 1, 2021 (print ed.). Lamb’s network during the pandemic has made the virus a huge focus, calling it a satanic attack that should not be treated with vaccines. He was 64 years old.

Daystar is the second-largest Christian network in the world, according to CBN News, a competitor, reaching 2 billion people worldwide. Its brand is a fluid, modern, charismatic faith, more about general good-vs-evil, miraculous healings and religious freedom than any specific denominational theology.

But during the pandemic, Lamb and his network went in big with anti-vaccine conspiracies, hosting daily interviews with skeptics who talked about dangerous, hidden forces pushing vaccines and stealing Christians’ freedoms. “What if the most dangerous thing your child could face in life is the very thing you’re told by your doctor is safe?” is the headline of “A Hidden Crisis," about coronavirus vaccines.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a spiritual attack from the enemy," Lamb’s son, Jonathan, said on the network earlier this month about his father’s covid-19 bout, Relevant magazine reported Tuesday. Talking about the alternative, unfounded treatments his parents promoted, Jonathan Lamb said, "there’s no doubt that the enemy is not happy about that. And he’s doing everything he can to take down my Dad.”

Daystar spokesman Arnold Torres declined to comment Tuesday on Lamb’s career or about his views of his illness before he died, or whether he was vaccinated.

“The family asks that their privacy be respected as they grieve this difficult loss. Please continue to lift them up in prayer,” Torres wrote in an email.

On social media, vaccine misinformation mixes with extreme faith

A brief statement said Daystar was launched in 1998 and grew to more than 100 television stations around the world. “[Lamb] will always be remembered for his fierce love of God, people, and his family.”

His wife, Joni, on their daily Ministry Show Tuesday, said her husband was diagnosed with covid-19, “got the covid pneumonia” and also had diabetes.

“We were trying to treat the covid and pneumonia with the different protocols we use, including the ones we talk about on Daystar. We used those — I myself used them and had breezed through covid,” she said on the show. His blood sugar spiked and he needed oxygen, she said. “He 100 percent believed in everything we talk about here on Daystar, things that help so many people around the world with early protocol treatments for covid. We still stand by those obviously.”

White evangelical Christians resist coronavirus vaccines at higher rates than other religious groups in the United States, a phenomenon experts say is bound up in politics, skepticism about government and in their consumption of alternative media and unfounded conspiracy theories about vaccine dangers.

Some Christian nationalists are fueling their movement with opposition to coronavirus vaccines and mask mandates

Lamb, whose network is headquartered in Dallas, was praised by prominent evangelicals Tuesday, who didn’t mention his anti-vaccine activism. Among them were Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia pastor who, with Lamb, was in a small circle of evangelical advisers to then-President Donald Trump, and Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and president of the international relief organization Samaritan’s Purse. Lamb appeared in a 2020 photo with Trump and a group of prominent Christians at an Evangelicals for Trump rally.

New York Times, Those Cute Cats Online? They Help Spread Misinformation, Davey Alba, Dec. 1, 2021. A mainstay of the internet is regularly used to build audiences for people and organizations pushing false and misleading information.

On Oct. 2, New Tang Dynasty Television, a station linked to the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, posted a Facebook video of a woman saving a baby shark stranded on a shore. Next to the video was a link to subscribe to The Epoch Times, a newspaper that is tied to Falun Gong and that spreads anti-China and right-wing conspiracies. The post collected 33,000 likes, comments and shares.

The website of Dr. Joseph Mercola, below left, an osteopathic physician who researchers say is a chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, regularly posts about cute animals that generate tens or even hundreds of thousands of interactions on Facebook. The stories include “Kitten and Chick Nap So Sweetly Together” and “Why Orange Cats May Be Different From Other Cats,” written by Dr. Karen Becker, a veterinarian.

And Western Journal, a right-wing publication that has published unproven claims about the benefits of using hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19, and spread falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 presidential election, owns Liftable Animals, a popular Facebook page. Liftable Animals posts stories from Western Journal’s main website alongside stories about golden retrievers and giraffes.

Videos and GIFs of cute animals — usually cats — have gone viral online for almost as long as the internet has been around. Many of the animals became famous: There’s Keyboard Cat, Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub and Nyan Cat, just to name a few.

Now, it is becoming increasingly clear how widely the old-school internet trick is being used by people and organizations peddling false information online, misinformation researchers say.

The posts with the animals do not directly spread false information. But they can draw a huge audience that can be redirected to a publication or site spreading false information about election fraud, unproven coronavirus cures and other baseless conspiracy theories entirely unrelated to the videos. Sometimes, following a feed of cute animals on Facebook unknowingly signs users up as subscribers to misleading posts from the same publisher.

Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, said this kind of “engagement bait” helped misinformation actors generate clicks on their pages, which can make them more prominent in users’ feeds in the future. That prominence can drive a broader audience to content with inaccurate or misleading information, she said.

“The strategy works because the platforms continue to reward engagement over everything else,” Ms. Ryan said, “even when that engagement comes from” publications that also publish false or misleading content.

Perhaps no organization deploys the tactic as forcefully as Epoch Media, parent company of The Epoch Times. Epoch Media has published videos of cute animals in 12,062 posts on its 103 Facebook pages in the past year, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Those posts, which include links to other Epoch Media websites, racked up nearly four billion views. Trending World, one of Epoch’s Facebook pages, was the 15th most popular page on the platform in the United States between July and September.

One video, posted last month by The Epoch Times’s Taiwan page, shows a close-up of a golden retriever while a woman tries in vain to pry an apple from its mouth. It has over 20,000 likes, shares and comments on Facebook. Another post, on Trending World’s Facebook page, features a seal grinning widely with a family posing for a picture at a Sea World resort. The video has 12 million views.

“Dr. Becker is a veterinarian, her articles are about pets,” said an email from Dr. Mercola’s public relations team. “We reject any New York Times accusations of misleading any visitors, but are not surprised by it.”

The viral animal videos often come from places like Jukin Media and ViralHog. The companies identify extremely shareable videos and reach licensing deals with the people who made them. After securing the rights to the videos, Jukin Media and ViralHog license the clips to other media companies, giving a cut of the profits to the original creator.

Mike Skogmo, Jukin Media’s senior vice president for marketing and communications, said his company had a licensing deal with New Tang Dynasty Television, the station tied to Falun Gong.

“Jukin has licensing deals with hundreds of publishers worldwide, across the political spectrum and with a range of subject matters, under guidelines that protect the creators of the works in our library,” he said in a statement.

Asked whether the company evaluated whether their clips were used as engagement bait for misinformation in striking the license deals, Mr. Skogmo said Jukin had nothing else to add.

“Once someone licenses our raw content, what they do with it is up to them,” said Ryan Bartholomew, founder of ViralHog. “ViralHog is not supporting or opposing any cause or objective — that would be outside of our scope of business.”

The use of animal videos presents a conundrum for the tech platforms like Facebook, because the animal posts themselves do not contain misinformation. Facebook has banned ads from Epoch Media when the network violated its political advertising policy, and it took down several hundred Epoch Media-affiliated accounts last year when it determined that the accounts had violated its “coordinated inauthentic behavior” policies.

“We’ve taken enforcement actions against Epoch Media and related groups several times already,” said Drew Pusateri, a Facebook spokesman. “If we discover that they’re engaging in deceptive actions in the future we will continue enforcing against them.” The company did not comment on the tactic of using cute animals to spread misinformation.

 

Washington Post, CNN suspends Chris Cuomo ‘indefinitely’ after documents detail help he gave his brother, Sarah Ellison and Jeremy Barr, Dec. 1, 2021 (print ed.). The decision follows revelations that he was far more involved in the efforts of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo than previously known.

CNN has suspended Chris Cuomo, above, one of its biggest stars, a day after the release of documents that detailed his efforts to help his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, fend off allegations of sexual misconduct.

Transcripts from the New York Attorney General’s office on Monday showed that the cable host was far more involved in the governor’s crisis-management efforts than the younger Cuomo had previously acknowledged.

The network and its president, Jeff Zucker, had previously backed Cuomo for months, even as details accumulated about his role advising his brother, who eventually resigned in the wake of the sexual harassment allegations.
Cuomo calls sexual harassment investigation a 'political firecracker' during farewell speech
During his farewell address on Aug. 23, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) derided the investigation into allegations that he sexually harassed 11 women. (The Washington Post)

In May, The Washington Post reported that Cuomo had joined conference calls to discuss how to handle the allegations. At the time, the network said it was “inappropriate” for Cuomo to engage in conversations that included members of the governor’s staff; the host acknowledged his error in doing so and pledged not to do so again.

Washington Post, Lara Logan draws outrage for comparing Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Fox News, Jeremy Barr, Dec. 1, 2021 (print ed.). It’s the latest in a series of inflammatory and conspiracy-tinged comments from the once-lauded former ’60 Minutes’ correspondent.

Lara Logan, right, once a lauded foreign correspondent for CBS News’s “60 Minutes” and now a boundary-pushing Fox News guest commentator and streaming show host, drew fierce condemnation for on-air comments Monday night comparing the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Her comments came during a segment in which Fox host Pete Hegseth, a frequent critic of coronavirus vaccine mandates and masking politics, accused the Biden administration of overhyping the new omicron variant.

Logan’s response, though, went well beyond.

“What you see on Dr. Fauci — this is what people say to me: that he doesn’t represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele,” she said. “Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps. And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this, because the response from covid, what it has done to countries everywhere, what it has done to civil liberties, the suicide rates, the poverty, it has obliterated economies. The level of suffering that has been created because of this disease is now being seen in the cold light of day.”

It was the latest and arguably the most inflammatory in a series of comments from Logan that have stunned viewers who remember her days as an impartial news reporter and star correspondent for the respected newsmagazine show.

But Hegseth, who guest-hosted Fox’s 7 p.m. opinion show Monday, showed little reaction while Logan spoke and did not contradict or push back on her statements. Before going to a commercial break, he promoted Logan’s show on the Fox Nation streaming service. (His other guest, Fox host Will Cain, called Fauci a “would-be authoritarian.”)

Known as “the angel of death,” Mengele performed “a broad range of agonizing and often lethal experiments with Jewish and Roma twins, most of them children,” while serving as a physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Early Tuesday morning, the Auschwitz Museum’s official Twitter account released a statement seeming to condemn Logan’s remarks without naming her. “Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful,” the organization said. “It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that works to combat antisemitism, issued a statement to The Washington Post on Tuesday saying that “there’s absolutely no comparison between mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and other covid-19 mitigation efforts to what happened to Jews during the Holocaust.”

Washington Post, The Facebook executive in charge of the company’s cryptocurrency push just quit, Gerrit De Vynck, Dec. 1, 2021 (print ed.).The top executive overseeing Facebook’s efforts to get into cryptocurrency and international money transfers quit Tuesday, further complicating the company’s efforts to gain a foothold in the fast-growing world of digital currencies and blockchain technology.

David Marcus’s high-profile departure comes just months after the company began hitting walls in Washington when it relaunched its initiative to use cryptocurrency to allow its users to make payments and send money to each other without transaction fees. The project has faced delays and name changes since it was first announced in 2019, coming under scrutiny from regulators and users, many of whom are already concerned about the social media giant’s power.

“My entrepreneurial DNA has been nudging me for too many mornings in a row to continue ignoring it,” Marcus said in tweets announcing his departure. Stephane Kasriel, a vice president in Facebook’s fintech and crypto division, will take over the job, Marcus said. A spokesperson for Facebook did not return a request for comment.

Washington Post, Analysis: Twitter’s new CEO is bringing an engineering background to a politics fight, Will Oremus and Elizabeth Dwoskin, Dec. 1, 2021. Parag Agrawal, right, was a surprising pick for one of tech’s most fraught positions. Here’s why he got the job.

On Day 1 of Parag Agrawal’s new job as CEO of Twitter, congressional Republicans took a tweet he had posted in 2010 out of context to imply that he’s biased against White people. On Day 2, Twitter unveiled a confusingly worded new policy banning the sharing of “private media,” which drew immediate fire from both left and right.

And that was all before Agrawal was formally introduced as the company’s new CEO at an all-hands meeting Tuesday, following outgoing CEO Jack Dorsey’s surprise resignation tweet on a Monday that was supposed to be a “day of rest” for Twitter’s employees.

Agrawal, who at 37 becomes the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company, was chosen unanimously to succeed Dorsey by Twitter’s board of directors, according to an official statement Monday. At Tuesday’s all-hands meeting, according to employees who attended, Dorsey emphasized Agrawal’s engineering background and the fact that he rose through the ranks over a decade at Twitter in touting him as the ideal choice to lead the influential social media firm.

Yet several current and former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said Agrawal was an unexpected choice internally — though not necessarily an unwelcome one — for one of the most fraught leadership roles in Silicon Valley. Having joined Twitter before completing his Ph.D. program at Stanford University in 2011, he spent much of his tenure there with zero direct reports, two of those employees said.

As chief technology officer, he also had limited experience handling the thorny questions of content policy — what people are allowed to post on social media — that make Twitter an influential force in global discourse and a target of criticism and regulation by governments and political actors around the world.

“Agrawal has to sort out how Twitter should respond to a fusillade of bills in Congress seeking to rein in social media companies and a new [Federal Trade Commission] chairwoman who has painted a target on the prominent platforms,” as well as attacks from former president Donald Trump and the right, said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, in an email. If Trump runs again, “pressure to reinstate him will be enormous. Impressive engineering chops won’t resolve that problem.”

• Washington Post, Analysis: In Washington, Jack Dorsey will be remembered for polarizing calls and historic scrutiny, Dec. 1, 2021 (print ed.).

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November

Nov. 30

Washington Post, Chris Cuomo sought ‘intel’ on media coverage about accusations against his brother, text messages show, Josh Dawsey, Michael Scherer and Jeremy Barr, Nov. 30, 2021 (print ed.). CNN anchor Chris Cuomo was more extensively involved in helping to defend his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, against allegations of sexual misconduct than he has previously acknowledged, according to documents released Monday by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Text messages between the CNN journalist and top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa show that Chris Cuomo, right, offered to draft statements for his brother to use to deny misconduct, demanded more influence over the strategy, and even researched potential news coverage and accusers for the governor’s office.

“Please let me help with the prep,” Cuomo wrote at one point to DeRosa, as the claims against the governor surfaced earlier this year.

On another occasion, the younger Cuomo texted DeRosa that he needed “all the best facts” for “reporters. Who can do it?” Chris Cuomo also appeared to use his journalistic connections to gather information for the governor’s team. He fielded requests from DeRosa for “intel” on a then-unpublished investigative story by New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow and information about a rumor that more accusers were about to come forward on March 7.

“On it,” Cuomo responded to the second request. About 40 minutes later, he wrote back, “No one has heard that yet.”

The messages deepen questions about whether Chris Cuomo, one of CNN’s star anchors, crossed lines in his advocacy for his brother and misused his position as a prominent cable television anchor.

Washington Post, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rachel Lerman, Nov. 30, 2021 (print ed.). The unexpected news caused Nasdaq to stop trading the company’s stock.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey,, shown at right (photo by Joe Raedel via Getty Images), said he was stepping down from the social media service in a letter posted to Twitter early Monday.

Dorsey, right, who co-founded the company and has been a leader there for the last 18 years, said his departure would be effective immediately, leaving Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal to replace him. Dorsey will remain CEO of payments company Square.

“I want you to know this was my decision and I own it,” Dorsey wrote, saying he was “sad” but also “really happy.” “It was a tough one for me, of course. … There aren’t many companies that get to this level. And there aren’t many founders that choose their company over their own ego. I know we’ll prove this was the right move.”

The message was captioned, “not sure if anyone has heard but, I resigned from Twitter.”

The surprise move caused Nasdaq to suspend trading on Twitter’s stock, and left most employees — many of whom were not working because it was an official company “Day of Rest” — in a state of confusion.

Even some senior executives seemed unprepared for the move. Vijaya Gadde, the company’s legal, policy, and trust and safety lead, tweeted congratulations to Agrawal and gratitude to Dorsey — but said she was “saving my ‘everything I learned from @Jack’ thread for another day.”

Dorsey has been distancing himself from direct leadership for years, according to people familiar with his management style who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Major decisions are generally made by other company leaders, though Dorsey does give a final sign-off. He also rarely tweets about Twitter, focusing most of his public energy promoting blockchain, decentralization, and bitcoin-related projects.

Though Twitter is much smaller than industry rivals Facebook and TikTok, the company punches above its weight because of its use by celebrities, politicians and other influential people. For years, the most influential user on Twitter was former president Donald Trump, who used the platform as a primary means to communicate — often in ways that pushed the boundaries of Twitter’s rules. The company suspended him for comments related to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

• Business Insider, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's daily wellness habits include fasting, five-mile walks, and two hours of meditation, Hannah Towey, Oct. 24, 2021. He said the strict routine helps him manage the stress of running both Twitter and Square.

Washington Post, Who is Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal? 5 things to know, Annabelle Timsit, Nov. 30, 2021 (print ed.). When Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO of Twitter, the company he co-founded, the first question on everyone’s lips was why now? — and the second was who’s next?

Dorsey, who tweeted the news Monday after 15 years in company leadership, said Twitter has outgrown its founders as all companies eventually should, and that the time is right for him to go — in part because he has confidence in his replacement, Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief technology officer.

Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Sun Media proposes moving printing of newspapers to Delaware, laying off 100+ workers, Christopher Dinsmore, Nov. 30, 2021. Baltimore Sun Media is considering a plan to move the printing of its newspapers from Baltimore to a printing plant in Wilmington, Delaware, owned by the newspaper there.

The shift, proposed to occur by the end of January, likely would result in the loss of more than 100 jobs, most of them full-time.

Sun officials met with affected employees Tuesday to inform them of the proposal to shut down the Sun Park printing plant in South Baltimore. The Baltimore Sun opened Sun Park in 1992, but the circulation of the print newspaper has declined in recent years, even as digital subscriptions have grown, and the plant’s size dwarfs The Sun’s needs.

Under the proposal, The News Journal, a Wilmington paper owned by Gannett, would print and insert The Baltimore Sun, The Capital of Annapolis, the Carroll County Times and other affiliated publications.

“This preliminary agreement would reduce expenses related to the print operation and help continue the investment in our digital growth,” said Trif Alatzas, Baltimore Sun Media’s publisher and editor-in-chief, in an email sent to employees Tuesday evening.

Alatzas said the move would offset “ongoing print revenue declines exacerbated by the pandemic.”

The Sun would join a growing list of newspapers that have closed their printing plants and moved printing to other publications’ presses for similar reasons, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Tampa Bay Times and The Kansas City Star, all of which shut down their printing operations in 2021.

Earlier this year, The Sun’s parent company, Chicago-based Tribune Publishing, was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has been accumulating newspapers for years and has a reputation for cutting its costs to remain profitable.

Alatzas wrote that the proposed changes with printing would not affect The Sun’s journalism or its ability to meet the needs of advertisers. Home delivery and retail sales of the newspapers also would not be affected, he said.

The Sun leases the building at Sun Park, which was purchased by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank’s Sagamore Development from The Sun’s former parent company in 2014 and rolled into the massive Port Covington mixed-use project.

Parts of the cavernous Sun Park building, which also houses The Sun’s newsroom and business offices, now sit vacant, Alatzas wrote. He did not say in the email what would become of Sun Park.

Nov. 29

New York Times, Local News Outlets Could Reap $1.7 Billion in Build Back Better Aid, Marc Tracy, Nov. 29, 2021 (print ed.). A small paper like The Storm Lake Times in Iowa would receive a big tax credit. So would Gannett, the nation’s largest news publisher.

For The Storm Lake Times, a family-run paper in northwestern Iowa, it could mean $200,000 in federal subsidies the first year and nearly $500,000 over the four years after that.

For EO Media, which publishes more than a dozen community newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, it could amount to $1.2 million the first year and $2.9 million over the next four.

And Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, could receive $37.5 million the first year and tens of millions after that.

The relief would come in the form of a payroll tax credit earmarked for local news organizations, a small part of the Build Back Better bill that the House passed on Nov. 19.

“It acknowledges democracy starts at home,” said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School who studies the decline of local journalism.

If the $2.2 trillion social safety net and climate package makes it through the Senate, where it faces a stiff challenge, it will provide $1.67 billion over the next five years for newspapers, websites, radio and TV stations, and other outlets that primarily cover local news. If eligible, they could reap up to $25,000 for each locally focused journalist they employ in the first year and $15,000 in each of the next four.

News outlets across the country have struggled for decades, as the rise of digital media slowed their once-dependable streams of revenue — print ads and classifieds — to a trickle. With few exceptions, those publications have not made up the difference with digital advertising, an industry dominated by Google and Facebook.

Media outlets funded by political action committees would not be eligible. The same holds true for news organizations that do not carry media liability insurance or fail to disclose their owners. News publishers with more than 1,500 employees at a single location also would not qualify, under the terms of the bill. The New York Times would be ineligible for the tax credit, a company spokeswoman said.

Large chains that include publications focused on local coverage would be eligible. One of them, Gannett, borrowed more than $1 billion two years ago from the private equity firm Apollo Global Management as part of its merger with Gatehouse Media.

Other major chains with Wall Street ties could also benefit from the tax credit. Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group, both owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, appear to be eligible, as does McClatchy, which is owned by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management.

Maribel Perez Wadsworth, the president of news at Gannett, defended the inclusion of her company, which publishes roughly 250 local newspapers, including The Arizona Republic, The Detroit Free Press and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (as well as USA Today). “Scale allows us to solve for some things,” she said, “but at the end of the day they’re local newsrooms with local reporters and photographers and editors, up against the same headwinds.”

McClatchy declined to comment. A representative for Alden did not respond to a request for comment.

There are now 200 U.S. counties without a newspaper, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina, and more than 2,100 papers have shut down since 2004. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of journalists at newspapers fell to 31,000 last year from 71,000 in 2008.

Supporters of the tax credit note the role that local news outlets play in bringing communities together. Without them, who will chronicle town meetings, hold local official accountable and note births, deaths and weddings?

New York Times, Commentary: Inside the ‘Misinformation’ Wars, Ben Smith, right, Nov. 29, 2021 (print ed.). Journalists and academics are developing a new language for truth. The results are not always clearer.

On Friday afternoons this fall, top American news executives have dialed into a series of off-the-record Zoom meetings led by Harvard academics whose goal is to “help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.”

Those are hot topics in the news industry right now, and so the program at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy drew an impressive roster of executives at CNN, NBC News, The Associated Press, Axios and other major U.S. outlets.

A couple of them, though, told me they were puzzled by the reading package for the first session.

It consisted of a Harvard case study, which a participant shared with me, examining the coverage of Hunter Biden’s lost laptop in the final days of the 2020 campaign. The story had been pushed by aides and allies of then-President Donald J. Trump who tried to persuade journalists that the hard drive’s contents would reveal the corruption of the father.

The news media’s handling of that narrative provides “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns,” according to the Shorenstein Center summary.

The Hunter Biden laptop saga sure is instructive about something. As you may recall, panicked Trump allies frantically dumped its contents onto the internet and into reporters’ inboxes, a trove that apparently included embarrassing images and emails purportedly from the candidate’s son showing that he had tried to trade on the family name. The big social media platforms, primed for a repeat of the WikiLeaks 2016 election shenanigans, reacted forcefully: Twitter blocked links to a New York Post story that tied Joe Biden to the emails without strong evidence (though Twitter quickly reversed that decision) and Facebook limited the spread of the Post story under its own “misinformation” policy.

But as it now appears, the story about the laptop was an old-fashioned, politically motivated dirty tricks campaign, and describing it with the word “misinformation” doesn’t add much to our understanding of what happened. While some of the emails purportedly on the laptop have since been called genuine by at least one recipient, the younger Mr. Biden, right, has said he doesn’t know if the laptop in question was his. And the “media manipulation campaign” was a threadbare, 11th-hour effort to produce a late-campaign scandal, an attempt at an October Surprise that has been part of nearly every presidential campaign I’ve covered.

The Wall Street Journal, as I reported at the time, looked hard at the story. Unable to prove that Joe Biden had tried, as vice president, to change U.S. policy to enrich a family member, The Journal refused to tell it the way the Trump aides wanted, leaving that spin to the right-wing tabloids. What remained was a murky situation that is hard to call “misinformation,” even if some journalists and academics like the clarity of that label. The Journal’s role was, in fact, a pretty standard journalistic exercise, a blend of fact-finding and the sort of news judgment that has fallen a bit out of favor as journalists have found themselves chasing social media.

Washington Post, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rachel Lerman, The unexpected news caused Nasdaq to stop trading the company’s stock.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he was stepping down from the social media service in a letter posted to Twitter early Monday.

Dorsey, right, who co-founded the company and has been a leader there for the last 18 years, said his departure would be effective immediately, leaving Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal to replace him. Dorsey will remain CEO of payments company Square.

“I want you to know this was my decision and I own it,” Dorsey wrote, saying he was “sad” but also “really happy.” “It was a tough one for me, of course. … There aren’t many companies that get to this level. And there aren’t many founders that choose their company over their own ego. I know we’ll prove this was the right move.”

The message was captioned, “not sure if anyone has heard but, I resigned from Twitter.”

The surprise move caused Nasdaq to suspend trading on Twitter’s stock, and left most employees — many of whom were not working because it was an official company “Day of Rest” — in a state of confusion.

Even some senior executives seemed unprepared for the move. Vijaya Gadde, the company’s legal, policy, and trust and safety lead, tweeted congratulations to Agrawal and gratitude to Dorsey — but said she was “saving my ‘everything I learned from @Jack’ thread for another day.”

Dorsey has been distancing himself from direct leadership for years, according to people familiar with his management style who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Major decisions are generally made by other company leaders, though Dorsey does give a final sign-off. He also rarely tweets about Twitter, focusing most of his public energy promoting blockchain, decentralization, and bitcoin-related projects.

Though Twitter is much smaller than industry rivals Facebook and TikTok, the company punches above its weight because of its use by celebrities, politicians and other influential people. For years, the most influential user on Twitter was former president Donald Trump, who used the platform as a primary means to communicate — often in ways that pushed the boundaries of Twitter’s rules. The company suspended him for comments related to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

• New York Times, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey To Step Down From C.E.O. Role

Palmer Report, Opinion: Chris Christie’s book crashes and burns, Bocha Blue, Nov. 29, 2021. There was a time, many years ago, when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was someone to take seriously. As I said, that was a long time ago. In recent months, the disgraced Governor and former Presidential candidate has attempted to stage a desperate comeback. Christie’s been out of power for a long time, and one can sense his desperation to once again become a part of the pulsating and ever-changing political circus.

Christie, right, has been aided in his pathetic efforts by many in the media, who have been relentless in featuring Christie, pontificating and bragging as he attempts to create a new image for himself – an image of an honest and courageous bloke.

Only sometimes the picture one tries to create is riddled with smears — sloppy in its falsities. And this, in the proper fashion of Karma, is precisely what appears to be happening to Christie.

Christie’s book tour was dismal. Nobody seemed interested in what the man had to say. But now, things have reached red alert levels of alarm for Jersey’s non-finest. Christie’s book is out and — ahem — not too many people seem interested in buying it. Sales have not been good, and his book has failed to make the NYT bestseller list.

Christie is a pretender. This country does not like pretenders. Most can see through them. Christie actually wants people to believe he is strong and courageous — the man who seems terrified of writing or even talking about the lies of Fox News. With his every word, his weakness shines through.

BoingBoing, Analysis: Despite continuous prime-time attention by a fawning media, Chris Christie fails to sell over 2,500 copies of his book, Mark Frauenfelder, Nov. 29, 2021. Ex-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is best known for three things:

• Closing Island Beach State Park during a government shutdown then taking an expensive taxpayer-funded family holiday there.
• His disastrous handling of the deadly lane closure of the George Washington Bridge, which he is suspected of ordering to exact revenge on a mayor who didn't support his reelection bid.
• Running against Trump by declaring him unfit to lead (January 4, 2016: "Showtime is over. We are not electing an entertainer-in-chief. Showmanship is fun, but it is not the kind of leadership that will truly change America.") and becoming an embarrassing Trump sycophant after failing in the primary (February 26, 2016: "There is no one better prepared to provide America with the strong leadership that it needs both at home and around the world than Donald Trump.").

You'd think Christie would be a pariah, but for some reason the news channels like to bring this unsavory ... character on their shows and act like he's some kind of respected statesman. For the last few weeks it's been impossible to turn on the TV and not see Christie fibbing about, denying, and backpedaling on every terrible thing he's said and done for the last ten years.

But despite the countless hours of free promotion for his new book, he's only managed to sell 2,300 copies in its first week, making it clear that no one but the news netoworks thinks this double-talking know-it-all is worth anything other than making fun of.

From Press Run:

A senior publishing source with access to the industry's BookScan tabulations tells me that Republican Rescue sold just 2,289 copies during its first week in stores, which constitutes a colossal publishing flop. That figure does not include digital copies of the book, but based on industry sales patterns, given Christie's weak showing in stores he likely sold only a few hundred digital ones. (On Sunday, Republican Rescue was ranked 15,545th at Amazon's Kindle Store.)

In comparison to Christie's 2,000 copies debacle, Jonathan Karl's new book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, sold 24,000 hardcover copies the same week as the Christie failure. How Christie was able to sell so few books after lining up so much national media attention during his marketing roll-out — "This Week" and "The View," "Fox & Friends," along with Fox News, Fox Business, the Daily Show, HBO twice, and CNBC — represents an extraordinary disconnect.

 

Insider NJ, Book Review: Chris Christie to the Rescue? Fred Snowflack, Nov. 26, 2021. Chris Christie was all over TV last week hyping his book, Republican Rescue, the cover of which, creatively, shows an elephant holding a rescue tube in its trunk.

As the name implies, the GOP is in danger. If not, why would it need to be rescued? The peril for Republicans is Donald Trump and the wacky conspiracy theories the former president seems to inspire.

That is the essence of the book, but before we get there, Christie spends the first part of the book detailing his personal relationship with Trump. They met years ago when Christie was U.S. Attorney and their friendship blossomed.

When Trump got to the White House, Christie says the now-president offered him many jobs, but not the one he would have taken – Attorney General. So, Christie began spending his post-gubernatorial life at home in Mendham Township.

The anecdotes and observations Christie presents of Trump will shock no one who follows politics closely.

When a very ill Christie was fighting COVID at Morristown Medical Center, he got a call from the president. A heartfelt wish to get well?

Not really. Christie said the president was concerned that he (Christie) would blame him (Trump) for his getting the virus.

Nov. 28

 

Washington Post, Opinion: Alex Jones is facing a reckoning. Let it be a warning to other conspiracy theorists, Editorial Board, Nov. 28, 2021. Distortions. Lies. Profiteering off the hurt of others. Those are the signature characteristics that mark the radio work of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (shown above in a file photo.

So it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that Mr. Jones reacted to a judge’s ruling against him in lawsuits brought by families of those killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., with more distortions, more lies and more attempts to raise money.

Connecticut Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis earlier this month found Mr. Jones liable for damages in defamation lawsuits brought by the families of eight people killed in the 2012 school massacre after the Infowars host made repeated claims that the shooting was a giant hoax.

The judge ruled that because Mr. Jones had refused to turn over documents ordered by the court, he was liable by default. A similar determination was made by a Texas court in September in two lawsuits filed by victims’ families. Jury trials will next be held to determine the amount of damages.

After Judge Bellis issued her ruling, Mr. Jones went on air and complained about being deprived of a fair trial and invoked his rights to free speech under the First Amendment. Days later, he released a video pleading for money.

Mr. Jones’s claim about being denied a fair trial is undermined by his own refusal to cooperate with the courts in basic procedures necessary to conduct one. Judge Bellis said years of what she called inappropriate conduct by Mr. Jones’s attorneys regarding depositions and the “callous disregard” for her repeated rulings required the most severe sanction of default, which she called “a last resort.” The judge in the Texas case cited the defendants’ “general bad faith” toward the litigation and Mr. Jones’s “public threats,” as well as his contention that the proceedings were show trials.

Multiple efforts by Mr. Jones to have the cases dismissed on First Amendment grounds have been roundly rejected by the state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. We are the first to stand up for First Amendment rights, but Mr. Jones’s repeated false claims that the shooting at Sandy Hook in which 26 people were killed was a hoax — “staged,” he said, and “inside job written all over it” — were beyond the pale and outside the Constitution’s protections. Mr. Jones, who has now belatedly acknowledged the reality of Sandy Hook, had no credible evidence for his outrageous claims, and his knowing lies did terrible damage to people who already had suffered the tragic loss of loved ones. One family has had to move nearly 10 times and even now is living in hiding.

The families have yet to specify the amount of damages they are seeking, and there is no amount of money that can make up for what they have suffered and will continue to suffer. Their hope, though, is that they will be able to establish that conspiracy profiteering off the tragedy of others is not an acceptable business model. Let’s hope that others in this age of increasing misinformation get that message.

Washington Post, Michael Vick found a future on TV, but his past is still chasing, Michael Lee, Nov. 28, 2021. Michael Vick appears in the lobby dressed in all-black sweats, a look that helps one of the NFL’s most famous — and at one point, most infamous — retirees find a seat in the middle of the hotel’s restaurant without notice. He’s lean and fit; the gray hairs on his chin are all that keep you from assuming Vick could still make a pair of defenders comically take out each other in an attempt to tackle him.

Vick was once the future — not the first dual-threat quarterback in NFL history but the reimagined version, the one whose game looked as though it had been created with the assistance of computer-generated imaging. But the future is now the present, and the quarterback position has finally gone where Vick was supposed to take it.

Vick, settling in for lunch on a fall Saturday, says he “changed the game” but admits that so much was left on the table. He retired without winning an MVP award or a Super Bowl ring, and he knows his trophy mantel would’ve been more crowded, his reputation less tattered, if not for his own hubris and an inability to reject the lures of the Newport News, Va., neighborhood that made him.

“I was a kid from the ghetto,” Vick says. “I never wanted to leave.”

His involvement in a deadly dogfighting ring halted a breathtaking career in its prime. He served his time, but no matter what he has done since — becoming a spokesman for animal rights, regaining all-pro status after his time in prison, and finding a second career in broadcasting — he can’t scramble from the stain. Still, he’s here, trying, with stories to share and a legacy linked to his darkest moment.

“I hate it,” Vick, 41, says between bites of Caesar salad. “I think about that more than all the good years and the good times. S---, it hurt [my chances of] going in the Hall of Fame. It’s going to impact everything. But it was all self-inflicted. I was young. I didn’t have no guidance. I don’t use this as no excuse. I could’ve said, ‘No.’ I could’ve made those right decisions, like, ‘This ain’t for me.’ That’s a blemish that I will never be able to erase.”

Nov. 26

Insider NJ, Book Review: Chris Christie to the Rescue? Fred Snowflack, Nov. 26, 2021. Chris Christie was all over TV last week hyping his book, Republican Rescue, the cover of which, creatively, shows an elephant holding a rescue tube in its trunk.

As the name implies, the GOP is in danger. If not, why would it need to be rescued? The peril for Republicans is Donald Trump and the wacky conspiracy theories the former president seems to inspire.

That is the essence of the book, but before we get there, Christie spends the first part of the book detailing his personal relationship with Trump. They met years ago when Christie was U.S. Attorney and their friendship blossomed.

When Trump got to the White House, Christie says the now-president offered him many jobs, but not the one he would have taken – Attorney General. So, Christie began spending his post-gubernatorial life at home in Mendham Township.

The anecdotes and observations Christie presents of Trump will shock no one who follows politics closely.

When a very ill Christie was fighting COVID at Morristown Medical Center, he got a call from the president. A heartfelt wish to get well?

Not really. Christie said the president was concerned that he (Christie) would blame him (Trump) for his getting the virus.

Nov. 25

 

Travis McMichael, left, his father Gregory McMichael, center, and neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan Jr. (Ahmaud Arbery trial pool photo via Getty).

Washington Post, A shaky video recorded on defendant’s cellphone changed the course of the Arbery murder case, Meryl Kornfield, Nov. 25, 2021 (print ed.). The first news story about the Feb. 23, 2020, shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a mere four paragraphs, offered little detail about what led to the death of the 25-year-old.

In the small coastal Georgia town of Brunswick, rumors swirled about a Black man who was shot while being pursued by two armed White men in a pickup truck, but no one was charged and the case received little attention nationally. It wasn’t until May 5, when a local radio station uploaded graphic footage of the deadly chase, that widespread outrage ensued. Two days later — 74 days after Arbery was killed while on a jog — arrests were made.

The convictions of Travis McMichael, 35, his father, Greg McMichael, 65, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, on Wednesday raised recollections of the beginning of the case when police let the men walk free and two prosecutors did not press charges. Yet, after just two days of deliberations, the jury found the three men guilty of murder and other charges for the pursuit and fatal shooting of Arbery.

“We came very close to this crime not being prosecuted at all,” said Clark D. Cunningham, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law.

After the Brunswick district attorney and Waycross district attorney recused themselves without charging the men, Cunningham noted two aspects of the case that made the arrests — and subsequent convictions — possible: Greg McMichael’s decision to share the video of the slaying with the public and Arbery’s outspoken family receiving national support and attention.

“We shouldn’t count on those kinds of things for justice to be done,” Cunningham said.

Arbery, above, a former high school football standout and avid runner, was killed weeks before George Floyd. But it wasn’t until the release of the video — showing men chasing him, cornering him and shooting him on a quiet suburban street — that the violence helped amplify the racial justice demonstrations of last year.

In an unlikely turn of events, Greg McMichael, with the help of attorney Alan Tucker, brought Bryan’s unsteady cellphone footage to radio station WGIG with the hope of absolving the men in the court of public opinion, WSB-TV Channel 2 reported.

“There had been very little information provided by the police department or the district attorney’s office, but there was entirely too much speculation, rumor, false narratives, and outright lies surrounding this event,” Tucker told Georgia Public Broadcasting last year. Tucker did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post on Wednesday. The McMichaels’ attorneys did not immediately respond to similar requests Wednesday night.

Instead, the video published online by the radio station surfaced questions nationwide about racial profiling and the lack of criminal charges.

At the time, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, called it a lynching “before our very eyes.”

Like Cunningham, University of Maryland sociology professor Rashawn Ray said there wouldn’t have been a trial, let alone a conviction, without the video repeatedly aired in court after Greg McMichael made it public.

“Video is an objective observer,” Ray said. “It’s very clear what happened. And I think part of what the McMichaels were trying to leverage was what their defense attorneys were trying to allege: that the mere presence, the mere physical body of Ahmaud Arbery as a Black person just running through the street should pose a big enough threat to justify their use of force.”

But for Larry Hobbs, who wrote that first short news article, doubts about the case were raised at the onset.

Hobbs, one of four reporters at the daily Brunswick News, said police wouldn’t answer his questions or even tell him Arbery’s name, which he discovered by calling the coroner. He published four stories before he obtained the police report, based almost entirely on an interview with Greg McMichael, who said he told his son to grab his gun when he saw a Black man running.

“Red flags start going up,” Hobbs said. “All the things started falling into place that this wasn’t right.”

• Washington Post, Journalists are reexamining their reliance on a longtime source: The police

Prosecutors were also not forthcoming, he said. Jackie Johnson, the Brunswick district attorney who was later indicted over her handling of the investigation and was voted out of office, gave the case to Waycross District Attorney George Barnhill. Barnhill justified the use of force as a lawful “citizen’s arrest” in a letter to police. Meanwhile, he told Hobbs he was still investigating, Hobbs said.

“The main thing I did was just not let go of it,” Hobbs said. “I didn’t do any great writing. I didn’t do any investigative reporting. I’m a small-town newspaper. We don’t really have time to invest. I come in every day and there’s an empty newspaper I have to do my part to fill up.”

At that time, the New York Times reported on the shooting, bringing national exposure and emerging details of the video that would later be released. Still, Hobbs has been credited for his dogged reporting, as he stayed on the case, covering the trial every day until he wrote Wednesday’s story of the conviction.

“Guilty. Guilty. Guilty,” he wrote.

Leaving the courthouse, Hobbs spoke with Arbery’s father, Marcus, and choked up hearing him say his son just wanted to “run and dream.”

“In times of reckoning, we’ve come up wanting so many times, especially people from my demographic,” Hobbs said. “The South got it right today.”

Washington Post, Va. professor steps down after firestorm over study into adults who are attracted to minors, Nicole Asbury, Nov. 25, 2021 (print ed.). Allyn Walker, an assistant professor of sociology, was previously placed on administrative leave.

Old Dominion University professor Allyn Walker, whose research into adults who are sexually attracted to minors drew protests and threats, has agreed to step down, Walker and the school announced in a joint statement Wednesday.

Walker, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice, had been placed on administrative leave Nov. 16. They now will remain on leave until the expiration of their current contract in May.

Walker’s research into “minor-attracted people” and their use of that term had been met with an outcry from students and others online, who claimed that such language destigmatized sex offenders. Walker has maintained that their work was intended to better understand would-be sex offenders and prevent child sexual abuse.

Nov. 24

Harvard Nieman Journalism Lab, Now nonprofit, The Salt Lake Tribune has achieved something rare for a local newspaper: financial sustainability, Sarah Scire, Nov. 24, 2021. The Salt Lake Tribune’s transition to nonprofit status has been closely watched in the news industry. “The opportunity for us to prove that this can work is significant and so is the responsibility.”

The Salt Lake Tribune has plenty to celebrate in 2021. The first (and so far only) major newspaper to become a nonprofit is financially sustainable and, after years of layoffs and cuts, is growing its newsroom. Executive editor Lauren Gustus announced the news in a note to readers in which the relief of escaping hedge fund ownership was palpable.

“We celebrate 150 years this year and we are healthy,” Gustus wrote. “We are sustainable in 2021, and we have no plans to return to a previously precarious position.”

It’s been quite the turnaround. Utah’s largest newspaper escaped the clutches of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2016 only to see its local owner, Paul Huntsman, lay off a third of staff two years later in the face of plunging ad revenue. In 2019, The Tribune made history as the first daily newspaper to become a nonprofit. And then amid the height of the pandemic last year, the Tribune ended a 149-year run of printing a daily newspaper and a 68-year-old joint partnership with the Deseret News.

(The Tribune, which once enjoyed a daily circulation nearing 200,000, had about 36,000 subscribers when the decision to move to a weekly print edition was announced. The Deseret News, which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also stopped publishing its daily print edition.)

Gustus pointed out that hundreds of American newspapers are owned by financial institutions with a well-deserved reputation for making every newspaper they touch worse by gutting newsrooms, selling off assets, and jacking up subscription prices for readers. Gustus herself joined the Tribune from McClatchy (owned by a hedge fund) and spent years at Gannett (once managed by one hedge fund, and now deeply in debt to a different one). Her note to readers has “hedge fund” in the headline and URL. Clearly, she has thoughts! When I asked Gustus about leading a news organization that was once owned by Alden and seeing the effect hedge fund ownership has had on other newsrooms, however, she chose her words carefully.

“I believe that there are differences in quality of ownership. Here’s what I will say, with a feeling that it’s really difficult to communicate [this] over the phone or in an interview. The journalists that I worked with in Sacramento or in Fresno, or in Fort Collins or Reno, are no less committed than any of the journalists here at the Tribune,” Gustus said. “That commitment that persists to doing the best that they can for the communities that they serve is real.”

The Salt Lake Tribune’s transition to nonprofit status has been closely watched in the news industry. Does that put additional pressure on Gustus and the rest of the Tribune team? “The opportunity for us to prove that this can work is significant and so is the responsibility,” she said.

The Tribune grew its newsroom 23% in the last year and will add new reporting roles focused on education, business, solutions journalism, food, and culture in 2022. Gustus also expects to follow the Utah News Collaborative (launched in April to make the Tribune’s reporting available to any news organization in the state) with more multi-newsroom projects centered on saving the Great Salt Lake and the centenary of the Colorado River Compact.

Other changes include introducing six weeks of paid parental leave and a 401(k) match for employees. In response to readers who said they missed the “daily drumbeat” amid the weekend edition’s in-depth reporting, the newsroom will publish an e-edition to accompany the Sunday paper. They’re also introducing a second printed edition — delivered by mail, rather than carriers — on Wednesdays at no additional cost to subscribers.

The Salt Lake Tribune draws revenue chiefly from subscriptions, donations, and advertising. (Dissolving that joint operating agreement with the Deseret News has also allowed the Tribune to sell its own ads and print subscriptions.) Subscribers pay for a digital subscription ($80/year), while “supporting subscribers” ($150/year) add a donation on top. In the donations category, members of The First Amendment Society pledge to donate at least $1,000/year for three years while major donors provide one-off gifts and grants.

The Tribune has about 6,500 supporting subscribers, more than 50 members of its First Amendment Society, and dozens of major donors. (In a bid for transparency, The Tribune forbids donations over $5,000 to be anonymous. You can see the full list here.) Gustus stressed that consistency of support is invaluable.

“We are so grateful to them [supporting subscribers] because it enables us to plan for philanthropic commitments. We’re not surprised and we can be more strategic about how we invest those resources,” Gustus said. “The First Amendment Society enables us to do the same thing, which is to plan our coverage and our investments because they have planned theirs. We are consistently engaged in conversations about what the value proposition is for each of those cohorts, and how we can continue to refine it and to continue to deliver for each of those groups.”

Gustus says that being “relatively lean” — the newsroom currently stands around 33 reporters, with a handful of open positions — sometimes lends itself to some unusual experiments. The Salt Lake Tribune’s NBA beat writer, Andy Larsen, told his sizable Twitter following he wanted to get 500 new subscribers for the Tribune by the end of the year.

Associated Press, All 3 men charged in Arbery’s death convicted of murder, Russ Bynums, Nov. 24, 2021. All three white men charged in the death of Ahmaud Arbery were convicted of murder Wednesday in the fatal shooting that became part of a larger national reckoning on racial injustice.

The convictions for Greg McMichael (shown at center above), son Travis McMichael (at left) and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan (at right above) came after jurors deliberated for about 10 hours. The men face minimum sentences of life in prison. It is up to the judge to decide whether that comes with or without the possibility of parole.

Travis McMichael stood for the verdict, his lawyer’s arm around his shoulder. At one point, McMichael lowered his head to his chest. After the verdicts were read, as he stood to leave, he mouthed “love you” to his mother, who was in the courtroom.

Moments after the verdicts were announced, Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery Sr., was seen crying and hugging supporters outside the courtroom.

“He didn’t do nothing,” the father said, “but run and dream.”

The McMichaels grabbed guns and jumped in a pickup truck to pursue the 25-year-old Black man, right, after seeing him running in their neighborhood outside the Georgia port city of Brunswick in February 2020. Bryan joined the pursuit in his own pickup and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael fatally shooting Arbery.

CBS News, All three men involved in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery found guilty of murder, Staff Reports, Nov. 24, 2021. A jury in Glynn County, Georgia, found three men – Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan Jr. – guilty on multiple counts of murder for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man fatally shot while out for a jog on February 23, 2020.

Travis McMichael, the man who shot Arbery, was found guilty on all of the nine charges he faced. His father, Gregory McMichael, was found guilty on eight of the nine charges he faced. William “Roddie” Bryan Jr. was found guilty on six of the nine charges he faced.

Rolling Stone, ‘Bitter,’ ‘Angry,’ ‘Enraged’: Reality Winner Blasts the Intercept After 4 Years in Jail, Tessa Stuart, Nov. 24, 2021. Reality Winner, a former intelligence analyst contracted by the NSA, is serving a home confinement sentencing by the federal courts in Kingsville, Texas on July 3, 2021.

One of the first things Reality Winner did when she was released from federal prison in June was start building a paddock for a horse named Trouble, and a small shed for her gym equipment beside it.

Winner, right, a former NSA contractor, was training for a powerlifting competition when she was arrested in June 2017, accused of leaking classified information to The Intercept. When the FBI showed up at her house that day, her main preoccupation was getting her perishable groceries into the fridge and figuring out who would feed her cat and foster dog if she came in for questioning. She hadn’t processed the fact that, not only would she miss the competition, she wouldn’t go home for years.

Inside the shed, where she spends most of her time these days, she’s got three hundred pounds of bumper plates, dumbbells, barbells, a kettlebell, pull-up bars, gymnastics rings, a nine-foot steel rig for doing squats and bench presses, a jump box, a rowing machine and stationary bike, all gifted by friends and supporters ahead of her release. Between reps, she’ll run out and give Trouble a scratch on his nose.

“I built my workout shed right by the side of his pasture, so he’s always creeping by,” Winner says. “It’s one of those moments where it’s, like, I’m doing deadlifts and petting my horse between sets? My life is perfect right now.”

For the next three years, Winner, who had her court-mandated ankle monitor removed on Tuesday, will still be on probation, which means mandatory drug tests every two weeks, a 10 p.m. curfew, and securing permission from her probation officer for any overnight trip she’d like to take.

“It enrages me,” Winner says, comparing the terms of her parole to those of friends she made inside the system.

Winner was just 25 years old when she printed a single classified document — one that described Russian military efforts to spear-phish dozens of local election officials ahead of the 2016 election — smuggled it out of the NSA facility where she worked and mailed it to The Intercept. (For comparison, Edward Snowden provided at least 10,000 documents to, among others, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, who later went on to co-found The Intercept. The NSA has claimed he took more than 1.7 million files.) Winner was ultimately sentenced to sixty-three months in prison for the leak, the longest prison term ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media.

The Intercept was widely criticized for its handling of the document Winner leaked—in particular, the decision to show the leaked document to the U.S. government.

After her arrest, First Look Media, which owns The Intercept, pledged to support Winner’s legal defense, but Winner says that support stopped shortly after her sentencing in August 2018. Nonetheless, she says, lawyers retained by First Look Media continued to advocate for her, even filing a petition for compassionate release “basically pro bono” after billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s nonprofit news outfit “fell behind” on payments to the firm. Omidyar is shown at right in a file photo.

According to Winner, the last time she discussed the matter with her then-legal team, First Look owed the legal team “30 percent of the original agreed cost” of her legal defense. David Bralow, legal director of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, strongly disputed Winner’s characterization.

In 2017, when Winner first came across the document on an internal NSA server, she chose to share it with The Intercept in large part because of her admiration for the disclosures Edward Snowden made with Greenwald and Poitras’ help, but also because of skepticism about Russia’s attempts to influence in the 2016 election.

Today, Winner is wary of what she sees as The Intercept’s contribution to an increasingly polarized media landscape. She has been especially stung by what she sees as Greenwald’s assertions that her own mistakes — including failing to follow guidelines for leakers outlined on The Intercept’s website, like specific advice not to contact the outlet either from work or by email — contributed to her arrest. (Greenwald, who was not involved in reporting the story, resigned from The Intercept in 2020, accusing the outlet of censoring an article critical of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.)

Like Chelsea Manning, Winner says she’s been surprised by what she views as a cynical change in Greenwald’s public persona. Greenwald, she says, is “addicted to negative press…He’s willing to have whatever message is going to generate the most attention… Glenn isn’t the problem, he’s a symptom, and they’re all going to wind up like him.”

Reached by email, Greenwald (shown above, second from left, as part of a 2019 promo, said, “The only point I ever made about Reality Winner is that even if The Intercept had acted responsibly, Reality Winner would have been caught anyway — not because she’s ‘stupid’ but because the US government has created such a pervasive surveillance system that it is very difficult for any inside source to evade detection if the government is determined to find them.”

“I wasn’t the first source that they burned and I definitely wasn’t the last — two other people have done prison time [due to] them being extremely sloppy,” Winner says, referring to Daniel Hale, sentenced to 45 months in prison earlier this year after he pled guilty to leaking documents about the U.S. military’s drone program, and Terry Albury, sentenced in 2018 to four years in prison after leaking documents concerning the bureau’s use of informants. “Every time one of their sources goes to prison, that’s another headline for them. That’s how they stay relevant — by burning sources, instead of the journalism that they once believed in.”

In a statement, Betsy Reed, editor in chief of The Intercept, said, “As we’ve acknowledged before, in preparing the story on Russian election interference in 2017, we made errors in the course of verifying a document that came to us anonymously. We honor her courage and feel awful about what she went through… We have learned from Reality’s case and we work hard to minimize the risks whistleblowers face.” Separately, Reed said she wasn’t aware of any evidence that The Intercept had made missteps in its reporting in either Hale or Albury’s cases.

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